Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill

Is there an honourable member that would move this bill?

Point of order, Madam Speaker. We’re just locating the Minister’s speech for this one. My apologies to hold up the House.

Speaking to the point of order, I move that the question be now put.

Let me seek advice from the Clerk. We’ll just take a pause for a moment. One of the Clerks is coming in to give me advice right now. Is there an honourable member that will move this bill?

on behalf of the Associate Minister of Transport: I move that the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill be read a first time.

💬 Hon Paul Goldsmith: It’s the second reading; so that’s completely wrong as well.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The words have to be precise, Minister.

Tim van de Molen: Point of order. Thank you, Madam Speaker. Clearly, we’re in a situation where the Government is not prepared to continue business, and, on that basis, surely the House must stand adjourned for the rest of this extended sitting and then recommence at 2 p.m. for the conduct of normal business.

Madam Speaker, I move that the Land Transport—

Tim van de Molen: Point of order! I had a point of order, Madam Speaker. I just made a point of order suggesting that surely the House must be adjourned, and I’m interested in your insight on that.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The advice that I was being given by the Clerk is that I give one more opportunity for the bill to be moved.

I move that the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill be read a second time—I present a legislative statement on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill, and I move that the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Would the Minister like to speak to the motion of the bill?

Yes. I move, That the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): So would you like to make a speech on the bill?

Yes, Madam Speaker. This bill is part of this Government’s commitment to stamp out dangerous and reckless behaviour on New Zealand’s roads and, in turn, reduce deaths and serious injuries.

This bill aims to reduce unsafe behaviour on Aotearoa New Zealand roads, and we are tackling this in two ways: firstly, by enabling police to respond more swiftly and effectively to fleeing drivers, whose behaviour poses a serious threat to road safety; secondly, by enabling the use of technologies to identify and automatically issue infringement notices for transport offences, including a pointtopoint average-speed camera system. We sent a message to dangerous and intimidating drivers earlier this year through the Criminal Activity Intervention Legislation Bill. The message is the same for drivers who fail to stop for police: this behaviour is unacceptable and could result in you losing your vehicle.

Fleeing drivers undermine the safety of our roads and represent a significant danger not only for our police officers and the people in a fleeing vehicle but for innocent road users who find themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time. After 63 fleeing-driver - related deaths between 2010 and 2020, police changed their pursuit policy to place more emphasis on post-event investigations. While this succeeded at reducing deaths and serious injuries, it also contributed to an increase in fleeing-driver events. There were 9,765 events last year, up from 6,757 the year before, and since December 2020, only 34 percent of fleeing drivers have been identified by police, partly due to insufficient consequences for the vehicle’s owners when they don’t provide police with information about a fleeing driver. The tougher consequences for fleeing drivers in this bill are intended to deter people from failing to stop for the red and blue lights. However, if drivers do choose to flee from police, the legislative tools introduced by the bill will assist police to identify them and hold them to account. The bill will complement a revised police fleeing-driver policy, which came into effect in late May this year, and together the two will strike a balance between improved road safety outcomes and proper punishment for those who break the law and endanger others.

This omnibus bill amends the Land Transport Act 1998 and the Sentencing Act 2002, with consequential amendments to the Summary Proceedings Act 1957, the Privacy Act 2020, and relevant land transport rules and regulations. It will also enable police to seize and empower the vehicle for six months, an increase from the current 28 days, if the police officer believes on reasonable grounds that the person driving the vehicle has failed to stop or remain stopped when signalled. It also creates a new power for police to seize and impound a vehicle for 28 days if the vehicle’s registered owner fails to provide information or misleads police about the fleeing driver. This will assist police to identify the driver, improving the current low identification rate.

The bill increases the period of driver licence disqualification after a second conviction for a failing-to-stop offence from one year to a range of between one and two years—a sentence which will be handed out at the courts’ discretion.

And, lastly, a new sentencing option will be created, enabling the courts to order that a vehicle be forfeited on conviction for a failing-to-stop offence. In these cases, not only will the offender lose their car permanently but they will also lose out on the proceeds from its sale. There is evidence that penalties which emphasise loss, such as a loss of licence or a vehicle, are more likely to influence behaviour than monetary penalties. They also reduce opportunities for reoffending.

