Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill

Good morning, members. The House is resumed. When we suspended last night, we were debating the third reading of the Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill, with two speeches remaining. The next call is a Labour call.

Every loss of life on our roads is a tragedy. Every single one is something that the Government and communities and drivers have responsibility to do everything in our power to stop. That includes safety measures on our roads, safe speeds, and the appropriate sort of testing that goes along with harmful products like drugs and alcohol to make sure that people aren’t unnecessarily affected in their driving by those things and kill themselves and kill others on the roads.

It’s something that I think about as a local MP when, in Manurewa, we have some of the highest incidents of road deaths in the country. In just a small area around my house, we are the area of highest road pedestrian deaths in the country. The impact on communities is huge. Every loss of life means a parent or a friend, a grandparent, someone who is taken out of those communities and cannot do the things that they need to, and their families who rely on them will never have them again. So this is part of that. This is part of something that the Government can do alongside communities to make our roads safer.

I speak about it in that way because all road rules, everything that we do on the roads, requires a huge level of community support. You know, just things like thinking about which side of the road we drive on is an arbitrary “line in the sand” judgment call for regulators to make that we need community buy-in for. We can’t be enforcing these things all the time. We need people to believe in the rules and to have faith that they will be enforced in a not-arbitrary way.

I’ve been thinking about how this bill—it has had a long life in this House. The Minister of Transport was right when he said that this is the third time Parliament has been back here to consider how these rules will impact on people and to design a system that can have both community support and is robust and is supported by not only the drivers themselves but also by the police, and, on the other hand, is something which gives enough flexibility to procure a system of testing on the roadside that not only meets international standards and international norms around these things but is also just something that New Zealand can get its hands on.

There have been problems for the select committee working it through, the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. Even though this is the third time, you’d think some of these issues were settled. But the science leads us to ask further questions—things like whether we can and ever will be measuring for impairment, when we know that the tests that are being used here are about measuring the substance in people’s systems and the existence of that substance in someone’s bloodstream, rather than the way it has affected their driving.

I was thinking about this because our democracy does rely on trust. It relies on people’s ability to see that their Government exists by consent. Around the world, the way that democracies are being challenged not only by the fringe on the right and the left but by people’s lack of engagement too—the fact that people aren’t voting and the fact that every year, in major democracies, people turn away from their opportunity to engage with their politicians and do not cast their vote tells me that there is something about Governments now where people don’t see themselves represented. They don’t see themselves listened to. And if we make rules where people don’t feel that they are heard and they don’t feel like their own personal experience is taken into account, then what do we expect?

I think the arbitrariness of laws is something we should always be sceptical about as politicians. Sometimes laws will be arbitrary. Whether you drive on the left-hand or the right-hand side of the road is an arbitrary call, but it’s a call because we need a side of the road to drive on and it needs to be safe, and everyone agrees that there does need to be a rule, even if that rule is neither here nor there about which rule it is. So to have any sort of rule, we have to be able to justify it, and that’s, I think, what the select committee has endeavoured deeply to do.

But, again, it does go to the wider context in which we are introducing this. Speed rules are also arbitrary because there has to be a number. The difference in safety between 50 and 51 or 51 and 52 is difficult to quantify, but there is a difference and someone needs to make a rule. So when we are making all of these rules around road safety, we have to constantly be testing: are these arbitrary? If it is an arbitrary rule, can people see themselves represented in this? Is their experience acknowledged by Government? That’s where we got into some real difficulties and some real testing conversations in the committee.

I think we’ve done that in real good faith and I think that we have landed somewhere in this bill that we can all live with. But there are some remaining challenges, and we want to see the review provisions in this bill used so that we can all be sure that this is a robust rule limit, that it will be enforced in the way that we expect it to, because discretion and fairness matter in this law, and those objective measures are needed to determine whether this is working in the way that we expect it to.

As I said, impairment would be the thing that you would want to test in this. You would want to have alignment with what was being tested at the roadside was how affected a driver was. We heard submission after submission that that was not in fact a perfect correlation, that the science wasn’t there yet. So we hope it will be.

