Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Associate Minister of Transport: I present a legislative statement on the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon DAVID PARKER: I move, That the Land Transport (Road Safety) Amendment Bill be now read a third time.

As I indicated at the committee stage, New Zealand’s record when it comes to the number of deaths on our roads—per kilometre—is not as good as countries that we might compare ourselves with. Last year, 377 people tragically died on our roads, which is equivalent to 7.3 deaths per 100,000 people. In comparison, in Australia, the average across all states is 4.6 deaths per 100,000 people. The bestperforming countries in Europe reported a significantly lower two deaths per 100,000 people. It’s true that some of those deaths can be accounted for by way of population size and public transport and the better motorways that you can have across most of your country than in a smaller spread-out country like New Zealand. None the less, we can much improve our safety record. The Government’s 202030 Road to Zero Strategy sets what we believe is an achievable target of reducing annual deaths and serious injuries, with the intention that there is a 40 percent reduction by 2030. The current situation isn’t good enough. The Government is trying to crack down on dangerous driving, and ensuring that our roads are safer for everyone to use and get around on. This bill will reduce unsafe driving by providing new tools to respond to fleeing drivers, and by addressing other safety matters within the transport system.

I’ll deal firstly with drivers fleeing from the police. A fleeing driver is a driver who has been signalled to stop by the police but fails to stop or remain stopped until the officer has completed their duties. This bill will complement a refreshed Police fleeing-driver policy. That revised policy came into effect in May this year. This policy is designed to ensure that the police can hold offenders to account for their actions whilst appropriately managing fleeing-driver events as safely as possible. Both the Police’s new fleeing-driver policy and this bill respond to a steadily increasing number of fleeing-driver events since 2010. While the number of fleeing-driver events has been growing, it is pleasing that the number of resulting deaths has decreased substantially. This was in part due to the 2020 iteration of the Police’s fleeing-driver policy, which saw more emphasis on post-event investigations rather than in-the-moment pursuits. However, a downside of that policy and a difficulty for the police in identification of drivers after the event is evidenced by the fact that the identification rate dropped from 52 percent—already low—to around 34 percent following that 2020 policy change.

So, while it’s critical we maintain the road safety gains, we can’t sit back and allow lawbreakers who flee the police to get off scot-free, which is why we’re introducing a new power for the police to seize and impound a vehicle for 28 days if the vehicle’s owner, or registered owner, fails to provide information or misleads the police about the fleeing driver who was driving their vehicle. This will help police identify the driver and incentivise owners to be, perhaps, more responsible with who they lend their vehicles to. The bill also enables the police—

Simon Court: What if it’s a finance company?

Hon DAVID PARKER: If it’s a finance company, the finance company interest is provided for in the legislation. The bill also enables police to seize and impound a vehicle involving a fleeing driver for up to six months, an increase on the current 28 days. The six-month impoundment is discretionary. Police use discretions like this quite frequently, and they will apply their discretion as to when the six-month impoundment rule should be used. It can only be used to prevent a serious threat to road safety.

Fleeing drivers often exhibit other unsafe behaviours, such as reckless driving or excessive speed. They could be fleeing from a checkpoint because they’re over the alcohol limit, or evading police because they’ve been involved in a crime. These situations, where the fleeing driver is driving at a high speed, involve—

Simon Court: It’s already a legal one, am I right?

Hon DAVID PARKER: Already a high number of vehicles are abandoned under the current 28day impoundment regime—

Simon Court: You’re making something illegal that’s already illegal.

Hon DAVID PARKER: —and this will expect the figure to—well, if it was already illegal, why is that member so fixated with the three-strikes legislation? The inconsistency of the ACT Party’s arguments knows no bounds.

We have introduced a 38-day abandonment provision to provide early financial assurance to towage and storage operating. The bill provides that, within 38 days of seizure and impoundments, a vehicle’s owner, or the registered person, must either pay the fees in full to the towage and storage operator or enter into a payment arrangement. If neither of these conditions are met, the vehicle will be deemed abandoned and can be sold by the operator to recoup costs. The registered person whose vehicle is impounded for six months will be given clear notice of the consequences, including the 38day rule, along with clear information about how to appeal the impoundment to Police and how to do so.

