Foster AndyANDY FOSTER (NZ First): First of all I want to congratulate the Minister and the stand-in Minister for getting his way through the introduction there. I've spent many years working in and around road safety and with road safety practitioners and I'm very very well aware that this the absence of a credible drug testing regime was always seen as a deficiency within the New Zealand road safety system so it's been a long-held aspiration to address this gap.I was slightly puzzled by Julie Anne Genter's comments—what we know is that in 2022 there were 94 deaths where the driver was both drug and alcohol impaired. Now she says 7 percent" but 7 percent when you're aiming for Vision Zero—which is what she was actually in charge of doing—is a material number of people of New Zealanders that you need to be looking after. On top of that there were 68 people in 2022 who died just with alcohol in their system—where alcohol was a contributing factor.But what's happened is it's proved very very difficult to get the alignment of the legislation and the technology and the operational systems to work together. In fact Labour had a crack at doing this and it's really great to see the multi-partisan cross-party support for this legislation—at least to get to the select committee. Labour had a crack at this—it didn't work because the legislation didn't line up with the technology which was available. The legislation just was too onerous and what it meant is that no technology for oral testing was able to be approved because what it meant is you were likely to get far too many false negatives but worse—false positives. The one thing you do not want to do is you do not want to be basically making criminals out of people who have actually done nothing wrong. One of the key bits of that is that the technology which is available would be able to test and you'd be able to pick up the drugs in the system but those drugs might have been in the system quite some many many hours ago and there may in fact be no impairment at all. But even in that situation you could then be declared guilty even though you were not impaired and that was a fundamental problem. Therefore none of the technologies which were available with that legislative arrangement were able to be signed off and approved so it wasn't able to take place. So I say good on Labour for giving it a crack. That regime didn't work and I hope that we can work together to put together a regime which will work because I think that is exactly what New Zealanders deserve.Just a couple of other things. I think really what this is about is getting the technology the legal and the operating systems to work together. Prior to the arrangement—well in fact really it probably is still the arrangement as it is at the moment which is that police will you know test the eyes just see how dilated your pupils are and do the walk the line but see if you can turn around without falling over those kind of things. I think we want something that's a little bit more modern a little bit less haphazard. The approach that they were taking was that they would have to know that there is you know good cause to stop a driver to test them—now it will be able to be random. Now some people might say that a random approach might be abused but the police are only targeting 50-60000 - odd stoppages for drug testing compared with—and it's not a cost-free proposition—about 1.5 million stops for breath testing for alcohol. So I don't think that the police will be abusing this but it's going to be really really interesting to see what the submissions say.I think the two other things I was going to say—first of all is that the AA has welcomed the introduction of this legislation. They said and I quote that it is "astonishing" and "ridiculous" that it has taken so long to get to this point; that this "will fix a gap in New Zealand's road safety strategy". The other point to make is of course that many many other jurisdictions—and we I know are looking particularly at the Australians—have managed to solve this conundrum by getting the technology by getting the legislation by getting the operating systems to line up and I'm sure that we have the capability of doing this. I am looking forward to a very very good select committee working together collaboratively to address this. I'm sure that there were many submissions which will be around the technical operational and legal complexities. I commend this bill to the House."