Coddington Deborah: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21341] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 I apologise to the House but in my haste this morning I grabbed the wrong glasses and I am visually impaired this morning. We support this legislation. To those people who are listening to the debate this morning it may be of some comfort to know that to me this was a bill that showed how select committees and Parliament should work in terms of the way the members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee put aside political point-scoring and worked together to achieve a result that most people supported and were happy with. The bill dealt with some very serious issues too. It dealt with a number of things as the commentary sets out. The serious issue for me especially was transport service licensing. This was known as the legislation that was going to clean up the taxi industry. 
When the legislation first came to the select committee many of us did not think it was tough enough on the taxi industry in two areas. One area was the signage for taxis and the other concerned the drivers of taxis and buses who had convictions for serious offences—in particular sexual offences. There is one such case before the courts at the moment. When the bill came to the select committee it caught only those people who wanted to go into the taxi industry and who therefore would be applying for a licence. Lianne Dalziel from Labour and I in particular felt that that was not strong enough and that for the taxi industry to enjoy a good reputation overall we needed to clean out the people already in the industry who have a serious conviction. I stress here that the bar is very high. We have made the provision retrospective but the bar is still quite high. We are not prohibiting people who have a minor conviction from driving a taxi or a bus. From memory—and as I say I cannot read the bill properly at the moment but my glasses are on their way—it relates to people who have been convicted of a crime that carries a sentence of 7 years’ imprisonment as a minimum. People do not have to be sentenced to that but the offence carries that sentence. One has to be convicted of quite a serious crime to receive a sentence like that. 
It was very disappointing that the member from the Green Party felt that that was too hard that it went back too far that people could have something dragged up from their past and that people may have rehabilitated themselves and could drive a taxi again. I have nothing against rehabilitation but people who get in a taxi are entitled to know that the person driving that taxi has been cleared and that it is safe. I have heard the Taxi Proprietors Federation pulled up about this issue in interviews and the head of that federation has been asked why the federation did not clean out the industry and why it granted licences to those drivers. Of course the federation does not control that; it is not the gatekeeper. The Land Transport Safety Authority as it was then was the gatekeeper for people getting a licence to drive a taxi. From replies to written questions that I have put to the Minister I have found the Land Transport Safety Authority did not have a list of all the people granted a licence to drive a taxi who had a conviction for a sexual offence. 
Hopefully this legislation will go some way towards improving the reputation of the taxi industry. There are some very good taxi-drivers who take pride in their profession. Their reputations are being brought down all the time by people going into the industry who have no knowledge of—yes I will say it—New Zealand culture. Just because a woman who gets into a cab may have had too much to drink or may be wearing revealing clothing that does not mean she is asking to be sexually abused or sexually molested. That is not an excuse any more than we would say that a man who gets into a taxi wearing a Hugo Boss suit with a wallet bulging in his back pocket is asking to be robbed. I do not care how much women who get into taxis have had to drink. That is the reason they get a taxi—to get safely home. They do not get into a taxi to be forced to commit indecencies on the taxi-driver. 
The other issue was that of signage. The ACT party disagreed with the National Party over that. We believe that signage is a safety issue. I can understand exactly how people feel when they look along a cab rank and cannot distinguish one cab from another because in Wellington the cabs are all white and they all have yellow and black signage. If like me people only use Wellington Combined Taxis because they know those taxis are safe and reliable but they have grabbed a cab got into it and started on their way before they realise the cab does not belong to the taxi company they rely on but to another company that is passing off and trading on the good reputation of Wellington Combined Taxis by copying its signage for me that is a safety issue. Yes there is competition and commercial legislation that deals with that but as the industry owners who appeared before the select committee said to us it is very expensive and time consuming for them to take a case to the Commerce Commission under the Fair Trading Act. They may win it but so what? It is very difficult for them to enforce a decision once a taxi company has copied all the signage. So those are the two main issues that we dealt with. 
We also dealt with the issue of whether the drivers of courtesy vehicles should be subject to the same stringent barriers as apply to those who drive for remuneration or reward. The report back to the House excludes them from the legislation because they provide an important service in terms of getting people home safely from clubs or wherever they are and including them would be too difficult and punitive and would disadvantage a lot of the people who rely on courtesy vehicles to get around. However I do hope that when this legislation is passed—and it will be passed under urgency—the people who operate courtesy vehicles do not just sit back and heave a sigh of relief that they have been excluded from the legislation. As we said in the select committee we would encourage the providers of courtesy vehicles to develop in-house policies to screen their drivers. I cannot emphasise that enough. Whether they should be included in the legislation has been considered by Parliament. The providers of courtesy vehicles should be on notice that although they have been excluded from the legislation this time if they do not voluntarily set up in-house practices and codes to screen their drivers and make sure they are safe then they will run the risk of being regulated by Parliament. It is not too hard for them to do that. There are very good organisations like Safe Network in Auckland run by John McCarthy which deals with trying to rehabilitate and run programmes for recidivist sex offenders. He has been there long enough to recognise the signs of potential recidivism and he is more than happy to provide guidelines for organisations that may run courtesy vehicles for kids’ sports teams for Cubs and Brownies and for all those sorts of organisations. 
I am proud that this legislation will be passed while I am still in the House and I look forward to it having a positive effect especially on the taxi industry.