As well as increasing the consequences for fleeing drivers, the bill also enables the use of technology to both increase the speed of enforcement and to widen the ability to detect offences as they occur. The bill will allow enforcement agencies to make use of emerging technologies, including point-to-point cameras. Point-to-point cameras calculate the average speed travelled over a distance between two points and have a proven track record overseas at reducing road deaths and serious injuries. The new camera network will play an important role in the Government’s Road to Zero strategy; simply put, it will help to save lives. We are also introducing electronic servicing and automated issuing of infringement notices. These changes will modernise our transport regulatory system through better use of technology. They will help ensure that important and time-sensitive infringement notices, including for speeding offences or revoking of licences on medical grounds, are finding their way to the right person, in the right place, at the right time.

This bill has now been considered by the Justice Committee. Thank you to the committee for their thorough and considered approach, particularly given their extensive work programme, and thank you also to the 33 organisations and individuals who submitted on this bill. The diverse range of expertise shared by these submitters has been integral to getting the bill to this stage today. I’m going to highlight some key changes: the commencement date of the bill has been extended to six weeks following Royal assent, and this will allow Police and Waka Kotahi time for the necessary implementation activities to ensure the new systems are as intended: quick, accurate, and secure.

In some cases, an impounded vehicle will be under a finance arrangement and the registered person may default on their payments during the six-month period, resulting in the car being repossessed by a creditor. The bill now enables a finance company to have a repossessed vehicle released from impoundment without being liable for any towage or storage fees. The robustness of the automated infringement system has been improved by separating responsibility for approving and for maintaining the system. The Minister of Transport will now be responsible for approving the system, while the ongoing quality assurance and audit processes will sit with the enforcement authority.

For the new point-to-point camera system, it is now clear in the legislation that the road-controlling authority must both install and maintain signage for each point-to-point camera on the network. The intent behind this is that a warning sign will encourage drivers to be aware of and reduce their speed. Providing the sign has been appropriately installed and maintained, a driver will still be liable for an infringement notice if the sign is not present or visible at the time at infringement. The safety camera network is designed to improve road safety outcomes, not to fill the coffers; however, if a driver chooses to speed through a point-to-point camera road corridor, they can expect to pay, and we hope it’s from their wallet and not with their life.

To further support the transfer of the safety camera network from Police to Waka Kotahi, the bill will amend the Privacy Act 2020 to enable the transport offence information to be shared between the two organisations as well as the Ministry of Justice and the Legal Services Commissioner. This is an extension of the current system and will ensure a continuity of roadside police activities. This bill is another milestone in this Government’s plan to make New Zealand’s roads safer. Again, I thank the Justice Committee and those who submitted for your valuable input. I would also like to recognise the collaboration that went into this mahi between both the transport and justice ministries, Police, and Waka Kotahi. One person killed or injured by a fleeing or speeding driver is one too many. This bill sends a clear message that these dangerous and harmful behaviours will not be tolerated on our roads. To that point, I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Well, this is a bill that seeks to toughen up the consequences for fleeing drivers, which we support. But, of course, I have an image of a fleeing driver in my head, panicked, careering down the road looking left and right over their shoulders, wondering what’s going on. We’ve just had that demonstrated by this Government and underlined how it is a metaphor for this Government itself, because they couldn’t find a Minister to introduce the actual bill. For five minutes we stand here in the House, we’ve got the second reading starting, there’s no Minister here to deliver the speech. They can’t find the speech notes. They’re rattling through the folders trying to find the notes. They come up with an earlier version of it—somebody delivers that—and it’s just an example of a Government that is confused and lost. Of course, it was Kiri Allan who introduced this bill for its first reading a couple of months or so ago. And she, of course, on the record, has been arrested, we understand, 500 metres away from her car.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member will come back to this bill.

Well, she was the one who introduced this bill, and then we have, I think, Ginny Andersen is now responsible for the bill as Minister of Justice, lampooned up and down the country as Minister of both catch and release—both Minister of Police and Minister of Justice. And so we now have this bill, and, look, there are two parts to this bill. One part of it is in relation to firming up the consequences for fleeing drivers. Now, we support that—we support the bill on that part of it. Not only does it bring in tougher consequences for people who flee in a car after a crash or ram raid or whatever, secondly, it introduces tougher consequences for people who own the car and don’t give information about who was driving the car when it was involved in such an incident. And so we support that. We supported it being rushed through the House on that basis because it’s an important issue. Of course, it’s only one element and it will make some difference and that’s why it’s supported.

