Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Madam Speaker. This is a really difficult issue because the science and the technology doesn't quite match up with our aspiration. I have three teenage boys. The eldest has his driver's licence and like a lot of young people has an active social life. I hope and trust that he makes the right decisions every time he gets behind the wheel but I don't have control over him and I don't have control over what other people do on the road when I'm driving. So it's important that we have a means of deterring people from getting behind the wheel and driving while impaired. That includes not just illegal substances but also prescription medications or medications that may be misused.When I've looked at the submissions—and the Green Party and the ACT Party did come to a differing view on the bill—we have reservations because at this point in time it's not possible to create a link between an oral fluid test a blood test and impairment for certain types of drugs. It's because drugs that have been illegal for such a long time like psychoactive drugs have not been assessed with sufficient academic rigour for their impairment for us to be able to make that very important causal link between somebody driving or operating a motor vehicle—or it could be a piece of plant and equipment on the road—having a positive result with an oral fluid test having a positive detectable result with a blood test and a level of impairment that would cause concern because as with alcohol testing it's well understood that there is a limit for a reason. And we accept that a person of a certain body mass or even one or more genders might have a different response to alcohol. So while you might pass a test actually depending on your fatigue whether you're dehydrated what your emotional state is your response to alcohol might be much more severe than actually what the test result at the roadside evaluation tells you.Many people have claimed that they can beat the test they can drink more than what is recommended whether it's one drink per hour and their bodies can cope with it. But many other people will tell you that that limit doesn't apply to them. They can't drink at all because they feel funny and uncomfortable getting behind the wheel. So if we're thinking about what's the purpose of the legislation—to deter people from driving while impaired to reduce the harm that people who are driving while under the influence of drugs cause through motor vehicle accidents through injuries and worst case through fatalities and harming others—then what are we going to do to solve that problem? And we do have some reservations that the proposed purpose of this bill and the functions that are set out in it actually don't line up. However the ACT Party will be supporting the bill at this reading with reservations and they're reservations that we've outlined in the report back in our differing view that we share with the Green Party that the very medical professionals who we trust to make judgments about health and wellbeing—medical health psychological psychiatric health—have raised significant concerns about that relationship between impairment testing and criminalising people for failing a test without actually being able to confirm whether they're impaired. So we do have concerns about that and we believe that there needs to be a tension a stress imposed on officials who would be administering this bill down the track to gather the data to actually demonstrate if possible a causal link between the oral fluid test result and impairment. Now this research is going on around the world and states like Victoria South Australia in Australia have struggled to align those two sets of data. But just because a task is difficult doesn't mean we should shy away from it.In fact New Zealand companies like Rako for example have developed a wonderfully effective and efficient saliva test for COVID-19 which despite the reservations of this Government—which recently reports that they've conducted only 15 tests with this wonderful Rako saliva test that the US military and various other organisations are using. In fact New Zealand of all places probably has the technological capability to develop oral saliva testing for impairment. So let's trust those scientists but we do need to collect the data. It does need to be reported back. There is a concern that officials who are given a regulatory licence will simply run away with it promise the Earth to their Minister and to the public but very very rarely return with the evidence that the legislation that they've asked for is working and to actually ask for tweaks. Because nobody who's asked for something promised that it would work—those people very rarely have the courage to come back and ask for it to be fixed afterwards. That's why we need to get it right this time. So what we're proposing is that the legislation is amended and we'll be working on Supplementary Order Papers with the Green Party to have the legislation amended at the committee stage. We need to apply an acid test to the bureaucracy. We need to make sure they understand that we've given them a licence but that it's not enduring and that within five years this legislation should expire unless they can demonstrate it's actually working. Barbara Kuriger: We apply that to everything.SIMON COURT: We should as our colleague the member Barbara Kuriger suggests apply this acid test to all Government legislation but it is particularly appropriate for this one. So on that note again ACT will support the bill at this reading and we look forward to continuing to engage with the Government and other parties to make it better legislation. Thank you Madam Speaker.