Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Green Party supports some aspects of this bill particularly around issuing point-to-point safety cameras that can be used as an enforcement tool for speeding offences; that's something I worked on as Associate Minister of Transport because it is a more effective way to identify when travelling above the safe and legal speed limit is occurring. We're also quite fine with providing for the electronic service of fines and infringement notices with email addresses; I think that's very practical and will be much more convenient for people than the old paper-based system.I did think there were some really great points raised by the previous speaker Nicole McKee—that the purpose of the Police change in policy around pursuit of drivers was predominantly to prevent serious harm and it has done that. An unacceptable number of people lost their lives due to police pursuit and that is something that I thought it was really important to change the policy on.We do understand where the other provisions in this bill are coming from; however we certainly haven't seen sufficient evidence that enabling some of these discretionary powers and the ability of police to seize and impound vehicles will deter the behaviour.I guess that's the fundamental challenge with our approach to crime: how do we address the drivers of crime and enable people to make better less harmful more responsible decisions when we're currently in a situation where there is inequality in our society. We're starting from a base of inequality and some people—particularly young people—don't always have the fully formed ability to make good decisions. We know that; brain development is going on until the age of 25. I certainly know that as a teenager I was responsible for making decisions that weren't in my best interests or the interests of people around me. So we have to identify ways of putting that wraparound support around people and addressing the true drivers of the issue and it's not clear at all that this will have the intended impact of deterring the behaviour and preventing more harm.We aren't able to support the bill at this first reading and we will be watching the bill very carefully during the select committee process.I know there was this old-fashioned belief that if you threatened offenders with punishment that would somehow deter the behaviour but I think it's been absolutely debunked by the evidence. The way to reduce crime is not to threaten harsh punishment but to enable people to be in a position to make better decisions. That starts very early on in life. We need to have better support for babies for mothers for whānau and we need to address systemic inequality in this country.One thing that I would really love to see that I don't see in this bill—and that we thought about quite a lot last term and I'm still keen to see it developed in Government—is switching to income-related thresholds for traffic infringements and fines. The reality is that if you're going to use infringements and fines to incentivise or disincentivise behaviour it's not fair when people have radically different levels of income.In some other countries Nordic or Scandinavian countries they have income-related thresholds so those on very high incomes pay much higher fines if they have some sort of traffic violation or infringement and those on lower incomes that have something that's proportional to their income and wealth. It makes it very difficult to use fines and infringements to incentivise behaviour when we have this inequality and the infringements themselves are not related to people's income.So because we are in a situation of inequality and because there are certain groups of people who are more likely to suffer under the provisions in this bill I think it's really really important that we look carefully at what the evidence is of what the impact will be.I think there's a more complicating factor in that currently our transport system is very dependent on cars and in many cases some of the people offending in cars are not the owners of those cars so if the car is to be impounded it might actually reduce access for other people in the whānau or family who need to get to work who need that vehicle in order to undertake a whole lot of other things in their life.For those reasons and our concern about whether it's going being effective at getting the outcome we want the Green Party cannot support this bill at the first reading.