Turei Metiria: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
Turei Metiria: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — First Reading 
[Volume:642;Page:12391] 
METIRIA TUREI (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. The Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) does two major things. Firstly a large part of the bill involves quite uncontroversial changes to the motor vehicle registration regime that increase the privacy protections for those who are on the register and the Green Party fully supports those changes. Secondly the bill goes on to provide a regime for dealing with drug-impaired driving and the safety issues around that. 
The Green Party has agreed to support this legislation through its first reading. We want to support legislation that makes our roads safer. We want to encourage the creation of deterrents and the use of enforcement against drivers who are driving while they are impaired. We do not want legislation that appears to be addressing the problems but is simply complicating the issue with what would be well-intentioned but otherwise ineffective provisions. The Greens are always after the best possible law. 
We are very concerned that impaired drivers are on our roads causing harm to property and most important harm to our community and to our people. The primary culprit for this harm is of course the use of alcohol while driving. In 2005 there were 23000 convictions for driving with excess alcohol. Alcohol remains the No. 1 problem drug for road safety and we believe that further measures could be taken to reduce that harm. A recent Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd study shows that of 408 drivers killed 208 had alcohol in their system—that is more than half of those drivers had alcohol in their system. 
I want to take the opportunity to thank the Minister in charge of the bill Annette King and her staff who have worked collaboratively with the Green Party to design a much better piece of legislation than the one originally proposed. Thanks to Green Party involvement we have retained the focus of this legislation on impaired drivers and have not allowed this law to become a back-door way of prosecuting drug offences. The presence of illegal drugs detected in drivers’ blood samples will not be allowed to be used as evidence of prosecution under the Misuse of Drugs Act. If we are to go to the point of allowing blood tests as a legitimate form of search and seizure for the presence of drugs then we need to have a very serious community discussion about the human rights issues implied in that and whether it is the right thing for our community to do. That discussion may well happen in time; the Misuse of Drugs Act is going to be reviewed. But we must not let those kinds of practices be enabled through legislation by assuming it into a bill that does not have that as its purpose. The purpose here is not to find convictions under the Misuse of Drugs Act; the purpose here is to get impaired drivers off our roads because they pose a danger to our community. 
In addition to that issue due to Green insistence—and we have been insisting for some weeks now—legal prescription drugs that are used in such a way as to cause impairment will also be captured by the new offence provisions in this legislation. This is a consistent and cohesive approach to removing dangerous drivers from our roads irrespective of the cause of their impairment. There is a case I agree for dealing with drivers impaired by a variety of causes and the same Institute of Environmental Science and Research study showed that of the 408 drivers I quoted before about 11 percent had only cannabis in their system and about 9 percent had other drugs like legal tranquilisers methadone morphine and amphetamines which are legal drugs. So if there is to be an assumption that illegal drugs cause impairment the research clearly shows that legal drugs are equally implicated as a cause of impairment that can lead to driver death. The bill as currently drafted needs to be made clearer and I thank the Minister for her assurances in the House today that the wording around this particular point will be made clearer in the committee process. 
Overseas jurisdictions seeking to implement similar measures to combat the problem of driving while impaired by things other than alcohol have faced considerable difficulty in providing effective legislation. No reliable objective test exists for roadside testing of impairment. Roadside testing for the presence of drugs—illegal and legal drugs—faces similar difficulties. A European Union research project in 2006 looked at nine different devices for on-site detection of legal and illegal drugs and found that there was no device considered reliable enough for roadside screening. So the only alternative is the subjective impairment test with all the inherent problems that surround that test. 
The physical impairment test in the bill will be administered by the police and we are very concerned about its subjective nature particularly as it leads immediately on to a blood test. One of our concerns—and we have raised this before—is the racist filters in the police force that lead to unjustified targeting of Maori and particularly Maori men when it comes to drug offences. Research in 2002 from the Christchurch Health and Development Study the work of Professor David Fergusson who has done very good work in this area clearly shows that one of the primary risks for being targeted by the police for drug offences is being a Maori man. The research concluded that the administration of laws relating to cannabis was inequitable and biased against Maori and males and that the current cannabis laws are discriminatory. The difficulty is that the choice to target one particular person for a search or for being stopped in a car is strictly a matter of individual police decisions. These racist filters have been recognised both in the policing area and in health. This bill will give police another tool for stopping drivers and being able to utilise these racist filters but with only limited instruction and education that will break down those racist filters so that the legislation is used fairly as intended and not as a discriminatory tool against Maori. 
The second step in the legislation is the blood test and we are very concerned about this of course because a blood test is a highly invasive form of search and seizure. A blood test is used for detecting alcohol-impaired driving; we know about that and are very used to that process and that is because we have in the law a lawful blood-alcohol limit under which a person is legally entitled to drive. If a person goes over the limit that person is in breach of the law. That limit is established through proven scientific methods that show definitively that at that specified level of blood alcohol a person is impaired and should not be driving. But for the evidence-based legal blood-alcohol limit a blood test would otherwise be an unreasonable search and seizure. 
The same principle should apply when we are talking about other drugs particularly cannabis. The law should establish using quality science a level of drug use for specified drugs that definitively shows that a person is impaired by that drug at that time and that limit should be set out in law. Our laws should be evidence-based and scientifically sound. The subjective view of a police officer is not a robust test; nor is the simple presence of a drug with no scientifically-based assessment of the level of impairment that that drug can cause. Maurice Williamson just talked about how long it takes for some drugs to wear off; the current research shows that it takes about 1 to 2 hours in the case of cannabis use. 
This bill is a very blunt tool for dealing with the issue of impaired driving and we expect the law will evolve into something much more mature as more research and technology become available. Professor Fergusson—I referred to him before—has produced further research that suggests that young people are simply not aware that driving under the influence of cannabis or other drugs can cause impairment. In large part that is because of the legal status of the drug; it creates considerable barriers to getting across to young people truthful and trusted information about the harms cannabis can cause. Again I hope that sometime in the near future we may take a much more mature approach to this issue. Excellent progress has been made towards developing legal limits for driving under the influence of cannabis. In Germany there has been some great research that shows that about 10 nanograms per millilitre is associated with a distinct and identifiable level of risk. That research needs to be brought in and be part of the discussion that we have at select committee. Science and technology in this respect will eventually provide us with much better guidance that will enable us to have good quality law that is based on science that is based on evidence and that does not abuse the fundamental rights of our citizens. Until then we still have some way to go. Thank you.