Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I present the legislative statement on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill.

SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the parliamentary website.

Hon MATT DOOCEY: I move, That the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Transport and Infrastructure Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time, I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 5 December 2024.

This bill amends the Land Transport Act to enable the roll-out of random roadside oral fluid drug-testing in New Zealand. Drug-impaired driving is a persistent issue on New Zealand’s roads and has a significant impact on road safety. Approximately 30 percent of road deaths involve a driver who has consumed impairing drugs. These are preventable fatalities that result in vast costs to families, communities, and society generally. We need to do more to detect and deter drug-impaired driving and protect the lives of all road users.

The previous Government sought to introduce a roadside oral fluid drug-testing regime through the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Act 2022. This Act was intended to enable police officers to test drivers’ oral fluid for the presence of the highest-risk illicit and prescription drugs that impair driving. However, that regime was found to be unworkable, as no oral fluid testing device can meet the appropriate criteria set out in legislation. Those approval criteria require a level of specificity and accuracy in the results produced by testing devices that is beyond the current capability of oral fluid testing technology. As a result, roadside oral fluid testing has been unable to be implemented.

This Government is committed to improving road safety and, in particular, to targeting the highest contributing factors in fatal road crashes, drugs and alcohol. This bill signifies our commitment to address the problem of drug-driving and resolve issues within the current regime.

The bill establishes a new regulatory framework to enable a compulsory random roadside oral fluid testing regime. The bill will allow police officers to screen drivers for the presence of impairing drugs anywhere, anytime, using oral fluid testing devices without cause to suspect a driver has consumed drugs, in a similar approach to breath screening for alcohol.

The new oral fluid testing regime will sit alongside existing compulsory impairment testing, which police officers can employ when they have good cause to suspect the driver has consumed drugs. The oral fluid testing regime will provide police officers with a faster, more efficient tool to remove impaired drivers from our roads and to better deter drug-impaired driving.

The bill retains much of the existing regime with some critical changes. The bill introduces new device approval criteria that better reflect the limitations of oral fluid testing devices. The bill provides that in approving oral fluid testing devices for use, the Minister of Police will only be able to approve a device if satisfied that it has a high level of accuracy, can approve devices that detect both specified qualifying drugs and groups or families of drugs which specified qualifying drugs are members of, and can approve devices that will return a positive result for a specified qualifying drug or specified family of qualifying drugs at a concentration level that indicates recent drug use.

The criteria are designed to include safeguards to ensure the regime is administered fairly and does not unintentionally penalise drivers who are not impaired. Drivers who have very low levels of drugs in their system which are not likely to be impairing will not be penalised.

The bill provides for the use of those approved oral fluid devices to conduct screening tests at the roadside. The bill enables the Minister of Police to specify by notice the qualifying drugs that will be screened for using an approved device. Typically, the devices can detect THC, the psychoactive substance in cannabis; methamphetamine; amphetamine; benzodiazepines; cocaine; and opiates. The drugs that are tested for at the roadside will not be known until a procurement process for the devices has been completed after the legislation comes into force.

If a driver tests positive for a specified qualifying drug at the roadside, they will need to undergo a second roadside oral fluid test. Drivers who return two positive screening tests at the roadside will be prohibited from driving for 12 hours to address any immediate roadside safety risk. The requirement for two positive screening tests before being prohibited from driving is intended to mitigate the possibility of enforcement action being taken on the basis of false positive oral fluid test results.

Drivers who refuse to take a screening test will be issued with an infringement fee and demerit points at the roadside and be prohibited from driving for 12 hours. Provided drivers do not refuse a test, infringement notices are only issued after laboratory test results are returned. The bill requires the evidential testing of oral fluid in a laboratory before infringement notices are issued.

A positive screening test at the roadside will require a sample of oral fluid to be sent to an approved laboratory for testing. An infringement fee and demerit points will only be issued if the laboratory test detects the presence of any specified qualifying drug at a level that is indicative of recent use.

The bill enables the Minister of Police to specify the qualifying drugs that will be tested by an approved laboratory, which must be from the list of 25 drugs in Schedule 5 of the Land Transport Act 1998. Those drugs were included in that schedule on the advice of an independent expert panel based on New Zealand data linking road crashes with the presence of drugs in the drivers’ blood samples. Those drugs are also representative of the drugs typically detected in oral fluid testing devices. A medical defence will continue to be available to drivers who can establish that they have taken prescription medication in accordance with a current prescription and any instructions from a health practitioner or manufacturer.

The regime described in this bill affects some rights and freedoms set out in the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990. These include the freedom from unreasonable search and seizure and the right not to be arbitrarily detained. I note that similar proposals to introduce or change drink- and drug-driving laws over the decades have had similar impacts. A number of safeguards are built into the bill to help protect people’s rights and freedoms. These include using oral fluid to screen drivers for drug use rather than more invasive detection methods such as blood samples.

