Beaumont Carol: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19233. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):Let me start where the member opposite the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee David Bennett left off and that is from this side of the House not only to join the National Government in supporting this Land Transport Amendment Bill but also to acknowledge the work of Darien Fenton on the select committee. Darien has been in the interesting position of dealing with both the industrial relations part and the transport part of the select committee and has obviously been a strong advocate in both of those portfolio areas particularly in transport safety.Of course in regard to the bill that we are speaking about that is really what we are talking about. This is a safety issue and the purpose of the bill is to address the problem caused by alcohol-impaired driving. Unfortunately I did not get to spend as much time on this bill as other members of the select committee because I was having to deal with legislation in another select committee. None the less I know that the select committee did put its mind to a number of issues around blood testing the payment for blood testing and all of that side of things. I do take the point that potentially there may well be matters that end up being litigated around this but the basic concept of lowering the blood-alcohol level is one that Labour has long supported and is one that is well overdue.Hon Anne Tolley: Nine years in Government.CAROL BEAUMONT: I certainly recall from the last Parliament that this was well traversed as part of the Law Commission work around alcohol and the impact of alcohol on our lives as well as in other transport legislation at the time that was dealing with younger drivers. The Minister Anne Tolley may go “Nine long years.”—well it has been 6 long years that National has been in Government and it could have done something. There were a number of actual opportunities to do something in the last 6 years but the Government has chosen to not prioritise this important safety measure.None the less here we are in the House on the second reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill and certainly as I say we are joining with National in supporting this bill. Obviously I think everybody—well pretty much everybody anyway—is convinced that the current level is far too high. It is out of line with overseas jurisdictions. There is a mountain of evidence actually that shows the difference that lowering the blood-alcohol level will make. One of the things that I recall from the last Parliament when we were talking about this was when we were making the changes for younger drivers.One of the reasons that was actually given was that we had to do more research—that was one of the reasons given for delaying. I think that it was probably more to do with people being concerned about whether they would have trouble with the public over the issue. But this is one of those issues where the Government needs to show leadership in the same way it did for example in the anti-smoking legislation even if it was not always that popular. Anyway we had to do more research and some of it I recall was because of the nature of our rural roads. I remember that was a particular reason the Australian research was not going to be that useful to us because we had different rural roads.But here we are. We are finally at this point which is great of having the second reading. As a select committee we received a number of submissions on the bill—106 submissions—and 21 of those were heard and the bill has undoubtedly been improved as a result. But just to note a number of people have died in recent years whose blood-alcohol limit was within the range that we are now talking about where we are lowering from 0.08 to 0.05. So we do know that there has been a cost to not passing this legislation earlier.So to just very quickly outline what the bill does it addresses the problem of alcohol-impaired driving with a number of amendments including lowering the adult legal blood-alcohol limits as I said from 80 milligrams to 50 milligrams per 100 millilitres of blood creating an infringement regime for adult drivers who return an evidential breath test in the range of 251 to 400 micrograms per litre and proposing that the penalties be an infringement fee and demerit points. There are then higher infringement fees plus the costs of blood tests for adult drivers who fail or refuse to undergo the breath tests and who then find that their blood test results are within that infringement range. So I do want to say that we are glad to see this legislation is here. People’s lives will be saved as a consequence and that is something that we can all be proud of. Thank you.