The broader context of the Government’s justice policies are more concerning because, ultimately, if you’re number one and only clearly expressed priority for the justice system is to reduce the prison population, irrespective of what’s going on to our community, then that will lead to a lowering of law and order and it will lead to the mess that we’re seeing on our streets and in our communities. So this bill will go so far, but if the Government was really serious about bringing back real consequences for serious crime, and if it was serious about having an answer to the countless shopkeepers and retailers that we speak to every day who say, “There are no consequences—we see no consequences for the young people who are doing this.” And in the context of fleeing drivers, the most obvious change that took place three or four years ago under this Government, through the Police Commissioner, was the decision never to chase—never to chase. Surprisingly enough, there’s been a massive increase in the number of fleeing drivers since that. And so the police have undertaken to review that, and I think they should, and they should leave some doubt in the mind of fleeing drivers, and that has to be part of it.

So you’ve got to have a broader sense of understanding of what’s the overall message from the Government about crime. And as I say, at the moment, it’s a very mixed one. It’s a confused one. It’s saying that our only priority is to reduce the prison population, irrespective of what’s going on. And if you’ve got a 33 percent increase in violent crime, if you’ve got 100 percent increase in retail crime, and if you’ve got a 550 percent increase in ram raids, then I struggle to understand why the target still is on reducing the prison population irrespective of what’s happening. So this bill will help in that regard but it won’t solve all the problems in the absence of a real firm policy around consequences for crime.

But I want to talk about the second element of this bill, which is bringing in the regime for pointtopoint cameras. We are opposed to this part of the bill. We don’t support this part of the bill, and when it comes to the committee of the whole House, we will oppose this part of the bill on two grounds.

The first ground is that there is no argument for ramming such a change through under a rushed process, because this bill has been pushed through on a shortened period so there hasn’t actually been a lengthy and full select committee process. It was truncated down to rush it through, and we think this area around bringing in a new regime for point-to-point cameras for speeding tickets should have wider examination. And, fundamentally, we don’t support it because, ultimately, when you look at the causes of a severe injury and death on our roads, speeding accounts for less than 10 percent of the people involved and yet that’s the only thing the Government focuses on. They haven’t focused on dealing with drunk drivers and drug-drivers. There’s been a great reduction in the number of police checkpoints for drunk drivers. They’ve fluffed around and haven’t made any progress on the drugdrivers, which are one of the greatest causes of death and injury on our roads. They haven’t done much around seatbelts, and they certainly haven’t done much on improving the quality of the roads because, you know, this will forever be known as the “pothole Government” given the shambles that the roads are at the moment.

All they do is they focus on slowing us down and I suppose I just want people to think about the consequences. What happens if there was a point-to-point camera in one of the many streets in our city right now where they have insisted that we drive around at 30 kilometres an hour, which most people—and I live in Auckland and I drive along streets and I, of course, stick to the speed limit. I’m very careful to do that, but I’m the only person in the whole place who does because everybody else is shooting past. Nobody can drive at 30 kilometres an hour in a modern car and feel like they’re not going insane. And so if we were to have this point-to-point camera down a 1-kilometre stretch of a 30-kilometre-an-hour road in the middle of Auckland, that would be, I think, an outrageous thing that would drive people crazy.

And that, I don’t think, should be the point of Government policy. I think the point of Government policy should be to make people’s lives easier, to actually help them get around and do what they want to do. Not to drive them nuts by making them crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour, and then, if you put a point-to-point camera, which means that you have to literally crawl along all the way down the road at 30 kilometre an hour in a modern safe car—cars have never been safer, never been better designed to help people avoid crashes, then that is a strange thing to do and we don’t support it.

In fact, we think the Government would be far better focused on transport policy; on (a) fixing the roads so that there are not dangerous potholes everywhere, (b) investing in good quality, modern, safe roads such as the Waikato Expressway which the National Government started and this Government finally finished only a year or so ago, and the beautiful road going north of Auckland which was lampooned and mocked by Labour politicians as the “holiday highway” but which they opened with great fanfare only a few months ago after six years of work started under National, and a third example being the Transmission Gully road—again, mocked and lampooned by this Government but now opened and one of the most beautiful roads.

