Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:626;Page:21354] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I guess the difficulty we strike now as a Committee is that this is a piece of legislation with lots and lots of bits in it. It has been cleverly constructed by the Minister so that it has Part 1 which has one clause called “Purpose” and then we go to Part 2 and that part by my calculations has something like—let me get this right—87 clauses and a lot of detail. I want to put in a reserve bid right from the outset that this is obviously where the rubber meets the road where the hook meets the load on the crane and where we need to start getting into some of the specifics. 
As I said in my second reading speech a lot of the bill is just tidying things up. It is to cope with some offences that have not been dealt with properly in the past and it will do some log-book process tidying up. The two big ones that I am happy about before I talk about a couple of the niggles in this part are by far the prohibition of people with a conviction entering the taxi industry or the P licence holder—people who have a conviction for a murder a serious sexual offence or a serious violent offence; we would like to exclude them even if they are in the industry right now. 
I know that the Minister has put forward Supplementary Order Paper 375 but in our view it misses the mark. I think that it will grant the right for people to appeal and the right for the director of Land Transport New Zealand—and I know that a number of speakers on our side in particular Dr Mapp is more versed in the law and will pick that up—but my view is that I am prepared to be hard and fast on it. If we were desperately short of taxi drivers I would suggest that we would have to find a way to accommodate them. But I have to say that convictions for murder serious sexual offences or serious violent offences are not just ordinary things. It is not just that a person has had a couple of small burglary convictions in his past when he was a young bloke with a few tattoos and so on. They are dreadfully serious events. 
My view on those people is: “Sorry get another job. Go and drive a bus.”—because there are lots of people on a bus so the one-to-one thing is not quite the same; or more important: “Go and drive a tractor a bulldozer or a truck or get into the construction industry. It is simply not acceptable that you were convicted for that and then for you to say that it was a while ago.” The 10 years that is currently proposed in the Supplementary Order Paper is not good enough either. 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: It’s not for murder. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No the 10 years does apply to other offences that I do not accept. Therefore I have to give notice that the National Party will certainly be voting against the Supplementary Order Paper but we will support the rest of the legislation. 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: You rely on that legal advice from him? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Dr Mapp is a doctor of law. I tell the member that I am happy to put him against that party’s legal brain any day of the week. 
Let us get back to things like chain of responsibility. The Minister in the chair now is different from the Minister who was here before and I shall repeat a few of the things I mentioned before about this. The chain of responsibility in this bill is a good move. For too long it had been possible for some dodgy operators at the company management and ownership end to embark on practices that were unsafe or were skirting their responsibilities for weight loads under the truck licences that operators had. Then when the poor old driver who was the very sort of person of last resort on the side of the road got caught he or she would be the one getting pinged getting the fines and the demerit points. 
The Road Transport Forum made a very good submission—Tony Friedlander’s team came along to the select committee and said they would like the chain of responsibility extended to include all appropriate transport offences where a third party has influence over the transport task. I am pleased to say that those changes look to be in the bill and look to be suitable. They cover not just things like speeding offences but weight limits load security and a range of other issues. 
When it gets down to the trivial I have an issue to discuss with the Minister and I hope he will think about letting the Government at least have a bit of leeway on one amendment I want to put up and that is to do with the little tiddlers—the Go-Peds and the mopeds. As everyone will know there is now a stunning level of little vehicles that mainly kids and some teenagers get around in. If one goes to the beach one will see them with those little devices. The problem is that under the old Transport Act most of them were considered to be a motor vehicle; people had to get a licence and a number plate pay for registration and all of that. It was truly ridiculous. 
However the attempt to exempt the more trivial of these has missed the mark. I showed the select committee some photos of my little 7-year-old twins driving an electric scooter at the beach. It is not an unsafe vehicle. It is not one likely to be involved in accidents on the road because they use it on little trailways and paths. It has a little 350-watt electric engine and unfortunately that will still get caught up in the bureaucracy of the director of Land Transport New Zealand making decisions on it and so on. 
In relation to the minority report I have to say that the National Party tried to be as cooperative as it could on this as always. As members will see in the commentary on page 9 of the report at the bottom New Zealand National believes that 600 watts would be a more realistic cut-off point. I agree that if we get into the really big powerful engines on some of the mopeds and Go-Peds—and there are now look-alike chopper bikes out there with much bigger engines—that would be foolish. But for a whole lot of the more kids’-end toys I would like to see changes. 
I look forward to taking more calls later on after other colleagues especially Dr Mapp and his legal mind on this stuff about penalties. However I do not want bad eggs driving taxis under any circumstances.