Bennett David: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Bennett David: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
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DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 I thank the Minister of Transport and members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. A number of members of the committee are here today. As the previous speaker Darien Fenton noted the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) has been carried over from the previous Parliament. Both parties have worked hard to find a constructive solution for the issue that we are dealing with. 
I think the first thing to take into account when we look at this legislation is that it is only a starting point. Throughout the passage of the bill and throughout the debate in the select committee many valid points were raised about taking the bill further making it watertight to cover every situation that may arise in the future and making our testing processes more technologically advanced than they are at the moment. That is all fine and well to do but the reality is that we had to come back to the starting point which is the legislation in front of us today. It may not be the most mature legislation in the sense that it has not been fine-tuned over many years of work through the parliamentary system but it is an extremely good starting point that the Minister in the chair the Hon Steven Joyce can be very proud of. He can see it delivered at a point in time when other Parliaments have failed in the past to do so. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: He did so much of the work on it! 
DAVID BENNETT 
: A member over there from the Labour Party Mr Mallard is laughing at this point but I think we need to give him due credit for the constructive way in which he worked within the select committee. His parliamentary experience was invaluable in the way that he approached the legislation and looked through it. I thank Trevor Mallard for that; it was most appreciated. On our side of the committee also not only did members like Tau Henare show their experience but also our newer members really got into this issue and enjoyed it. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: I’m a new member. 
DAVID BENNETT 
: Oh he is not a new member; he is a widely experienced member. 
When we look at the bill we see that it has two angles. The first is the drug testing. Basically that provision goes back to the good old days when there was an impairment test to see whether people could walk in a straight line and if they could not do that then they went for a blood test. The difficulty with going to a blood test straight away is the expense of those blood tests so the impairment test is there to weed out people from the others who may potentially be in a state where they need to be tested. It is an opportunity to cut it down so that the group with which we will have the greatest proportion of success goes through those more expensive blood tests. 
The second part of the bill deals with the motor vehicles register and some issues there look at what we are dealing with with regard to registration issues. There has been a lot of talk in the past about information on the register that people thought was private and unavailable for public use being made available in the public arena and especially commercialised. Provisions deal with that issue in the bill as well. Then there are some minor provisions that had been put in a separate bill earlier around some of the tidying-up we needed to do around time frames in the land transport area. Drug testing is the heart of the issue that the public will be interested in and it is probably the heart of any amendments that will be made through this Committee stage. Those amendments relate to particular issues in that area and provide some clarity to the situation. However many of those amendments also relate to things that this legislation already covers though probably not in as specific a way as the amendments will make them do. To have that happen will provide some unity within Parliament and also some direction through the legislation so that people know explicitly what it intends to achieve and what some of its goals and limits are. 
The drug-testing requirement gained public prominence recently—a few months ago in fact. The Government had committed to making sure that we provided a solution to this issue in reasonable time. I think the first thing we have to acknowledge in that respect is that this Government has kept its word and delivered the legislation in that reasonable time. This legislation will be in force by the end of the year and it will give an opportunity for the enforcement mechanism our police to be able to deal with this issue.