Woodhouse Michael: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second Reading 
Woodhouse Michael: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) — Second Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:4341] 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
 I am pleased to take a call in support of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). I congratulate the Minister of Transport on the clarity of his expectation that this bill will be given timely passage through the House. I stress that “timely passage” by no means suggests haste on the part of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. 
Although I did not hear submissions on the bill I was very much a part of the consideration of those submissions in this term of Parliament. I congratulate all members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on their careful consideration of the bill. I think that there will be times in the future when members of that committee deal with some issues on which their views will be quite considerably apart in principle and I look forward to robust debate when that occurs. But I think we have established a standard of consideration and discussion that is a model for the other select committees to consider. 
I also congratulate the officials who provided very carefully considered advice on issues that on the face of it are reasonably straightforward road-safety issues but which when we delve deeper into them become much much more complex and problematic. So I congratulate those officials. 
One of the members of the committee who is not with us now the member for Hutt South mentioned a couple of those issues that we really needed to grapple with. 
Hon Darren Hughes 
: He’s right there! 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: Well he is no longer on the select committee but I am delighted to see he is still in the House. His actions on the committee were a measure of his chameleon-like ability to swing from one side of the political spectrum to the other. There were times when I could close my eyes during the consideration process and think gosh that could be an ACT member of Parliament such was the tub-thumping right-wing rhetoric that came from him from time to time about otherwise quite important issues. I do not say that to trivialise the very careful consideration in particular of multiple drug and alcohol use. 
Mr Mallard has mentioned in the House the real difficulty that members of the committee had in accepting that a different standard might apply to someone who was high on drugs and also under the influence of alcohol. As the Minister Steven Joyce mentioned the survey of several hundred fatal accidents revealed that many of those people and their passengers were killed not only as the result of alcohol but also as the result of drugs. It was difficult for the committee to accept that a different standard might be applied or that once somebody was screened for alcohol the process would stop. There was quite careful analysis of whether this bill should be lined up in some way with the Misuse of Drugs Act as it related to penalties sanctions and consequences. After all the crime of possession of drugs is really no different from the crime of ingesting drugs as would be revealed by the impairment test and subsequent blood test under this legislation. 
The last issue that was very carefully debated in relation to the drug elements of the bill was future-proofing. The committee looked at whether there might in the future be a screening test that is less intensive and time-consuming than the impairment test that the committee saw. I went through that test for the first and I hope very last time. Perhaps there will be a time in the future when swabs or some other less invasive procedure could be used for screening. The officials have quite rightly raised some questions around the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act and the invasiveness of that test and whether there is a prima facie case to have that test. 
Fundamentally it comes back to the issue of this bill being about road safety. A couple of the members mentioned that this bill is the first step on a journey and I expect that there will be amendments to this legislation in the future. But this bill is about reducing the risk of death and carnage on our roads. Regardless of whether there might have been a better way or might be a better way—and I guess we will hear some details about that when we come to the Committee stage—I think we can say that people will be safer on the roads as a result of the passage of this legislation and the police being able to use their powers of enforcement. 
I want to touch on one other aspect of the bill that Ms Fenton talked about and that is the provisions of the bill relating to the motor vehicles register and the public availability of that information which is sometimes used for marketing purposes. The previous member for Otaki rather disingenuously described the ability to access that register by referring to a certain organisation. I think Ms Fenton’s description of the choice to opt in or opt out was probably a little emotive. I consider this provision to be analogous to the junk mail that we all get in our letterboxes every day of the year unless we have a “No Junk Mail” sign on the letterbox. The bill now provides for a simple and timely opt-out provision which in my view is the electronic equivalent of a “No Junk Mail” sign on the motor vehicles register. 
I look forward to the Committee stage where we will debate the bill in more detail. Other parties will be introducing what I am sure are very carefully considered amendments. I look forward to that debate going ahead. Thank you.