A person that fails two oral fluid screening tests will be prohibited from driving for 12 hours. This provision does not come with an offence and is proportionate to addressing the immediate road safety risk posed by a possible drug-impaired driver, and the basis for charging a person with an infringement offence for drug use will be laboratory testing of that oral fluid, which is highly accurate and mitigates the possibility of a person being charged on the basis of a false positive result from a screening device at the roadside.

I appreciate that some people will be concerned about being detained on the roadside to undergo an oral fluid test and that this will involve an intrusion of bodily privacy. On balance, I consider the potential limitations on the rights of drivers through the new regime are proportionate to the road safety risk that has been addressed.

Driving is a heavily regulated activity because of the importance of road safety and the risk to other road users caused by unsafe practices. Addressing the significant risk of harm caused by drug-impaired drivers is in the public interest. This bill is intended to fix the issues with the current legislation which have meant oral fluid testing devices could not be approved. The regime outlined in this bill was developed by the previous Government. While I have taken it forward in the interests of timeliness, I invite the select committee to consider further the workability of the proposed regime, particularly the availability of screening devices to meet the proposed new criteria above. I will also invite the committee to consider any further possible operational improvements that may be suggested by police.

Passing this bill is a priority. It is important to ensure that the New Zealand Police has appropriate powers to detect and deter drug-driving. Oral fluid testing for drugs at the roadside has been employed as a road safety tool overseas for decades. It’s time for New Zealand to adopt this. The amendments in this bill will enable the roll-out of random roadside oral fluid screening tests with laboratory testing following a positive screening result. This will help keep New Zealanders safe on our roads. It has been estimated that 65 lives and 431 serious death and injury crashes will be prevented over a 10‑year period with the implementation of an oral fluid testing regime. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Meitaki maata, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call, as Labour’s transport spokesperson, on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. The Minister, in his contribution this afternoon, has highlighted that the capacity for roadside drug-testing as a regime was introduced while Labour was in Government by way of the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Act 2022. And that is because it is important to ensure that we keep our roads safe and also ensure that police have the resources and are equipped in order to keep not just all road users but the public safe as well. And that’s because road safety is an absolute commitment, and we as a party are absolutely committed to reducing what is devastating harm for communities, for whānau, when we see certain things happen on our roads.

Labour is happy to support this bill through to select committee, because it does build on that desire that Labour has to ensure that our roading network is safe for all users and for the community as well. Up until this point, the police have relied on a number of interim measures that many will be familiar with. They may include the stock-standard infringement offences, which this bill does propose as a penalty regime as it stands currently, but also criminal opportunity as well when it comes to the risk that impairment around driving brings with it—whether that’s around alcohol or whether it’s around some other prohibited substance. So this bill goes quite some way to address some of the concerns that the community does have in this space and around it.

I do hope that this goes to the select committee, and I know that the Transport and Infrastructure Committee will turn its mind to this. I note, from the Minister’s opening comments, that his intention is to effectively commit this to a four-month period in front of select committee. I know that the select committee will be able to work within that, but I do hope that it does provide ample opportunity for the community to feed into that process.

I note that the Minister referred to some of the rights and freedoms. Now, naturally, a bill of this nature will give rise to some of those considerations when it comes to some form of detainment—whether it’s a shorter period or slightly lengthier—but also some of the actions that are proposed in the bill, which, effectively, would forbid someone from driving for a period of 12 hours and does provide some limitation on the free movement and rights of individuals. So I have no doubt that that’s something that the select committee will be turning its mind to.

This is a bill that, effectively, I think, lands on the side of fairness, as it’s currently drafted at the moment. The committee will have a look a bit further around that, but instead of allowing someone to continue to drive on our roads if there is a risk or any ounce that they might be impaired, the safest thing to do would be to ensure that they are not putting the lives of other road users—and not just those on the road but those who are surrounding the road network—at risk. And so I’m sure we will have a look at that.

My concern, I guess, is in the broader scheme of the ability of the Government of the day to be able to deliver on some of these road safety initiatives where there is, effectively, a reduction in the road safety space, where today we hear about the counting of numbers of police. There are real limitations that are at play there. And so that will be something that I’m sure will be in the minds of members on the select committee on this side of the House, but of others as well.

We do support the proviso that the bill currently carries, which would provide a medical defence. There will be people who are, effectively, using substances and are doing so under the direction of a medical practitioner, and I see that, in the bill, there is a provision or proviso for that.

So we will be supporting this through to select committee. I look forward to the select committee process. There will be many things that will turn our minds, I’m sure. It is, again, in the vein of the former Labour Government having effectively committed to rolling this out, and it’s taken a wee while to get to this point, but I’m pleased that it has.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. All New Zealanders deserve and should have the right to be able to move around their communities and around our country in a safe manner. We should be doing everything we can to ensure that our roads are safe when people are driving. The question for us, and this remains the case since the bill on this issue went through last time—of course, this amendment bill is amending that regime that was brought into place by the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Act in 2022. The issue for the Green Party is the question: what is the most effective way to ensure that people are safe on our roads? Is having a random roadside drug-testing regime going to be effective at reducing impaired driving? Or, on balance, is it going to have no meaningful impact, because, ultimately, it can’t be rolled out at the scale that would be necessary and it can’t be done in a way that has tests that are accurate and specific?

