Coddington Deborah: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:618;Page:14289] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 The ACT party will support the referral of the bill to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. However we will be looking at it very carefully at the select committee. The bill does need to be dealt to in select committee. There are some issues we will be looking at very carefully along the same lines as Roger Sowry from the National Party signalled. The criteria for appointment to the Land Transport Safety Authority are to be consistent with the Human Rights Act. Surely appointments to the authority should be made on the grounds that the appointees have the skills experience and talent for the position not that their appointment complies with the Human Rights Act—an Act that is often more correctly called the “Human Wrongs Act”. 
We support anything that tries to get recidivist drink-drivers off the road. They just wreak carnage on New Zealand families leave behind a huge amount of grief and more often than not they have absolutely no remorse for what they do. They take no responsibility for their crimes. They are just out there committing them again and again. 
I do despair sometimes whether we will ever do anything about it by changing the law. Certainly changing laws and passing regulation does bring about culture changes. However I think that there is something endemic in the New Zealand psyche whereby people have a skinful of liquor they get behind the wheel of a car and they think they are invincible. They think they can do things that clearly they are incapable of doing. In fact they are in charge of a very very dangerous weapon. 
I do not have a problem with people having to spend a lot of money to get a driver’s licence to pass the test. I understand where Peter Brown is coming from. It is difficult for a lot of elderly people but then a lot of elderly people are very dangerous on the road too. It has been proved by research recently that drivers who fall asleep repeatedly are just as dangerous as repeat drink-drivers and a lot of elderly drivers fall into that category. 
The other issue that concerns me is that it is no use passing laws like this if there are not the resources on the roads to police them—if roads in the areas where it is known that repeat drink-drivers get in their cars are not policed and I am talking about country roads and country pubs. It is not so much now. One often drives out of Auckland at 6 o’clock in the evening and a booze bus is stopping everyone. People are probably not over the limit but the police have a quota to fill of potential drink-drivers. They are not the people who are causing the problems. The people who are causing the problems mostly are in Dannevirke Takapau West Coast and all those sorts of places. [ 
Interruption 
] I am just making sure that members are awake. 
 Finally I agree with Sue Kedgley from the Greens when she was alarmed at United Future wanting the select committee to look at noisy stereos in cars. Sure these stereos are a nuisance but should we as politicians get into the area of passing laws to ban things that we find a nuisance? I mean they are not actually physically hurting anyone except themselves and they are not actually breaking the law. It is alarming that we have people in this House who think it is their role to pass laws against people who are just a bit of a bother. But we will be supporting this bill to select committee.