Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill

I move, That the Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill be now read a third time. I thank members for their work on this bill. It has been given a thorough examination, and the amendments have made a good bill even better.

People who engage in illegal street racing activity—and by that I mean unauthorised races, unnecessary acceleration, burnouts, and the pouring of diesel and other substances on the road—are a danger to themselves and to others. Current legislation already prohibits these activities, but it does not go far enough in providing police with appropriate powers that reflect the wider issues associated with illegal street racing. This bill will tighten up that legislation, and tackle other offending that goes hand in hand with illegal street racing.

The select committee received many submissions from residents, who said that the peace of their homes was compromised by the selfish and often intimidating behaviour of antisocial drivers. Business owners told of loss of revenue and damage to premises. People told of incessant noise, and it could be said that we have heard some examples of that in the Chamber here this evening. The bill aims to reduce this nuisance and disturbance by giving road-controlling authorities such as councils the powers to create by-laws to prevent cruising. Cruising is carefully defined in the bill as the repeated circling of the same sections of road in a manner that draws attention to the power or noise of the vehicle, or that forms a convoy that impedes the flow of traffic. If car enthusiasts want to meet and admire each other’s vehicles, of course that is fine. However, it ceases to be OK when they create a nuisance to others, intimidate communities, and have an adverse effect on local businesses.

This bill will also enable police to attach warning notices on vehicles used in breaches of certain illegal street racing or cruising by-laws. The warning on the vehicle will allow the police to impound the vehicle if it is caught breaching another by-law within 90 days. Impoundment in this situation will be mandatory, as it will be for all illegal street racing offences. The bill will also reduce fines for breaching the graduated driver-licensing system and provisions for noisy vehicles, while increasing demerit points for those same offences. We know that fines can be largely ineffective for this group of drivers. Often the fine is paid by parents, pooled and shared amongst the occupants of the cars, or just completely ignored. Demerit points can lead to loss of licence, which has a far higher deterrent value. Demerit points will also be attached to registration plate offences for those who deliberately obscure or use false registration plates to avoid detection.

Police have told me of their frustration when, after ticketing drivers on a learner or restricted licence for breaching their licence conditions, they then watch the offenders drive away, still in breach of their conditions. This bill will give the police the power to stop this by forbidding the person from driving, by taking away the vehicle’s keys, or by taking other necessary steps to immobilise the vehicle until it can be driven legally. Drivers who have been suspended or disqualified are supposed to surrender their photo driver’s licence card, but often this does not happen. The administrative costs of a licence suspension and disqualification are borne by all licensed drivers. This bill will give the New Zealand Transport Agency the power to cancel a driver’s licence card. Drivers will have to pay to get a new card after their period of suspension or disqualification ends.

The bill will increase penalties for those who try to evade the police by failing to stop when requested, and for those who try to avoid detection by refusing to give the details of drivers and passengers involved in offences. The bill will make it mandatory for a vehicle ordered off the road by the police for excessive exhaust noise to undergo a metered noise test before obtaining a new warrant of fitness. Vehicles that pass the test will have their exhaust system indelibly marked. This will prevent exhaust swapping or tampering, which is known to happen following a warrant of fitness. Police will also have the power to direct a vehicle to be inspected if the officer suspects that the vehicle has been illegally modified or is unsafe. Currently police can ask drivers to take their vehicles for an inspection but have no power to compel them to do so.

For too long, serious traffic offenders have been able to avoid having their vehicles confiscated because of a loophole in the law that allows them to transfer the registration of vehicles to friends or family members while still having full access to the vehicles. Police will now be able to prohibit the sale or disposal of vehicles prior to the vehicles being confiscated. Serious traffic offenders will lose their vehicles. Bailiffs and officers of the court will now be able to seize or confiscate a vehicle directly from an impoundment yard. This will reduce the number of vehicles that disappear between the time of being released from the impoundment yard and that of the bailiff turning up.

Further to the increased penalties for failing to stop, a Supplementary Order Paper has been introduced to give the police power to impound a vehicle for 28 days when the driver has failed to stop when signalled to do so. Failure to stop represents a deliberate attempt to evade punishment for offending. When high speeds and dangerous driving are involved, the safety of all road users is jeopardised. Vehicle impoundment is an immediate sanction, which will send a clear message to people who attempt to evade the police that this will not be tolerated.

