Hipkins Chris: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
Hipkins Chris: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Third Reading 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call on the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). I thought as a starter I would talk a little bit about the principle that I hold with regard to this issue. I have not been involved in the select committee process so I probably do not have the level of detailed knowledge on the bill that members who were involved in hearing submissions may have. 
When I go out into the electorate and talk to people about the issue of driving whilst impaired I find that people do not necessarily make a distinction between somebody who is driving whilst impaired as a result of drugs and somebody who is driving whilst impaired as a result of alcohol. I think the fact that this bill deals with some anomalies around driving whilst impaired by drugs is very important. 
The bill has two main functions. The first is that it enhances the powers of the police to deal with drug-impaired drivers. It creates a new offence for when a driver is impaired and there is evidence of drugs in the driver’s blood. The second function is to make changes regarding the registration and licensing of motor vehicles and I will talk a bit more about that function in a few minutes. 
The Labour Government introduced this bill back in 2007 and the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee further improved it over 2 years. We acknowledge the good work done by the select committee. I was particularly interested in the approach taken by my colleague Trevor Mallard who has taken a very active involvement in this bill to seeking public feedback and public opinion on this issue. He put several blog posts on the Labour MPs’ blog Red Alert and I am told that over the totality of the two posts he had 46 comments; some of those were from him replying to other people’s comments. 
Hon Anne Tolley 
: 23! 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Probably not quite that many. 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: We know Anne Tolley reads it. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: We know Anne Tolley read it because she has mentioned it in the House. 
I think it is a novel approach because it is a very accessible way for members of the public to have a direct say on a particularly technical piece of legislation before the House. Some of the matters Trevor Mallard raised in his blog post were technical but he was also seeking feedback in a fairly immediate way. People can give feedback without having to come to Parliament or write a submission; they can simply post a comment on the blog and the comment goes directly to MPs. Other Labour MPs have read it and we know that Anne Tolley has read it. So members of the House are able to get immediate feedback from members of the public. I think that is particularly good and we can see the value of that approach in the amendments that Trevor Mallard has put forward and that the Government has indicated it will support. 
I acknowledge the work done by National when it accepted Labour’s amendments. They are sensible amendments and we are very pleased that National will be supporting them. They will give police the ability to test for class A drugs when people are hospitalised which is common after car crashes and they will allow the police to carry out drug tests after a driver has failed a test for alcohol where that is considered to be appropriate. So I think we agree that those things are very sensible. We recognise the dangers of drug-driving particularly with the growth of the P menace which I think many in this House acknowledge is increasingly becoming a problem. So we are pleased that National has picked up this legislation and is working to have it implemented. 
However I will depart from the bipartisan approach slightly at this particular point in time—just for a change—and say that it is kind of strange to be talking about a bill that will enhance the powers of police to crack down on drug-driving when the Government has just pulled $49 million out of the road-policing budget. Presumably the police will hitchhike to catch drug-drivers. I am not entirely sure how many cars were to be taken away from the police but they will presumably have to hitchhike. Maybe they will be given bicycles to catch drug-drivers. It is a bit strange really to see this bill come before the House while at the same time there is publicity around the reduction in the budget for police cars. 
One of the other things I guess that has been interesting about this debate is that we have seen a reasonable amount of common agreement across the House that this bill is necessary and should be supported and pushed through. But we also saw through the course of this particular debate this afternoon—I have not seen all of it but I saw part of it—an acknowledgment that this is not an absolute solution to the problem and that there is more work to be done. It is quite unusual that both sides of the House—or all sides of the House really—admit that there is still more work to be done. We certainly welcome that work. 
The roadside impairment test will become compulsory under this bill. When an officer at the roadside has reason to suspect that a driver is impaired the driver will be required to carry out a series of tests. If the driver cannot satisfactorily complete this series of tests he or she will be required to provide a blood specimen. If an illegal drug is detected in the blood specimen an offence will have been committed. In the Land Transport Act there is already the offence of driving while incapable of proper control due to alcohol or drugs so together these two offences will send a clear message that people must not drive whilst under the influence of drugs. 
The new impairment offence will enable an officer to make a well-informed decision about a person’s ability to drive safely and if that person is not safe he or she will not be able to continue. I think that will provide a significant level of reassurance to the public. It should however be noted that any evidence of drug use that is gathered as evidence of a driving offence will not be able by law to be used as evidence of any other offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act because this measure is particularly a transport measure. 
I want to talk about the second part of this bill which deals with the motor vehicles register. The bill implements measures to improve protection of personal information held in the motor vehicles register. I think everyone in this day and age is becoming more and more aware of issues around privacy and the protection of personal information. 
It is interesting to note that under the current law any person can obtain the names and addresses of the present and previous owners of a motor vehicle simply by quoting its registration plate number. That is quite interesting because motor vehicles change hands frequently. It is interesting to note that my name and address may be available in relation to a vehicle that I may not have owned for 4 or 5 years. That obviously creates some interesting privacy issues and this part of the bill helps to deal with that. The information is available over the counter at present at post shops and other registration agencies and there are no safeguards on how this information can be used. 
The system is clearly open to abuse. There are examples where angry motorists in the aftermath of a road-rage incident have used the register to trace a person and then harass that person. I think that is something we would all be very concerned about. Professional car thieves can also use that information to target high-value vehicles. They can use the register to find out where the person who owns that car lives and then they can effectively go and steal the car. I think that is an issue. Looking very closely at the requirements around making that information a little bit less accessible is I think very valuable. 
The names and addresses of vehicle owners began being made available over the Internet in bulk during the 1990s and of course that has probably exacerbated the problem. The Internet has created a whole range of new problems with making information available. I think we would all agree that making information available over the Internet is a good thing but when that information is personal information new moral and ethical issues are created. The Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) helps to address that situation. 
It is interesting to note that 2.3 million people are on the register of names and address for vehicle ownership so this will impact on a significant number of people. The information on the register of drivers’ licences is well protected so I ask members why motor vehicle owners should be treated any differently. This bill addresses that very concern. It removes the current obligation on the Registrar of Motor Vehicles to release information to anyone who asks for it. Instead requests for information will be dealt with under the Official Information Act in the same way that any other request to a Government department or Crown entity is dealt with. To assist with the consideration of Official Information Act requests the bill clarifies that the principal purposes of the motor vehicles register—and this is very important for those familiar with the use of the Official Information Act—are law enforcement and the collection of revenue. 
The bill recognises that on occasions the individual’s privacy interests may be balanced against the wider public good. Therefore the bill will empower the Minister to authorise information to be released for certain purposes at the discretion of the Minister. Prior to issuing such an authorisation the Minister will need to seek the views of the Ombudsman and the Privacy Commissioner and that authorisation may be a one-off or it may be a standing authorisation that is valid for up to 5 years. I commend this bill to the House.