When we contributed work to an original bill on this, we were trying to go through and look at the actual evidence and make sure that we were setting up a regime that was as evidence-based as it absolutely could be, and ensuring that any testing devices were actually going to give good information about recent use of drugs, in an accurate and specific way—that is really, really important. What this bill is doing is changing that so that tests that are not necessarily accurate or specific can be used. And to what end? How is that going to help ensure that we’re deterring impaired driving if the tests themselves cannot accurately and specifically identify recent impairing drug use? Testing positive for drugs in one’s system, firstly, doesn’t directly relate to impairment, and, secondly, there’s been a range of criticism of the testing devices and the places that use them currently, because they have a high rate of false positives—they can’t show specific information about how much of a substance has been taken or used.

Ultimately, this is a big distraction from something that would actually make people safer on our roads. The Government is going through a process right now to take away a community’s ability to set safe and appropriate speeds around schools and on dangerous rural roads. Most local authorities have come out opposing those changes.

I think it is really relevant to raise at this point that the Minister of Transport, Simeon Brown, continually talks and conflates drugs and alcohol. He puts them together about the amount they’re contributing to serious and fatal injury crashes. I’m looking at a graph right now, taken from CAS, which is the New Zealand Transport Authority Crash Analysis System. Contributing factors for fatal and serious injury crashes from a 10-year period from 2014 to 2024—overwhelmingly, the vast majority is from alcohol. It’s 56.6 percent—a huge contributing factor. The next biggest contributing factor to fatal and serious injury crashes is inappropriate speed, at 30 percent. Of course, after that is 10 percent lost control, and, usually, lost control is often related to driving at a speed that is higher than safe. So if we go down—drugs suspected or confirmed is 7 percent, so it’s contributing to a tiny fraction of serious and fatal injuries, relative to speed and alcohol. That’s what the data says—10 years of data.

Does this House really want to solve the problem of making our roads safer? If so, why are they doing this at the same time that, objectively, they are enabling unsafe speeds everywhere where they will contribute to significantly more serious and fatal injury crashes? And it’s interesting that the ACT Party—because they joined in with the Greens in a differing view last time a bill on this issue went to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and acknowledged that testing technology was not up to scratch, that a huge number of expert submitters came and told us they were worried about the power of the State being abused through this process. And it’s not even going to get the outcome we want of safer roads. So, you know, this is classic for this Government. It doesn’t care about evidence; it’s all about a big show and punishing people who they think are bad.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The main purpose of this bill is to replace the current regime with a new, much more robust, and effective roadside oral fluid screening regime. Now, it’s really important that people feel safe on the roads, as the previous speakers have alluded to. This legislation is intended to keep our roads clear of unsafe drivers. Even if it’s only 7 percent of crashes, that’s still a significant number. New Zealanders want to be able to head out on the roads and feel a bit more secure out there.

Look, the new provisions for the approval criteria of oral fluid devices for screening purposes, as well as changes being made to the laboratory analysis following a positive initial screening result, are improvements. The previous speaker, member Genter, mentioned that ACT has previously opposed this bill, and that was due to insufficient results produced by older tests. We now have provisions within this bill to provide for at least two oral tests followed by an evidentiary laboratory test of oral fluid sample being sent off for analysis. There are changes being made to the legislative settings that will prevent the implementation of oral roads that will have prevente-ted—ughh! There is the change that has previously prevented the implementation of oral roadside fluid drug-testing. That was me trying to clear my thoughts so that I could continue after slurring through some terribly terrible pronunciation—from my lack of education, perhaps.

There are no devices that were able to be approved by the Minister of Police under section 71G of the Act. The bill replaces the section in the Act with new approval criteria which will allow the Minister of Police to approve an oral fluid screening device for the purpose of detecting one or more qualifying drugs or one or more family of qualifying drugs. It also includes provisions that allow the Minister of Police to approve a device if satisfied—[Hon Chris Penk passes member a glass of water] I really appreciate that, thank you.

Mark Cameron: That’s a nice man right there.

CAMERON LUXTON: He’s a great man and a great Minister. It also includes provisions that the concentration level at which the device will appear positive is clear and accurate.