Finally, following the agreement of Parliament to consider a Supplementary Order Paper amending the new drug-impaired driving legislation, this bill will strengthen that legislation in an important way. It adds 34 sedative and anti-anxiety medications, known collectively as benzodiazepines, to the list of drugs, which, if found in the bloodstream of a driver who has failed the compulsory impairment test, will be grounds for prosecution. Recently published research shows that benzodiazepines significantly increase the risk of motor vehicle crashes. We need to send a strong signal deterring people from driving under the influence of such drugs, and this bill will help to achieve that.

This new legislation will come into force on 1 November, and I thank the House for facilitating this enhancement. The bill will give police and road controlling authorities the appropriate powers for addressing this problem. It sends a strong message that illegal street racing and the antisocial use of vehicles have no place on our roads. We are working to improve road safety further through the Safer Journeys strategy, and we simply cannot tolerate wilfully dangerous behaviour on our roads. I commend this bill to the House.

As we have said throughout this debate, the Labour Party will be supporting the Land Transport (Enforcement Powers) Amendment Bill. We think a number of its aspects have a high degree of value.

I support Supplementary Order Paper 78, which brings in seizure sanctions for a failure to stop. I can recall going out a number of times over the last 9 years with local police in Christchurch, and that was one of the issues they had to deal with. I commend the Minister of Transport, the Hon Steven Joyce, for his action on that matter. It was often a dangerous situation, where the lights would go on and the siren would sound, and the young person, as it generally was, would do a runner. I have seen some situations while in the back of a police car where potentially tragic actions could have occurred and innocent bystanders could well have been killed because of a failure to stop. It creates a reaction in the police that they have to take some sort of positive step. They have to chase the person within the rules that are allowed for, and that in itself is hazardous to the innocent, the offender, and the police. We also support the amendment to the provisions on benzodiazepines. There has been some good information from officials on that issue, and we think that amendment has a reasonable amount of logic.

However, I will reiterate some of the points that have been made in the debate. We support this legislation, and there is goodwill from members of the Opposition on the need to see the actions of boy racers and girl racers dealt to. They are a nuisance and they are, in many respects, violent. I have seen that violence. It has been perpetrated on police, innocent homeowners, and people who have to drive through crowds of these boy racers, many of whom act like lunatics, to put it bluntly. Many of them are very savage in the actions that they take against innocent folk. Many of them are intimidators.

It has gone beyond what some people might think when they say that their dads and granddads did doughnuts on the footy field, and that everybody did the same. I think that the difference between then and now is that they were not in turbocharged death machines, as some of them are now. They were not out there in groups of 500, 600, 700, 800, or in excess of that number. They were not kicking in people’s letterboxes, abusing people, and throwing objects and bottles at policemen in police cars, they were not intimidating, and, ultimately, they were not being violent towards the citizens in our community. It has gone beyond a joke.

I gave it a shake in 2003, using some of the best information that we had and information that came out of Australia. A policeman called Geoffrey Kenna brought over the New South Wales legislation that we modelled ours on. Today it is a fact that the provisions of our legislation are still tougher than any legislation that exists in Australia. Sadly, we have judges—I am being careful with what I say—who have not taken advantage of the full strength of the law. The penalties that they have dished out have resulted in permanent confiscation in only 2 percent of cases.

I will raise a couple of issues again. This legislation will be only as good as the resources that the agencies—the police, primarily, in this case—are given to implement it. If agencies are not resourced, they will not be able to implement this legislation, and expectations are very high in the community that it will be enforced. I commend Minister Steven Joyce for his use of language. Unlike Judith Collins, his counterpart, I think that probably he can see into the future to the point where he knows that there is no silver bullet for this issue, and that this legislation may or may not work, although we hope that it does. He has not done the impersonation of John Wayne at the OK Corral, swaggering around with the six-guns like a latter-day Clint Eastwood, saying that he is the tough guy who will sort this out. We have all given it a shot, and the activity goes on.

But I say to the Minister that he cannot put through legislation without providing the resources behind it. Cutting the police budget by 21 million bucks and taking out 10 percent of the vehicle fleet is not the way to do it. That 10 percent of the vehicle fleet includes many front-line vehicles. We have been told that 32 vehicles have gone in greater Christchurch alone—32 vehicles. A drug-dog car has gone. We know that. There are other examples of front-line vehicles that have gone because of a requirement to make cuts in the budget.

It is no good for Ministers to say that the police budget has been increased on the one hand while they slip the other hand behind their back and require the police to claw back 10 percent of the vehicle fleet, to ration firearms training—as is happening now—and to cut the police budget by $21 million. The National Government calls it “savings”. That is probably Mr Joyce’s spin that he has worked through at his focus groups. The Government calls it savings, but when we take money out of an organisation, it is called a cut.

