Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:666;Page:14082] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 This is an interesting scenario. I follow the Hon Tau Henare in the debate and in fact I agree with an overwhelming amount of what he has just said. That makes a good change and perhaps we are on a new path in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee but I think perhaps not in the short term. 
I rise to speak in favour of the Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Obviously this bill as others have mentioned is to put in place a number of key initiatives from the  
Safer Journeys: discussion document 
 which came out last year. It is the Government’s road safety strategy to 2020. The measures in this fairly comprehensive bill cover a range of aspects. They cover enhancing the enforceability of the current provisions within the Land Transport Act improving the safety of young drivers toughening the sanctions for serious or repeat driving offenders and clarifying and augmenting the powers of road-controlling authorities. 
We support the main aspects of the bill and I will talk about those. I start by saying that Labour believes in promoting road safety. As others have said many of the tragedies on our roads are tragedies that did not need to happen. The loss of people in this country and the implications for their families and friends and for our economy is terrible. So we support increasing the minimum licence age from 15 to 16 years. We support the zero limit for repeat drink-drivers. We support the alcohol interlocks for repeat offenders. We support doubling the minimum prison time for drunk drugged or reckless driving causing death. But what we do not support and this is where I do disagree with the Hon Tau Henare is this Government’s cop-out over not going through with the proposals to lower the adult limit for drunk driving from 0.08 to 0.05 blood-alcohol concentration. 
I will talk about that a little bit more because it is a very important issue for us but before I do I will talk about some numbers. One could call them statistics except that they are about people. The good thing is that over the past 35 years the road toll has dropped significantly so that is something to celebrate. However and this is what was shown in the work done on Safer Journeys the progress has slowed. The progress in reducing the number of road deaths has slowed and we really need to focus on what we can do to change that. The other thing that has occurred is that the number of serious injuries has risen by 6 percent since 2004. So there are some clear indications of things that we need to focus on. 
The other important bit of information I noted in this report was that compared with other OECD countries New Zealand has a relatively high rate of road deaths per head of population so clearly there are things we can do. Clearly other countries are doing some things better than us and we need to pick up those things and make some changes. This bill proposes a number of changes that we support. 
We are a highly motorised country; we use roads a lot. Some of that is to do with our geography and our demographics. We are spread out and we are quite a small population. Some of it has been about active choices and I will come back to that. But none the less even when we take that into account the figures still show that in a comparison of our level of deaths per vehicle kilometres travelled with the level in other countries we see very poor results for this country. Based on the 2008 results we have a road fatality rate of 9.1 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres compared with 6.5 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres in Australia. In France the figure is 7.7 deaths per billion vehicle kilometres travelled; in Ireland it is 5.7; and in the United Kingdom which is the best performer it is 5 deaths. This is about people. Those are not just figures; those are dead people. We need to take this very very seriously. 
I am glad that this bill will be coming before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I am looking forward to working on it. The costs of those deaths and those injuries are huge. They are huge for people and they are huge for families that have lost somebody whom they love. The cost of serious injury can also be huge in terms of suffering in terms of loss of income and in terms of relationships within families. 
A very moving story in a weekend newspaper—I think it was either last weekend or the weekend before—talked about a couple who were in a serious road accident. Both of them survived but both of them had very serious injuries. Neither of them has got back to full-time work. Their marriage has subsequently deteriorated and they have split up. The cost to their children has been immense and the cost to the taxpayer has been immense. So in terms of personal suffering and financial costs we see that this is a significant burden for New Zealand. Again I reinforce that we need to do something about it. 
One of the things that is mentioned in the  
Safer Journeys 
 report is as I have said our dependence on cars. I made the point that there is potentially a choice and particularly in our major urban areas we have some choices. We have choices about whether we favour putting more and more money into road transport versus increasing the funding put into public transport. There has been a clear difference between the previous Labour Government and the current National Government in this regard. The relative weighting of funding has shifted from what we were trying to fund under the previous Government more towards roads. Yet we know that if are talking about Safer Journeys public transport—for example using bus lanes in Auckland—is generally going to be safer than car transport. We know that getting trucks off the road and replacing them with the movement of freight by rail will be significantly safer. 
In fact again we see that there is no doubt at all that truck crashes are more serious. I quote from  
Safer Journeys 
: “Crashes involving trucks are usually more serious than those involving lighter vehicles because of their greater size and weight.” Of course this Government is also allowing even heavier trucks on to our roads. So there is a real road safety question. We need to shift more freight off roads and on to rail. We make no bones about it on this side of the House. Labour loves rail. We think rail has a really important role to play here in terms of safety. 
I note that some major improvements in terms of rail will be opened soon in Auckland. I am sure that the Minister of Transport in opening the Onehunga branch line this Saturday and a week later the New Lynn train station will acknowledge that these were initiatives of the previous Labour Government. I am expecting to see and I am sure I will see the Hon Steven Joyce up there acknowledging the contribution of the previous Government in initiating those projects. I look forward to both of them. 
This is an issue in the mayoral campaign as well. There is quite a key distinction between John Banks who favours roads and thinks that eventually we might get a bit more public transport and Len Brown who has a vision for public transport in Auckland. 
I want to go on to the issue of alcohol. Certainly my colleague Darren Hughes is to be commended for his work in raising the issue of the Government’s complete lack of backbone in relation to the issue of reducing the adult alcohol limit for driving. We do not agree with the Government’s cop-out in failing to move to lower the adult drink-driving limit from 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood to 50 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood. There is a weight of scientific evidence to back that up and we certainly support it. There is clear public support. Despite what the Hon Tau Henare said there is huge public support for the issue of moving the drink-driving limit. I am sure my colleague David Shearer will be talking about this a little more—it is overwhelming. I think we all know why. I want to quote from a Bay of Plenty trial where a number of journalists started drinking excessively to see when they would get over the current drink-drive limits. In that particular case each journalist failed a breath test after consuming eight bottles of beer or five glasses of wine. I am sure that most people in this House know that if they drank as much as that they should not drive. Thank you.