Lees-Galloway IainIAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): I appreciate the enthusiasm that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee chair Jonathan Young has for passing this piece of legislation before the election. But unless the Leader of the House is planning to take us into urgency I do not think that is going to happen but never mind. As my colleague Michael Wood said Labour is opposing this legislation with a heavy heart. There are aspects of this legislation that we absolutely do support but then there are other aspects of it that are fatally flawed in our opinion and that leads us unfortunately to having to vote against the whole bill.Just to reiterate we do support the bill allowing New Zealand to increase the level of compensation available to meet the claims for oil pollution damage. I think we are all acutely aware of the incident with the Rena and are acutely aware of the fact that because New Zealand had not acted quickly enough in terms of international treaties and the passing of legislation through this House to ratify those treaties or enact those treaties in New Zealand we actually left ourselves in a vulnerable position in relation to the Rena and the taxpayer ended up wearing more of the cost than was necessary. So it is good—we certainly support that aspect of the legislation.But as other members have pointed out at the select committee we heard repeated messages from both operators and employee groups including unions that requiring operators to carry out random drug- and alcohol-testing regimes is unnecessarily onerous and does not actually address the issue of drug and alcohol impairment. I suppose an important distinction to make is the distinction between drug and alcohol use and drug and alcohol impairment. Many tests for various drugs do detect low levels of drugs in people's systems. That does not necessarily mean that they are impaired. Unfortunately a lot of these tests are very blunt instruments and it is difficult to detect the difference between impairment and use.With alcohol it is fairly straightforward. We have an alcohol limit. We can be tested in our vehicles on ships at work and we can generally tell whether someone is impaired or not. With cannabis it is a little bit more difficult. In fact because of the fact that cannabis stays in people's systems that actually often drives people to use higher-class more potent drugs that move through the system more quickly and are out of the system despite the fact that they have a more detrimental effect in the short term and the long term and can have a more detrimental effect on their ability to work. People can be impaired but those drugs might not be detectable in their system.This is a tricky area to get the law right and it is a tricky area to get testing right as well. Often the detection of drugs can be used against workers even when they are not impaired. So this is an area where I think we have to be fairly nuanced in our approach and we do not need to be unnecessarily heavy-handed in our regulations. From a Government that likes to tell us about how it does not like to put unnecessary and onerous red tape on employers this is one where we heard from both employers and employees that the regime that was being suggested was (a) not going to address the problem that has been identified and (b) was unnecessarily onerous. So it is on those grounds that we in the Labour Party have chosen to oppose this legislation and also because of the concerns around opening up the routes to the Chatham Islands to foreign-flag vessels. The people who came and spoke on behalf of the Chatham Islands industry made a very good case that that industry needs some protection and that it is simply not economic to expect multiple operators to be able to operate in that space and that ultimately what then happens is that large operators can simply push out the domestic operator. That just does not seem to have any obvious benefit to domestic operators especially Chatham Island operators and it actually does not seem to have any obvious benefit to New Zealand as a whole. We appreciate those submissions that were made by the Chatham Islands operators and we support them.What could have been a good bill—had the Government members on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee been prepared to actually work with members of the Opposition and to make some amendments that would have satisfied the concerns raised by submitters—unfortunately has been slightly let down by these aspects of it. There is still the Committee of the whole House and we will have an opportunity to traverse those issues again.I am sure members from the Labour Party and the Green Party will take the opportunity to offer up Supplementary Order Papers if we address the bill at the Committee of the whole House before the adjournment for the election. If we are dealing with it after the election well then things might look very different and we might be able to sort the bill out and we might be able to pass a good piece of legislation. From this side of the House we are looking forward to that prospect but for the time being sadly it is our duty to oppose the bill at second reading.