So building safe, modern roads is the most useful thing you can do for safety. And then, secondly, dealing with the real causes such as drunk driving, drug-driving—we still haven’t made much progress on drug-driving, they’ve fluffed around and still haven’t got it sorted there—and actually have some checkpoints and actually deal with things like, you know, focusing on seatbelts. And those are the sorts of things that would make a real difference rather than the point-to-point cameras.

So in conclusion, we have a Government that’s in a bit of a shambles. They can’t find a Minister to deliver a speech. They can’t find the speech notes. They don’t know what they’re doing. And when they finally get around to bringing in a bill, it’s a bill that on one part we support—and overall we support—because we do see the need to have firmer consequences for fleeing drivers, we just wish that there was a broader, more coherent justice policy that had firmer consequences for crime right across the board rather than the mixed messages that we are getting from this Government. And secondly, when it comes to point-to-point speed cameras in the context of a Government determined to make us crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour, we don’t think that’s a very sensible thing to do, and we don’t support that element of the bill. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill, a bill that has passed through the very hard-working Justice Committee, who will be meeting during our lunch break today—a reminder for colleagues around the room.

This is a bill that is designed to improve the legislative response to fleeing drivers and to address the public safety issues within the land transport system. I am still a little bit unsure whether the National Party are supporting or opposing the bill. I understood from that speech that they were supporting the first part but not the second. So I’m sure other members will confirm their position for us. I am a bit disappointed in that, though, because the significance of point to point cameras is that they can evidence fleeing drivers as well. So there is a connection between the first and the second part that Mr Goldsmith was speaking to. And we did traverse this within the select committee as well.

Can I thank committee members for engaging on this bill, but also our advisers. This was a fascinating bill to work on, because we did have four sets of advisers with us: Waka Kotahi, the Police, the Ministry of Transport, and the Ministry of Justice, who came back to us on several occasions with additional advice. We also had 33 submissions and eight submitters, who also really did help us make some proposed changes to this bill, some of which the Minister has traversed. They include things that are really practical like changing the commencement date to allow for some public education, but also policies and procedures to be developed to allow Waka Kotahi to make arrangements to collect the fees or the payment of fees from the registered person, because Waka Kotahi would be in the first instance responsible for them.

I think one of the really useful points that submitters made was in the area of financial service providers. So where there’s debt registered against a car that might have been confiscated. And the points that they made resulted in us proposing an insertion, in clause 13, of new section 97A, which meant that we’d be clear that those financial service providers would not be liable for fees associated with impounding the car, but also inserting a provision which means that if the financial service provider became the registered owner, then the vehicle would automatically be released.

I know my colleagues from the ACT Party have a differing view and I do understand their concerns in terms of the rights of people who may not themselves be connected with the actual offending of fleeing. But I do believe that there are sufficient protections within the bill to ensure that there’s a good rights balancing exercise that’s taken place, including amendments to section 102 of the Land Transport Act, which means that those owners can make an appeal in relation to the release of the vehicles.

So I do believe that we have had a really robust process. I thank the Members again and I commend the bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on this bill, the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill. What a car crash of a process at the start of this bill, when the Government couldn’t find the bill notes and then found the wrong ones. This just shows the shambles that this Government is in as they come to the end of their days of this Labour Government. We can’t wait—we can’t wait—in terms of getting rid of this Government, and New Zealanders can’t wait either.

The National Party, we support the bill, but we do not support a component of the bill in relation to point-to-point cameras. The members on the other side might be waving their hands around like some sort of interpretive dance at the moment. I’m struggling to interpret the dance, but I think that’s sort of the exit dance, isn’t it? The exit dance before they leave in four weeks’ time, as New Zealanders will go to the polls and kick them out.

But the point I’d make in regards to point-to-point cameras is very similar to what my colleague Paul Goldsmith made in that this is being rushed through as part of something which I think there is general support for from New Zealanders around tackling fleeing drivers. In fact, under this Government, we have seen a range of different policies around how we tackle fleeing drivers—one where the police stopped pursuing; now they are pursuing again. Here they are providing some more tools around how to tackle that problem, and, of course, we’ve got the ram-raid issue as well.

