Joyce Steven: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Joyce Steven: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:18032] 
Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 I will make a couple of points if I can at this stage. I appreciate the support that the Opposition has given to a number of the measures in this bill but I am a bit concerned at the double standard it now appears to be taking with regard to young drivers versus the blood-alcohol level. Firstly if we look at the evidence and at what this bill is trying to achieve—I think it will make very strong inroads—we will see that the biggest problems on our roads sadly are our young drivers where we have a very tragic situation. We have a 60 percent worse fatality rate in this country than in Australia. It is a shocking statistic that we all need to take some responsibility for. High-risk drivers are sadly again dominated by people who are not just under or just over the legal blood-alcohol limit but are actually well over the blood-alcohol limit. 
I take the point that the Hon Shane Jones was making to a point when he told the Committee of the terrible story of the person who was blind drunk in Northland. We all have those stories. The point is that that person was obviously well over the current legal limit. In terms of the youngsters whom the Hon Shane Jones referred to I agree with him entirely which is why we have proposed a nil alcohol limit for young drivers. We have imposed that limit not because we want to punish young drivers but because we all know partly from our distant memories and partly from our own children in our lives that teenagers are not that good on making decisions about when to drink and when to drive. We have had a number of tragic cases in this country where the least drunk teenager has been picked to drive home with sadly horrible consequences. We have only a 0.03 grams limit now for young people. A nil limit for young people—having it as an infringement penalty between 0.0 and 0.03 grams and taking into account the tolerance for mouthwash and all those things—sends a very straightforward message to the under 20s and tells them that if they have a drink they should not drive. That is the deal and we are making it very straightforward and very black and white because we are all conscious that we are 10-foot high and bulletproof when we are young. 
The contradiction in the Opposition’s position is that on the one hand it says the polls state that everybody says we should lower the adult blood-alcohol limit despite the fact that there is no evidence of the actual harm caused by drivers with a blood-alcohol concentration between 0.05 and 0.08 grams in this country; there is no evidence. On the other hand the Opposition says that it is not necessarily in favour of raising the driving age by a year which is actually a more popular initiative in this country—if we are going to be populist—right through rural and urban areas than the call to reduce the blood-alcohol concentration from 0.08 to 0.05 grams. So that is a bit of a contradiction in terms particularly when we know the evidence of the difficulties for young drivers. Sadly we know that we have a 60 percent worse fatality rate in this country than the rates in other countries. 
People have raised the issue of mobility of young drivers and I completely understand that. But I ask why it is so different to give a 14-year-old a drive to the sports game but suddenly it is not possible to do that for a 15-year-old. I do not buy that. I think that someone can take a young person to events until they reach the driving age. That is not the excuse. 
The question we have to ask ourselves is: what is an appropriate age at which young people can drive? There is a chart which we have shown to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in answer to Darien Fenton’s concerns and it has also been shown to all the members who have shown an interest. This chart shows quite clearly that the younger someone is with the same level of experience the higher his or her accident rate will be. That is the reality. In fact there are many people who think the driving age in this country should be another year older again than what we have proposed in the Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. 
We have to consider that very very carefully because there is another chart which we have shown the select committee and it is in the high-risk drivers report. It is a very sad chart that shows the number of passengers in vehicles who die at the hand of their young driver friends when their driver friends are out on their restricted licence or learner licence late at night in places like the Bay of Plenty Waikato Auckland or out the back of Hawke’s Bay. There are young kids out there making bad driving decisions and unfortunately taking the lives of other kids with them. We have to make the call that we need a young driver package—it is not just one measure—that says that driving involves more responsibility than they think. We need to take that step so the Government has put together a young driver package that is about a zero permissible breath - blood-alcohol concentration for under-20-year-olds changes the minimum age for driver licensing to make it the same as in Australia toughens up the restricted licence provisions so that young drivers are encouraged to have 120 hours training and also looks at things like vehicle power restrictions which we will have a report on later this year. We are saying that here is a whole package because we do not want to have a fatality rate for our young people on the roads that is 60 percent worse than that in Australia. We do not want that. 
I will raise one other matter in terms of the adult blood-alcohol limit. It was addressed at the time that the UK was also looking into lowering its limit from 0.08 grams to 0.05 grams. The UK is an interesting place. It has half the road fatality rate as New Zealand when using the same population basis. It has one of the lowest rates in the world but it has a 0.08 grams blood-alcohol level. The UK looked at lowering its blood-alcohol limit too and said that maybe it should be dropped to 0.05 grams because a lot of countries have that limit but it said no. It has made a decision now. The decision is that it is high-risk drivers who are the problem and that it is high-risk drivers that they will focus on in the UK. We have made the same decision in this country because the evidence is clear. If we look at the two areas high-risk drivers and young drivers who have not already been classified as high-risk drivers together they comprise 53 percent of at-fault drivers in fatal crashes. More than half the at-fault drivers in fatal crashes are either high-risk drivers or young drivers. By high-risk drivers we mean people who are well over the blood-alcohol limit people who have had alcohol licence problems before and all those sorts of people. They actually have an alcohol problem which turns up the roads. That is the problem we are dealing with. It is an alcohol problem that unfortunately turns up on our roads. 
The other initiative that this bill allows for is alcohol interlocks. That is a big step forward for this Parliament: the ability to provide a technological solution that in many cases will separate the drinker from his or her driving. We have to try to do that. Unfortunately we cannot have someone in every driveway saying “You can go on the road” or “You cannot go on the road”. The road is a very democratic place; everybody has access to it. What we can say is that when someone is the sort of person who cannot make responsible decisions once he or she has had a couple of drinks then having an alcohol interlock in place will make that decision for him or her. As Darien Fenton has pointed out we will also have a nil alcohol limit for repeat drink-drivers. 
I think this is a cohesive package. I ask the Committee to keep a real focus on young drivers; on the fatality rate that is 60 percent worse compared with that in Australia which I think is very sad for this country; and also on the real issues with adult drink-driving which are at the serious end of the spectrum. Once this bill has passed we will collect the actual data over the next 2 years on the harm caused by drivers who have a blood-alcohol level of between 0.05 grams and 0.08 grams and then we will settle what has been an emotional and long-running debate in this country about whether moving the blood-alcohol limit from 0.08 grams to 0.05 grams will actually make the difference to the road toll that its advocates say it will. 
I will say a final word on those advocates. I understand the Labour Party’s view is that sometimes to achieve social change the rules in other areas have to be changed because it likes to do a little bit of social engineering but I think we are talking about transport here. This issue is actually about transport and what it is safe to do on the road. To all those groups like Alcohol Healthwatch Alcohol Advisory Council and the rest who want to use the road as a means to achieve wider societal change I say good on them but this is actually a transport issue that we need to deal with and we need to deal with it on that basis. We do not punish people just in the hope that if we really come down hard on them then we will change the alcohol culture in this country. If we want to change the alcohol culture in this country that is fine but many people who are quite happy and law abiding will have a few drinks at home and not drive anywhere and those people will not respond well to the suggestion that this is all about social engineering. Thank you.