Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. This will be a short speech from me because my colleague Tangi Utikere has set out Labour's position on this bill. We support this bill and are really interested at the select committee stage to be able to unpack it and get into the detail of what is a framework that both major parties as well as many parties around this House want to progress.I think the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee Andy Foster put it best when he said that one of the key points that we'll be looking at here is that we don't want to make criminals out of people who haven't done any wrong. That's essentially the question that the committee in the last Parliament dealt with when it was dealing with Labour's legislation on this question. It heard from countless experts about how the technology for saliva testing and drug testing has developed even in the last few years let alone the last decade and what has enabled police around the world to be able to test drugs at the roadside. Over and over again experts presented the evidence that the science is out on this that it is incredibly hard to develop a test which is available on the roadside which is easy enough for police to use which can serve the purpose of providing an officer with enough evidence or enough confidence that somebody is impaired by drugs whilst at the same time being convenient and quick to use. That's really what the committee will be charged with because no one in this House wants to see law which is introduced which cannot be enforced by the police. That undermines public confidence in the police and ultimately puts them in a position where they're being asked to enforce laws which do not make sense. We need to make sure that our drug laws are sensible that they apply to everyone in the same way and that the police are proud to uphold them. That is the task of the select committee in regard to this bill.There are some questions that I'll be focusing on and the idea here is that we don't want a roll of the dice. We need to understand at the select committee level how has the technology advanced even since the last bill was progressed through this Parliament because when the Government members have given speeches today and they've said that the prior Government's legislation didn't work because it was overly onerous and it had too many regulations that's not right. It didn't work because there was a high evidentiary threshold and a group of experts who were recommending to the Government that the evidence required from the technology wasn't there. The technology wasn't up to it. So we need to make sure that the technology is there to be able to enable this.In some of the jurisdictions that have allowed saliva testing not to a high evidentiary threshold but just as a sort of indicator for police there are a number of instances where people are essentially being told they have done wrong when they have not done something wrong. That is not how our criminal law should work. People should have confidence that when they come up at a roadside testing station roll down the window kids in the car—that you are being tested and that the results coming through are not going to be false. And that you are not going to then be subject to a further invasive procedure on the side of the road in your public neighbourhood your neighbours looking on if there's been no reason for that and you're not at fault. We need to make sure that the public can have confidence in this. So that is one question for the select committee to really work through.The next is the broader question of impairment here. This was something that also came through loud and clear in the submissions last time which was: is the correct thing for the police to be testing impairment or should they be testing sobriety? Those are two different things because impairment when you are driving can include a number of things—things like medication which is prescribed by your doctor which will impair your driving being tired which is a significant contributor to many of our roadside fatalities as it is already and a number of other factors which lead to people not driving in the way that they should and not driving in a safe way. Sobriety and functional sobriety is something that police can test already by an observation of an officer which doesn't require a drug test per se but it requires as an officer to make observations about a person's ability to be in control of a car safely and and officers are trained to be able to do that. So we need to investigate that too.But the parting remarks I would leave this House with are that nobody absolutely nobody thinks that drug driving is acceptable—no one should be driving under the influence of drugs—that we do need police to have these tools to be able to intervene in that and that we need to make sure they actually work.