Fitzsimons Jeanette: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
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JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 I am happy to rise to address the third reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). The Green Party supports this legislation. We do so with some unease as the bill does not do quite what it was intended to do and it does not meet all of our objectives. We want to encourage the creation of deterrents and the use of enforcement against drivers who drive while they are impaired. We do not want legislation though that appears to address the problems but simply complicates the issue with what could be well-intentioned but otherwise ineffective provisions. 
The Greens are always after the best possible law—law that is effective and just. Although it is not always the case with legislation in New Zealand we have worked hard to make sure that the bill goes some way towards meeting those objectives. 
In the first reading my colleague Metiria Turei noted our great concern that impaired drivers are on our roads causing harm to property and most important causing harm to our communities and people. The primary culprit for this harm is of course the use of the drug alcohol while driving. Alcohol remains the No. 1 problem drug for road safety and we believe that further measures could be taken to reduce that harm. 
Although acknowledging that fact it is true that other drugs can cause impairment. It is important to have legislation that is concerned with drug-impaired driving overall whether alcohol lawful drugs or unlawful drugs. Thanks to the Green Party this bill has been extended to include legal drugs and prescription medicines. 
We have retained this legislation’s focus on impaired drivers and we have not allowed it to become a back-door way of prosecuting drug offences. Legal prescription drugs that are used in such a way as to cause impairment will also be captured by the new offence provisions in this legislation. This is a consistent and cohesive approach to removing dangerous drivers from our roads irrespective of the cause of their impairment. The victim of a crash does not really care why the driver was impaired; the fact that the driver was impaired should be sufficient reason for getting the driver off the road. 
However we are extremely concerned—this is one reason for the unease about this bill as I said earlier—that this bill excludes a major class of drug benzodiazepines. I note the comment made by my colleague Darien Fenton. I can only be guided by my colleague Metiria Turei who has worked intensively on this bill whereas I have not. Benzodiazepines are commonly known as sedatives and are a widely used prescription medicine. They have been implicated in a number of road accidents and deaths. They are exactly the kinds of drugs the Greens were worried about when the negotiations on this bill began. They are the kinds of drugs that the Greens expressly wanted to be included in the bill because they have been implicated in road accidents and deaths. 
Metiria Turei our spokesperson has talked with the Minister of Transport Steven Joyce about this issue. Her understanding is that he recognised this was an oversight and he has called for a scientific report into whether these drugs could be included in the legislation. She said that the Green Party will support any parliamentary measures to ensure that this legislative gap is filled as soon as possible—and it must be filled. We look forward to seeing the Minister progress this issue to make our roads safer. 
Although we have argued that the impairment test should remain so that the new law is not used as a back door to prosecuting under the Misuse of Drugs Act we none the less remain concerned about the misuse of the impairment test by enforcement officers. The physical impairment test referred to in the bill will be administered by the police. We are concerned about the test’s subjective nature particularly as it leads immediately to a blood test. 
One concern relates to the discriminatory filters in the police force that lead to unjustified targeting of Maori and in particular Maori men when it comes to drug offences. Research in 2002 from the Christchurch Health and Development Study—the work of Professor David Fergusson who has done very good work in this area—clearly shows that one of the primary risks for being targeted by the police for drug offences is being a Maori man. The research concluded that the administration of current cannabis laws was inequitable and biased against Maori and males and that the current cannabis laws were discriminatory. The difficulty is that the choice to target one particular person for a search or to stop that person’s car is strictly a matter of individual police decisions. Such discriminatory filters have been recognised in the areas of policing and health. Of course similar discriminatory practices have been known to affect younger people and those who are already known to the police. Although many police officers are well aware of these practices and operate fairly it is not the case for all officers who exercise considerable power in the community particularly over young people. Professor Fergusson has produced further research suggesting that young people are simply not aware that driving under the influence of cannabis or other drugs can cause impairment. In large part that is because of the legal status of the drug. It creates considerable barriers to getting across to young people truthful and trusted information about the harm cannabis can cause. Again I hope that some time in the near future we may take a much more mature approach to this issue. 
A blood test is used for detecting alcohol-impaired driving. If a person goes over the limit that person is in breach of the law. That limit is established through proven scientific methods that show definitively that at that specified level of blood alcohol a person is impaired and should not drive. But for the evidence-based legal blood-alcohol limit a blood test would otherwise be an unreasonable search and seizure. 
The same principle should apply in relation to other drugs particularly cannabis. The law should establish using quality science a level of drug use for specified drugs that definitively shows that a person is impaired by the specified drug at that time and that limit should be set out in law. That is more difficult to show for most drugs than it is for alcohol. Our laws though should be evidence-based and scientifically sound. The subjective view of a police officer is not a robust test nor is the simple presence of a drug with no scientifically based assessment of the level of impairment that that drug can cause. 
This bill is a very blunt tool for dealing with the issue of impaired driving. In this respect science and technology will eventually provide us with much better guidance to enable us to have good-quality law that is based on science that is based on evidence and that does not abuse the fundamental rights of our citizens. Until then we have some way to go but the Greens support this bill as a first step.