Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): I'm rising to take a call for the third reading of the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill. It's a real privilege to talk to this important bill. There are several good improvements in this particular version of the bill and it's important to make that comment because we've heard a lot of feedback from the other side of the House today that we are debating previous Government bills and while indeed many of these bills are an exercise of cross-party work some of these bills have been transformed quite significantly and are actually a very different version from the bill as it was first introduced.This bill in particular was introduced without the support of the industries and the population it would affect but our MMP Government has made important changes to reflect the submissions that were made and I would like to thank Minister Julie Anne Genter for driving this important bill to completion.We've already heard from previous speakers about the importance of increasing the amount of compensation that New Zealand's Government can seek in case of a major oil disaster so that it puts the responsibility for cleaning up the mess back to the owner or owners of the vessel that caused it—so a really important change.My previous colleague Paul Eagle has spoken quite eloquently on the removal of the contentious provisions that would have allowed foreign operators to compete unfairly with our domestic vessels on the Chatham Islands route—so also a really good change to this bill.So I guess what we now see is that these two sides of the House seem to disagree on the mandatory testing aspects of this version of the bill. I'd like to talk a little bit about what this bill actually does with regard to testing—in particular the director testing regime that is contained in this bill. This bill gives certain powers to the director of Maritime New Zealand and these powers do allow for carrying out non-notified drug and alcohol testing of maritime staff in safety-sensitive positions. Maritime rules set the requirements under which this testing will be carried out and it can be either randomly or for reasonable cause when there is suspected impairment. Also in many instances operators may already have non-mandatory drug and alcohol testing in place through their in-house scheme.Therefore in this version of the bill the amendment that would have provided for mandatory drug and alcohol tests has rightly been removed and I believe that is a good thing for several reasons. As stated by many submitters during the select committee stage a compulsory scheme is difficult to comply with and very costly for many of the small operators that make up the maritime sector. But added to that the very important point that hasn't really been made yet is that with compulsory testing comes division in the workplace and when you have division between an employer and employees that is very likely to result in a decline in work culture and a decline in engagement which can have real negative impacts. I'm not talking only about productivity; I'm talking about a decline of culture that actually hinders safety. So these amendments for compulsory testing were really counter-productive. Twenty-five submitters commented on this bill and 18 submitters actually said that alcohol and drug testing provisions were unnecessary. They said that impairment was already addressed by health and safety at work as well as maritime safety system requirements.Now I'm a little bit disappointed with some of the comments that have been made on our working people in New Zealand. I've heard comments like rotten apples" I've heard things like "let's put the fear of God in them" and I think that's really really unacceptable. As the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions put in their submission workers should not lose their human rights at the door of the workplace. We need safe workplaces—absolutely—but we need to also retain people's right to dignity and privacy at work and this bill in its current form does exactly that.There is a fine line between the need for random testing and invasion of privacy. I used to work in an industry where safety was regarded as the cornerstone of the workplace and I know about random testing. I had the experience myself of being randomly picked for testing and it does leave you feeling kind of uncomfortable even from the perceptions of your colleagues. So when there's no need for it and all it does as a previous speaker has said is increase red tape and cumbersome processes I could only think it must be put in place for political reasons rather than for impact on safety.So in short to conclude I would like to thank the Minister the officials and members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for all they work they've done on this bill. It's a necessary overdue bill that we support. I commend it to the House."