Moroney Sue; Borrows ChesterSUE MORONEY (Labour): I rise to respond to the speech just given by Minister Simon Bridges the Minister who should really be spending his time this evening wondering why he did not pay more attention to the fraud happening in the Ministry of Transport. But instead he is talking about this series of changes. The Land Transport Amendment Bill will be supported by the Labour Party but with serious reservations actually. If I can say at the outset many of the technical changes that the Minister described before are things that will make a small amount of difference. They are sensible. They are practical.In particular we want to support the mandatory sentences for alcohol interlocks which is something that we think will improve this Government's poor record on the road toll which has started increasing—it now looks like this year will be the fourth year in a row that the road toll will increase against the trend of decades of coming down. In fact it is against the international trend where other countries similar to us are experiencing their road tolls coming down year after year. Under this Government's regime we have got the opposite happening with the road toll going up and all of the grief and tragedy that that causes for the friends and family of the deceased. So the alcohol-interlock measure in this bill will be an improvement to road safety as are some of the provisions about overloaded trucks. Although I have got to say that if the Government was really serious it would not keep introducing larger and larger trucks on our roads which just are not fit to carry those larger trucks therefore increasing the incidence of crashes and fatal crashes on our roads.So there are many areas that we do support. The area that was probably the most contentious though of this bill was the bit about the small passenger service vehicles. This is the part—and I think the intention is correct which is to ensure that as technology improves and changes some of those new services are now captured and that there is a level playing field that is going to be presented. That is admirable in its intent but I am not sure that this bill actually brings that about in a very safe way because it is my view and it is Labour's view that the role of this Parliament when it comes to small passenger services—and these are not services for small passengers; these are small passenger vehicle services—is to ensure public safety. That is our primary role. The Labour Party does not feel that this bill goes far enough in doing that so we have some amendments that we will be proposing at the Committee stage and I am going to outline them now.The two areas of most concern to us exist around the removal in this bill of Braille signage and also the removal of the requirement for in-vehicle cameras. These are two major public safety issues. The reason why we are so concerned about public safety is that we know that the track record of deregulation under National Governments has caused this country great grief in the past. We have only got to think about the Pike River mine where a National Government deregulated and removed mining inspectors and that was a significant cause of what happened at the Pike River mine. We have only got to think of the thousands of New Zealanders whose livelihoods and lives have been affected because they have weather-damaged buildings—houses—because the weathertightness is not correct because again a National Government deregulated the building industry and the standards and therefore we ended up with a leaky-homes crisis in New Zealand. We have only got to look at those two examples to know that we have got to be very careful when a National Government deregulates in the way that this bill in fact does.Deregulation is the catchcry of a National Government. National members love deregulating but they ain't so keen to put their hands up to actually be accountable for the results of it. With small passenger vehicle services the fact is that people who are using the services—apart from MPs who are using taxis and maybe Ubers from the airport and back to Parliament but for the majority of people they are using these services when they are impaired one way or the other. In fact the largest number of submissions that we had on this bill came from people who were from organisations that were representing people with disabilities because they are utterly—in many cases—dependent on these services for every movement that they make. They do not have the ability to drive themselves and often taking public transport is not an option for them either.So they are utterly dependent on this service and these services need to be safe for them because they are extremely vulnerable. That is the reason why we want to ensure that the requirement for Braille signage is not stripped out of these services because people representing those who are sight-impaired told us how important that was for them to have certainty over what vehicle they were in so that if anything untoward did happen they could report it. That was something that was very important to them for their security.But the other group of people of course when we talk about impairment is often people who are using these services because they have been out and they have had a bit too much to drink or they have certainly had too much to drink to drive themselves home or they may be involved in other substances and they are using these services. Again they are very vulnerable when they are in those situations. So this is the reason why we are insisting and asking this Parliament to back our call to ensure that the current provisions for in-vehicle cameras remain. After all those provisions were brought in only in 2011. That is not very long ago. It was the National Government that put that requirement in place. Why did it do that? Well it did it on the back of two vicious murders of two taxi drivers: Hiren Mohini in 2010 and Abdulrahman Ikhtiari in 2008. Those two men were brutally murdered. They were taxi drivers and those murders led to the decision by this Parliament to insist that in-vehicle cameras were installed in certain circumstances.The Government may well argue that that is no longer necessary because new technology is going to fix all this and it is going to be all fine because you know you are going to use your app and you are going to dial up the Uber or the taxi and they are going to know who you are and you are going to know who they are so it is all sweet—except that we had a man come and do a submission to our select committee. He came into our select committee and said: I'm Rod Stewart." He clearly was not Rod Stewart but he had been able to register himself as an Uber driver using the rock star Rod Stewart's actual photo and calling himself Rod Stewart. Uber accepted him as being Rod Stewart you know with the hair and all. He clearly was not Rod Stewart; he looked completely different to Rod Stewart. I do not know what his singing voice was like—he did not demonstrate that to us—but you could see that he was not Rod Stewart. However he was able to become an Uber driver as Rod Stewart and pick people up as Rod Stewart. They did not say "Hey you're not Rod Stewart." when they got in the car.But worse than that he actually then lodged a complaint against himself as Rod Stewart. He lodged a complaint against himself and he still was able to keep driving Ubers. Nothing happened. So I think this shows us the folly of relying entirely on new technology to give us an assurance of public safety. It clearly will not do that. Since the 2011 amendment that brought in the in-vehicle cameras not only have we not had any murders happening in taxis but in fact the findings were that just 2 years later the number of violent incidents that have happened in taxis dropped by 40 percent simply because the in-vehicle cameras were there. So this is something that we should be embracing not getting rid of and that Government I fear is going down its good old deregulation track again where deregulation becomes the captain to it all and it forgets about public safety.Thank goodness for the Labour Party because we are here to remind it that our job in regard to regulating these services is public safety first—public safety first. If it means a little bit of compliance cost public safety comes ahead of that because that is the mistake that was made in the Pike River mine where safety was put behind compliance costs. It was also the mistake that was made with leaky buildings. So let us please learn from those mistakes and not repeat them and let us get it right this time round. At the Committee stage I will have those two amendments to put forward. I do believe that they are things that will make a considerable difference to public safety as we move to ensure that there is regulation across the board that captures all of those services.The other thing that I want to say is that the media had a little bit of mischief during our select committee process and pretended that the problem with MPs is we just did not know what an app was—you know those of us who are on our cellphones all the time do not know what an app is do not know what Uber is. Despite the fact that Uber staff are in our offices pretty much all the time telling us exactly what Uber is and that they came to the select committee and told us several times over what Uber is apparently we are just a bit thick and we do not know what Uber is—absolutely untrue. But what we do—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sorry to interrupt the member because I was interested to hear the end of the story but your time has expired.Sue Moroney: Maybe Committee stage."