White HelenHELEN WHITE (Labour): I'm not on the Health Committee but I was the counsel in the Air New Zealand case which was the test case on drug testing and then I was also counsel on Toll which was the second case in the run. So I do know rather a lot about drug testing. In the original case I remember John Haigh QC who was a very lovely man and he described exactly the risk of what has been described here: that people would actually use inventive ways to get round the situation and they would use synthetic urine or somebody else's. And actually at that point he was reassured by the expert witness who was in favour of drug testing that gold standard testing would mean that no one who did a proper drug test in a proper robust way would actually be able to pull the wool over the eyes of an employer. So as long as an employer is paying for the gold standard test that simply should not occur according to the experts. What has probably happened is there's been an insidious creep in this area so that there are a lot of tests that aren't necessarily up to scratch in terms of their science. Now the problem with that testing of course itself was evident to the full court. It is a very invasive form of testing and we've heard a little bit about that today. It does involve really a balance between the employer's interests or the public's interests and the private interests of the employees. What the court warned in that case was that while drug testing at that point was accepted in quite prescribed circumstances it was not for ever. In fact what they said was that as soon as saliva testing became reliable it should replace this form of testing because it's a lot less invasive. We now have actually really good saliva testing available. It's going to be cheaper for employers. It's way less invasive because it is only saliva. It's on the spot so there's a lot less chance that you can actually fiddle with the tests. And also it does something very important: it focuses on recent use. There's all sorts of issues with testing with regard to picking up historical use—particularly of marijuana because marijuana stays in the fat cells—and so it is actually a very bad indicator of whether there's impairment in the workplace. I have some concerns about drug testing in general because I think it does distract from the real issue which is actually fatigue and other forms of impairment in a workplace. If you have people who are incentivised to work very very quickly—it was happening on the port and it has been discussed recently; if you have people who are very fatigued by the types of shifts they are on; if you have people on various drugs or they're just fatigued because their lifestyle is out of kilter then you can have really bad accidents. And this kind of approach where we focus on and demonise always the employee actually tends to distract from some of the actual causes of workplace fatalities and serious injuries. So I am absolutely in favour of workers turning up to work unimpaired as I am in favour of them not being impaired by alcohol. But what I would like to do is see the wood for the trees in this situation and the intelligent approach here is to look at saliva testing if you have to and look at impairment testing ultimately because impairment testing will actually focus on the worker who's driving the forklift erratically or dangerously. It won't actually tick the box that they are not impaired by drugs and put them back on the forklift. In my career I have actually seen that happen and it frightens me. It frightens me that we are misdirecting. This bill could be a costly one to supervise and to enforce and it would be a waste of taxpayers' money. I do not commend this bill to the House.