But what they’ve snuck in here and which New Zealanders would not have paid as close attention to—due to the fact that what’s on the tin is quite different to what’s actually in the bill—is that this Government is also giving new powers to road-controlling authorities to put in place point-to-point speed camera operations across New Zealand. Now, the issue with this is that this Government has also been reducing speed limits blanketly across our country—blanket speed limit reductions right across New Zealand, slowing New Zealanders down everywhere they go. If you go to some suburbs in Auckland, it is now a blanket 30 kilometres per hour on some roads which are actually quite busy and should be operating at much higher speed limits.

But this Government knows best, and they are pushing and enforcing on local authorities blanket 30-kilometre-per-hour speed limits on every single suburban street across New Zealand. When you tie that in with what they’re now proposing here, which is point-to-point speed camera provisions, this will give the opportunity for road-controlling authorities to be able to effectively, potentially, mean that someone could drive from one side of Auckland to the other and lose their licence because they may have been going 35 kilometres per hour down a road. That is what—

💬 Terisa Ngobi: Read the bill.

—this bill provides for. I’ve read the bill, and that’s exactly what it says. It allows for point-to-point speed camera operations to be put across road-controlling authorities.

Now, that is something which the National Party doesn’t agree with, because, ultimately, this Government has ignored the real issues when it comes to road safety. When it comes to drug-driving, well, the Government passed the law after we said it’s time to deal with this issue back in 2017. They finally passed the bill at the beginning of last year, and it’s unenforceable. It can’t even be implemented. Now, drugs and alcohol are the number one cause of deaths and serious injuries on our roads—the number one cause of death and serious injuries.

But instead of dealing with that issue, we’re here in the House saying, “No, no; we’re going to fine people going an average of 31 kilometres per hour down a suburban street.” I think that’s appalling, but that just shows where this Government is at. They just want to tell people that they need to drive slower rather than dealing with the real issues around road safety on our roads.

So I challenge the Government and say, where is the legislation to actually ensure that our police can test people on the side of the roads for drugs? Where’s the legislation? Where’s the fix? I know the Minister has received advice on how to fix it. I’ve drafted a bill on how to fix it. The Victorian Government, the NSW Government, the Australian states, America, UK—they’ve all got tools on how to do this. Where’s the legislation? But this is all this Government can bring in their dying days, trying to enforce and put fines on people driving 31 kilometres per hour down the road. Shame on this Government.

Again, it says in here: signposting speed cameras. So when they are going to have these new 31kilometre-per-hour speed cameras—because that’s what it will be; people who dare drive 31 kilometres down a street which used to be 50, they’re now going to have to signpost that speed cameras are in place. Well, this Government said, in 2019, “We will make sure that every single fixed speed camera in New Zealand is signposted.” Well, I asked the Minister of Police earlier this year how many fixed speed cameras have been signposted. Well, the answer came back with Michael Wood’s big red zero—zero. I mean, the Minister could have sent the picture. Zero fixed speed cameras have been signposted since 2019 when this Government made a commitment to ensure that every fixed camera—so I don’t believe this will happen at all.

So the National Party does believe that we need to have tougher penalties when it comes to fleeing drivers and more tools for police, but this Draconian approach to now enforce point-to-point cameras to find people who dare drive a speed limit of 31 kilometres per hour down a suburban street is absolute absurdity. It’s Draconianism, it’s “Government knows best”, and the National Party opposes it.

Wasn’t that a perfect metaphor for the National Party’s approach to crime? They like the toughening up of consequences that this Government is implementing, but they don’t like the tools to actually do it. To actually deliver on the toughening up of consequences for fleeing drivers, we need a system which records and issues infringements for speeding, but they don’t like that on that side of the House, they don’t actually like doing it. They don’t actually understand that part of the bill’s place in this enforcement of the law; they just want something in the statute book which says “We’re tough, we don’t like these people who are fleeing drivers”—that’s all they wanted, and we had two speeches from that side of the House which told us and told New Zealanders that more clearly than ever.

