Land Transport Amendment Bill

Let me say—

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: Don’t use it.

Members over there are telling me not to use the 4 minutes 30 seconds I have left to speak. But between my last contribution and this one, the Government has seen fit—and it is right and proper that it has—to listen to New Zealand First, and has produced a Supplementary Order Paper that will, in fact, ease the burden of some taxi-drivers who have, in the distant past, been guilty of some crime. I am told in the information the Government has sent me—and it has been very cooperative, which might please Clayton Cosgrove; it has sent me quite a lot of information—that this legislation could affect 600 current taxi-drivers, or people with passenger licences, of which 200 will get the right of appeal. We think that is fair. I point out to Government members that if they want justice in this country, and I am sure they do, then it has to be embraced with fairness.

But an area that I do not think the Government has yet taken on board in terms of this bill—and I emphasise that New Zealand First is going to support the bill—is one that we are concerned about. It is the courtesy buses that are run by clubs. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, I recall, was informed that clubs seek donations to run these buses, but I have since found out that some of the major clubs in this country would not be able to provide this service on the basis of donations alone, and therefore have a minimum charge. From what I can gather, the clubs provide a very, very good service. The courtesy buses pick up their clients at their homes, charge them something like $2 or $3, and bring them to their clubs. The people enjoy their evenings in the clubs, then, for another $2 or $3, they are taken home.

This bill will make that illegal, because it provides only for courtesy buses run on the basis of donations. The manager of the Cosmopolitan Club in Mount Maunganui, which, I believe, is one of the largest clubs in New Zealand, told me that the service could well be in jeopardy if he is not allowed to charge a fee, albeit a very modest one. I understand that many other clubs are also in the same circumstances. I spoke with the Minister of Transport on this, and he asked me to get some letters from the clubs.

In very short order, I have had this amount of letters from clubs, which illustrates the depth of concern. They come from all over the place.

Obviously there is one from the Cosmopolitan Club in Mount Maunganui. I have a couple from cosmopolitan clubs. I have one from the Alexandra District Club in the South Island—the message has got around pretty well. I have other letters from Matamata, from the Petone Workingmans Club, the Napier Returned Services Association, and the Whangarei Returned Services Association. So this is a widespread problem. If we do not allow these clubs to put on a minimal charge—if the Supplementary Order Paper does not come into being when the bill goes through the Committee stage—there is a real risk that this service will disappear, or it will be run illegally.

I can see that some Government members are listening—the Minister for Transport Safety is listening. I ask honourable members whether that is what we want. Should we not be facing reality, what is happening out there in the real world? Should the laws not reflect what is happening, as long as it is legal? We are turning a perfectly legal, sound operating activity into an illegal activity. The argument will be that those people should get passenger licences. That is not always possible or practical.

I apologise to the House, but in my haste this morning I grabbed the wrong glasses and I am visually impaired this morning. We support this legislation. To those people who are listening to the debate this morning, it may be of some comfort to know that to me this was a bill that showed how select committees and Parliament should work, in terms of the way the members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee put aside political point-scoring and worked together to achieve a result that most people supported and were happy with. The bill dealt with some very serious issues, too. It dealt with a number of things, as the commentary sets out. The serious issue for me, especially, was transport service licensing. This was known as the legislation that was going to clean up the taxi industry.

When the legislation first came to the select committee, many of us did not think it was tough enough on the taxi industry, in two areas. One area was the signage for taxis, and the other concerned the drivers of taxis and buses who had convictions for serious offences—in particular, sexual offences. There is one such case before the courts at the moment. When the bill came to the select committee, it caught only those people who wanted to go into the taxi industry and who, therefore, would be applying for a licence. Lianne Dalziel from Labour and I, in particular, felt that that was not strong enough, and that for the taxi industry to enjoy a good reputation overall we needed to clean out the people already in the industry who have a serious conviction. I stress here that the bar is very high. We have made the provision retrospective, but the bar is still quite high. We are not prohibiting people who have a minor conviction from driving a taxi or a bus. From memory—and, as I say, I cannot read the bill properly at the moment, but my glasses are on their way—it relates to people who have been convicted of a crime that carries a sentence of 7 years’ imprisonment as a minimum. People do not have to be sentenced to that, but the offence carries that sentence. One has to be convicted of quite a serious crime to receive a sentence like that.

