Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:658;Page:7215] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 I rise also to speak in relation to the issue of noise. It came up in the course of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee’s deliberation on the petition of Nicky Wagner. I think there are a couple of points and they relate to the point I made earlier about the deliberation and consideration phase of our select committee work being very rushed. A number of important issues were raised about lower decibel requirements and a lot of information was provided by officials in this area but I do not think we really got to debate it. 
I think it is too simplistic to say that lower stationary tailpipe noise limits will not significantly reduce vehicle noise. I think also that the issue of modification of exhausts is one we need to look at more closely. There are countries for example that ban such modifications completely and some that have lower decibel limits than we currently have. As has already been noted Labour took action in that regard in its last term in Government. 
The area I particularly want to focus on is the fact that the police already have powers to take action in the area of noise under the Land Transport Rule: Vehicle Equipment 2004 and the Land Transport (Road User) Rule 2004. We noted that those rules provide the police with a relatively straightforward way of dealing with noise as long as the police are there. So it is about police resourcing actually; use of the vehicle rules that I have just mentioned depends on resourcing. 
One of the things I found particularly interesting was that there is very inconsistent usage of those rules around New Zealand. We saw quite a bit of evidence. I will give members some examples. 
Hon Tau Henare 
: Oh don’t! 
CAROL BEAUMONT 
: Oh I am sure that Mr Henare really does want to know these things. If we are taking a holistic approach we need to look at what is used already. If we looking at noisy vehicles we see that there were 249 infringements in the Waitamata area whereas in Auckland there were only 15. I do not know; arguably there are different numbers of vehicles in each area but both areas are quite large and it seems to me that that is a major inconsistency. If we go through to Counties-Manukau we are looking at 82 infringements in relation to noisy vehicles. In the Waikato area we are looking at 111 infringements. On the other hand the Bay of Plenty which does not have the same population and therefore one would think does not have the same number of vehicles as Waikato had 202 infringements in relation to noisy vehicles. Let us look at the Canterbury area because it comes up a lot in relation to vehicle noise. In the Canterbury area there were 926 infringements. That is quite a lot of infringements in the area of noisy vehicles. On the other hand in the southern area there were 147. 
My point is that there is quite a lot of inconsistency. One of the things that became obvious to us and the point was made by the police themselves is that a lot can already be done in relation to this problem. Essentially the main part of the problem with boy racers is the noise element and a lot could be done if there were consistent policing across New Zealand. It seems to me that those two rules on noise are not being applied consistently at the moment and that they may provide a more straightforward way of dealing with it than some of the propositions that are being put up in both the Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill and its companion bill which we will be talking about next. 
I go back to the point made earlier that the issue is police resourcing. The utilisation of these provisions requires sufficient police at the right time and in the right place and that is a problem. It seems to me that it is particularly a problem for us at a point when the Minister is actually cutting funding to the police. Cutting $21 million from the police budget and reducing the number of police vehicles on the roads will make it more difficult arguably for the police to use those noise provisions. 
I thought it was important to note that we do have some noise rules that could be a very useful device but we do not have adequate policing to use them.