Madam Speaker, you can see that I’m riled up about this because the Justice Committee did an incredible amount of work on this bill to improve it and make sure that those powers that police have asked for—which the Government is introducing—are being implemented in a way which is fair, which is appropriate, and which actually delivers these consequences well. And I thank my colleague from the ACT Party, Nicole McKee; I look forward to her contribution, because she engaged with this bill very deeply as well—not so much from the National Party, as we have heard from their speeches today. They are right that there are two points in this bill: the first is that it clarifies that powers the police have to enforce harsher consequences for fleeing drivers. It deals with those things like when vehicles are unregistered: what we do about that situation, and when the registered vehicle owner is not the driver or claims to not be the driver. This is a problem because in those cases, essentially, we might have a situation where that is ungovernable: where somebody claims that they were not the driver, we don’t actually have any way of enforcing a penalty there to do with their property.

Many other jurisdictions have taken different responses to this—say, in Australia, where you have a nominated driver register where the police can get in touch with someone who is the nominated driver of a vehicle; we don’t have that in New Zealand. There is no record of who actually is the owner of a vehicle. There’s only a register of drivers of vehicles, and that’s not the same thing. So in this bill, we’ve gotten around that in a situation which I think actually the law captures what the Government is trying to do here without creating a massive new bureaucracy of sorts, and I’m proud of that work that the Justice Committee did to ensure that that was going to work.

The second point that my colleagues on the other side of the House are so upset about is this point-to-point camera regime, and again, the committee really got stuck into the details to make sure this was a system that was going to work; I have faith that it is, because speed as a factor in these serious accidents—we heard in the committee room—was a major factor. Often it won’t be recorded as the main factor, but in many of the situations, speed is a massive factor which point-to-point cameras can help to identify very clearly. We need to use this new technology, and we need to update our rules so that police can use it, and so there is an infringement system which responds to that new technology. We need to make sure it has safeguards in place, yes. This bill allows for those checks and balances, and that’s why I’m proud to support it.

Mālō e lelei, Madam Speaker.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Kia orana.

I stand to speak on behalf of the ACT Party for the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill and have put on notice that the ACT Party will not be supporting this bill going forward. We did support it at first reading and we had reservations, which we pointed out.

I think it’s important, at this point, that I do acknowledge all of the officials that came into the Justice Committee because it was a very complicated bill and they had to go backwards and forwards many times with our many questions, and I do want to acknowledge the hard work that they did there. As well as across the board with the Justice Committee—we had robust discussions there.

But we’ve still come to the conclusion that we cannot support this bill. ACT are not satisfied with the bill and we do firmly believe that this Labour Government is heading further and further in the wrong direction on how to address law and order issues. We also recognise that the point-to-point cameras is merely revenue gathering for the Government trying to rebuild their fiscal hole from the taxpayers’ pockets—the taxpayer who already has to repay this Government’s wasteful spending. What else do you do when your tax take is down by billions of dollars? It’s put more onto the poor old taxpayer.

The consultation period for this bill actually only ran from 19 May to 4 June. It was 16 days in total—we couldn’t even take three weeks, this had to be rushed through so quickly—and there were 33 submissions to the bill, of which only five were regarded as being “generally supportive” of the bill. The majority did not support this bill, and they raised many concerns with us. Those concerns included that the bill wouldn’t achieve making our roads safer; that the fleeing driver proposals are disproportionately severe; there was impounding vehicles for six months; and the use of forfeiture will also have an unnecessary impact on the finance industry, the towage, and the storage operators. There were concerns raised about e-servicing regimes, about the use of average speed to issue infringements, along with the accuracy and approval of the automated infringement systems.

So if we start to work through some of these bill’s details, the objective of the bill is to reduce unsafe driver behaviour. It has claimed that it will do this by lengthening the 28-day impoundments of vehicles to six months for drivers that fail to stop, but also for the drivers that fail to remain stopped—the ones that that take off—and also to create new power for the impoundment of the vehicle if a driver, the owner, or the registered owner fails to provide information and prevent a serious threat to road safety.

So the question—and I guess we could have asked this, but I didn’t think of it at the time—was actually how many times does a fleeing driver commit that offence twice in the same vehicle? Because if they do, the vehicle itself can now be forfeited regardless of whether or not they own it. They would increase disqualification from one to two years, and we don’t have a problem with that one. But it also allows electronic service of notices and automated issue of certain infringement notices, and this is through the enabling of the point-to-point revenue cameras.

The implementation of this bill was meant to be the day after Royal assent, but it’s now six weeks. This is to enable the new empowerment regime to take place and create a new financial assurance regime for the six-month impoundments. Waka Kotahi are going to be liable for all of the costs. What are the ultimate costs of this scheme going to be? We still don’t know. Who pays Waka Kotahi? Well, the taxpayer is paying Waka Kotahi so the taxpayer, ultimately, is going to be the one liable for all of the costs.