It was very disappointing that the member from the Green Party felt that that was too hard, that it went back too far, that people could have something dragged up from their past, and that people may have rehabilitated themselves and could drive a taxi again. I have nothing against rehabilitation, but people who get in a taxi are entitled to know that the person driving that taxi has been cleared and that it is safe. I have heard the Taxi Proprietors Federation pulled up about this issue in interviews, and the head of that federation has been asked why the federation did not clean out the industry, and why it granted licences to those drivers. Of course, the federation does not control that; it is not the gatekeeper. The Land Transport Safety Authority, as it was then, was the gatekeeper for people getting a licence to drive a taxi. From replies to written questions that I have put to the Minister, I have found the Land Transport Safety Authority did not have a list of all the people granted a licence to drive a taxi who had a conviction for a sexual offence.

Hopefully, this legislation will go some way towards improving the reputation of the taxi industry. There are some very good taxi-drivers who take pride in their profession. Their reputations are being brought down all the time by people going into the industry who have no knowledge of—yes, I will say it—New Zealand culture. Just because a woman who gets into a cab may have had too much to drink, or may be wearing revealing clothing, that does not mean she is asking to be sexually abused or sexually molested. That is not an excuse, any more than we would say that a man who gets into a taxi wearing a Hugo Boss suit, with a wallet bulging in his back pocket, is asking to be robbed. I do not care how much women who get into taxis have had to drink. That is the reason they get a taxi—to get safely home. They do not get into a taxi to be forced to commit indecencies on the taxi-driver.

The other issue was that of signage. The ACT party disagreed with the National Party over that. We believe that signage is a safety issue. I can understand exactly how people feel when they look along a cab rank and cannot distinguish one cab from another because, in Wellington, the cabs are all white and they all have yellow and black signage. If, like me, people only use Wellington Combined Taxis because they know those taxis are safe and reliable, but they have grabbed a cab, got into it, and started on their way before they realise the cab does not belong to the taxi company they rely on but to another company that is passing off and trading on the good reputation of Wellington Combined Taxis by copying its signage, for me that is a safety issue. Yes, there is competition and commercial legislation that deals with that, but as the industry owners who appeared before the select committee said to us, it is very expensive and time consuming for them to take a case to the Commerce Commission under the Fair Trading Act. They may win it, but so what? It is very difficult for them to enforce a decision, once a taxi company has copied all the signage. So those are the two main issues that we dealt with.

We also dealt with the issue of whether the drivers of courtesy vehicles should be subject to the same stringent barriers as apply to those who drive for remuneration or reward. The report back to the House excludes them from the legislation, because they provide an important service in terms of getting people home safely from clubs or wherever they are, and including them would be too difficult and punitive, and would disadvantage a lot of the people who rely on courtesy vehicles to get around. However, I do hope that when this legislation is passed—and it will be passed under urgency—the people who operate courtesy vehicles do not just sit back and heave a sigh of relief that they have been excluded from the legislation. As we said in the select committee, we would encourage the providers of courtesy vehicles to develop in-house policies to screen their drivers. I cannot emphasise that enough. Whether they should be included in the legislation has been considered by Parliament. The providers of courtesy vehicles should be on notice that although they have been excluded from the legislation this time, if they do not voluntarily set up in-house practices and codes to screen their drivers and make sure they are safe, then they will run the risk of being regulated by Parliament. It is not too hard for them to do that. There are very good organisations like Safe Network in Auckland, run by John McCarthy, which deals with trying to rehabilitate and run programmes for recidivist sex offenders. He has been there long enough to recognise the signs of potential recidivism, and he is more than happy to provide guidelines for organisations that may run courtesy vehicles for kids’ sports teams, for Cubs and Brownies, and for all those sorts of organisations.

I am proud that this legislation will be passed while I am still in the House, and I look forward to it having a positive effect, especially on the taxi industry.

I rise on behalf of United Future, which will also support the Land Transport Amendment Bill. I also was able to sit at various meetings of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as it was considering the bill, under the able chairmanship of Mark Gosche. It was pleasing, as other members have already said, that there was unity across all the parties that the issues we were dealing with in the legislation were important. It was great to see the cooperation as the members discussed rationally issues that were sometimes fairly hot and contentious.