In respect of the penalties imposed by the court, the driver’s licence disqualification after a second conviction for a failing-to-stop offence is increased from a year to between one and two years, and that sentence will be at the court’s discretion. A person who has fled from the police not once but twice should, in the view of the Government, face more serious consequences before being allowed behind the wheel again.

Lastly, to tackle the problem of fleeing drivers, a new sentencing option has been created, enabling the courts to exercise a discretionary power to order that a vehicle be forfeited either on first or second conviction for failing to stop. In these cases, not only will the offender lose their car but they’ll lose out on the proceeds of sale. Confiscation is currently used sparingly by the court, and we expect forfeiture orders will be relatively rare as well. None the less, it is an important tool for the court to use to improve road safety.

The package of legislative changes will both deter people from fleeing the police and reduce opportunities for reoffending. There are also other provisions in there that were discussed at the committee of the whole House stage, relating to point-to-point speed cameras, and they will have notices to warn people that they’re in operation, because the intention is to moderate speeds and to discourage people from speeding, which is dangerous, rather than being to collect revenue.

Can I thank the Justice Committee for the time they spent considering the bill. Their recommendations strengthened the legislation. The 33 submissions from organisations and individuals were also valuable. Can I also thank the officials from the Ministry of Transport, who assisted not only the select committee but this House. Lastly, can I thank members around the House for their contributions in the debate.

The purpose of the bill is clear: to crack down on dangerous driving and reduce unsafe behaviour on New Zealand roads. Accordingly, I commend the bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It was very good to listen to one of the last senior Ministers standing in the Labour Party—David Parker. He did have a bit of a nasty crack at a member of the Opposition for sort of slight inconsistencies, and it did occur to me as we heard him talk about the fact that this new, tougher legislation he’s bringing in is going to deter fleeing drivers from doing it. But for the last year, they’ve been yelling at us, saying that all these tougher sentences that we’re proposing, like three strikes, are not going to deter people because, when they’re in the act of committing a crime, they’re not thinking about the consequences, so deterrence is a mirage—it’s a dream. But when it comes to this bill, apparently it’s important. So I can’t quite work that out: if, when the 14-year-old is deciding whether to put the foot down when he sees the police or not, this bill is going to deter it. I think it will, but that’s certainly not been the argument that Labour has proposed for every other proposal that we’ve made around tougher sentencing over the last two years.

So it’s been a wonderful and very agile backflip from David Parker that I didn’t think he was capable of, but there you go. In the last week of Parliament, having derided the National Party for years for being tough on crime and so-called knee-jerk reactions to crime, we heard David Parker, on his way out the door, after six years, saying that we need to crack down on crime—again, another backflip from the Minister on this topic. But here we are; we’re on this bill.

The National Party’s in a slightly tricky position in the sense that we agree with half of it and we disagree with the other half—in the sense that we agree with the proposed changes around fleeing drivers. Everybody knows that the police decision that they’ll never chase has been a bit of a mistake. And—surprise, surprise!—people worked out relatively quickly that, if they put their foot down and took off and are safe that they’ll never be chased, well, the probability of being caught drops very substantially. So—surprise, surprise!—more people do it. That has been one of the contributing factors to the explosion in ram raids that we’ve seen in this country.

If you think that this is a global problem, go and talk to Michael Hill Jewellers, who have got places in Australia and Canada, and neither of those countries have anything like the level of violent crime and ram raids and smash and grabs that they are seeing. So that was a mistake, and they are slowly getting around to fixing it in this bill—in the sense that it toughens up the consequences for fleeing drivers by allowing their cars to be impounded for longer. Allowing the owners of the cars, if they can’t provide information, to have their cars impounded will make some difference. And it is something that we broadly support, in the sense of taking this issue of ram raiding seriously. Bearing in mind that only 18 months or so ago the Labour Government was downplaying this issue, pretending it didn’t exist, but now it does exist and they’re finally doing something about it, and we support them in that.

