Mitchell Mark; Salesa JennyHon MARK MITCHELL (National—Whangaparāoa): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to stand and take a call on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill in the second reading. And can I also firstly acknowledge the Minister . his opening comments and also the members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and the chair Greg O'Connor—he chairs that committee. He has been a serving police officer and also a president of the New Zealand Police Association which made a very compelling and strong submission to the committee as well.The committee had several issues that we really pored over and discussed; some of them worried us—some of the issues that were raised by the Attorney-General and the Regulations Review Committee. And I think that the committee members led by the chair did a thorough job of making sure that we went over it and tried to return this bill in the best possible shape it could be to continue to get support from the entire House.I have to say that I feel very strongly that it has taken us too long to get the bill here. I think with the Minister's opening comments I reflect on the fact that we lose eight Kiwis every month due to people driving under the influence of drugs on our roads. And so it just highlights for us the importance of actually the passage of this bill to get it through and to allow the police time to operationalise it because there's actually going to be a lot of work to train staff to actually be able to operationalise this and make sure that it's actually effective on our streets to keep our communities and our road users safe.I do just want to go over a little bit of the history of the bill. Alastair Scott actually brought a bill to this House in 2018—a very similar bill—around implementing roadside drug testing. Unfortunately it was voted down and there were several more efforts to get the bill introduced that failed. I don't know whether or not we got caught up in the fact that there was a referendum that was coming towards the country rapidly around the legalisation of cannabis and there were concerns around depending on the result of that referendum how it was going to impact and have effect on the drug-driving amendment bill. In my view we should have separated those two things out. We should have stayed solely focused on the drug-driving legislation and allowed the referendum and the people to have that say as a separate matter. If we needed to make amendments or changes to that legislation then we could have done that.I do want to make a special mention of Matthew Dow and his family who have worked extensively with Nick Smith on this issue. Just to give you a bit of history Matthew Dow was a young Nelsonian. He was killed on the Appleby highway on the last day of 2017. He was driving home from Kaiteriteri to Nelson to meet his family for New Year's celebrations. A reckless drug-impaired driver under the influence of a cocktail of drugs who had had multiple police reports already that day for his erratic driving crossed the centre line of State Highway 60 and smashed head-on into Matthew. Ambulance drivers described it as the most horrific scene that they had attended and some of them had served up to 30 years—he didn't stand a chance. He is just one of hundreds unfortunately that are killed due to the actions of drivers under the influence of drugs. His family Karen and Peter Dow organised a petition two years ago to try and get the Government to move. Finally for Karen and Peter and in Matthew's memory we are moving forward and I am proud to be here tonight taking the first call for National on this bill.We heard several submissions. One of the submissions that was compelling was from the New Zealand Automobile Association (AA). Their submission basically made the following points: the bill strikes the right balance to enable meaningful enforcement action against drivers who are drug-impaired while having safeguards in place to ensure individual rights and freedoms are protected. We felt very strongly too that those had to be in place and there was a lot of debate around transitioning through the oral test through to the option of actually having a blood test. And we debated it quite a lot around the fact of should the person pay for that blood test if they elected to have it. We felt that if they had a blood test and it came back and it was negative then there should be no cost associated; if it was positive then actually they should pick up the cost of that.The AA supports the provision in the bill requiring either two positive oral fluid tests or a positive blood test to trigger enforcement penalties. They also support the two-tier approach for infringements for likely lower-level impairment and criminal offences for likely higher-level impairment. They said we need to be sending a much stronger message to drivers that if they are drug impaired they risk being tested and caught. According to a University of Waikato study 60 percent of drivers thought they were likely to be caught for drunk driving where only 26 percent thought the same for drug driving. So 60 percent of drivers thought there was a high chance of being caught for drunk-driving which actually is a very good deterrent in itself whereas only 26 percent of people thought that they'd be picked up or caught for drug-driving. A Waka Kotahi review on drug-impaired driving noted that effective deterrence requires highly visible general deterrence components.Roadside oral fluid drug testing will be a crucial factor here. We talked a lot about roadside testing and there were very valid concerns raised by committee members around concerns of different groups being targeted with random roadside drug testing. We did talk about that a lot. My own personal feeling was that having been involved having served in the police myself and having been part of a random roadside breath test it is quite simply that it's random—it's whoever pulls into that checkpoint will actually be tested. There was no specific targeting or singling out any group. It was quite simply a matter of whoever came through that roadside testing. Actually I have say I'm very pleased to say that in my own electorate the police are still proactive and active and out there stopping motorists coming through checkpoints. I've been stopped twice myself and I expected on both of those occasions to be tested which I was. And it's very simple now with quite simply talking into the device that the police have stating your name and address and they can very quickly tell whether or not there's alcohol detected on your breath.We hope that the drug-side testing will transition and become good enough that it'll cause very little disruption in a motorist or a person's business but it is going to take time because it is obviously going to be a new regime in New Zealand. Police will need significant extra resources to deliver the testing programme—that is without a doubt. We had assistant commissioner Bruce O'Brien there advising the committee. He was very very good and succinct in his advice to the committee but he did make it clear that it was going to be a big programme that was going to require time to train the police and to operationalise this. We had a submission from Fulton Hogan. Fulton Hogan employs more than 7800 people across New Zealand Australia and the Pacific. They maintain roads for 26 local authorities and one third of the State highway network. Their vehicles travel 100 million kilometres a year. Fulton Hogan use temporary traffic management to protect staff and the public within worksites. Controls assume largely compliant and predictable road use. Unpredictable behaviour whether impairment or otherwise is a serious threat to road workers and to the public and contractors cannot control unpredictable driving behaviour. Impaired drivers need to be prevented from driving to enable contractors to maintain and improve transport network safety. So they were very very very clear in their support for this bill.We had a couple of submitters that submitted to the committee and they were obviously users of cannabis products and various drugs. They tried to convince us that this made them better operators of vehicles but we asked them for any scientific evidence to be able to back that up and they couldn't provide that. But in their own minds they think that when they've had a couple of joints they were better drivers and they were safer on the roads. And I think that that highlighted for us just why it was so important to have this regime in place because there are people that genuinely take drugs consume drugs and feel emboldened and feel that they're actually safer operating a vehicle—and they were bold enough to come in front of the committee and actually make submissions like that.Look I'm only half way through the comments that I wanted to get through tonight but there will be further chances to speak to the bill. But I am very happy to be standing tonight in support of the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. It should have been here earlier; it's here now. Let's get this bill through Parliament and passed as quickly as we can. Thank you.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The question is that the motion be agreed to.