Flavell Te Ururoa: Land Transport (Driver Licensing) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Flavell Te Ururoa: Land Transport (Driver Licensing) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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TE URUROA FLAVELL (Maori Party—Waiariki) 
: 
 Tena koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tatou e hoa ma i tenei po. I am told by my colleague Hone Harawira that downtown in Papatoetoe in Auckland there is a project called Street Talk which is literally about getting out on to the streets and helping people to be safe. We are not talking about sexual health and we are not talking about child welfare; the safety brand that Manukau Urban Maori Authority is promoting is road safety. 
Street Talk provides drivers with a chance to learn new safety skills and to look at their own performance as drivers and to improve their style if there is a case for doing that. The programme is funded by the Accident Compensation Corporation. It helps participants to make the right decisions and learn how to manage risk and control and it even includes the provision of child restraints. It is targeted particularly at Maori and Pasifika people and it has a specific focus on drivers up to 25 years of age—the key group addressed in this Land Transport (Driver Licensing) Amendment Bill. 
At the opposite end of Aotearoa in Ohai the locals are doing much the same thing except that their programme is based at Te Oruanui marae. A key concern for the locals was that a lot of the younger ones were driving without licences. Whether it be for literacy competency or cash reasons a lot of the local rangatahi were driving without having sat their licence. I read a comment from the marae kaiwhakarite Serena Harris that actually blew me away. She was talking about their plans to offer restricted licence driving courses. She said: “For some people this is the first time they’ve got 100 percent in anything. The confidence somebody gets from getting their licence is unreal.” That is at one end—to do with rangatahi. 
But at the other end of the scale one of our own kuia back at Rotorua of Tamatekapua Aunty Miro Morrison aged 79 has just got her licence—for goodness’ sake!—having driven around for 50 years without one. She got snapped—thank goodness!—had her car confiscated and decided to attend a course for free with Lil Emery at Taharangi marae in Rotorua. So she is away now. 
At completely different locations there are resounding success stories of Maori groups making a difference in keeping our people safe our young ones in particular. The focus of this bill presumably is about much the same thing—trying to keep our young ones alive instead of bumping up the national average for car fatalities. 
The Ministry of Transport tells us that over the last 5 years 22 percent of fatal car accidents involved Maori drivers with an even higher number 28 percent of fatal casualties from crashes being Maori—that is the passengers the ongoing traffic and the whanau that have the bad luck to be following on behind. Then there is what is called the vulnerable road users: the cyclists the pedestrians and the motorcyclists. It makes for another bizarre irony in the debate around peak oil and the search to reduce our dependency on cars as the main mode of transport when we look at the statistics for vulnerable road users. 
We need to be doing something and this bill is a good place to start. We know who is getting killed—it is our young men who are being daring risking their lives out on the roads and too often losing the gamble. Young men aged between 15 and 19 years are seven times more likely to die than 45 to 49-year-old male drivers. 
A high proportion of the fatal crashes of our young drivers under 29 years of age occur on rural roads. As other speakers have said speed is a huge factor in this. Looking at my own electorate in the 2004 national road safety public attitude survey 32 percent of drivers in the Bay of Plenty region said they enjoyed driving fast on the open road. That is all good and fine but it ain’t so good when one learns that in the Rotorua area excessive speed was a factor in 23 percent of injury-causing crashes in 2004. Taking one year as a case in hand—2004—in Rotorua we suffered the cost of 193 road crashes. We lost eight lives that year from car crashes 33 drivers and passengers were seriously injured and another 153 were reported casualties. 
One of the things I have picked up from the heap of television ads telling our mokopuna “If you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot.” is that the message is slowly getting through and sinking in. But although it seems that drink-driving is becoming an unacceptable practice across the community there still seems to be a tolerance towards speeding. 
Teenage boy racers I am told would tell us that the key to success is all about how fast their machine can go. Success actually counts for nothing for those turning up at the cemetery—at the urupa—a couple of days later to pay their respects. Those turning up to court to receive their sentence are not so successful. All those victims of other crimes in the city that become relegated to a lower priority because the full squad is out with the boy racer squad are not so successful. 
This bill does not target any of these factors—speed booze social pressure road conditions and education. The bill is basically just to raise the minimum driver’s licence age from 15 to 16 years and to extend the length of the learner-licensing period from 6 to 12 months. Will adding 6 months make a difference? I doubt it. 
What will make the difference is the way the message gets through. It could be those billboard messages that tell us it is better to be late than to arrive dead on time. Or it could be what they are doing at the Whakatu marae in Nelson with a driver’s licence course which has had a 100 percent success rate. They could not get much better than that. 
In Nelson the local constable John O’Donovan was getting worried about all the young people in the region who were constantly getting parked up by the cops their cars being impounded fines being thrown at them and their getting caught up in a cycle of offending. A teacher David Tepania was enlisted and before they knew it 33 students had passed the course. They found in the programme that some of the reasons cited for not having licences were learning difficulties and low self-esteem. Yet again that is more proof that basic literacy skills keep proving to be a common underlying factor in offending. 
The interesting thing about the programme is that although it picked up referrals from the courts and police there was support from the city council Land Transport New Zealand and Work and Income to get the programme off the ground. Probably the biggest factor of all was that it involved heaps of volunteers helping out for the greater good. That is where I think a lot of our efforts could be usefully spread as well. Instead of constantly telling our young boys how mad bad and fast they are we should be working with the whole whanau in the interests of whanau well-being and safety. 
We need to be thinking about how to create optimum safety environments. Increasing the age at which young people can legally purchase alcohol—from 18 years to 20 years—was one of the strategies to keep our young alive but it was a strategy that this House voted down last year. We the Maori Party block voted. All four of us supported the proposal to raise the legal purchase age to 20 when that legislation came to the House last November. Other Maori members voted to keep it at 18. I was particularly interested that the Minister of Maori Affairs and the sponsor of the Land Transport (Driver Licensing) Amendment Bill Peter Dunne could overlook the brutal combination of alcohol age and fatal crash data and vote to keep the purchase age at 18. Alcohol is such a huge and potent contributor to fatal crashes that I would have thought it would be impossible to overlook it. 
Although raising the licence age and increasing the time of learning licensing practice are better than doing nothing other actions could be taken which we hope the select committee will explore—new technologies like alco-locks education such as the three good examples I offered by Maori groups around the motu or indeed more accessible and affordable public transport options. Australian and Canadian graduated driver’s licence schemes for example require a zero blood-alcohol level for young and inexperienced drivers. The option to reduce the blood-alcohol content limit for our young drivers to zero is certainly something that we would do well to consider. 
Finally I hope that all of these mayors in their first meetings with their newly elected councils might be thinking of ways to keep our young people alive. That is something that I am sure we are all hearing and that we would all support.