Moroney Sue: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
Moroney Sue: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
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SUE MORONEY (Labour) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to rise to speak to the third reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). Every party in the House has acknowledged that this bill was introduced by the previous Labour Government and it has enjoyed good support throughout the House as a result of its being well-drafted legislation. 
Before I come back to the detail of the bill and its very good intentions I will speak to the very serious issue of the way in which the changes in this bill will be resourced given that as my colleague Chris Hipkins pointed out the funding for road policing has been reduced in Budget 2009. It has been cut by $49 million. Yet here we are debating in the House today this bill which is about to pass its third reading—this bill is about to become an Act—and this will put even more pressure on those road policing resources because of the additional issues that the police will now have the ability and powers to deal with. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: Get your facts straight. 
SUE MORONEY 
: Well the facts were actually in the Budget and also in the media today—$49 million has been cut out of road policing. 
On top of that as we discovered at question time today an additional $21 million is being cut from police resources and this will have an impact on the fleet of vehicles available to the police. The involvement of vehicles in road safety policing is quite fundamental. If members on the Government side of the House are really stuck I can probably offer them my family horse which won the Melbourne Cup in 2000 and on retirement became a police horse in the Melbourne police force. I could probably bring Brew home if they get stuck for police vehicles! 
Hon Tau Henare 
: He was a good horse! 
SUE MORONEY 
: He was a good horse but I have to alert the Government to the fact that he was owned by my family and sometimes he had to be chucked out of the police academy for bad behaviour. So perhaps he would not be terribly reliable but maybe he would be more reliable than having no transport at all. All joking aside—of course that was not a serious offer—and to come back to the bill itself I am concerned about the level of resourcing that will be put into road policing as a result of this legislation. 
This bill amends the Land Transport Act 1998 and it has two main functions. Its first function is to enhance the powers of the police to deal with drug-impaired drivers. That is a new power and new powers require resourcing and always have some teething problems. That is the reason why I raised the concern about the funding cut to road policing in the Budget that has just gone through the House. This bill creates a new offence for a situation when a driver is impaired and there is evidence of drugs in his or her blood. 
The second thing that this bill does is make changes to the registration and licensing of motor vehicles. I think that is probably the least contentious part of this bill because it is about people’s ability to maintain their privacy. Many members have made great contributions on this part of the bill and talked about how it will stop the abuse of people’s private information by marketing companies. 
Chris Hipkins gave a very detailed explanation of some of the criminal activity that can be associated with this information being freely available but I would like to draw the House’s attention to another area of great concern. That issue is about access to information via the registration and licensing of motor vehicles. This is a concern for women and families who live in fear of previous violent partners or of other violence associated with their lives. There were instances outlined to the select committee where women who had protection orders against former loved ones had found that the access to this information had worked to their disadvantage. When they had tried to move in order to not be easily located by people whom they had protection orders against they found out that their previous partner had been able to track them down by using the registration and licensing information from the motor vehicles register. The openness of this register and the way in which its information has been used are very serious issues that have many consequences. Sadly we now live in a society where the openness and the freedom of that information have worked to undermine the protection of individuals within our society. It is a sad thing that we have needed to do but across the House everyone agrees and understands the rationale for why the changes must be made. 
I want to acknowledge the good work that was done across the parties in the select committee; select committee processes do not always work in this way. One of the very important things about the type of democracy that we have here in New Zealand is that our select committee process—and many people come from overseas to observe this process—has the ability to do exactly what we have seen happen in respect of this bill and its development. It is a very fine feature of our democracy that parties can get together and work on a very detailed issue. I can see from the work that has been done in the select committee that there was a great deal of detail for the officials to impart to members of Parliament. Members were then able to work through not only all of that detail but all of the very tricky issues that come with the detail. 
Of course issues involving people’s access to and use of drugs are very contentious and difficult to deal with. However the select committee has been able to deal with this issue in a way that has accepted all members’ perspectives. Many members who have spoken about the select committee process have praised the Hon Trevor Mallard’s participation—and I am loathe to join in with them in doing that! Obviously they recognise that many good ideas have come from this side of the House. In fact some of us would say that any of the good ideas that the Government has had have been based on Labour policy or previous bills put forward by the previous Labour Government—and this bill is just another example of exactly that. 
In summary I commend the bill. I thank the select committee members for their very hard and detailed work on this issue; obviously they had a great deal of support from the officials. I commend this bill to the House.