Woods Megan: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Land Transport Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 03 July 2014. Volume:700;Page:19240. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram):I am happy to take a call on the Land Transport Amendment Bill. After sitting in the House listening to the speeches I do want to commend the members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It sounds like a lot of work has been done on this bill to bring it to the House. As my colleague who spoke before me Andrew Little acknowledged notwithstanding New Zealand First not voting for it at this stage it sounds like it has been a genuine example of parties across the political divide working together to find a solution for what I am sure we can all agree is something that we have to find a solution for. We as legislators simply cannot have New Zealanders dying on our roads because we are not putting in place the right legislation in order to send the right messages to New Zealand about what is a safe level of alcohol to consume before getting behind the wheel.Other speakers before me have brought to the attention of members the fact that although we support this bill we do acknowledge that it has taken us a very long time to get here. This legislation first appeared some time ago. It was kicked to touch by Steven Joyce in 2010—this was when it was introduced as a member’s bill from the Hon Darren Hughes and was subsequently taken up by my colleague Iain Lees-Galloway. This is something that National has not been willing to grasp early enough and do what is needed so we are pleased that we are here seeing the second reading of this bill and being able to do something.The fact of the matter is that New Zealand does have until we pass this legislation more permissive drink-driving laws than evidence-based research would suggest we should have. The evidence is clearly there and we do not need complicated logic to get to the point where we understand that when people drink too much alcohol and get behind the wheel of a heavy piece of machinery such as a motor vehicle and attempt to drive it their judgment is impaired and deaths ensue.Other countries have acknowledged that we simply have to lower the thresholds of what we deem to be a safe amount of alcohol to drink. If you look across the Tasman at what the Australians have said is a safe amount of alcohol to drink we can see that we actually are allowing people to drink far too much and then get behind the wheel. Other people have talked about some of the work that has been done while this bill has been circulating and while the whole issue has been swirling around. That work includes getting people to actually consume the amount of alcohol that is deemed safe and under the legal limit and then putting them in driving simulators so we can see what the results are—and that is not something that we should condone at all.The simple fact remains that there is a huge cost on a personal level in terms of the number of lives that are lost and the families that are touched when people die in car accidents. We know that many motor vehicle accidents are simply avoidable—that if people had not consumed excess alcohol and got behind the wheel of a car then they would not have occurred. We know that 3.4 lives could be saved annually and 64 injury crashes could be avoided. This would save $200 million in social costs over a decade. The evidence is overwhelming that we as a Parliament need to bring in the requisite changes and for this reason Labour is happy to support this bill at the second reading.