One of the first things to be touched on was the provisions with regard to drink-driving—the “three strikes and you’re out” approach. First-time offenders face just the current court-imposed penalties, but the legislation recognises the challenges we face with drunken drivers on the road.

It is ironic that we want to get drunk drivers off the road, and we are also dealing with the taxi industry. Taxis are often the very method used by people who have the common sense to realise that they have had a little bit too much to drink. As Deborah Coddington said, that especially applies to young ladies. We are putting into place measures that mean that, hopefully, the taxi company will be interested only in taking them from their point of pickup to their home. Unfortunately, even recently, we have seen examples again on our roads where the taxi industry has failed in its choice of drivers, and there has been inappropriate behaviour from some taxi-drivers. This legislation will go a long way—hopefully, all the way—to rectify those problems. At one stage, the select committee looked at putting a blanket ban on drivers who had serious convictions, but I see the bill has been amended so that in certain cases there will be a right of appeal for those with minor convictions. I think that is fair. We have to accept that, after a period of 10 years, some people have definitely turned their lives round. So there will be a way that they can appeal, if they have behaved well over a long period of years.

I know that the disabilities industry welcomes the recommendation to put Braille identification in taxis, for blind people. Of course, as Deborah Coddington said, one cannot necessarily pick up from the colours of the car which taxi company the car one is hopping into belongs to. That is even worse for blind people; they have no idea what company it is. Now all the companies will have to have Braille identification, and blind people will be able to pick up which taxi company they are with, the name of the driver, and what the cab number is. I think that is a step forward. It is definitely a progressive step indeed.

Another part of the legislation that has been altered is that police are now able to serve at the roadside a notice of licence suspension. I had thought they were always able to do so, and was surprised to learn that they could not. Previously, they had to try to catch people at home, if their demerit points had got over 100; they had to find those people, who had often moved flats or were not at home. But, now, if someone is picked up on the road for any offence—it may just be that the brake lights are not working—and the police discover that the person has exceeded 100 demerit points, they will be able to serve a notice of licence suspension on the roadside, and that driver will be taken off the road.

United Future raised the issue of excessively noisy vehicles. That is a particular problem in some of our tourism spots. For example, in Larry Baldock’s area, Tauranga, there is a problem with people who, in the later hours of night, when tourists who have arrived in the country are trying to sleep, use excessively noisy vehicles. It may not necessarily be the vehicle itself that is noisy; maybe the noise is from the tyres, the stereo, or whatever. But people are being kept awake at night, and tourists are, in some cases, avoiding certain spots because of the noise level. I welcome discussion in the Committee stage about demerit points now being able to be issued to people who offend in such cases.

Another point that has been discussed relates to the passenger service licence for courtesy buses. That is an interesting issue to talk through. Yes, service industries use courtesy buses—we think of RSAs and those types of institutions that have courtesy vehicles that take people home or pick them up to bring them to the club for a few drinks—but it is more wide ranging than that. Sports clubs use them. There are groups that care for children after school that have courtesy vehicles to pick up children and bring them to after-school care clubs, or to places where they can do their homework, etc. They are providing a service.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Pick it up, you’re losing the audience.

I am sorry. Maurice Williamson is really wanting to wind everything up.

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: Get a bit of excitement.

I ask Mr Williamson how we can be excited about courtesy buses. These sorts of things need to be worked through. At the moment, as Deborah Coddington said, such groups will be exempted.

I also welcome the improvement—and I say to Maurice Williamson that I think it is the major one—to the logbook system. I think logbooks are essential; they have done a lot to bring safety to the industry. Now, as we move into the electronic age, we find that a lot of the more modern taxi companies run electronic logbooks that cannot be fiddled like a manual logbook can, yet drivers have had to run the two in conjunction with each other. Now we have released the courier industry, in relation to lighter vehicles, from having to have a logbook. That will stop a lot of paperwork and effort. It will be interesting to see whether the industry handles that responsibly, or whether we run into challenges with an industry that has been given the freedom to run without logbooks. Only time will tell.

United Future supports this legislation, and I have no doubt that my colleague Larry Baldock, who is our transport spokesperson, will add additional stuff as we go into the Committee stage.

