Hague Kevin: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHague Kevin: Land Transport Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 03 December 2013. Volume:695;Page:15139. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]KEVIN HAGUE (Green): It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill the Land Transport Amendment Bill which the Green Party will certainly be supporting. It is interesting that we have arrived today at a day when there seems to be a consensus across the House about the damage caused by a person with a blood-alcohol concentration of over 50 milligrams driving a motor vehicle. Other members have already talked about some of the parameters of the problem. Thirty percent of crashes are alcohol related and a higher proportion are serious crashes. The Law Commission in its report noted that drink-driving fatalities in this country were higher than in other countries. In 2009 there were 138 deaths arising from crashes where alcohol was a factor. New Zealand as other speakers have noted has one of the highest blood-alcohol concentration limits in the world and the current limit has been in place since 1978. Others have mentioned the incredulity of those who test the amount of alcohol that is required to reach that 80 milligram limit. It is between six beers and nine beers for an average adult man and between four and six for the average adult woman over the course of 2 hours in order to reach that 80 milligram limit. I do not know about you Mr Deputy Speaker but certainly speaking for myself if I had been drinking anything like that amount I would not be safe to drive.So what about the reform attempts in recent years? Other speakers have referred to those. We had the reduction of the limit recommended by the Law Commission. We then had the Ministry of Transport and itsSafer Journeysdocument recommending areduction from 80 milligrams to 50 milligrams. Interestingly a previous speaker David Bennett spoke about the necessity of reducing the blood-alcohol concentration limit for drivers under the age of 20 to zero as a step towards this goal. Although I commend that and commend that particular measure I see no reason at all why this measure being introduced today could not have been introduced at the same time as indeed had been recommended by both the Law Commission and the Ministry of Transport. There is nothing at all about reducing the blood-alcohol concentration limit for drivers under 20 that was necessary to set the stage for this change that we are now proposing and considering. Interestingly this is another one of those cases where Parliament is lagging well behind public support and public opinion. When expressed as the number of drinks needed to get to the limit just 2 percent of the public actually support the current blood-alcohol concentration limit—just 2 percent. There is extremely wide-based and strong support for making the change.Other speakers have already talked about the opportunities to make this change that have been squandered actually since 2009. At the time we made the changes to the youth limit we could have done it. In the Alcohol Reform Bill which the House considered last time we could have done it and the Government chose not to. It is my belief that the Government is moving now to make this change only because Iain Lees-Galloway’s member’s bill was pulled out of the ballot and therefore the Government could no longer avoid the issue being debated on the floor of the House. That is why we are seeing a Government bill on the matter.When we look at this bill most of the framing of the drink-driving issue has been around the proposal to lower the limit effectively extending the category of offending downwards from 80 milligrams to 50 milligrams. There has not been much discussion in the public arena or indeed in specialist circles around the other aspect that the Government intends to do which is effectively to introduce a new category of offending with much lower levels of penalty than the existing penalties in the current law. I think that is an interesting point because the argument for lower penalties for less severe offending of course holds true. But even when we consider the current law above 80 milligrams there are not graduated penalties above that. There are penalties and it becomes a matter for the discretion of the judge and for the courts to determine what level of penalty is applied. So it is a very curious approach that the Government has taken to effectively introduce an entirely new and much less serious category.The point of law is to achieve a variety of things. One is to directly protect people from risk of harm as a result of having dangerous drivers on the roads. A second point is to actually impact on the whole range of drink-driving behaviour and reduce the amount of alcohol that the whole range of people consume in relation to driving bringing benefits right across that spectrum. Then the third benefit is to provide a very direct disincentive to those who might otherwise drink excessively and then drive motor vehicles. The question is whether the lower penalties that the Government intends for people who are consuming to a level that takes their blood-alcohol concentration to between 50 milligrams and 80 milligrams will be sufficient to achieve the disincentive effects that we want and those other benefits of the law change. I am going to be very interested to hear what submitters say to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee because I believe that those penalties will not be adequate to achieve the kind of gain that we want to see.In the explanatory note of the bill the Government says: “The analysis indicates that conservatively an average of 3.4 fatalities and 64 injuries per year could be saved and that the policy would have a positive net present value of $200 million over 10 years …” etc. etc. The question for me is that I do not see how those numbers were derived because actually with the lower level of penalties the disincentives the shapers ofbehaviour that we use currently above 80 milligrams will not be the ones we use. So those numbers may in fact be an overly optimistic estimate based on the lower level of disincentive that the Government is intending with this bill.The additional points I am going to be looking for in the submissions are first of all whether 50 milligrams is low enough. Why ought we to have any permitted level of blood-alcohol? Certainly other countries—Sweden and Norway for example—have effectively a zero limit. They have that because they recognise—and it is set out inSafer Journeys—that actually at any level of alcohol consumption judgment and skill are impaired. People become worse drivers and that means they are more likely to cause crashes with all of the consequences of fatality and injury to themselves and to others. So why is there any limit at all? Is 50 milligrams low enough?The other point is that there is another change that has not been discussed so far in this debate which is that the Government is intending that someone who is found to have more than 50 milligrams but less than 80 milligrams will not be able to seek a blood test. They will get their infringement notice on the basis of the breath test alone. I am going to be very interested to see what submitters have to say to the select committee about that quite significant change. So with those reservations I again state that the Green Party will support this bill at its first reading. Thank you.