Davis Kelvin: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
Davis Kelvin: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — In Committee 
[Volume:655;Page:4466] 
KELVIN DAVIS (Labour) 
: 
 I am happy to take a call on the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). Although I have not been part of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which helped to develop the bill the issue it addresses is really close to my heart. I have absolutely no time for those who drink or take drugs and drive. I come from a beautiful part of the country and we have many talents and skills up in the far north. However one of the problems that we have is the availability and accessibility of drugs. I do not want to cast a shadow over the far north but that is one of our problems. 
As a school principal I saw the effect of the availability and accessibility of drugs firsthand. In fact one time I asked the youth aid officer of the local police with whom I had a really good working relationship to do a raid on a house from which I suspected a child brought drugs to school. Whereas most people in New Zealand would have in their lounge a bowl for peanuts potato chips or snacks of some sort in 14 places around the lounge of that house the people there had cannabis. While the family was watching TV they would just roll up a joint and smoke it; it just became a normal part of the kids’ lives. To quote another example in the late 1990s when I shifted to Kaitaia instead of the player of the day in the local league competition that was running at the time getting a meat pack or petrol vouchers the player got an ounce of dak. That is disgraceful. That shows how prevalent and normalised the use of drugs has become in some parts of the country. 
To bring this speech back to drug-driving if it is normalised behaviour in sports clubs to take drugs after sports then that combined with alcohol means that people are drinking and taking drugs. The booze bus turns up regularly to Kaitaia and the reason it does so is that it regularly catches people. I support that. Even though we are talking about people whom I have played sports with and people whom I know in the community I agree that there need to be measures to make sure these people do not continue with this sort of behaviour. As the same youth aid officer I have already mentioned said to me the only way to change people’s behaviour sometimes is to severely inconvenience them and the inconvenience of having to get out of a car and walk a line is something I agree with. To take blood samples and to check to see whether people have drugs in their system are measures I totally agree with and I congratulate the members who have developed this bill. 
There is one area where I do not think the bill goes far enough. We are talking here about dealing with class A B or C drugs but there is also another class of drugs that we should not take lightly and that is recreational drugs. I struggle to see how we can possibly call drugs “recreational” because we do not have recreational assault or recreational murder. I think we should also be testing for recreational drugs whatever they may be because to me it is wrong for drugs of any sort to be combined with alcohol and taken by people who are going to parties or coming back from sports events. I have a 14-year old daughter who has started to learn to drive and it concerns me that when she gets a licence and she does not have her father sitting next to her telling her what to do she will be going out on her own. She will be on the road with people who may have drugs and alcohol in their systems. So I support these steps that we are taking to make sure that people whose actions are clouded by the presence of drugs in their system will be taken off the roads so that my daughters my son and my other family members will be safer on the road. 
Clause 3A agreed to.