The Green Party is supporting this bill. It makes a lot of good amendments to the land transport regulations. The issue of taxi-drivers has come up in the debate so far, and it did exercise the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. Members will note from the commentary on the bill that, although the Green Party supports improved safety for taxi passengers in terms of preventing unsuitable people from holding licences that allow them to carry passengers, we did criticise the permanent character of the exclusion of certain people who have committed serious offences. That view is in line with the Green Party approach that we cannot hold somebody’s transgressions against them forever.

We are in favour of rehabilitation. That is the essence of the clean slate legislation that was initiated by my Green colleague Nandor Tanczos and then became a Government bill under the name of Phil Goff and passed through Parliament. The concept behind that legislation is that we do not punish people forever. It is true that the clean slate legislation is about less serious offences—the concept is that after 7 years, a minor conviction can be scrubbed from a person’s record instead of it affecting his or her whole life. In terms of serious offences, our general approach to rehabilitation is that as much as possible people should be given chances in life to really make amends, contribute to society, and have a fulfilling life, even if they have done time for committing very serious crimes. We should not hold it against them forever.

The Greens propose that there be a discretion to allow the Director of Land Transport to issue a passenger endorsement to someone who has committed a serious crime according to the list provided in the bill, if the director is satisfied that there is no risk to public safety now or in the foreseeable future. That would be a very high test, but it would mean that the offence was not held against the person forever. Not to do that would, in some ways, elevate taxi-driving above some other professions in which there is danger, such as the sensitive area of early childhood education. We should not have a totally forever, prescriptive sort of approach to the exclusion of people from that particular profession. Sure, the offences listed in the bill are serious—attempt to murder, conspiracy to murder, wounding with intent, causing grievous bodily harm, aggravated wounding or injury, kidnapping, aggravated robbery, firearms offences, etc.

It is true that there should be an exclusion for such people, but the Greens are saying that years later, when such people have rehabilitated themselves—and a number of people in our society who have committed murders or done very serious things have later contributed in a very effective way to our society—there has to be room for discretion. The Green Party will support giving the director a discretion in that respect.

I am pleased to take a call in this debate and to congratulate the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee on some extremely good work in bringing this bill back to the House.

I want to comment briefly on the taxi-driver issue. A whole bunch of issues around taxi-drivers cause concern. Recently I was in Auckland to do a couple of things, and I caught a cab off the rank to get back to where I was staying. As I hopped in, the driver said: “This is my second day.”, and I suddenly realised that I would have enormous difficulty getting anywhere, much less to my destination. Indeed, it proved to be that way. I had to tell the driver where I was going, and I was more confused than she was. I despair at what the Parliamentary Service has to pay out in taxi chits on occasions like that. It took us an extraordinary amount of time to get from the centre of Auckland out to Mount Wellington. I shuddered—I nearly wrote out two taxi chits, I was so embarrassed about the size of the amount to get back from the city. [Interruption] I must say that that crossed my mind.

I note that Peter Brown has made some good comments this morning about work that has been done in the interim since the commencement of this debate. I do think it is right that we take a strong line on who can and who cannot be a taxi-driver, particularly in relation to violent sexual offenders. There is one cab company in this city that I simply will not use. There is a history of reasons why I will not use that cab company. It goes back a long way, to a time when the company treated a rape complaint frivolously. I simply will not use that company at all. Indeed, if the company I do use suggests to me that it will send a cab from another company, I tell it not to bother. Even to this day, I would rather walk than use a company that took a complaint of that sort frivolously.

These are not frivolous issues, and it is good to see that they are now being tidied up in this bill. It is good legislation. I am delighted to see that we have perhaps managed to sort out an issue that concerned New Zealand First. So there will be rather widespread support for this bill, and I am just sorry for Maurice Williamson that his radio audience is no longer listening.

I am very happy to take a call on the Land Transport Amendment Bill on its report back from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, because in the case of this legislation the select committee worked exceedingly well. There was pretty much broad agreement on the objectives that needed to be achieved. Obviously there was some niggling about little bits and pieces of detail, and I want to get off my chest one of my niggles. This has more to do with the officials than with the Government. It relates to the fact that when the photo driver’s licence first came in, I wanted it to include—and I thought that, as the then Minister, I should have had at least some say—a field to show when one had first obtained a licence. In my case it was when I turned 15, back in—

💬 Darren Hughes: 1945.