What we don’t support is the obsession with making everybody crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour and putting point-to-point speed cameras in that context. We’re not keen on that. We agree that public road safety is important, but we would prefer that the Government focus on all the many other factors leading to road deaths. We asked the officials what number of road fatalities and serious injuries were caused by speeding as compared with other things. It’s about 10 percent—10 percent. But when it comes to actually having checkpoints for drink-driving, or actually coming up with a decent solution to drug-driving, or dealing with people wearing their seatbelts, or actually providing safe roads and building safe new roads, and the whole plethora of other elements around safety, not much has happened.

But the one thing that the Government has been vigorous on under Michael Wood—and, before him, Phil Twyford—is cracking down on speeding everywhere. Well, yes, that might be appropriate, but not if, at the same time, you’re making people crawl around at 30 kilometres an hour—24 hours a day if they happen to be anywhere near a school and in our cities. And then on roads where you used to be able to drive at 70 kilometres an hour, suddenly, with the safest cars in the world, you have to crawl around at 50 kilometres an hour, and everywhere you look, you’re having to go slower. So putting point-to-point cameras in that context is just an irritation. We don’t agree with it, and we don’t support it. We’re sort of left thinking, “Well, do we support a bill that we sort of half support and half don’t like? Or do we oppose a bill because we half don’t like it and half support it?”

On balance, as a caucus, we thought it is sending a clear message to the ram-raiders that we’re not going to expect their vote but we do take what’s going on in our communities very seriously and there should be tougher penalties for them, and we’ve got to do something to try and restore some law and order in this country. So, on balance, we support it, but we don’t like this element of it and we’ll be dealing with that if we get a chance in Government. But on that basis, we will be supporting this bill in the third reading.

The only final point I’d make is that we’re in the last sitting week of Parliament. If you step right back into the justice sector, what have we seen over the past six years? What we’ve seen is a Government that has set one priority, clearly articulated, which is to reduce the prison population, irrespective of what’s going on in our communities—and that’s driven everything.

We’ve seen a rise in serious crime and in youth crime over the six years, and we’ve also seen huge delays in the courts. There’s been a lot of denial about that; a lot of saying, “No, no, no, no—crime’s coming down; these are not issues.” Then a lot of claims that the National Party’s been fear-mongering, a lot of talk about knee-jerk reactions and all that sort of stuff. Now, right at the very end—just as the finish line is in view—as the end of a six-year period comes into view, we now, all of a sudden, hear Ginny Andersen and David Parker talking about cracking down on youth crime and ram-raiders, and all of a sudden there’s this mad flurry in the last week of Parliament, with a whole bunch of justice bills, to try and demonstrate that they take things seriously.

I think New Zealanders are not stupid. They see what the Government’s doing. Yes, this bill will be useful—half of it—but they know that the Government’s heart isn’t really in it and they are only doing it because they know they’re so badly out of touch with public sentiment on this issue. So my simple message to people tuning in: if you want the real thing and you want to have law and order restored in this country, well, then, you’ve got an opportunity in two months’ time to give your vote to National. Thank you very much, Mr. Speaker.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Responding to Mr Goldsmith’s objection to the point-to-point cameras, at the second reading—thank you to the Hansard team—he said, “I live in Auckland … I, of course, stick to the speed limit. I’m very careful to do that, but I’m the only person in the place who does.” Now, Mr Goldsmith, that’s a bit of an unfair indictment on the good people of Epsom for a start, but then he continued to be very concerned about the 30 kilometre speed limits and was repeatedly told by the Minister that the cameras would be inserted on the areas of high risk—clear answer.

