Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I just want to start by acknowledging that a lot of effort went into the design and drafting of this legislation to ensure that it could meet both the concerns that have been raised about the potential impact that impairing substances were having on our deaths and serious injuries on our roads and the fact that there's actually quite a bit of uncertainty still with the tests as they are and about their ability to establish impairment alone. So a lot of work has gone into this legislation as it's proposed to ensure that there would be minimisation of false positives and to ensure that there is as good a relationship as can be established between a given saliva level and impairment. Of course there's no ability through the saliva tests alone for anyone to get a criminal conviction. This was really important because the saliva tests cannot provide the evidential standard that would be needed to give someone a criminal conviction for driving impaired.Now I just want to especially acknowledge all the pain and suffering of those families who have lost people due to any sort of car crash or vehicle crash and acknowledge that it is particularly painful in those cases like in the case of Matthew Shepherd [Matthew Dow] when the driver was known to be under the influence of impairing substances and a repeat offender. But those tragedies alone are not a reason to rush to a particular legislative solution unless we have enough evidence that the legislative solution is actually going to be a solution and is actually going to reduce impaired driving. In the case of Matthew Shepherd [Matthew Dow]—and I did meet his family—this legislation would not have made any difference in that case because that driver had already been reported to the police was already driving erratically and the police already had tools in place to do a compulsory impairment test. So it wasn't the lack of random roadside drug testing that that led to that; it was insufficient police on the roads and insufficient response to the complaints that were being made.So while it's an incredibly emotional issue we have to be really focused on the evidence. I have to say it was a privilege for me having been somewhat involved in the drafting of the original legislation to be able to sit on the select committee and hear the submissions. One thing that I'm slightly surprised about that we haven't heard tonight is the number of submissions from health professionals and scientific experts that made it very clear that there's extreme difficulty to reliably establish an equivalent blood level of a substance with an oral fluid test result and that neither of these can actually be correlated with impairment. It's much more difficult than in the case of alcohol and it's particularly difficult with some substances.Yes there's no doubt that there were a couple of unreliable submissions that you would always get in front of the select committee of you know people who maybe haven't brought a lot of research and evidence to their submission. But there was a huge number of very well researched evidence-based submissions from Wellington Regional Public Health the New Zealand Medical Association the Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists and even the independent expert panel itself made it very clear there is no simple relationship between the dose of a drug and the resulting impairment of driving. The Royal New Zealand College of General Practitioners states that the testing framework proposed is not supported by reliable scientific evidence of correlation between presence of substance and impairment."The Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists was concerned that a harm-minimisation approach is not implemented by this bill as well as noting that—and I quote—"The presence of drugs in a person's oral fluid or blood does not directly relate to impairment. … We call for greater research in understanding the link between substance misuse and a person's impairment." The New Zealand Medical Association echoes this stating "the science to support roadside oral fluid testing is not quite sufficiently advanced although it is rapidly evolving. Key concerns include the inability of oral fluid testing to detect impairment the absence of well-defined threshold levels and impairment limits for many drugs and the potential for the Bill to exacerbate inequalities for Māori in the criminal justice system."So when we look at the submissions that were presented an overwhelming number from people who presented actual research and have a professional health background raised these very significant concerns despite the best efforts to design a regime which would give us certainty of being able to test for a proxy for impairment. And that really is the ultimate goal right? If we want a safe road network if we want safe drivers I completely understand that we need some tool to try and deter impaired driving and to detect impaired driving and to do so in a way that will enable us to actually get those impaired drivers off the road. The Green Party's completely supportive of that. What we are very very happy with is that the best efforts have been made to design this bill to minimise risk but we do feel that some additional improvements could be made to reflect the weight of submissions that suggest that actually there is not enough evidence to give these powers and to put such weight in saliva testing and blood testing.So we believe that following the submissions to the select committee there are two improvements that can be made to the bill and we will be moving these in the committee stage and we are very open to support from other parties. One of these is to really instantiate a robust independent review several years after the implementation of the bill. The other one is really just to reflect the fact that we cannot know before implementing this legislation that it will be effective at its stated objective. It is important that we take an empirical approach to this.So if it turns out that this regime is not effective at reducing impaired driving that it hasn't had the desired consequences and that it is resulting in unfair targeting of certain populations it will be incredibly important that there is some requirement or impetus for the Government of the day to respond to that evidence and to change the law and potentially to say "Sorry it didn't work. We're going to have to take a different approach. We might have to go back to more resource for compulsory impairment testing or we might have to do more research into alternatives to saliva tests." which I have no doubt sound really easy and effective and the Police Association came and told us that was definitely what they wanted but we want the test that is out there and applied to drivers to actually detect impaired driving and to discourage it.So the Green Party will be voting for this at second reading. We will be moving several amendments that we think are entirely reasonable amendments that will help address some of the uncertainty. Given the scale of the problem with impaired driving in New Zealand we are open to testing this regime but we believe that there simply is not the evidence beforehand to prove that it will achieve the outcomes we want and that we can minimise the risk of harm to those vulnerable populations. So the Green Party will be looking to improve the bill with just two very minor amendments that will help improve and give confidence to New Zealanders that we are going to take an empirical approach that we are not going to be swayed by emotive stories and then impose something that doesn't actually achieve the objective."