Dalziel Lianne: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
Dalziel Lianne: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:629;Page:1958] 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL (Minister of Commerce) 
: 
 I would like to be the first to congratulate our first gold medal winner in the Commonwealth Games. That is very good news. 
I want to traverse the history of the bill— 
Gordon Copeland 
: I did not actually catch the name of the gold medal winner and I would like to know. There was a bit of noise around at the time. 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: Moss Burmester. Perhaps I could put it on the record for the House. Moss Burmester has just won a gold medal in the swimming—in record time I am told so that is even better—and we would all like to offer our congratulations. 
I want to briefly traverse the history of the bill. I have had to listen to the political correctness eradicator attacking me for supporting the bill in my position as Minister of Women’s Affairs which I think is somewhat ironic. Unfortunately Wayne Mapp has got a very short memory. The Act that we are amending tonight—the original legislation—actually covered a lot of different areas. This issue was only one small part of major reforming legislation. This is what Wayne Mapp had to say about that legislation: “I guess it is evidence that the Government has finally run out of steam when the only things it can bring before the House are the mundane the ordinary and indeed some might say the dreary. The kind of legislation it is dealing with does not speak of any grand agenda for the country. Here is a Government that is looking for a third term. Does it have any sense of an agenda to put to the country or is its greatest concern whether a bicycle could have a 200-watt electric motor or a 300-watt electric motor? Is that the only thing it can think of? Ms Lianne Dalziel’s great concern was stationary engines. We even had a video to that effect. So this is the sense we get of the agenda of the Government.”  
Was that somebody taking seriously the issues that the legislation dealt with? 
Jill Pettis 
: When did he say that? 
Hon LIANNE DALZIEL 
: That was 10 May last year. He raised the question that we are dealing with here tonight but he thought that we had introduced the whole of the provisions at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. That is how much notice Wayne Mapp took of the whole bill. We had to point out to him that in fact there was an issue that the select committee raised. What we said as a committee was that we wanted to raise the bar for existing passenger service licence holders. That was what we wanted to do. The bill as introduced did lift the bar for prospective applicants for P licence endorsements and that is what happened at the select committee. 
We found out that even when the director had said that the driver was not a fit and proper person to drive passengers the court would invariably turn the director down. On many occasions the court allowed driver after driver to pick up passengers in spite of the offending in their past even though the director did not want that person driving passengers. We were told that a convicted murderer was driving a taxi in Christchurch. We were told that convicted rapists were driving taxis throughout the country. We were not able to give an assurance that a woman who had been the victim of a rape would not get into a taxi that was driven by the rapist after being let out of prison. We said that the Minister should make provision for people to have their licence reinstated. He did that but the provisions that he put in place were too tight. 
National members say that it is OK to fix the situation for historic offences that judged by today’s standards are minor but not for future offenders. I think we should discuss who they are talking about here. They are talking about under-age offenders. We have a member in the House with precisely the kind of conviction that they are talking about. He had sex with somebody who was under 16 and he has a conviction on his record for the rest of his life because of one mistake that he made when he was 17 years old I think. 
 I ask members to remind me but I thought that last year the Government tried to fix that issue. The Government last year introduced legislation to amend the Crimes Act by saying that if a person under the age of 16 had sex with somebody who was within 2 years of his or her age—so if the person offended against was aged under 16 and the offender was within 2 years of the age of that person—then criminalising that behaviour made no sense. Let us not have a criminal offence for kids who are experimenting in a sexual way. Instead we should have a law that is reasonable and respectful of that reality. We do not want people holding a criminal conviction for the rest of their lives for a silly mistake they made as a young person. 
What happened to that law? Did we proceed with that? No we did not. Why did we not proceed with that? Well what did National do? National went public with the view that the Government was reducing the age of consent to 12. That is what Tony Ryall said up and down the country. I am not surprised that he is now sporting a serious overuse injury because we have had enough of the sort of nonsense that we had to put up with from that individual. He said from one end of the country to the other that the Government was reducing the age of consent to 12. 
We could have fixed this problem. One of our own members did a silly thing as a young person. He did not in my view commit a criminal offence. Every single one of those members who have stood up to defend their constituents quite justifiably and said that they should not have the scar of criminal offences against their records for the rest of their lives because as 17-year-olds they had sex with 15-year-olds—people who were within 2 years of age of each other and who were basically experimenting with each other—has said that those people should be criminal offenders. I think there has been a little bit of hypocrisy in the whole debate outside this Parliament—because of course there has not been any of that in here. Outside Parliament people believe that National has had a consistent position on this. It has not had a consistent position on this at all. 
I am satisfied now that under law that existed when National was last in Government the director declined to allow some people to add a P endorsement to their licence. Those people would then go to court and say that they wanted a P endorsement and the court would say that they could have one. That is what we at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee found out last year and I am sure that Peter Brown would agree that that is what we were told—that the law was being applied in the breach and not in the spirit in which it was intended to be applied. 
 We set about fixing that law. We said that we would not allow people who had certain levels of convictions to be able to apply for P endorsements. The bill was prospective. We have now added into that the retrospective application of the law and that is right and proper. But we have gone a step further. We have said that if a person wants to have a P endorsement added to his or her licence and wants to apply for that then that person cannot have been jailed or had a sentence of 12 months or more. I think that is the protection that the previous law did not have in it. We have now offered a strong protection that says anyone who has been jailed for 12 months or more with those serious offences in his or her past will not be able to drive our taxis in the future. 
I think we have sought to strike a balance here. The balance is right and I endorse the Minister for the work that he has done to resolve a mistake that was made. It was a mistake made in a genuine way but nobody on that side of the House should pretend that what those members are arguing tonight has any validity in the face of their appalling behaviour over the proposed amendment to the Crimes Act last year.