In the Act, there’s a provision for an infringement notice as a result of the analysis carried out by an approved laboratory, rather than just the roadside test. We believe these amendments have resolved some of the apprehension we had with the previous bill. Part 9 of the bill also allows for the amendments to be reviewed no earlier than three years but no later than four. This review assesses the impacts of the amendments; the reliability of screening tests in assessing a person’s impairment; whether appropriate thresholds and impairment levels have been set; whether the amendments have been appropriately implemented by the New Zealand Police and other relevant entities; whether Māori and Pasifika people have been disproportionately affected; and if the amount, as far as can be assessed, who are driving while impaired has changed since before the amendments came into force. There are other aspects to the report, but we hope that this offers some assurance that this Government is taking safety on our roads seriously.

Safety on our roads has always been a priority and will continue to be for this coalition Government. We’re happy to see these changes, and I think, as I’ve mentioned, it is a positive change. ACT is going to be supporting this bill, especially through first reading.

I would just like to actually comment, being a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, that I would expect to see submitters who would want to comment on some aspects of the bill moving forward. One thing that I think would be interesting to hear from submitters is how they see the comparison between the new oral screening tests and the old ones and the rates of accuracy which they provide. I’m going to be very excited, and I welcome some robust discussion on this point. The ACT Party supports this legislation because Kiwis deserve to feel safe on the roads.

First of all, I want to congratulate the Minister and the stand-in Minister for getting his way through the introduction there. I’ve spent many years working in and around road safety and with road safety practitioners, and I’m very, very well aware that this, the absence of a credible drug-testing regime, was always seen as a deficiency within the New Zealand road safety system, so it’s been a long-held aspiration to address this gap.

I was slightly puzzled by Julie Anne Genter’s comments—what we know is that, in 2022, there were 94 deaths where the driver was both drug and alcohol impaired. Now, she says “7 percent”, but 7 percent when you’re aiming for Vision Zero—which is what she was actually in charge of doing—is a material number of people, of New Zealanders, that you need to be looking after. On top of that, there were 68 people in 2022 who died just with alcohol in their system—where alcohol was a contributing factor. But what’s happened is it’s proved very, very difficult to get the alignment of the legislation and the technology and the operational systems to work together.

In fact, Labour had a crack at doing this, and it’s really great to see the multi-partisan, cross-party support for this legislation—at least to get to the select committee. Labour had a crack at this—it didn’t work, because the legislation didn’t line up with the technology which was available. The legislation just was too onerous, and what it meant was that no technology for oral testing was able to be approved, because you were likely to get far too many false negatives, but worse—false positives. The one thing you do not want to do is to be basically making criminals out of people who have actually done nothing wrong.

One of the key bits of that is that the technology which is available would be able to test, and pick up, the drugs in the system, but those drugs might have been in the system quite some many, many hours ago, and there may in fact be no impairment at all. But, even in that situation, you could then be declared guilty even though you were not impaired, and that was a fundamental problem. Therefore, none of the technologies which were available with that legislative arrangement were able to be signed off and approved, so it wasn’t able to take place. So I say good on Labour for giving it a crack. That regime didn’t work, and I hope that we can work together to put together a regime which will work, because I think that is exactly what New Zealanders deserve.

Just a couple of other things: I think really what this is about is getting the technology, the legal, and the operating systems to work together. Prior to the arrangement—well, in fact, really it probably is still the arrangement as it is at the moment, which is that police will test the eyes, just see how dilated your pupils are, and do the walk the line but see if you can turn around without falling over—those kind of things. I think we want something that’s a little bit more modern, a little bit less haphazard. The approach that they were taking was that they would have to know that there is good cause to stop a driver to test them. Now it will be able to be random. Now, some people might say that a random approach might be abused, but the police are only targeting 50,000 to 60,000-odd stoppages for drug testing compared with—and it’s not a cost-free proposition—about 1.5 million stops for breath testing for alcohol. So I don’t think that the police will be abusing this, but it’s going to be really, really interesting to see what the submissions say.

I think the two other things I was going to say—first of all is that the AA has welcomed the introduction of this legislation. They said, and I quote, that it is “astonishing” and “ridiculous” that it has taken so long to get to this point and that this “will fix a gap in New Zealand’s road safety strategy”. The other point to make is, of course, that many, many other jurisdictions—and we, I know, are looking particularly at the Australians—have managed to solve this conundrum by getting the technology, by getting the legislation, by getting the operating systems to line up, and I’m sure that we have the capability of doing this. I am looking forward to a very, very good select committee working together collaboratively to address this. I’m sure that there were many submissions which will be around the technical, operational, and legal complexities. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. As I stand to speak to the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill, I’m reminded again of the Government’s lack of understanding about what Māori and Aotearoa really need. What Māori need and what Aotearoa needs is more solutions, not more punishments. We need to stop coming up with ideas that target Māori, and in this case, you’re targeting rangatahi Māori. If you don’t understand those stats, man, your dudes need to do more research. Young Māori boys already have a hell of a problem with simple traffic infringements being their launching pad into the justice system, and because of a range of other socio-economic—oh yeah, shrug your shoulders; that’s all good. Away you go. You’re the head of it—

Hon Paul Goldsmith: So drug-driving is not a problem?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Not necessarily drug-driving or drink-driving; small infringements—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Teanau Tuiono): If you could direct your kōrero to the Chair.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Kei te pai. Tēnā tātou. This bill establishes a new random roadside oral fluid testing regime. Whilst it might detect drugs in someone’s system, there is no way of knowing that the person had just taken those drugs and was under the influence of those drugs while they were driving the car. So how can you—

Sam Uffindell: Have you not read it, mate?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, no, no, no. If a young boy from Remuera, if young Cameron Arbuckle had been pulled up somewhere and had—

Hon Member: Who’s Cameron Arbuckle?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: —you know, one of those young guys—and had cannabis in his blood and it was detected by a saliva test, well, that might have occurred six weeks ago.

