Delahunty Catherine: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Delahunty Catherine: Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:666;Page:14077] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tena koutou katoa. I rise to speak on behalf of the Green Party on the Land Transport (Road Safety and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. Road safety is hugely important. Already this year 265 people have died on our roads in Aotearoa New Zealand causing huge suffering. I have personally experienced as no doubt have others in this House loss through a truck-related accident and the loss of my best friend and my godchildren is still in my heart more than 20 years later. 
Bad driving is not just about alcohol and youth but about a range of social and economic issues which Darien Fenton alluded to in her speech. It is a very very important issue to all of us and to all our families. However recent progress on road safety has been going backwards. Compared with other highly motorised countries our safety record is poor with a fatality rate double that of Sweden and the United Kingdom. 
The Green Party supports making our roads safer and will support this bill’s referral to a select committee where we will attempt to improve it. Although we support initiatives to improve road safety and reduce drink-driving we believe that not all the initiatives in the bill will achieve their desired effect. We believe that targeting the blood-alcohol levels of under-20-year-olds only scapegoats young people and overlooks the fact that Aotearoa New Zealand has a pervasive drinking problem. Alcohol and drugs contribute to a third of all fatal crashes. The single biggest thing this Government could have done to reduce the road toll was to reduce the blood-alcohol level to 0.05 but unfortunately there is no provision to do so in this bill. The  
Safer Journeys  
report estimated that this would save between 15 and 33 lives every year and every death on the road is a tragedy. 
This bill attempts to promote road safety with methods such as increasing the driving age from 15 to 16 making the legal blood-alcohol concentration level—or BAC—zero for under-20-year-olds and introducing tougher sanctions for drink-drivers. It allows the police to gather blood evidence from drivers involved in serious or fatal injury crashes who have a breath-alcohol reading of between 250 and 400 micrograms per litre of breath. Also it brings some rules about enforcement—about parking bylaw-making powers etc—from older transport legislation into the Land Transport Act 1998. 
The Green Party is a great supporter of taking drunk and drugged drivers off the road. Driving under the influence of drugs and alcohol contributes to a third of all fatal crashes and results in 119 deaths and 572 serious injuries each year and we often forget that those serious injuries come at an enormous cost and stress to everybody concerned. Since 2000 we as a nation have made no further progress on reducing the number of deaths and serious injuries occurring from drink-driving. For 15 to 19-year-olds and 25 to 34-year-olds the trend has actually been worsening. The social cost of drink-driving is $833 million. 
Our current legal blood-alcohol concentration is 0.08 for adults. This equates to consuming six standard drinks within 90 minutes for an average man—a fact that was notoriously demonstrated by the claim of the Minister of Transport Steven Joyce that he could drink three-quarters of a bottle of wine and still be within the guidelines. We agree with the Minister’s description that the existing legal alcohol limits for drivers are ridiculous. 
The World Health Organization recommends a blood-alcohol concentration of 0.05 as a key to reducing drink-driving. France achieved a 30 percent reduction in drink-driving fatalities when it lowered its allowable blood-alcohol concentration from 0.08 to 0.05. New Zealand Transport Agency analysis suggests that 15 to 33 lives a year could be saved by such a move here with an estimated social cost saving of $111 million to $238 million a year. Who would not want to make that saving? Which of us parents and grandparents would not want our tamariki and mokopuna to be safer on the road? We could solve this long-term issue by taking a braver step than this bill allows. 
We are disappointed that the Government has chosen to place the blame on young people rather than highlight the most important recommendation to come out of the Ministry of Transport’s  
Safer Journeys 
 discussion paper. If this “keystone” element to saving lives on our roads is not addressed at the select committee the Green Party will move an amendment in the Committee stage to lower the alcohol limit for adult drivers to 0.05 micrograms per 100 millilitres to move our limit in line with that used by most countries. We are keen to look at other measures to reduce the terrible toll that alcohol is causing on our roads. We believe that reducing drink-driving needs more emphasis on treatment and not just on stricter penalties. We are looking forward to the select committee consideration which will allow greater investigation into how the bill might be improved to better achieve its aims. We will also raise important civil liberty questions raised by the expanded rights of the police to gather evidence from drivers suspected of being under the influence. 
In looking at raising the driving age from 15 to 16 years our caucus and our members challenged ourselves to look seriously at the issue and the evidence that our 15 to 17-year-olds have the highest death rate in the OECD. The Green Party supports raising the driving age to 16. However we look forward to hearing at the select committee submissions from rural communities and from young drivers who live in areas with very little or no public transport and God knows there are plenty of those. We would like to investigate the possibility of having exemptions for 15-year-olds where public transport alternatives are not available. This is a very real issue. Any of us who have lived in rural Aotearoa know that there are many regions where we need to talk about this because our tamariki are trying to get to school and events and they do not always have any options in regard to public transport and they can sometimes be very good drivers. 
Safer transport journeys are not limited just to the speed limit blood-alcohol levels drugs or driving age. This road safety bill fails to address the fact that pedestrians and cyclists are the most vulnerable road users. 
This bill is too narrow and unchallenging. The focus is heavily weighted towards vehicle safety and direct deaths and injuries caused by our road system. If the Government was taking a really broad look at road safety it might take a leaf from the Green Party’s submission on Safer Journeys and point out that it is now well-established that as many people die as a result of pollution from road vehicles as are killed on our roads directly. In addition greater reliance on cars as our primary means of transport is exacerbating our current obesity epidemic. Then we have people in this House like me who are wimps and do not want to ride a bicycle because we have seen too many people knocked over by mad drivers yet we would like to be more competent and far more fit cyclists. 
Our submission on Safer Journeys emphasised walking and cycling priorities including lowering urban speed limits supporting the 1.5m campaign encouraging a modal shift out of cars to safer more healthy modes of transport and broadening the current narrow focus of road safety to look at the wider impacts of our driving culture on health such as addressing obesity and the hidden particulate road toll. If we are to achieve Safer Journeys then we need a wider vision for road safety—one that incorporates indirect as well as direct casualties from transport. If we are to achieve Safer Journeys then this bill should propose ways of reducing overall levels of vehicular traffic whilst simultaneously encouraging investment in more active modes of travel like walking and cycling. 
The Green Party does support Safer Journeys for all Kiwi and urges the Government to do more than just scapegoat young drivers. It should lower the blood-alcohol level for all drivers and adopt a broader and far more holistic vision for road safety. Thank you.