O'Rourke DenisDENIS O'ROURKE (NZ First): New Zealand First will vote against this bill because it is unnecessary and it is going to be ineffective. I want to refer first of all to the purpose of the bill. Clause 3 states it is to provide for greater safety of road users by prohibiting the washing of vehicles in a matter that may be unsafe"—may be unsafe—"that may intimidate or cause a nuisance to any person or may cause an obstruction to vehicles." So let us examine that purpose against what is actually in the bill.I will make this point straightaway. Even though this is going to be just an infringement offence they can be appealed and those appeals will cost money and those appeals will result in a waste of police time—not local authority officers' time but police time. So if the parties opposite think they are going to be saving police time and saving expense they are going to be utterly wrong about that. First of all the term "safety of road users" is not really the purpose of this bill at all because there is no actual evidence of any harm to drivers of motor vehicles as a result of this activity—none at all—because it typically happens at traffic lights where the vehicle is stationary.Then there is the term "prohibiting the washing of vehicles in a manner that may be unsafe". So there would immediately be a good defence because of course the washing of a window is not itself unsafe so the prosecutor would have to prove the term "a manner that may be unsafe" and that would not be easy. It is not enough to just prove that a vehicle's windscreen was washed while stopped at traffic lights; there would have to be actual proof of unsafeness and that is not going to be easy to do in any appeal. It is made worse by the term "may be unsafe" because that means there would have to be a subjective test to show unsafeness in the particular circumstances of the case and the drafter of this bill seems to have overlooked that. In addition to that of course washing vehicles' windscreens actually does improve driver visibility so even if the way the windscreen was washed could somehow be shown to be unsafe you still have to balance that against the fact that there is an advantage for safety in clean windscreens.Then I move on to the term "may intimidate". Although I acknowledge that some women may feel intimidated this bill will not help that because again the word "may" requires a subjective test to prove intimidation in the particular circumstances of the case. It will require a lot more than a woman just feeling uneasy if approached to have her windscreen washed. Then I move on to the words "may cause a nuisance". Again we have the same problem with "may" requiring the application of a subjective test. It would need proof of real and serious disadvantage; not just inconvenience to a driver. I move on to the words "may cause an obstruction to vehicles." The same problem arises again: a subjective test that would require proof that there was an obstruction to a vehicle which would not be easy to do when vehicles are typically stopped at traffic lights for these activities.So for all those reasons this is simply not a suitable matter for an infringement offence. Compare it with a speeding offence where the fact of speeding is enough by itself or compare it with a parking offence where the simple fact of exceeding a time limit is in itself enough—it is not like that. You would require a lot of other evidence of a lot of other things which I have already referred to. So practicality and enforceability are going to be real problems. Do we really want police chasing youth all over the place to catch them for activities that are usually harmless—I would say that 95 percent or more of the time they are actually harmless. Those people will not have the money to pay the fines anyway—unless of course they do more window washing—and the infringement will not really be enforceable.So it is not a bill that we can support and I would ask this question of Jami-Lee Ross: is this his best contribution to the improvement of the New Zealand criminal justice system? Is that the best he can do when there are so many serious crimes to attend to in this country and when we could much better spend the parliamentary time being spent on this bill and also spend much better the police time that will be involved in the attempted enforcement of this useless and ineffective bill?"