Sam Uffindell: There’s a concentration threshold.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: That might have occurred weeks or days ago—not necessarily. You can’t prove it’s at the time that the kid is driving. So support—

Hon Member: This is defamation!

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Away you go—away you go. I know you’ve done no looking at this, but that’s all right. Māori are overrepresented in all of the justice statistics, yet you fellas want to ignore it. Māori are overrepresented in traffic offence convictions.

Sam Uffindell: We’re protecting people on the roads.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Hey—simple: overrepresented, not necessarily because they are guilty of those offences. The 2019 Human Rights Commission cited that, when it comes to low-level conventions, Māori are overrepresented. Possession of cannabis: 54 percent Māori, 22 percent non-Māori. Disorderly behaviour: 43 percent Māori, 24 percent non-Māori. Things like theft: 35 percent Māori, 23 percent non-Māori.

Hon Member: It’s personal responsibility.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: If you look into it, you’ll discover it’s more than just personal responsibility. But these are facets of a justice system that have been racist for a long time, and this side of the House seems to care nothing about the numbers, the history, the explanation, the research that has gone into it, and they’re happy to roll out a bill that will overly convict young Māori in particular. So I am standing here speaking up for young Māori.

You know, communities around the country—marae, kura—they all put in huge effort to try to get the young boys in their kura and in their communities a licence before they leave school, so that they don’t fall victim to the justice system by way of a simple traffic infringement. But here we go; we’re going to wind this up. We’re going to add drugs to it—drugs they might have done six weeks ago, three weeks ago, four days ago, not necessarily an inordinate amount of drugs, but it can be in their system when they’re pulled up. We know 100 percent that this will adversely affect rangatahi Māori, and you fellas are happy with it. You’re absolutely happy with it.

It took about 10 minutes to discover all the numbers—10 minutes. Ten minutes, fellas—you could have put 10 minutes’ effort in and discovered what the numbers are for young Māori people, and the nature in which they’re treated. Dr Rawiri was in here only last week speaking about the justice pipeline and how it delivers Māori from first point of contact with the justice system through to prison at alarming rates, and here we go again; we’re going to have another crack. Despite being 20 percent of the population, Māori are more than 51 percent of the people charged when it comes to traffic and low-level offences.

So, unfortunately, this is the plight that we have at this point with this Government, and we will be here fervently standing up for our people, encouraging that half of the House to do a bit of research, encouraging that half of the House to consider their role as the Treaty partner in Aotearoa. You guys are the Treaty partner in Aotearoa. We should have at least some ABC, elementary level understanding of what these things mean when you just roll out a law and what the impact on Māori will be, and the impact on Māori youth, of this law, will be catastrophic. So, ka pai koutou.

Tom Rutherford: Mr Speaker?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Yeah, you can stand up now.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. That was a woeful, woeful contribution about Māori versus non-Māori. Let’s actually be clear about what this bill is intending to do: it’s about drug testing to ensure our New Zealand roads are safe for everybody that uses them. There is not a provision in here about targeting Māori versus non-Māori. It’s simply about protecting our New Zealand roads for those that use them every single day—every single day.

So I rise today in support of this legislation that marks a pivotal step in our ongoing effort to improve road safety in New Zealand. The Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill will enable roadside drug-testing, fulfilling our Government’s commitment to make our roads safer for all New Zealanders. We cannot ignore the grim reality that faces us. Drug-impaired driving has been a silent killer on our roads for far too long. In 2022 alone, alcohol and drugs contributed to 200 fatal crashes. These are not mere statistics. They represent 200 families devastated by preventable tragedies. Yet our law enforcement currently lacks the tools to effectively detect drug-impaired drivers at the roadside. Even more alarming, only 26 percent of drivers believe they’re likely to be caught while driving under the influence of drugs.

The previous Government’s attempt to address this issue, while well-intentioned, proved flawed and unworkable. Their legislation required oral fluid tests to meet evidentiary standards instead of serving as screening devices, effectively stalling progress and leaving our roads vulnerable. This bill cuts through those barriers. We’re introducing a system of random roadside oral fluid screening tests, like how we enforce drink-driving laws. This method is widely used overseas and has proven to be an effective way to screen for drugs at the roadside. Our legislation will bring New Zealand in line with Australian practices, removing unnecessary obstacles that had hindered our ability to combat drug-driving.

