Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. When it comes to road safety the evidence is very clear: countries like Sweden Ireland Canada and Norway had comparable rates of death and serious injuries per capita to New Zealand just 20 years ago—in the case of Ireland and Canada only about 10 or 15 years ago—and they embarked on a programme called Vision Zero which was a safe systems approach to road safety and they demonstrated that you can significantly reduce deaths and serious injuries on the road which is what we should all be aiming to do. In Sweden where this approach was pioneered they had cross-party support after a particularly devastating accident took the lives of many young children.Now in some places they've actually achieved this. In cities like Oslo there hasn't been a single person killed who was on foot on a bike or a young person who has died in a car crash. So the Vision Zero approach while you could say Yeah you never get to zero."—that's true. But by taking this approach where we say it's not an acceptable side effect of our transport system we're going to put safety first like we have done in workplaces because ultimately human life is the most important thing to us—the lives of our friends and whānau and our children—we can have a transport system that's much safer.So the provisions in this bill around the point-to-point safety cameras are a positive step the best way to approach speed. I've heard some misleading statistics used in this House about speed not being the cause of most crashes; it is the major factor though that decides whether the crash results in a death or serious injury. So you can have minor crashes that are not caused by speed but if speed is involved—high speed—it's much more likely to result in death and serious injury and that's why appropriate speed limits are so important and the point-to-point safety cameras can give you a better accurate reading of what the average speeds were doing in a particular point on the road. So rather than just that one point they take the average along a stretch of road.The whole approach with the safety cameras was meant to be changing behaviour and not penalising people and raising revenue. So the idea is that you have a lot of cameras—this is what Sweden's done. You have a lot of cameras—you're using point-to-point safety cameras—but we're signposting them well and we're using them in the areas where people would tend to travel higher than the safe speed and people know that. So they change their behaviour and so you have fewer deaths and serious injuries. In no way should this be seen as a way of raising revenue. In an ideal scenario you're losing money on it because people are changing their behaviour. They're taking the speed that is appropriate for the road and there's much less likely to be a death or serious injury as a consequence.Even in the state of Victoria we can see the success of this road safety approach and I think it's a shame that it's become a political football thanks to parties like the ACT Party and the National Party who will jump on any change and find any reason to defend the status quo rather than achieve an outcome that most New Zealanders truly want in their hearts. So that's the situation we're in. But the rest of the bill unfortunately we cannot support because the issue around confiscation of vehicles from fleeing drivers unfortunately I think crosses the line. It's unlikely to solve the problem of fleeing drivers. We do absolutely agree with the approach the police took to stop pursuing when it was leading to fatal crashes—an incredibly dangerous situation for people when that happens. So that was a really good approach but we need to do more to address the drivers of crime and until we have a transport system where people aren't so reliant on private vehicles it's punitive to take away the vehicle.Now we could have transport that's less reliant on private vehicles and that would be good for equity and many other things and that's something the Green Party is definitely advocating for—giving people more options to get where they need to go without having to own and run a car all the time to get there. But the provisions in this bill that then say that vehicles can be confiscated even if it's not necessarily the owner of the vehicle who was the one fleeing the police are we think too problematic. So the Green Party cannot support this bill."