O'Connor GregGREG O'CONNOR (Labour—Ōhāriu): I'll start as we traditionally do on a Wednesday on a members' day by congratulating the member Simeon Brown for having this bill drawn out of the biscuit tin and I'll congratulate him on his enthusiasm for the bill. He looks at it and thinks This seems like a good idea" and like so many things that do come before this House they looked like a damn fine idea. But when they are actually giving some scrutiny and I'm afraid Mr Brown some history then things look a little different. Now I sometimes do tend when I see these things come in to dig deep into my memory which I'm fortunate looking around the House is a longer memory than anyone else in this House—even your own Mr Speaker. But I can remember a time when police cars didn't have sirens; they only had little red lights. Now I'm not sure if anyone in this House will actually remember when police cars just had little red lights on their grey cars but that was the police which I joined. They had previously had sirens but as a result the folklore was—whether it was true or not—that a certain inspector had raced home for lunch using his siren and had been caught and prosecuted and so as a result the commissioner of the day said "Right. No more sirens." So that meant that a generation of police officers like myself were then forced to try and get their way through traffic with little red lights or actually subsequently little blue lights in the middle of our Holden Kingswoods and Holden Belmonts—when we weren't stopping because the gears had jammed—trying to actually get to where we were going. In fact I do recall in the Evening Post—again showing my age—a reporter wandering down Lambton Quay had heard a police car with apparently a siren going as it raced to a job down Lambton Quay. Now I happened to be in that car at the time. I was the driver but my passenger was on the PA or public address system whistling and trying to emulate a siren so that we could actually get to where we were going as quickly as possible because it was pretty hopeless trying to get there just with this little blue light. Just as an aside when the blue lights were introduced I can say that I was in the first police car that crashed that ever smashed a blue light in racing to a major incident in the Newlands Arms Hotel. We hit a fog layer went through the fog and my erstwhile companion Dave Potaka didn't know there was a curve in the road and we ran along and smashed the blue light. Again another little pat to fame. But I digress Mr Speaker. DEPUTY SPEAKER: You certainly do. GREG O'CONNOR: I know we are here on this serious matter of why we should look at the possibility of these particular emergency vehicles having a flashing amber light.Why I did take some time to get to this position is that the reality of it this history of how we've got a number of vehicles around there with amber lights and why it is not a good idea to put another amber light there with rights—it is not a particularly good idea. I would invite all these members when they leave here and return to their electorates to actually have a look out and see how many vehicles there are out there with amber lights on the top of them at the moment. There are a considerable number. If you happen to be anywhere near a major construction site if you happen to be anywhere near a mining site—locally in Wellington you will see that every single vehicle that actually comes off Transmission Gully has all got an orange light. They haven't got any ability or any powers with them but they have these lights because they are safety devices. So were we to put another vehicle on the road with a right or ability to use these particular lights it would just add to confusion.The other thing if you are ever in a vehicle without a siren and with a light on and even with a siren is to just see how motorists actually react to it. Again I'll invite anyone who sees an ambulance a fire engine or a police vehicle approaching an intersection to just see how the public behave. Actually if you have an inexperienced ill-trained driver behind the wheel of the vehicle with a siren as you will know it could actually create more danger—create more of a peril situation if you don't actually approach it properly. Just imagine the scene where you are sitting on the motorway as described by Mr Brown and all of a sudden you've got this orange light flashing behind you. I suggest that any driver who is in that situation trying to get to the sort of situations he described is not going to get very far just with a little amber light going on. No what they will do is they will put their hazard lights on as I have seen many a dog control officer do racing off to a scene. They'll probably be tooting their horn and they may even be—going back to my little situation down on Lambton Quay—having some sort of PA system emitting all sorts of noises trying to attract attention.The other thing that happens also is you'd probably find that if this vehicle is required to go to an emergency there will have been a lot of emergency vehicles on their way there too. So there will be considerable sirens; there will be considerable lights. Now there is American research that actually shows that when motorists are confronted with flashing lights they will intuitively go towards the flashing light. So when you look in your rear-view mirror or if you are approaching an intersection and you see flashing lights what people intuitively do is actually go towards them. Now again I'll go back to the member here who has brought this bill. There is a very good reason and looked at in isolation without dissecting your arguments Mr Brown I can see that there are reasons. Without taking into consideration out of context and just looking at it alone without any history it may actually seem on the surface a very good idea like many pieces of legislation—particularly members' bills—that come before the House. So what I'll be saying is that we have to ensure that if we're going to put another set of flashing lights—particularly if it's someone's rights on the road—we have to be very careful firstly to educate the public. Now that would be quite interesting. The previous debate was about making sure that we look at the regulatory consequences of any legislation. Well one of them would probably be having to rewrite the road code for a start and for a party supposedly worried about the Government spend just be very wary when you do because the other thing with the orange light—at the moment no vehicles with orange lights actually have any powers. We have red lights and we have the police vehicles with the blue lights and I've already explained the change from red to blue. Apparently there was some science at the time that showed that with blue lights people do notice them particularly much more than they do red lights. You'll see also that most cars now have blue and red flashing lights. Again the important thing is that they go with a siren because it is the siren that will actually attract you first so then that allows them to go through the traffic. In my experience and the experience of many of my colleagues where an emergency vehicle is required to get to somewhere like the Auckland Harbour Bridge the smart thing to do is to actually get a police car to escort them in the same way that often happens—and already the member spoke about midwives. There's many a midwife—in fact there may even be statistically someone in this House who was born in the back of a car because it is not an uncommon occurrence and generally when that happens the first thing that we'll do is that a police or other emergency vehicle will actually be dispatched despite the fact that they actually have the ability not to go through or break any law or to speed but to just have the ability currently to put their lights on. Essentially it means that they're unlikely to be charged. Like all these things it's when something goes wrong that really it will be tested and "going wrong" means that it would generally be an accident. Sadly even with experienced fire staff police staff and ambulance staff serious accidents still occur because actually having the ability to go through red lights to go to speed or to go into lanes or places where the general public would not be expecting to see a car does create issues. It may well be again some of the rationale for allowing particularly people going to electrical emergencies to get there quicker—it is something that will not be solved and it never should be solved by a member's bill in this House. It is something that again—as I've spoken about previously—the law of the unintended consequences in a situation like this will be considerable. So I am not going to stand here and say that it is necessarily a bad idea but without taking into consideration the implications for other road users this is a bill that if it is to be considered it should be considered within a package of other proposals to ensure that we do actually understand the consequences. Therefore I cannot support this bill."