But he may want to talk to his colleague in ACT, who, it appears, would want the cameras everywhere to monitor congestion. So they may want to have a little bit of a conversation about the consistency. I can understand how listeners would be very perplexed about the Opposition’s view: are they objecting to point-to-point speed cameras—

Simon Court: Yes.

VANUSHI WALTERS: —being put in in the highest-risk areas, where there is death, where there is serious injury—say that one more time, Mr Court. Are they objecting to police monitoring compliance with the law? Or are they objecting to the use of modern technology to free our front-line police up to free their capacity to address more serious offending?

It is very confusing on the other side of the House tonight. I would suggest they get out their Magic 8 Ball of decision making, give it a little shake, and try again for the second half of their responses this evening. I commend this bill to the House.

Well, I learnt absolutely nothing about the Labour Party’s position on this bill from that speech. In fact, all that speech was saying was, “Look, we’re trying to pass something; this is something, so we’re going to vote for it.” That’s basically the Labour Party’s position on everything at the moment: “We’re going to address crime; this bill’s about crime, so it’s good. Please vote for it.” That’s about the depth of this Government’s position when it comes to these issues at the moment. They have lost this country when it comes to law and order. They have lost the country when it comes to these actually very serious issues. And now they’re trying, in the last week of this Parliament, to give the perception that they actually take these issues seriously, when they’ve had six long years to actually try and fix some of the problems facing our country.

Then, when they come and they actually put a fleeing drivers bill to Parliament to try and make a difference, they have to chuck something at the back to have a go at people who might go 31 kilometres per hour down a 30 kilometre street in Auckland. That is absolutely shameful. But that just shows this Government: they can’t even just pass a bill about fleeing drivers; they have to try and stick some of their agenda into that piece of legislation as well. That’s the bit that the National Party objects to. We don’t have a problem with what this bill’s trying to do around fleeing drivers, trying to crack down on fleeing drivers. We’ve seen the problems that they’ve caused in Auckland and around New Zealand. But what this bill also does is allow for average-speed checks to be put in place around our country to try to enforce the slower speed limits that this Government is ramming down New Zealanders’ throats. That’s not going to stop a fleeing driver, but what it will do is be used by road-controlling authorities up and down our country to enforce the blanket speed-limit reductions that we’re seeing put in place.

I asked the Minister in the committee of the whole House about an example on Nelson Street in Auckland, a street which has just had its speed limit drop from 50 to 40 and there’s a trial happening on that street there. I asked the Minister, “Why is that happening on that street?”, because the Minister told the House, “No, we’re only going to see these happen on high-risk stretches of State highway.” Well, there’s actually a trial happening on a non - State highway: Nelson Street in Auckland. It’s not a State highway; it’s a local road, and it’s just gone from 50 kilometres an hour down to 40 kilometres per hour. Then we heard the Minister say, “Well, it’s not going to be used on roads where there’s lots of intersections.” Well, I’m not sure if David Parker’s actually been down Nelson Street in Auckland, but there’s lots and lots and lots and lots of intersections down Nelson Street.

So, whilst the Minister might get up in this House and say this is only going to be used on highrisk stretches of State highways, this bill has no criteria around what types of roads these averagespeed checks can be put on. It doesn’t include the term “high-risk”—and I just heard from the member who just took her seat, Vanushi Walters, that this will be about high-risk stretches of road. There’s no criteria in this piece of legislation that limits the ability for these to be put on just high-risk roads—there’s no definition of “high-risk” included in the legislation. I take Mr Court’s point: if we’ve got some high-risk stretches of road, why don’t we go and fix them?

Under this Government, what have they done on transport? They cancelled the entire roads of national significance programme that National put in place to fix some of the most dangerous stretches of road. Ōtaki to Levin: over 50 deaths and serious injuries in the last five years, and that’s a road that this Government cancelled. They cancelled it as soon as they came into office—one of the most dangerous stretches of State highway in New Zealand, and instead of fixing that road, what this Government would rather do is put an average-speed check in place. That’s their solution to road safety: an average-speed check on Ōtaki to north of Levin, one of the most dangerous stretches of road in our country, the most high-risk stretches of road—“Instead of trying to fix the road, we’ll cancel the fix and we’ll put in an average-speed check.”