So there is the issue of resourcing, and there is the issue of whether the bill works, as we hope it does, and as we have already pointed out. Sadly, we have less confidence tonight than we did before this debate that the definition of “cruising” is robust enough to withstand a court challenge and a case precedent that may water it down, robust enough to not catch innocent people, unintended though that may be, and robust enough to ensure that boy racers cannot get around it.

When we asked Minister Steven Joyce during the debate to give us confidence and to give us the information he had that this provision would stand up in court, would catch the boy racers, and would not have the unintended consequence of capturing the innocent, he replied: “Do not worry. They will know it when they see it.” It is the approach of putting a finger in the air and hoping that the police get it right. If the police, perchance, get it wrong because the legislation is loose, we will not see this Minister for dust. He will not be standing up to defend the police as they get a hammering from a judge in court. We will not see this Minister for dust. He will not take responsibility for this. He will be off and out of it. Neither will the Minister of Police take responsibility for it.

The other issue that was raised was noise. Some members opposite laughed at that, but I suspect that those who are in the constituencies where these people are running amok will know that the noise issue is of paramount importance to our communities. If people are not being threatened or intimidated, then they cannot get to sleep because of the noise. These people are running amok every day, and they are not car enthusiasts. I commend car enthusiasts. They are good, law-abiding folk who love their wagons, their vehicles, and I say good on them. Some people collect stamps, other people put their dough into cars. If they act legally, then I say good on them. I support them.

But the noise issue in Christchurch, Hamilton, Auckland, and around the country is literally driving people mad. They have had a gutsful of it. We have heard from families in areas in Christchurch where people cannot get a good night’s sleep. They cannot get to sleep at any time, because the boy racers are out there having a go. There was an opportunity in this bill to put that right and to implement the pledge, cast iron as it was, of Nicky Wagner, Kate Wilkinson, Gerry Brownlee—he is a Canterbury member who was up on the stumps saying that the Government would sort out the noise—David Carter, and Aaron Gilmore, who is another of the invisible men. All of them lambasted us before the election, saying that they would sort it out and that it would be dealt with. Well, it has not been dealt with, and nowhere in this bill or its companion is there a clause that deals with the 90-decibel limit.

Nicky Wagner gave a petition from 435 good souls in Christchurch to the select committee. There was a National majority on that select committee. On that committee, which was controlled by the National Party, she was rolled by National members. She was rolled by the Minister and even by the Leader of the House, who, I presume, supported it because he said so before the election. He was out there on the stump saying that National would make it happen, and that there would be a 90-decibel limit. He said that if people voted for National, then National would sort it out. He said that Labour members were a pack of wimps and that National would do it. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! Presumably, he was rolled by the Minister of Transport as well, and he is the Leader of the House. He is the third most powerful man in the country, according to the Christchurch Press.

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: Mr Joyce is No. 2.

Mr Joyce is No. 2. But presumably Gerry Brownlee got rolled. Maybe Mr Brownlee could get up and tell us where in the legislation, either in this bill or in the companion legislation, is the clause that meets the pledge that he and Nicky Wagner made to get the issue of the 90-decibel limit sorted. [Interruption] Maybe David Bennett is the 2,000th most powerful man in New Zealand, although I doubt it; maybe he is the 200,000th most powerful man.

💬 David Bennett: It’s more than you are.

I say to the great maestro who just interjected on me that at least I never went around the country and said: “I will do this. Vote for me and it will happen.”, and then with the first bill that came up, produced the silence of the lambs. I do not mean the lamb chops, I say to Gerry Brownlee. It is the silence of the lambs. I am sure that Mr Brownlee will go to his Ilam constituency, where he resides occasionally—he occasionally has a clinic, apparently; maybe Nick Smith is there—

💬 Hon Darren Hughes: Once a year’s a lot.

—once a year—and tell his constituents that he has sold them out. He said it would happen. He said that they should vote for him and he would sort it out. It never happened.

This is a test, and it is a very important issue. It might not be a great issue of gravitas for others around the country, but I tell members that for someone who lives on Blackett Street in Rangiora and who cannot get to sleep every night, it is a hell of an issue. It is a big issue—a huge one. I am sure that a couple of people who live in Blackett Street may have voted for Kate Wilkinson and the National Party—or maybe one person did—and they were sold out as well.

Debate interrupted.