Genter Julie Anne; Salesa JennyHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Madam Speaker the Green Party does not have a member on the Justice Committee so we didn't have someone hearing it through the committee. I do want to start my contribution by speaking to the parts of the bill that we do support and specifically explaining the importance of speed management in addressing our very high deaths and serious injuries on our roads.Now when I was Associate Minister responsible for road safety we looked at all the data and evidence from around the world on what is an effective way to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads. We can look to a couple of countries—they're actually quite comparable to New Zealand in some ways like Sweden Norway Ireland and Canada—that have made substantial reductions in deaths and serious injuries over a period of one to two decades. Sweden pioneered the Vision Zero approach: the idea that you don't tolerate deaths and serious injuries on the roads you don't build it in as something that is acceptable. So they have a really good evidence base and they took about 20 years to drop their death and serious injury rate from what was something comparable to New Zealand's to less than a quarter when you consider the relative population.Norway has taken Sweden's lane and done it much faster; Ireland as well. So Ireland is down to less than half what New Zealand is and one of the key pillars in how they did that was safer speeds and speed management. I feel that both National and ACT Party MPs have cited this really misleading statement about speed being the cause in less than 10 percent of crashes. It doesn't matter what the cause is the speed has a massive impact on the severity of the consequences of the crash. So speed is the cause of 10 percent but it could be the major factor resulting in serious injury or death in 30 percent or more of those crashes.So I think we just have to distinguish between speed being a cause of the crash itself and speed being a significant factor that means that you're more likely to have a death or serious injury result from the crash. All of that data is available. I feel like it's a bit of politicking really to kind of claim that speed has nothing to do with our high death and serious injury rate and it is just absolute denial of the facts. You know if you have a crash and you're traveling at a slower speed you're much less likely to have a serious injury or death and having an appropriate speed limit for the road is also important. We know that a bunch of the roads that we currently have—and we're talking tens of thousands of kilometres of roads not something that's going to be fixed overnight—the posted speed limit is unsafe for the design of the road. And so you could say Well they weren't travelling above the speed limit but they were still travelling at an unsafe speed for the road and that was a factor that contributed to it being a serious injury or a death when it could have been a minor injury instead of that."So the proposals in the bill that bring in signposting speed cameras and allowing point-to-point cameras I think are really important. This was a key part of the Road to Zero strategy as well which is we're not putting up speed cameras and enforcing speed to raise revenue; we're doing it to change behaviour so fewer people die and have serious injuries on the roads and that will in fact save costs for New Zealand because we've got those people able to get on with their lives and we don't have the emergency services having to respond or the pressure on the hospitals. So there is a benefit to changing that behaviour—a human benefit that's probably the most important but there's also a fiscal and an economic benefit to lowering the number of serious injury and fatal crashes on the roads. The point-to-point cameras are really important because they pick up the average speed throughout the journey not just at a particular point. I know I'm running out of time Madam Speaker and I guess unfortunately we can't support the bill because of the proposals around the confiscation of vehicles and the punitive approach. I think that it's just really recognising that harsher punitive consequences do not deter the behaviour. We want to deter the behaviour. We want people to not be fleeing the police. Obviously that's really really important but the evidence is that having harsher punishments and confiscating people's vehicles is not going to help someone in that moment to make a better decision because they're already not making a good decision. So they're not thinking about the consequences in that moment and those punitive consequences can affect them and their ability to get back on track after whatever incident has led to them fleeing and it could even punish someone who has nothing to do with the activity because they're the ones who own the vehicle but somebody else was using the vehicle. So we can't support the bill because it's not taking an effective approach to getting the outcomes we want. But we do absolutely support all of the proposals around signposting speed cameras and around point-to-point cameras and I just really want to emphasise that it would be helpful if members on the right side of the House looked at the evidence. If you believe that it's worthwhile to New Zealand to have fewer people die on our roads to have fewer people be in serious injury crashes then please look at the evidence because right now they are not. The National Party and the ACT Party are taking a populist approach on road safety that is going to result in more harm on our roads and it's really very very counterproductive to the important debate that we need to have as people who all live in a country together who all benefit when our fellow countrymen when people visiting New Zealand and when our families are less likely to be seriously injured or killed on our roads. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. Ka kite anō. Debate interrupted. The House adjourned at 1 p.m. (Thursday)"