Let me outline the key provisions of this bill. Drivers will be subject to random testing using approved oral fluid devices. If a driver tests positive, they’ll undergo a second roadside test. Two positive results will lead to an immediate 12-hour driving prohibition to address any immediate road safety risk. Additionally, a sample will be sent to a laboratory for confirmatory testing. Infringement notices will only be issued if the lab test detects the presence of specified drugs at levels indicative of recent use—recent use. Importantly, this bill empowers our police force. We expect them to conduct 50,000 oral fluid tests per year once this regime is fully implemented. This sends a clear message: if you drive while impaired by drugs, expect to be caught and expect to face serious consequences.

I want to emphasise that this is not just about punitive measures; it’s about deterrence; it’s about changing behaviour. By implementing this testing regime, we aim to make people think twice before getting behind the wheel while under the influence of drugs. We recognise that implementing this system will require careful planning and resources. Once this legislation is passed, there will be a procurement process to acquire the necessary testing devices, followed by comprehensive training for our police officers. We are committed to ensuring that this roll-out is efficient and effective.

In conclusion, this bill represents our Government’s commitment to taking a harder line on the causes of death and serious injury on our roads. We owe it to all New Zealanders to ensure that when they set out on our roads, they can do so with the confidence that we are doing everything in our power to keep them safe. I commend this bill to the House and look forward to working on it further as a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill. This will be a short speech from me, because my colleague Tangi Utikere has set out Labour’s position on this bill. We support this bill and are really interested at the select committee stage to be able to unpack it and get into the detail of what is a framework that both major parties, as well as many parties around this House, want to progress.

I think the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, Andy Foster, put it best when he said that one of the key points that we’ll be looking at here is that we don’t want to make criminals out of people who haven’t done any wrong. That’s essentially the question that the committee in the last Parliament dealt with when it was dealing with Labour’s legislation on this question. It heard from countless experts about how the technology for saliva testing and drug testing has developed even in the last few years, let alone the last decade, and what has enabled police around the world to be able to test drugs at the roadside.

Over and over again, experts presented the evidence that the science is out on this and that it is incredibly hard to develop a test which is available on the roadside, which is easy enough for police to use and which can serve the purpose of providing an officer with enough evidence or enough confidence that somebody is impaired by drugs, whilst at the same time being convenient and quick to use. That’s really what the committee will be charged with, because no one in this House wants to see law which is introduced which cannot be enforced by the police. That undermines public confidence in the police and ultimately puts them in a position where they’re being asked to enforce laws which do not make sense. We need to make sure that our drug laws are sensible, that they apply to everyone in the same way, and that the police are proud to uphold them. That is the task of the select committee in regard to this bill.

There are some questions that I’ll be focusing on, and the idea here is that we don’t want a roll of the dice. We need to understand, at the select committee level, how the technology has advanced even since the last bill was progressed through this Parliament, because when the Government members have given speeches today and they’ve said that the prior Government’s legislation didn’t work because it was overly onerous and it had too many regulations, that’s not right. It didn’t work because there was a high evidentiary threshold and a group of experts who were recommending to the Government that the evidence required from the technology wasn’t there. The technology wasn’t up to it. So we need to make sure that the technology is there to be able to enable this.

In some of the jurisdictions that have allowed saliva testing, not to a high evidentiary threshold but just as a sort of indicator for police, there are a number of instances where people are essentially being told they have done wrong when they have not done something wrong. That is not how our criminal law should work. People should have confidence that when they come up at a roadside testing station, roll down the window, with the kids in the car, and are being tested, the results coming through are not going to be false and that they are not going to then be subject to a further invasive procedure on the side of the road, in their public neighbourhood, with their neighbours looking on, if there’s been no reason for that and they’re not at fault. We need to make sure that the public can have confidence in this. So that is one question for the select committee to really work through.

The next is the broader question of impairment here. This was something that also came through loud and clear in the submissions last time, which was: is the correct thing for the police to be testing impairment or should they be testing sobriety? Those are two different things, because impairment when you are driving can include a number of things—things like medication which is prescribed by your doctor, which will impair your driving; being tired, which is a significant contributor to many of our roadside fatalities, as it is already; and a number of other factors which lead to people not driving in the way that they should and not driving in a safe way. Sobriety and functional sobriety is something that police can test already by an observation of an officer, which doesn’t require a drug test per se, but it requires an officer to make observations about a person’s ability to be in control of a car safely and that officers are trained to be able to do that. So we need to investigate that too.

The parting remarks I would leave this House with are that nobody, absolutely nobody, thinks that drug-driving is acceptable—no one should be driving under the influence of drugs—that we do need police to have these tools to be able to intervene in that, and that we need to make sure they actually work.

