Woods Megan: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15143. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): It is my pleasure to take a call to discuss the Land Transport Amendment Bill a piece of legislation that many others before me have talked about. The purpose of this bill is to lower the adult legal alcohol limits from 400 micrograms of alcohol per litre of breath to 250 micrograms and from 80 milligrams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood to 50 milligrams; and to enact the civil infringements of $200 fines and 50 demerit points that will be imposed on those who fall between the 50 and 80 milligram levels. I think it is important that we as a House can come to consensus and collective agreement around how it is that we as a society deal with those who choose to get behind the wheel of a car after they have been drinking to a level that makes them a danger not only to themselves but to others who use the road. I think that it is really important that we do not see this issue becoming highly politicised and that we can come to an agreement. So it is a pleasure to be part of a debate where parties are signalling their support for this bill to go to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to hear the submissions and for finally doing something about lowering even further the number of deaths on our roads caused by alcohol.As many speakers before me have outlined this is a piece of legislation that has a long history. It has been a long time in the making. It has been brewing for a while and my colleagues Iain Lees-Galloway and Darien Fenton pointed to Darren Hughes and hismember’s bill that he brought to this House in 2009. It is an interesting history that this piece of legislation that we are standing here and debating today has.I think the idea that we are debating—whether or not we are going to make a change as legislators in this country that will mean fewer deaths of New Zealanders—is really important. We have the power with decisions we make in this House that will mean that fewer New Zealanders will needlessly die on our roads. I think that is the important stuff that drives many of us in this House. Between 2006 and 2008 30 people were killed in accidents where drivers were known to have a blood-alcohol content of between 0.05 and 0.08. We can treat this as a dry statistic of 30 people or we can think about the 30 human beings and the families of those 30 human beings their friends and all their networks who were needlessly mourning the loss of a loved one. This is really important stuff and it is important that we crack on with it because as others have noted it has been a long time coming.I think that it is really important that we go back and revise the blood-alcohol limits that were set in 1978. I remember growing up in the 1970s and 1980s in New Zealand and there being an entirely different attitude to drinking and driving in this country. The concern of many of the adults around me seemed to be whether or not they were going to be caught not whether or not they posed a danger to themselves or to others who were using the roads. As a student in the 1990s I was part of the SADD movement—Students Against Drunk Driving—where we signed contracts with our parents. There was a two-way contractual agreement that a parent or a new teenage driver would come and pick up family members if they had consumed too much alcohol. We have seen much societal change that has led to fewer deaths on our roads but it is my belief that we need to revisit blood-alcohol limits that were concocted in the 1970s when we did have an entirely different attitude to drink-driving.In July 2010 Cabinet did make some decisions around what was going to happen with drink-driving as many speakers have alluded to. There was a lowering of the youth drink-drive limit for drivers under 20 years of age—the blood-alcohol content was lowered. I think that the evidence did point to the fact that many of the deaths and injuries on our roads do happen amongst the lower-aged cohort of people. But there was a perplexing decision to maintain the current adult drink-drive limit at its 1978 level of 0.08 while we went and did some more research. I think that the then Minister of Transport Steven Joyce had an attitude that is somewhat perplexing to me. In this House in response to a question from Darren Hughes the Minister Steven Joyce said: “before lowering the adult blood-alcohol limit the Government would want to ensure that the specific impact on the road toll of drivers with a blood-alcohol concentration of between 0.05 grams and 0.08 grams was known and that the move had very broad support amongst the driving population of this country.” I am all for consultation but when it comes to making decisions about where we need to set a safe limit for the amount of alcohol that people are allowed to drink before they get behind the wheel of a car I think we need to rely on the science and the evidence and perhaps not on how people feel.We already had very well-established international evidence. We had well-established New Zealand evidence. We could have made this decision back then in 2010. New Zealand lagged behind the rest of the world and I do not know whether Steven Joyce really did believe that there was something inherently different about New Zealanders and their physical make-up that meant that their level of blood-alcohol should be substantially different from those in Australia or those in other places that had made moves to lower the blood-alcohol limit.It is somewhat perplexing that this is a Government that has run roughshod over the will of New Zealand during its 5 years in Government but on this the level of blood alcohol it chooses to go out and see how people feel. It just does not make sense to me.At the time in 2010 we on this side of the House the Labour Opposition offered cross-party support because we do not believe that this is an issue that should become a political football. We believe that this is an important health issue for New Zealand—an important issue where we can literally save the lives of New Zealanders each year. We offered up that support. We also pointed to what international experts were saying about the New Zealand Government’s and Cabinet’s decision not to proceed with the lowering of the blood-alcohol limit. The UK drug and alcohol expert Professor David Nutt described National’s reluctance to make a decision on this as weak and making no sense. This was how the international expert community felt about how our Government was dealing with a really important issue.We did not need to go back and do more research; we had research coming out of our ears. The Law Commission’s report on alcohol left no doubt that blood-alcohol limits needed to be lowered. There just simply was not a need to go back but the Government did. The Government decided to go back and now we have a report that shows that indeed if we had done this we could have literally saved lives. I say that it is not before time that we see this legislation come before the House. It is a pity that we are not heading into the Christmas season—a period of time that is notorious for road accidents and for drink driving—of 2013 with these lowered levels with which we could literally be saving lives.But I will not be churlish. It is good to see it going to the select committee. The public do now have a chance to make their views heard. Other members of this House have raised areas where people might want to have a say. They might want to raise questions about whether this is the right limit as has been alluded to by earlier speakers. They might want to raise questions in their submissions about whether or not the sanctions that this legislation is imposing are appropriate and whether they are the right sanctions. Whatever way I am very pleased to see this bill progressing through the House and I really do urge people to have their voices heard in the select committee process and make it clear to this Government and give it a clear message that the time is right now we cannot delay any further and we need to get on with this. Thank you.