Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. All New Zealanders deserve and should have the right to be able to move around their communities and around our country in a safe manner. We should be doing everything we can to ensure that our roads are safe when people are driving.The question for us and this remains the case since the bill on this issue went through last time—of course this amendment bill is amending that regime that was brought into place by the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Act in 2022. The issue for the Green Party is the question: what is the most effective way to ensure that people are safe on our roads? Is having a random roadside drug-testing regime going to be effective at reducing impaired driving? Or on balance is it going to have no meaningful impact because ultimately it can't be rolled out at the scale that would be necessary and it can't be done in a way that has tests that are accurate and specific?So when we contributed work to an original bill on this we were trying to go through and look at the actual evidence and make sure that we were setting up a regime that was as evidence-based as it absolutely could be and ensuring that any testing devices we're actually going to give good information about recent use of drugs in an accurate and specific way—that is really really important. What this bill is doing is changing that so that tests that are not necessarily accurate or specific can be used. And to what end? How is that going to help ensure that we're deterring impaired driving if the tests themselves cannot accurately and specifically identify recent impairing drug use? Testing positive for drugs in one's system firstly doesn't directly relate to impairment and secondly there's been a range of criticism of the testing devices and the places that use them currently because they have a high rate of false positives—they can't show specific information about how much of a substance has been taken or used.Ultimately this is a big distraction from something that would actually make people safer on our roads. The Government is going through a process right now to take away a community's ability to set safe and appropriate speeds around schools and on dangerous rural roads. Most local authorities have come out opposing those changes.I think it is really relevant to raise at this point that the Minister of Transport Simeon Brown continually talks and conflates drugs and alcohol—he puts them together about the amount they're contributing to serious and fatal injury crashes. I'm looking at a graph right now taken from CAS which is the New Zealand Transport Authority Crash Analysis System. Contributing factors for fatal and serious injury crashes from a 10-year period from 2014 to 2024—overwhelmingly the vast majority is from alcohol. It's 56.6 percent—a huge contributing factor. The next biggest contributing factor to fatal and serious injury crashes is inappropriate speed at 30 percent. Of course after that is 10 percent lost control and usually lost control is often related to driving at a speed that is higher than safe. So if we go down—drugs suspected or confirmed is 7 percent so it's contributing to a tiny fraction of serious and fatal injuries relative to speed and alcohol. That's what the data says—10 years of data.So does this House really want to solve the problem of making our roads safer; if so why are they doing this at the same time that objectively they are enabling unsafe speeds everywhere where they will contribute to significantly more serious and fatal injury crashes?And it's interesting that the ACT Party—because they joined in with the Greens in a differing view last time a bill on this issue went to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and acknowledged that testing technology was not up to scratch that a huge number of expert submitters came and told us they were worried about the power of the State being abused through this process. And it's not even going to get the outcome we want of safer roads. So you know classic for this Government—doesn't care about evidence; all about a big show and punishing people who they think are bad.