No, it was before the First World War, as Darren Hughes will remember. I wanted to have that date on my licence, and the officials said no. They told me that the licences were to comply with a European Union standard layout, with the flag and the fields in certain areas and in a certain order. I remember having quite an argument about that. I was finally beaten into submission, because officials always ruled the roost when I was around. [Interruption] All right—sometimes. The officials said that we had to stick with the layout, so that when one went to a European Union country or elsewhere one would be carrying a licence in a standard format.

I am just staggered to learn that the advice to the Government has now changed. I think that is good. I am delighted that the licence is changing, and I think that will be great. I have a question for the Minister for Transport Safety. When we get another licence after this legislation comes in, will the new licences go back to showing the date when one obtained one’s original licence, or will they show the date when one first obtained a photo driver’s licence? I do not know whether the database now records that I first got my driver’s licence in 1966. That is a really important point, because I would like my licence to show the date as 1966, and that I have been driving for that length of time.

I am pleased that the committee dealt with some quite central issues in this legislation. I am happy to say that one of those issues—I know it is of serious concern to people like Deborah Coddington, and it should be of serious concern to everybody in this House—concerns the people who drive our passenger service vehicles, mainly taxis. I am not so strident about the requirements for those who drive a big bus, because unless it is very late at night and on a very long, thin, sparse route where there may be only one passenger, a bus driver has a lot less ability than a taxi-driver to do dreadful things to the passengers. In a taxi there is quite often, especially late at night in a lot of parts of the city, a one-on-one relationship. I think the passenger has an absolute right to know that the person who holds a P endorsement and is driving the taxi meets a number of qualifications. Passengers have a right to know that the person is a good and safe driver, has knowledge of the area and will not try to go from the city out to Mount Wellington via Albany—as happened to Mark Peck—and, more important than any of that, does not have serious past convictions.

I am prepared to be really hard-nosed on this issue. I am happy that the committee has reported back that, as one of its changes to the bill, this measure will affect not only people who apply for a P licence from now on but also people who may even be in the industry right now. I am sorry if those people get upset about that. I do not actually care whether they do. Anyone who has been convicted of murder, of a serious sexual offence, or of a serious violent offence, even if it was 20 years ago, should get another job. Those people should go and drive a truck, a bulldozer, a carrier, or a grader. I am sorry, but if they have been convicted of an offence like that, the taxi industry is the one industry I do not think they should be in—on a one-to-one basis with a female passenger late at night—even if they have had a clean slate for a while. That may be punitive to one or two taxi drivers who, like Steve Maharey, have led a life of blameless excellence for the last 20 years and would like to stay in the industry. I am sorry, but if this legislation picks on two people, that is bad luck. Hard cases make bad law. This legislation is the way to go.

It is not as though we have a shortage of taxi drivers. It is not as though we are saying that if we exclude the murderers and rapists, no one will be left to drive taxis—quite the opposite of that. If anything, in Auckland we have a most serious abundance of people driving taxis. We have Russian brain surgeons who have come to New Zealand and are taxi drivers. I have to say, to the credit of the Government, that that is better than it would be if it were the other way round—Russian taxi drivers coming here and being brain surgeons. Yes, it is better than that. [Interruption] Mr Duynhoven is referring to my earlier question. The issue of the date of the licence is fixed in the bill, but will the date shown be the date when one obtained one’s original licence?

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: Yes.

Good, there we are. The Minister for Transport Safety has earned his morning’s pay already, by giving me an answer to that. I am happy to say that I do not want serious offenders of the nature of those on the list to drive taxis. I am pleased that the bill not only excludes such people from coming into the industry but also applies to those who are already in it.

There is a lot of detail in the bill, but I want to talk about just a couple more things. The first is the issue of the chain of responsibility. I am happy to see that the legislation will be amended to allow for measures whereby in, let us say, a trucking operation, instead of pinging just the driver who may have committed an overweight offence or an unsafe driving offence—

💬 Clayton Cosgrove: It’s like Rodney.

No, no. Mr Cosgrove thinks that “overweight” applies to the driver himself, personally. I am talking about the vehicle that is being driven. It is a shame that Mr Cosgrove does not keep up with these things as he should. In the past drivers would get pinged for things that they were literally squeezed into doing.

