Woodhouse Michael: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Woodhouse Michael: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:671;Page:18038] 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 One of the prerogatives of the Minister of course is that he gets to take a call whenever he wants and when he did he probably stole about 95 percent of the things that I wanted to say on the two most important aspects of Part 1 of the Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. But I will persevere nevertheless because I think there is plenty more to say about it and I am very happy to flesh out— 
Sue Moroney 
: Oh trying to upstage the Minister now. 
Hon David Parker 
: Obviously ministerial material. 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: —thank you; I appreciate the further endorsement from the members on the other side but not in transport I am sure—the issue of evidence. 
We are really talking about risk and harm reduction. We have heard from the Labour members that they are absolutely hell-bent on reducing the blood-alcohol concentration level to 0.05 grams of alcohol per 100 millilitres of blood because the current level is high-risk and because it is obvious that we should be doing more in that area. But in a strange kind of double backflip they are taking a very libertarian view about the age at which someone can get a driver’s licence in the face of the relative risks of serious injury or death in those two cohorts. I will quote the results— 
Darien Fenton 
: Why aren’t we doing a 2-year study on that? 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Well let us just look at the studies that have already been done because there is quite a bit of data about that. 
Firstly let us talk about the relative risk of a blood-alcohol concentration of between 0.05 grams and 0.08 grams. I will quote the  
Safer Journeys 
 strategy which says we do not know the exact extent of the harm caused by drivers in that area. However between 2004 and 2008 it is estimated that adult drivers with a blood-alcohol content within that range were responsible for at least 7 deaths and 45 serious injuries. So we are talking about fewer than 2 deaths a year of people who have had alcohol in their systems within that range. The document does not say whether those blood-alcohol concentrations actually caused the fatal accidents. 
Let us turn then to young drivers because I think that young drivers are at far greater risk. Young New Zealanders aged between 15 and 24 are 14 percent of the population but they have 37 percent of the fatal crashes. They have killed more people than older drivers. For each young at-fault driver killed 1.3 other drivers have been killed. 
David Shearer 
: Are you going to set the legal age at 25 mate? 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Well that is exactly my point. Mr Shearer asks that question. What would we do about that? The easiest way to solve that problem is to set a driver age of 25 or 30. But why stop there? We might make a driving age of 50. 
The point is that we accept a level of risk in everything we do. That is what life and living is about. The question is whether we accept the right risks and target the right harms. In focusing on our young we recognise that the fact of simply being young simply being aged from 15 to 19 will increase the risk of having a fatal accident by five times when alcohol has not— 
Carol Beaumont 
: Is that the same for males and females? 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: No. Actually males are at greater risk so gender is a factor. There are a number of contributing factors to risk on our roads but this bill targets one specific risk and increases the driving age. I mean I do not know how many studies there are about the development of the prefrontal cortex in young males. However the paradox to changing the driving age is that although we know that the younger we are the greater at risk we are the only way we can learn to drive is by doing it—by gaining that experience. So the Government has to accept that paradox. I think the Government has set a very very good balance in both increasing the driver age and increasing the number of supervised hours that are required before someone gets a full licence. I am absolutely amazed that Labour is opposing that—more dog-whistle politics I suspect. 
I will come back to the evidence regarding a drop to 0.05 grams because the Minister mentioned the United Kingdom which is a fascinating study. Our fatal injury rate due to accidents is 82 percent higher than the United Kingdom’s notwithstanding that that country also has a blood-alcohol content legal limit of 0.08 grams. So there are so many other factors at work. The United Kingdom is a country geographically about the same size as ours but it has a population that is about 15 times greater than ours. It has the infrastructure to create the sort of engineering that Heather Roy is talking about in respect of safer roads. But I think also in respect of the lowering of the blood-alcohol limit studies—and there are 300 of them and not a single one has been quoted yet by Labour—those studies show high levels of co-relation and often use language like “That strategy resulted in a reduction in the fatal accident rate.” But it is not actually true to say that one caused the other. The simple fact is that we just do not know.