We had to amend the bill so that police are responsible for telling Waka Kotahi when a car has been impounded. They hadn’t even thought that far through in the drafting of this bill. Then we had the financial services industry, who came in and said, “Well, if a car is on finance, who’s going to tell us that the car has been impounded?” After the toing and froing with officials, it was actually deemed that it’s going to be up to the person whose car has been impounded to tell the financial services that it has been—that is, the registered owner.

So the finance companies have to change their processes to accommodate unknowns, and Waka Kotahi have to set up a system of payments and debt collections. Owners and registered persons of vehicles will potentially be losing their vehicles for six months and having to pay the towage and storage fees. Yet what of the fleeing driver? What of the fleeing driver? There are so many questions that came out through the select committee. My colleague across the way there, Anahila Kanongata’a-Sui—

💬 Marja Lubeck: That’s all. She dropped the second bit.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): That’s all now.

Thank you. Thank you. She actually brought up a really good point, and it was: what if members of Pacific Islanders’ families go home—the parents go home sometimes for a month, two months, three months—and their vehicle is used and they don’t know that? They come back to find that their vehicle’s been impounded for three months. They did not have the opportunity to be able to address who was actually driving the vehicle.

The hardship that could be imposed on some of our families for events that had nothing to do with them—for events where they had no control—and yet they would be the ones that would be subjected to having to pay for these fees. Some of these fees start at a minimum of $2,500 and that’s not including all of the towage and the ultimate storage fees. That’s just your starting basis.

There are so many questions here. Police can release a vehicle if they’re not prosecuting, but then again, who pays? So if a vehicle’s been in impoundment for three months, who’s actually going to pay that? Is it the taxpayer or is it the owner of the vehicle? What are those expected costs to Waka Kotahi; to the taxpayer?

Also, where are all these vehicles going to go? Where are they going to be stored? I remember during the protest here, we had an issue where the towage companies could not place all of the cars that were blocking the road into a facility. So if we’re going to start impounding cars for six months at a time, where is it that they’re actually going to go?

This bill was so rushed that even Waka Kotahi’s newly added financial responsibility—no one had actually thought about how would Waka Kotahi know a vehicle had been impounded? How would they know whether or not they had to actually be able to get in touch with the finance company, with the registered owner? They don’t. So we had to put a variation within the bill to allow the distribution and sharing of information. This is basic stuff that should have been in there in the first place.

But if you’re a finance company and there is no sharing of information, then it’s tough luck. The only way that the finance company can actually get the vehicle back out is if they themselves become the new registered owner of the vehicle. And who’s liable for the payment of all these fees? The registered owner. So when we look at all of the implementation that needs to be made around this bill, it becomes quite destructive and it’s not achieving the objectives of the bill, which is to make our roads safer and to try and stop the deaths.

Now, I understand 10 percent of road deaths are from speeding. So when we have the pointtopoint cameras, we have to wonder whether or not we are financially making ourselves liable for 10 percent when in fact we could spend that money looking at how we can improve services across the whole of New Zealand on all of our roads to decrease the deaths.

We now have towage, storage, Waka Kotahi, and finance companies all having to make changes to the way that they operate. But what about the fleeing driver? What about the person who’s caused all of the harm in the first place? This bill will confiscate, it will impound, and it will possibly forfeit private property of a person who may not have necessarily committed a crime, putting unreasonable financial pressure on already stressed out community environments struggling under a cost of living burden. And what of the fleeing driver?

We can’t support this bill where the onus is placed on one for the actions of another, and to do so financially and with confiscation is unjust and it’s wrong. Then there’s the automated infringement notices as well. Email addresses having to be provided, when the Heartland Tour showed me we can’t even get Wi-Fi everywhere. So many issues. We can’t support.

Kia orana. Before I call the next member, just to let you know that you may have to give your speech in two parts, given the time.

Madam Speaker, the Green Party does not have a member on the Justice Committee, so we didn’t have someone hearing it through the committee. I do want to start my contribution by speaking to the parts of the bill that we do support and specifically explaining the importance of speed management in addressing our very high deaths and serious injuries on our roads.