When Deon Hadley’s Audi crashed head-on into an ambulance, he had meth in his system, and his erratic driving had already sparked a call to police. That’s the opening sentence from an article in yesterday’s Waikato Times, outlining the details from the crash investigation report from an accident that occurred in late 2022 in the Waikato. It goes on to say both Hadley and the ambulance officer Susan Cutler died as a result of that crash on State Highway 1. She had been with St John for over 50 years. Speed was not a factor, but methamphetamine found in Hadley’s system is considered a contributing factor.

This is from another article: “After his car was hit by a methamphetamine-affected driver, Nick McEwan sat in his wrecked vehicle unsure whether his three children in the back were alive.” Fortunately, they were. They were all helicoptered to a hospital and recovered, although one of his sons has been left with permanent injuries. Another article: “A driver drank alcohol, smoked methamphetamine and cannabis, and snorted ecstasy at a Halloween party before crashing a car, killing his cousin and injuring seven other people.”

Drug-driving is an absolute scourge on our roads. It is totally unacceptable, and we need to get tougher on it. This Government is introducing the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill to address that very issue. It enables the random roll-out of those roadside oral fluid tests to help reduce the number of drug-drivers on our roads.

I do just want to touch on the fact that the previous Government introduced a bill and it had an intent to try and address some of this. But I do just want to make a couple of corrections, because, actually, it wasn’t a timely response. The National Party had on six previous occasions tried to introduce legislation to give effect to drug testing. Alastair Scott in 2018 introduced a member’s bill. It was voted down by the then Labour Government. The Hon Dr Nick Smith on numerous occasions attempted to reintroduce a bill to enable that to occur. The Labour Government voted that down. So there were six previous attempts, and finally they did introduce a bill, but, as we’ve heard, it hasn’t been able to give effect to actually enabling practical outcomes on the road for our police officers to try and reduce the number of impaired drivers. So this piece of legislation will do that.

We’ve heard the criteria around that outlined by previous speakers. I think we can also look back at some of the impact, the change in behaviour, over time around drink-driving, and although that’s not an apples-with-apples comparison, there is some relevance there. Behaviour has changed over time. Perceptions have changed. Approaches from law enforcement to cracking down on that have changed.

People now, generally, would say if they drink and drive, they would expect to get caught. We need that to be the expectation of anyone that is using drugs—not that they should be using drugs in the first place, but if they are, then they should not be getting behind the wheel.

We can hear apologist comments from the Māori Party and the Green Party around why we need to change that approach. But I note again the articles that I referred to at the start. Those families that have been impacted unnecessarily by the terrible behaviour of a few individuals deserve better outcomes than this.

This legislation will help to address that. And, look, we don’t for a second expect that bringing in this law will stop every drugged driver from getting behind the steering wheel, but it will help change that behaviour. As Mr Rutherford said, the expectation that there will be 50,000 tests conducted annually will make it quite clear to those drugged drivers that if they get behind the wheel, there is a much higher chance that they will be caught, and if they are caught, there is a much stiffer consequence for that.

Ultimately, I am confident that those actions will, in a number of cases, change behaviour, and if we can stop a single one of these horrific accidents from occurring as a result of that change, then I think this is a great piece of legislation and it should be progressed. I look forward to following the progression of this bill through the select committee and back to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. Labour supports this bill because it makes our roads safer, and it’s important that we do that in a consistent way right around the country. I think it’s important just to correct the record, though, and to make sure we’re all debating the right thing here. The main hold-up for this legislation coming into law is the fact that technology has not been able to deliver the certainty required for a regime with penalties and demerits and consequences to be attached with it. So what this regime delivers—it works with what the technology is able to do with a back-up test of a lab test.

Fundamentally, the issue here is that the current saliva test for drug-driving can throw a false negative or a false positive. That is what the research shows—that you cannot be sure when you’re testing on roadside with saliva what it is that you’re exactly testing for, and it’s possible that it can throw a false negative. So that is why, in this system—and we agree with the system—that’s being introduced, there are two tests. If someone is pulled over and tested by a police officer and they test positive, they are required to do a second test—a second positive. If they test negative, they’re free to go. So on that second positive test, at that point in time, it is required that that test go back to the lab, and only if that lab test backs up the saliva test does the infringement and then the demerits take place.

The interesting point we’ve got—or we will have, if we see this legislation rolled out—is that after that second positive test, the driver will be required to not use their vehicle for 12 hours. In parts of rural New Zealand, it could be challenging for some parts of New Zealand, and also potentially, after those two positive tests, the lab test still could come back negative, and so you may have drivers here who have been prohibited from driving for 12 hours but yet don’t receive an infringement and don’t receive demerits. But, on balance, we believe that if it makes our roads safer and if that risk is balanced, it’s still OK to move forward.

One of the interesting areas has already been touched on, and that is impairment. What it states in this bill is that the qualified drug is “at a level that indicates recent use”, if that drug has been detected in the driver in the lab test, and so that is quite different to being impaired. So there’s going to have to be some decisions made from a scientific point of view in the lab as to how recent that drug use was and whether that would have been a factor in impairment.