What about the Tauranga Northern Link? This Government cancelled the Tauranga Northern Link. It was going out for tender when this Government came to office back in 2017, but they couldn’t wait to chop up those tender documents, which construction firms were tendering, spending their own money putting tender documents together to tender to fix one of the most dangerous roads in New Zealand. They cancelled the tender documents, and instead what did they do? Well, we’ll just put an average-speed check in place on that road. I could go through example after example. Cambridge to Piarere—another incredibly dangerous stretch of road. What’s this Government’s solution there? An average-speed check on that piece of road too. So the National Party opposes this part of the bill because not only is it not going to be used appropriately on our State highways, we also know it’s going to be used inappropriately on local roads.

In Auckland, Auckland Transport has just finished consulting on more blanket speed limits for something like 26 percent of the local roads in Auckland, which they’re now going to be reducing to 30 kilometres per hour—30 kilometres per hour on almost a quarter of the roads in Auckland.

Simon Court: Walking speed.

SIMEON BROWN: Well, I mean, some kids can bike to school faster than that. Are they going to get caught by the average-speed checks, too? Well, that’s the reality of these ridiculous blanket speed-limit rules that have been forced on to people up and down this country—

Simon Court: National and ACT will repeal them, won’t they?

SIMEON BROWN: —in suburbs across New Zealand. We will repeal the land transport setting of speed-limit rule—absolutely, Mr Court—because we don’t agree with those blanket speed-limit reductions that are being imposed on our suburbs up and down our country.

Because there’s no criteria, there’s no definition of “high-risk”, and there’s no limitation to just being on State highways, what this bill does is it will now allow road-controlling authorities up and down this country to put average-speed checks on 30-kilometre-per-hour stretches of our roads up and down our country. That is revenue raising. That is slowing people down. That is not actually about road safety.

The evidence through the Justice Committee was very, very clear: if this Government was serious about road safety, they would be focused on things which they have failed to do, like making sure that the police are doing the 3 million breath tests that they are required to do every year. They’ve been doing only half the breath tests that they’re meant to be doing—half the breath tests. Alcohol and drugs are the number one contributor to deaths and serious injuries on our roads, and all this Government is focused on is speed—reducing speed limits, slowing people down.

Here’s another example of that: whilst our police have not been doing the required number of breath tests, this Government was dragged kicking and screaming to pass legislation to allow the police to do random oral roadside drug testing. Then they finally passed it, and the legislation doesn’t work. They promised two weeks ago—they promised two weeks ago—“Oh no, we’ll fix it; we’ll fix it after Christmas.” “Fix it after Christmas.”—that’s the approach this Government takes to the real issues. Drugs and alcohol are killing people on our roads. This Government has been soft and slow when it comes to addressing those issues. They’ve kicked the can down the road, but here, in the dying hours of this Parliament, instead of fixing the broken legislation around drug testing on the side of our roads, which they know needs to be fixed—they’ve even announced they think it needs to be fixed—they’ve announced their intention to bring legislation to this Parliament. Instead of us using urgency and the end of this Parliament to try and save lives through random oral roadside drug testing, something which we know will work to drive down our road toll, they’re ramming through legislation to be able to enforce average-speed checks on 30 kilometre per hour speed limits on Auckland roads and roads across New Zealand. That is shameful. The National Party opposes that part of the bill.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a very short call on this bill, which is a very simple bill. It sends a clear message to drivers: if you flee from police, you will lose your ride. That’s all it does. Very little to do with speeding and drug testing, like we’ve heard on that side of the House. They can’t find a reason to oppose it, so they’ve found the broader picture. But this is a good bill and that’s why I commend it.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair. The House stands suspended until 9 a.m. in the morning.

Debate interrupted.

Sitting suspended from 9.57 p.m. to 9 a.m. (Wednesday)