When I was at university I used to drive for Refrigerated Freight Lines, a frozen pea and frozen bean trucking company. The company told us, when we came out of Napier at a certain time of the night, that we had to be at the bulk frozen stores in Auckland by 7 a.m. We would say that we simply could not do that without speeding. The bosses used to say that that did not matter, and that if we were caught speeding they would pay the fines. They told us that we had to just do it, so we did. All the drivers broke the speed limit, and I ended up being pulled over a number of times. I just gave my name, the name of my company, and so on, and off I went. The fines were all paid. Fortunately, there were no demerit points around in those days.

💬 Simon Power: Those were the days.

Those were the days. The company had to do things in that way. I kept thinking that it was a bit unfair that I was copping it. [Interruption] There were not demerit points.

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: Who did that?

Demerit points came in under National. Yes, I think demerit points are good; I am not arguing against them. One of the drivers—and I will not name him—racked up 18 speeding tickets within 12 months, but that did not matter, because Refrigerated Freight Lines picked up the tab and paid the speeding tickets, and so on.

This bill brings in what is called the chain of responsibility. It states that if a company makes a driver carry an unsafe load, if a direction comes from the boss that a driver is to take a container even though it is known to be overweight, or if a direction is given that a driver is to drive at a speed that exceeds the speed limit, it is now possible to extend the chain of responsibility to include all appropriate transport offences where a third party has influence over the transport task. We have done that. I know that was done at the request of the Road Transport Forum. The chief executive officer of the Road Transport Forum, Tony Friedlander, gives our committee a lot of very, very good advice. We are very lucky to have the services of those people. I look forward to dealing with some of the issues regarding this matter in the Committee stage.

I want now to pick up on my next little niggle. I want members to think about this, because it is not a big political issue, and I would hope that Government members may be prepared to support a slight amendment to the bill. It is to do with the little moped, Go-Ped motorised scooters. My little kids have graduated to a nice little electric scooter from the little scooter they used to stand on and use their own foot to push themselves along with. I have worked it out that the little electric motor on the scooter is 350 watts. This legislation will cover, say, someone who gets on one of those little scooters, which little kids can flick around on in parks. We are providing in this legislation that the director of Land Transport New Zealand—and I really shudder at the thought of the power that could go to his head on this—is able to allow those vehicles to be exempt or not exempt. I suggest a more realistic level—and National members put it in our minority report—of, say, 600 watts, which would cover nearly everything. In case anyone is interested, there is a table in the bill. I will cover this issue in more detail when we get into the Committee stage on the bill.

I am pleased to take a call in support of the second reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill. When I read through the report, I thought the members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee had done a great job on a whole range of different areas that a number of members will have had raised with them in their constituency clinics.

A number of people have come to see me about chartered clubs, like the “cossie club”, the RSA, and the workingmen’s club, which run a courtesy vehicle, normally on Friday and Saturday nights, to take members home. There has been some issue—[Interruption] Never this member! There has been some issue around whether there could be a fee for that service, and whether a courtesy coach should be included as a passenger transport service. Of course, if that were the case, that would mean that the drivers were required to comply with a whole lot of extra regulation. I am very pleased that the select committee has provided for the exclusion of those courtesy vehicles from the passenger transport service definition, provided that the service is not done on a hire or reward basis. If members of the club just make a donation for the use of the van, it will be excluded from the official definition. I think that will make things a lot easier for those chartered clubs, which do a lot of work in our communities and provide a very good service for their members.

In addition to all the other very good features of the bill, I particularly wanted to highlight that one, because I have had representations from clubs in the Otaki electorate. I am very happy to be able to support that provision of the bill.

I am really glad to have the opportunity to participate in the second reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill. I understand that the National Party is supportive of the bill.

I challenge the self-proclaimed hard-working Minister for Transport Safety, Harry Duynhoven, to take into account my proposed amendments during the Committee stage that will further improve the objective of the bill. This bill’s purpose is meant to be to “promote, and enhance provisions in that transport legislation relating to safe road user behaviour”, and also to “improve and enhance the enforcement provisions of that transport legislation.”

As I have previously raised in Parliament, in 2003 a group of Chinese New Zealanders who were driving instructors raised a whole series of concerns with regard to other driving instructors, with or without licences, and their practices. I see that, after 2 years, one of those concerns has been taken up in this legislation. But there are other concerns that I would like to take this opportunity to raise, so that we can consider amendments during the Committee stage.