The other point to consider is the fact that this testing process identifies families of drugs. So, for example, if you’re talking about opioids, some people will be potentially on prescription opioids like tramadol—which is a synthetic form of morphine—or even morphine or codeine. Those are forms of opioids, and so if someone is taking a legal opioid, that may turn up in a lab and be perceived as being heroin, which is also an opioid. So it’ll be interesting to see how the lab deciphers—given the fact of its ability to do that—those families of drugs. Even more interestingly, now that pseudoephedrine is now available over the counter for our cold and prescription purposes—pseudoephedrine is part of the amphetamine family, which methamphetamine is also a part of.

It’ll be interesting to note how we decipher legal prescription drugs from those illegal black market drugs, and how that works through this process. It will be very important to make sure that New Zealanders who have taken a legal prescription drug have done so well and were not impaired when they were driving, and to make sure that they are not unnecessarily penalised through this new process.

I think that this is a good step towards making our roads safer. It’s interesting that the National Party still want to raise the speed limits outside schools but they’re quite keen on making sure our roads are safer. I wish they’d apply that methodology right across our roads in New Zealand.

Overall, this is a good step. Both parties have worked on it; multiple parties have seen that. There are still some flaws in the system, but we think that on balance, having a way to detect drug-driving in New Zealand is important, and, hopefully, it sends a strong message out to people that you are not to take drugs or alcohol if you want to be in charge of a motor vehicle on New Zealand roads.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to speak in favour of the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill at the first reading. It’s good to see other parties around the House, specifically ACT and New Zealand First, and the Labour Party—thank you for your support in this as well. Look, this bill addresses issues that we have on New Zealand roads with drug-drivers.

I was reading, before coming in here, that in the Bay of Plenty from 2018 to 2023, there were 45 fatal crashes involving drugs on our roads. I can see Mr Rutherford in front of me, rightfully, shaking his head, because that is totally unacceptable. That’s 45 lives gone and families tipped upside down because people have decided to get in their cars while high or under the influence of drugs, which has been a contributor towards their crash.

Look, I do note that the previous Government brought in legislation several years ago to help address this. It has been discussed how the evidentiary standards meant that it couldn’t actually be practically applied, and this bill will address that.

This bill amends the Land Transport Act 1998 and enables random oral fluid screening. It introduces new device approval, which is crucial and will enable police to have the tools that they need to stop drivers and to test them for drugs at the roadside. And, yeah, I hear there have been concerns. There were concerns around oral testing, which is why there are two tests at the roadside. If the first test is positive, then you will undergo a second test. If that is also positive, you will not be allowed to drive for 12 hours. You will then submit another test, which will go off to a laboratory, and if that comes back positive, then you will be given an infringement notice and demerit points, and the full weight of the law and whatever punishment will come down on you from there. You will also be issued an infringement notice and demerit points if you refuse to participate in a roadside drugs test.

For too long, drug-drivers have put others at risk with very limited enforcement in New Zealand. This brings us into line with Australian legislation, which uses oral testing over there. And, look, it’s about time. It’s well overdue. We note significant loss of life due to alcohol and drink-driving on our roads. Drug-driving is also very serious. No one wants to have their life or their family’s lives tipped upside down, because someone recklessly or selfishly took drugs, got into a motor vehicle, lost control of their vehicle, and caused the loss of life or severe injury to an innocent person who frankly was just going about their daily business. That is an absolute tragedy.

I look back and I remember that late last year, there was a report of a crash on Hewletts Road in Mount Maunganui involving a car and a truck. It was late at night, and one person died in this event. It eventuated—and it was due to go to court early last month—that one of those people is being charged with manslaughter and for drug-driving. You have to wonder, when you look at Hewletts Road, how you could have such a crash on such a road. The only way you could do it is if you’re totally oblivious, and the only way you’d get to that state would be if you were highly distracted or, most likely, drink-driving or, in this case, drug-driving. That was a totally avoidable situation. And it’s been noted by other members of this House—and I want to mention the Hon Matt Doocey for his first contribution here, Tom Rutherford, and also Tim van de Molen, who I thought spoke incredibly well earlier today.

Look, we have said quite clearly that this isn’t going to stop people taking drugs and driving in New Zealand. But what it will do is actually say, “New Zealand thinks it’s totally unacceptable that you take drugs and drive. If you go and do that now, you cannot just go and do it without any fear of being pulled up. You may be stopped, you may be tested, and if you are, then the weight of the law will come down upon you.” We are very serious about making sure that our roads are safe. We are very serious about giving police the tools and the powers that they need to enforce this. This is a very good bill. I am very supportive of it, and I wish the select committee all the best going forward. I commend it to the House.

The question is, That the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Instruction to Transport and Infrastructure Committee