We have designed a rule here which not only gives police quite a lot of flexibility in terms of the kind of procurement and the kind of devices they can use but also we’ve given regulatory flexibility in the secondary legislation to experts to determine, over time, what impairment looks like at a level for certain substances. You need to do that. There’s no way that as a select committee we could have possibly made every regulation for every substance or every family of substances, because the sorts of substances used on our road now will be different to those used in 10 years, will be different to those used in 20. I mean, in the crises of synthetic cannabinoids in New Zealand, when those were widely available on the market, it was changing month to month as the regulations couldn’t keep up. We appreciate that. But we need people to also know that that is why this Parliament hasn’t considered the level of impairment there, because we could not, because the science isn’t there.

We also need our officials to hear us. There have been a number of speeches in this House about what officials could tell the committee and what they couldn’t. There is no intention here that this is a carte blanche licence to use the levels of substance and people systems or the very wide provisions around time and the amount of time that someone can spend on the roadside in a way that would be an incremental erosion of the ordinary rights and freedoms that New Zealanders can expect, because we want them to have faith in this law. We want them to have faith in this system, in this regime, and they all need to buy into it, because it’s not a system which can rely on enforcement. It’s a system which relies on people knowing that drug-driving is not OK, that nobody should be operating a car if they’re under the influence of any sort of drugs, whether it is prescription drugs and they haven’t been taken in accordance with the instructions, and so that person shouldn’t be driving while they’re behind the wheel, or whether it’s illicit drugs and that person should be off the roads and shouldn’t be putting other people in danger.

It also needs to have a practical outcome. So we want to make sure that what we’re designing here is a system which—you know, New Zealanders will have seen in other jurisdictions, where the committee heard that in many jurisdictions in Australia, they’ve also been through a few different rounds of this sort of legislation where they’ve made changes as they go, because you need to get these settings right, because they do get challenged in the courts. So it’s important here that New Zealanders feel like this is something that could change over time.

But we want to design a system that is more similar to roadside alcohol breath testing, and that it’s just a part of being a driver on the road, that you might expect to be pulled over for a short amount of time and be submitting to the swab test. You might need to do two, and you might need to go through that process. We’re not envisioning here a system where you would spend a long amount of time on the roadside. Personally, I think that it would have been a real benefit to this law if we had set some guidelines and some parameters around how long we expect being on the side of the road. But, again, we could not get a good sense from officials about a reasonable amount of time to put in the Act. In other parts of the Act, you’ll find 15 minutes is a useful amount of time to be deterring someone on the side of the road, and I personally think that that would have been a reasonable amount of time to include in this, but that is not what’s included here.

Just to wrap up, I think this is a sensible law. I personally will be watching this progress in our communities and around New Zealand, because I want it to work. I want people to have faith in it. I want people to have faith that the parliamentarians who are making these laws are taking their experiences into account. I don’t want to see people arbitrarily detained, I don’t want to see people spending too long, and I don’t want this having an effect where we’re having people on prescription medications unfairly treated when they’re just trying to get home. This is a reasonable bill, and I commend it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. For far too long, drugged drivers have put other road users at risk. Well, guess what! Those days are over, and anyone driving while impaired can expect to get caught and face the consequences. Finally, police will have the tools they need to help keep Kiwis safe from drugged drivers. My final thoughts on this bill are, if you’re thinking of driving drugged, don’t—just don’t. I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Otirā tēnā tātou. E tū ana ahau ki te waha i ētahi whakaaro hei apiti ki ngā kōrero kua hori nei e ngā mema o te Whare. E tū ana ahau ki te kōrero mō te taha ki te rangatahi Māori me ngā pānga ka ngau kino ki runga ki a rātou, ā, ka tōia te wāhi ki te Māori i roto i ngā kawenga o Te Tāhu o te Ture, tōna katoa.

[Thank you, Madam Speaker. Greetings to all. I stand to deliver some sentiments to add to what has already been said by the members of this House. I stand to speak regarding Māori youth and the impacts that have caused them trauma, and that Māori should have a place in the functions of the Ministry of Justice, completely.]

I rise to present Te Pāti Māori’s views on the bill. Let me just be clear that we do not support driving under any impairment—drugs, alcohol, or any other thing; we’re 100 percent pro safer roads. But what we cannot not address in this House is the Government’s continuation of dismissing the negative impacts on Māori, and in this bill I’m going to speak to the negative impacts on rangatahi Māori.