Now, when I was Associate Minister responsible for road safety, we looked at all the data and evidence from around the world on what is an effective way to reduce deaths and serious injuries on our roads. We can look to a couple of countries—they’re actually quite comparable to New Zealand in some ways, like Sweden, Norway, Ireland, and Canada—that have made substantial reductions in deaths and serious injuries over a period of one to two decades. Sweden pioneered the Vision Zero approach: the idea that you don’t tolerate deaths and serious injuries on the roads, you don’t build it in as something that is acceptable. So they have a really good evidence base and they took about 20 years to drop their death and serious injury rate from what was something comparable to New Zealand’s to less than a quarter when you consider the relative population.

Norway has taken Sweden’s lane and done it much faster; Ireland as well. So Ireland is down to less than half what New Zealand is, and one of the key pillars in how they did that was safer speeds and speed management. I feel that both National and ACT Party MPs have cited this really misleading statement about speed being the cause in less than 10 percent of crashes. It doesn’t matter what the cause is, the speed has a massive impact on the severity of the consequences of the crash. So speed is the cause of 10 percent, but it could be the major factor resulting in serious injury or death in 30 percent or more of those crashes.

So I think we just have to distinguish between speed being a cause of the crash itself and speed being a significant factor that means that you’re more likely to have a death or serious injury result from the crash. All of that data is available. I feel like it’s a bit of politicking, really, to kind of claim that speed has nothing to do with our high death and serious injury rate, and it is just absolute denial of the facts. You know, if you have a crash and you’re traveling at a slower speed, you’re much less likely to have a serious injury or death, and having an appropriate speed limit for the road is also important. We know that a bunch of the roads that we currently have—and we’re talking tens of thousands of kilometres of roads, not something that’s going to be fixed overnight—the posted speed limit is unsafe for the design of the road. And so you could say, “Well, they weren’t travelling above the speed limit, but they were still travelling at an unsafe speed for the road, and that was a factor that contributed to it being a serious injury or a death when it could have been a minor injury instead of that.”

So the proposals in the bill that bring in signposting speed cameras and allowing point-to-point cameras I think are really important. This was a key part of the Road to Zero strategy as well, which is we’re not putting up speed cameras and enforcing speed to raise revenue; we’re doing it to change behaviour so fewer people die and have serious injuries on the roads, and that will, in fact, save costs for New Zealand because we’ve got those people able to get on with their lives and we don’t have the emergency services having to respond or the pressure on the hospitals. So there is a benefit to changing that behaviour—a human benefit that’s probably the most important, but there’s also a fiscal and an economic benefit to lowering the number of serious injury and fatal crashes on the roads.

The point-to-point cameras are really important because they pick up the average speed throughout the journey, not just at a particular point. I know I’m running out of time, Madam Speaker, and, I guess, unfortunately, we can’t support the bill because of the proposals around the confiscation of vehicles and the punitive approach. I think that it’s just really recognising that harsher punitive consequences do not deter the behaviour. We want to deter the behaviour. We want people to not be fleeing the police. Obviously, that’s really, really important, but the evidence is that having harsher punishments and confiscating people’s vehicles is not going to help someone in that moment to make a better decision, because they’re already not making a good decision. So they’re not thinking about the consequences in that moment, and those punitive consequences can affect them and their ability to get back on track after whatever incident has led to them fleeing, and it could even punish someone who has nothing to do with the activity because they’re the ones who own the vehicle but somebody else was using the vehicle.

So we can’t support the bill, because it’s not taking an effective approach to getting the outcomes we want. But we do absolutely support all of the proposals around signposting speed cameras and around point-to-point cameras, and I just really want to emphasise that it would be helpful if members on the right side of the House looked at the evidence. If you believe that it’s worthwhile to New Zealand to have fewer people die on our roads, to have fewer people be in serious injury crashes, then please look at the evidence, because right now, they are not. The National Party and the ACT Party are taking a populist approach on road safety that is going to result in more harm on our roads, and it’s really very, very counterproductive to the important debate that we need to have as people who all live in a country together, who all benefit when our fellow countrymen, when people visiting New Zealand, and when our families are less likely to be seriously injured or killed on our roads.

Members, the time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. Ka kite anō.

Debate interrupted.

The House adjourned at 1 p.m. (Thursday)