Bennett David: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Bennett David: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
[Volume:655;Page:4467] 
DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 Part 1 of this legislation clauses 4 to 18 relates to the heart and soul of what members will be debating today and also to the amendments that have come through. When we look at those provisions we see that they contain the rules and regulations about how drug-driving will be tested by the police to determine whether someone is under the influence of drugs while driving. 
When we look at the offence of drug-driving compared with the more common or more understood offence of drink-driving we see that the nature of that offence is the difficulty in measuring the drugs in someone’s system. There has been a lot of debate on that and Part 1 reflects that difficulty. Testing for drugs is not as easy as testing for alcohol in the sense that a method of roadside testing for drugs has not yet been developed for drugs. We do not have that technology available to us so the testing regime has developed through a two-step process. 
The first step is the traditional impairment test to see whether somebody is under the influence of some substance. The nature of that test is very much what we used to do in the old days to test for alcohol impairment before the technology was developed. That first test is to see whether there is a case of an impaired driver. The officers working in that area are extremely well trained and there will be special training for officers involved in testing for drug-driving. If an officer believes that a driver is impaired then the driver’s blood is tested which is the next level of tests. Those tests are expensive so it is not expected that every driver will be expected to do a drug test. That is why we have the impairment test to filter out those who may potentially be seen as impaired but not impaired enough to warrant the expense of a blood test. 
Part 1 covers a number of issues about blood testing that have become quite prominent. They relate to some of the issues that arise around the current testing for drink-driving in the sense that there are some holes in the law and this bill attempts to plug them. Those holes relate to particular situations which one could debate all day and all night where people cause injury to themselves and to some of the issues that have been raised by the Opposition members in regard to amendments that have been followed through. 
The Minister of Transport has today put before the Committee amendments that try to dilute one offence provision by using another offence provision. Those kinds of requirements and changes to the legislation will be integral in trying to make sure we have a system that covers off as much of that drug-testing as possible especially in regard to the blood component where there are possible angles whereby smart lawyers or poor drivers who are breaking the law could take advantage of a law that is in its infancy and try to create holes by which they could avoid the full force of the law. 
This bill is an attempt to try to cover off those angles as much as possible. One such angle relates to the traditional situation where we have that point of difference between drink-driving and drug-driving in the sense that somebody may be convicted of drink-driving and then the question arises as to whether the person could be convicted of drug-driving. That issue has been covered off in Supplementary Order Papers to this bill so if there is a minor breach of the drink-driving requirements then the drug-driving requirements can also be applied.