Henare PeeniPEENI HENARE (Labour—Tāmaki Makaurau): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Thank you for this opportunity. I rise to speak to the Land Transport Amendment Bill. I want to just pick up where the member who has just resumed his chair Andrew Bayly finished but perhaps with not as much creepiness.When I look at these kinds of bills these amendment bills I always get a little concerned when I read Miscellaneous amendments". It makes people think that they are just some little minor things; "we'll just sneak it in the back door and people won't really pay too much attention to it and we'll just brush it off as miscellaneous". But if you have a good hard look at the details—and the member for Hunua has just spoken to some of those—there are actually quite a lot in there. I do think it is an important opportunity for the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to do due diligence if you like on this bill to make sure that the amendments are not just miscellaneous tagged on into other parts of the bill where once again the wool is being pulled over too many people's eyes. I look forward to that and I want to reiterate that point—miscellaneous; it is just too common to find in a lot of the bills from this Government where it just tries to sneak stuff in through the back door.We support this bill going to the select committee. The fine members from the Labour benches on that select committee will be sure to debate and will be sure to listen to those stakeholders in relation to this bill. One of those important ones has been mentioned today during this debate. It is the police. I just happen to be sitting here next to the spokesperson for police Mr Stuart Nash.I look across the House and Mr Jami-Lee Ross we understand has a bill about window washers. I think about the busy road in my electorate the Great South Road and I wonder with that particular bill and some of the provisions in this bill just how the police are going to find time to go to every intersection on Great South Road. Let me tell you Great South Road is a very very big road—in fact from Tāmaki-makau-rau all the way down to Hamilton with busy intersections all the way. Now the police are going to be keeping an eye out for window washers—now they are going to enforce many of the parts in this bill. It goes to what my colleague Mr Lees-Galloway was saying which was: how are they going to do that? Where are they going to get the resources? How are they going to find the time to make sure that the bills passed in this House actually mean something out there to the people?We do support some of the things about making sure that the roads are safer and making sure that when whānau and people are driving on the roads going about their daily business they can be safe in the fact of knowing that they are going to be safe on the road. I think about a particular place just south of Whangarei which in the past 6 months has had no less than eight truck crashes.Su'a William Sio: How many?PEENI HENARE: Eight in the past 6 months on this one spot on State Highway 1. I wonder then when we look at this particular bill: how can we improve the safety on our roads? This side of the House—well certainly myself and my colleagues on this side—would argue that while we welcome some of the provisions about tightening up heavy loads on trucks what we actually want to see is something more comprehensive—"more comprehensive" seems to be the catchword nowadays—to make sure that we can still meet the demands of freight transport and also keep the interests of your everyday road user in mind and make sure that safety is paramount.There were eight heavy truck crashes and in half of those—thank God—no other vehicle was involved but for the other half there were serious injuries for the other road user but not for the heavy truck driver who with a heck of a lot of cargo and in command of a very large vehicle sustained some minor injuries. Sadly on half of those occasions the driver in the other vehicle did not fare as well. So we want to make sure that the bills that we pass through this House have that in mind: safety must be paramount.As other members have spoken about in the House there are other parts to this bill such as the vehicle locking device for recidivist drink-drivers. I think that is a good thing. It keeps up to step with technology but it has been a little bit late coming. I can recall when I first got into the House members of the public were crying out for this kind of technology. It has been around for a long time. So we commend the Government for taking this step but we do ask: why did it take so long? Since the time when I first started hearing the cries for this particular piece of technology to be utilised until now how many have fallen victim to drink-drivers on the road? We support that particular clause.I do now want to talk about some of those miscellaneous amendments. There are no less than a dozen in this particular bill. Some of them talk about simple things like digitising some of the functions for licensing and a few other things—those make sense to me. But I can tell you that as a member of the public who quite enjoys going online and paying for things instead of walking into the post office it says in the explanatory note of the bill "allowing recovery of bank charges associated with payments by credit card:". People say that that is miscellaneous but you know for those of us who use our credit cards more and more and who are going online to do these types of transactions it is important that the public get to know about those things and that it is not just a simple miscellaneous matter pushed through in this particular bill.I want to now draw our attention to fare-fleeing. The member from the Greens talked about how up to $2 million is being lost from those people who actually skip paying a fare on public transport in Tāmaki-makau-rau in particular where this Government crows about how great the public transport network is—and this is beside the point but I can tell you it is actually not that great. I think it is a good thing but once again just like the infringements and the enforcement requirements of the police we ask the same question: who is going to do that? How exactly are the people put in charge of fulfilling the particular duty that is prescribed in this bill going to make sure that they can carry out their duty? Or are we simply wasting our time and will we continue to see more of it and people getting away with it despite passing through this House the legislation that will supposedly smack those people on the hand and make sure that they do not do that again? Sadly I do not believe the resources are put in place so that this bill is actually something meaningful for the general public.There are some good parts in it. We do look forward to the debate and I do take exception to the comments by the member from Hunua Andrew Bayly about my colleagues and our role on the select committee. My experience in the short time I have been on that select committee has been that we are in fact the hardest-working members on it and we make sure that this Government is listening. Kia ora."