This is a very, very key piece of the justice pipeline when it comes to Māori in prison, because being in prison—that 54 percent of Māori men in prison starts somewhere; for most young Māori youth, male, rangatahi Māori, it starts with an interaction with the police over driving, or an interaction with police over low-level drug offending. This is how it starts.

Hon Member: Don’t do it.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, “Don’t do it.”, you say. It’s a symptom of poverty. You wouldn’t know about that. You obviously haven’t researched what poverty means either, so don’t do that.

Carl Bates: He’s bringing you into disrepute, Madam Speaker.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: So this is where it starts for rangatahi Māori, OK?

Hon Member: Bet you did it—did you get pulled over?

TĀKUTA FERRIS: This is where it starts for rangatahi Māori, and this is how the system and the laws that are being created ensures that they are delivered—

Carl Bates: You’re the only one that’s been—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Can we please not have a barrage in front of the person who’s speaking. It’s OK to interject—

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Kia ora. Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: —but I don’t want people shouting in front of the speaker.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Let me just get back to the point. I’m talking about young Māori, aged 14, 15, 16, 17 years old. They don’t fairly come into contact with the justice system. It’s not fair. That’s perfectly understood. If you don’t understand that, oh, man, we’re in trouble.

But this is what we’re dealing with and this is what I’m speaking to with regards to this bill. I see our justice Minister is here. Justice, right across its three areas, has three key performance indicators, or goals: one of the big ones is to reduce the overrepresentation of Māori in the justice system. Almost every piece of legislation that’s come through the House does the opposite. This is one of them, and it will exacerbate the presence of rangatahi Māori in the justice system. How can that be the justice Minister’s way forward? How can that be the way forward for a justice system that wants to reduce the overrepresentation of Māori in the system? It can’t be, but it is. So why? Well, I’ll leave the public to work that one out.

Hon Casey Costello: To save their lives.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: You’re not saving anyone’s lives—the road toll hasn’t come down. OK, so, rangatahi Māori—that’s what we’re talking about. Forty-one percent of minor drug offences: Māori, OK—and similarly for minor traffic offences.

Andy Foster: It’s the lowest in a very long time. Look at the stats. The lowest per capita since the 1920s—a hundred years.

TĀKUTA FERRIS: I see the ex-mayor of Wellington is talking over there. He might want to think about this—he didn’t do such a great job in Wellington when he was the mayor. So rangatahi Māori entered the system there—many rangatahi Māori. The reason I know this is because many iwi all around the country have tried proactive programmes to counter this phenomenon. So what they do is get early licensing programmes into schools so that their kids have got licences. Then they teach them how to interact with the police when they get pulled up, because police profile rangatahi Māori; that’s why they pulled up more than any other rangatahi group.

Hon Casey Costello: Garbage!

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Oh, “Garbage!”, she says.

Rawiri Waititi: Read the reports!

TĀKUTA FERRIS: Yeah, no, she doesn’t like reports. That’s what happens. And these are the proactive steps that te iwi Māori have done to try to circumvent this little circle of delivering our kids into the justice system. Once they get in it, the number of offences quickly racks up for them, OK? It quickly racks up. That’s the beginning of a long delivery line for rangatahi Māori, particularly men, into prison. The Government is happy for that—they’re happy to ignore it. I raise it time and time again and they ignore it time and time again. So I’m putting it here for you, bluntly and point-blank.

All the experts says that the tech doesn’t work, you shouldn’t do it—da, da, da, da. They’ve ignored all of that. And, you know, when it comes down to leaving all of these things to police discretion, well, we currently have a very serious case in te iwi Māori of a young rangatahi Māori who experienced the blunt force of police discretion and brutality and racism and everything that comes with that. Young Kaea Heta, from Hastings, had his jaw broken by police, just recently. OK, that’s the excessive exercise of force, and as you commit to putting more rangatahi Māori into that system, more rangatahi Māori are going to come into contact with that discretion and the excessive force that the police report itself noted. We just can’t commend it, we can’t agree with it, and we can’t possibly let that go through this House. So we do not commend the bill to the House, at all.

I declare the House in committee for further consideration of the Sentencing (Reform) Amendment Bill.