O'Connor GregTUESDAY 29 AUGUST 2023(continued on Wednesday 30 August 2023)LAND TRANSPORT (ROAD SAFETY) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The House is resumed. Good morning. When the House rose last night we were on the third reading of the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. We are up to speaker No. 6—Dr James McDowall.Dr JAMES McDOWALL (ACT): Thank you Mr Speaker and good morning to the House. It's a pleasure to rise on behalf of ACT to speak at the third reading of the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. For what it's worth ACT is taking a more straightforward approach in how we're voting for this bill. It was interesting to listen to the speeches yesterday and last night from the National Party friends over there but also from other parties in this House. Our more straightforward approach is simply that on balance there is more that we dislike about this bill than we like so we are opposing it at third reading.We had some more questions that we would have liked to ask in committee stage but none the less that was concluded and our concerns for this bill are around the unintended consequences—what we see as potentially disproportionate penalties that can be applied which could severely impact people and their property particularly in the event where that person or business that owns a vehicle is effectively punished despite having nothing to do with the situation. We understand there are recourses there are ways to repossess vehicles and it's just a lot of red tape and a lot of additional cost.The bill itself while on the whole having good intentions is too broad. It raises too many questions and I reflect on some of the scenarios and situations that other members have highlighted particularly those where we have a fleeing driver who flees police and commits a raft of offences in the process if not leading up to the event often injuring someone or worse destroying property and so on. The reality is the measures introduced in this bill will be the least of their legal problems and the disincentive isn't necessarily there—they are already committing a range of offences.The comparisons to other countries particularly in Europe is quite interesting—countries with much lower road deaths per capita. Most of those countries have much higher speed limits than New Zealand does. I've lived overseas for a while and obviously it varies from country to country but you can go from the Netherlands and go to Germany and a lot of their autobahns still have no speed limits and those that do sit around 120 and in some cases 130. So it's an interesting comparison.We do not feel the point-to-point or average speed camera should be a feature of this bill. It is a potentially significant punitive revenue-gathering exercise that targets the masses not fleeing drivers—not just those committing specific offences.We question how this technology would operate alongside traditional ambush tactics at present. How would those enforcement tools interact? Would they overlap meaning someone in theory could get fined twice for a single speeding offence? Perhaps an option is to have one system of either ambush tactics in a certain area or the speed cameras but not both. But that's obviously not a feature of this bill and I suspect the Government has little appetite for getting rid of speed traps.The consultation for this bill was insufficient being from only 19 May to 4 June which is about the time it takes to get a stock standard overdue written question back. The majority of the submissions to the committee disagreed with the bill and we hear those concerns and one of those concerns is that it may not make the roads actually safer especially from those who have absolutely no regard for the law in the first place. We've heard in contributions that with fatalities sitting around 10 percent as a result of speed alone this may not be actually targeting quite the right thing. There are aspects and elements of this bill that we can get on board with and we've spoken to that but there is too much there. Property will be destroyed or seized without sufficient notice and there are concerns around the insurance companies and the finance companies and yet here we are in the dying days of this Parliament on the second to last day having to see this through along with a whole raft of other pieces of legislation that were consulted at some stage some time ago or had very little consultation at all and were left to the last minute.The costs of the scheme are unknown which in this current fiscal environment is a hard sell and more unknown are the costs to third parties to sectors like the insurance sector and the finance sector. It will be a costly implementation getting these cameras up and all the systems in line with that and all the extra staff. As my colleague Simon Court discussed during the committee stage if we're going to be putting cameras up on our roads wouldn't it be better to look at congestion charging so that we can actually fund our roads better and make our roads safer because at the end of the day a lot of the issues with fatal crashes and accidents come down to bad roads.Yes we agree that crime is out of control. Fleeing drivers are part of that problem but a bill that focuses too heavily on property and issuing speeding tickets is not a solution to mitigate random criminal activity. It is a band-aid at best and one that will generate a fair share of paperwork and court time. We'd also caution the Government as a last note to keep an eye on this regime and how it rolls out because the punitive measures in this bill will undoubtedly cause considerable financial hardship for many not only those that have fallen foul of it themselves directly but those who are indirectly connected to a situation and bear no criminal responsibility.On the whole we don't believe this bill is tough or smart on crime. It's quite a rough approach and ACT is opposing it.