Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:658;Page:6962] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. No doubt everyone in this Chamber recognises that there is a problem and Labour supports the Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill and will support any genuine effort to deal with the issues of illegal street racing and antisocial behaviour. I want to acknowledge the people whose lives are impacted on by the actions of the so-called boy racers. Those people made submissions to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and I am fully aware that in many cases their lives are absolutely blighted by the actions of those people. We listened to a 15-year-old talk about not being able to sleep at night because of the noise and we heard from her parents about their business being impacted on. I acknowledge that this is a serious problem particularly it would seem in Christchurch and there are genuine issues being raised. 
I also want to acknowledge the efforts made by my colleagues particularly Clayton Cosgrove but also other Christchurch MPs in relation to this particular issue. But the reality is that this legislation and its companion bill that we will be talking about later are in many cases just window dressing. They have the appearance of trying to deal with what is a serious problem. I say that for a number of reasons. One reason is that there is a real issue in enforcing any law that targets boy racers and that is the ability of the police to have sufficient officers present at the right time and in place to witness offences taking place and then to safely intervene and make arrests. The bill does nothing to deal with those issues of policing and I will come back to that. 
The current legislation including the bill my colleague Clayton Cosgrove put in place allows courts to permanently confiscate cars. However the reality is that tough laws work only if courts back up lawmakers. Confiscation is presently happening in only a very small percentage of cases. The reality is that we have no guarantee that this new bill will change that position and lead to a change in the behaviour of our courts. If the courts do not back up legislation then we do not deal with the issue. We need to be passing legislation that is enforced and of course the other side of that coin is that we need to pass legislation that is enforceable and practical. I will come back to that later as well because as my colleague Darien Fenton said there are some real issues in this bill that will make enforcement difficult. 
The real issue here is that the Minister of Police Judith Collins has raised public expectations on this issue by talking tough. This is National talking tough but she will not be able to carry through on those expectations. This legislation and its companion bill will not provide the solutions she says will be put in place. The reason for that is the issue is one that does not have an easy answer. We cannot just decide that one or two changes to the law will solve the problem. When listening to the submissions it seemed to me that the key issues were around road safety and safe driving noise and antisocial behaviour. The drivers of those issues—road safety noise and antisocial behaviour—will require a wider range of interventions than the ones this bill and its companion bill put in place. 
Before I go into the detail I would like to acknowledge the submitters on the bill. There were 126 submissions from interested groups and individuals and the select committee heard 30 submissions. As has been mentioned that included hearing submissions in Christchurch and I think it was a very powerful day of submissions. Some very very good submissions were made in Christchurch by those who are negatively affected by the behaviour of boy racers and in fact by those who would consider themselves to be the good boy-racers. Those submissions were important to our efforts and I acknowledge those submitters. 
We also received a lot of advice from a range of officials from the Ministry of Transport the New Zealand Transport Agency the New Zealand Police the Ministry of Justice and the Parliamentary Counsel Office. Again I acknowledge those people because they were trying to deal with some quite difficult propositions to try to give us the advice necessary to put those measures into place. 
I still think there are many problems with this bill and I will talk about some of those. One of the areas that is covered is the issue of by-laws. This bill provides for the making of anti-cruising by-laws and it will enable local authorities—road-controlling bodies—to create those by-laws. One of the interesting things was that most of the local authorities that submitted did not want to have that ability. When looking at the submissions and going back to them we see that considerable concern was expressed by many of those local authorities about the efficacy of by-laws in this situation. So I think that is an issue that sits there for us. Those by-laws will look at things like the roads where cruising can take place and will deal with issues such as the amount of time that must elapse between successive times a vehicle can be driven along a section of road for it not to be regarded as repeatedly using the same section of road. The Minister also has some powers in relation to those by-laws including the powers to amend replace and disallow by-laws and there is a really important issue in there about what requirement there is on the Minister to consult. That is also an area of concern. 
I suppose the biggest area of concern in relation to these by-laws is the definition itself. The definition of “cruising” refers to the act of driving repeatedly over the same section of road to draw attention to the power or sound of the motor vehicle or in order to create a convoy that impedes traffic flow. The bill was unclear as to whether a driver should be allowed to drive in one direction along a two-way road and back in the other direction without being considered to have driven on the same section of road twice so the select committee recommended an amendment to clause 4 to the effect that “cruising” means “driving repeatedly in the same direction over the same section of a road …”. That certainly raises some very interesting questions because in my opinion driving backwards and forwards along the same stretch of road is just as much cruising as repeatedly driving over the same stretch of road in the same direction. It is as likely to cause people living in the area as much harm in terms of issues like noise as driving over the same stretch of road in the same direction. I think there is still a need for clarity about this matter. It seems a pretty foolish sort of definition and we do not want to have legislation that enables boy racers effectively to thumb their noses at the police over the issues concerned. So by-laws are one part of this—in particular the interpretation of these terms. 
A number of submitters raised concerns about the sort of legitimate activities that they hoped would not fall under the definition of cruising which is why we ended up with the definition we did. I think that although the submission process was actually quite a good one and a number of good submissions were made as Darien Fenton has already raised the consideration and deliberation phase in the select committee was rushed and quite flawed. We had to deal with things without the documentation in a timely manner due to some reasoning on the Government’s part that we had to meet some sort of timetable that it had put in place. We were not able to really get down and deal with issues like the question of the cruising definition I just raised. 
As I said if we distil it all down one of the key issues that came up in the submission process was the issue of noise. Noise is fundamentally the most significant problem that boy racers create. I recognise the fact that provisions are already in place that allow us to deal in some way with noise. They are the Land Transport Rule: Vehicle Equipment 2004 and the Land Transport (Road User) Rule 2004. Those rules provide a range of powers to deal with the issue of noise but they require sufficient policing resource to do just that. That is a fundamental problem with this legislation because we are seeing cuts to police budgets at the moment and we are seeing police cars being taken off the roads. In fact overwhelmingly our deliberations showed that police resourcing is the key to dealing with the issue of boy racers. Thank you.