Amongst the concerns raised by those driving instructors was one about driving instructors who are allowed to teach driving in exchange for reward or money currently having to have an I endorsement licence. I am assured that this legislation includes an offence provision, which was previously, for some reason, omitted from the Land Transport Act 1998. But the bill does not require that those I licences be displayed. So there is no way for an enforcement officer to check whether a person is entitled to teach in exchange for monetary reward. So I will move an amendment, and I hope that all parties see fit to support it at the Committee stage.

I will move another amendment relating to people who are allowed to teach in exchange for monetary reward. I would like to think they are currently New Zealand citizens or holders of permanent residence visas. I allude to the fact that overseas students can obtain an I endorsement, in order to teach others to drive. I do not think that is safe. For me, it is important that people who teach others in a commercial manner should, at least, have been resident in New Zealand for a considerable period of time. Those people should understand the road conditions and the safety measures that go with that.

I also want to raise concerns, which I have written to the Minister about, in terms of the lack of monitoring of some of the outrageous advertisements that say learners can choose their own testing officer. The Minister has written to me and assured me that Land Transport New Zealand has now taken the issue seriously and will monitor those advertisements. But I hasten to point out that the Mandarin Times, a Chinese newspaper, dated 10 June—last Friday—included a driving school’s advertisement that said learners could choose their own testing officer, the testing route, and also to have weekend testing. In response to my query, the Minister stated that the special test to be carried out on weekends is meant to facilitate a group of people who seek their licence at the same time. If that is the case, why are there at least eight advertisements on the same day, in which every one of those driving schools or instructors offers people the option of sitting the driving test at weekends? I imagine that people want to sit it at the weekend because the traffic tends to be slightly lighter then, but that is no way to improve driving safety on New Zealand roads.

The other concern raised with me by some of the driving instructors was about the 6-month minimum requirement before the holder of a learner’s licence can convert it to a full licence. I would like the Minister later on to share with us whether there is actually discretion for a testing officer to grant dispensations for migrants in some situations. If migrants have had a long period of driving experience in their home countries, and can demonstrate, once they have passed the written test, that they are capable drivers, can they then convert a learner’s licence into a full licence? On some occasions, migrants who have had sufficient driving experience find it inconvenient to have to wait 6 months. That may lead to their resorting to acquiring a licence without sitting the practical test, which they are not allowed to sit. We should discuss that issue.

All in all, given that the bill’s purpose is to promote and enhance enforcement provisions, I have been wondering what Land Transport New Zealand has done with regard to the latest sentencing handed out to a driver’s licence testing officer. He got only 280 hours’ community service for selling about 100 fake licences—genuine licences in one sense, but fake in the sense that the people who had acquired those licences had never sat the practical driving test. I want to know whether Land Transport New Zealand is serious about enforcing safety on roads. Is the authority appealing the sentence? Is it working with the police to appeal that light sentence handed out to a driver’s licence testing officer who accepted $50 in exchange for granting a licence to people who had not sat the test? I want to know whether the Minister is serious about making sure that the people who paid to get those licences have their licences revoked. It is no laughing matter, even though Labour members may find it funny. Over 100 people might be driving on our roads without properly passing the driving test—

💬 Jim Peters: Only 100?

—well, it could be more—endangering their own lives and other people’s lives. I challenge Labour members to stop laughing and get serious about ensuring safety on New Zealand roads.

I am looking forward to the Minister taking a call in the Committee stage, to assure New Zealanders that corrupt officers will be pursued, and that Land Transport New Zealand will appeal the sentence of 280 hours of community service that was dished out to an officer who had received bribes in exchange for handing out licences to people who had not passed the driving test.

Today we are debating the Land Transport Amendment Bill, which is supposed to strengthen the enforcement capacity of Land Transport New Zealand, and I want to know whether the Minister will ensure that the provisions are tough enough, and whether there are the resources and the will for Land Transport New Zealand to enforce the provisions. I am looking forward to the Minister’s support for the amendments I will propose in the Committee stage, and I also want an answer as to what further action the Minister will take with regard to the recent sentencing of the officer found guilty of accepting bribes to issue licences.

Bill read a second time.

Instruction to Committee