Land Transport (Drug Driving) Amendment Bill

Members, we now come to Part 4. Part 4 is the debate on clauses 32 to 36, “Related and consequential amendments”. The question is that Part 4 stand part.

Thank you, Madam Chair. I’m grateful to members of this committee of the whole House for the discussion that’s taken place already this morning. Part 4 is really related and consequential amendments—so the policy decisions that have now been agreed by the committee effectively, now, need to be put into effect by way of regulation change. I won’t spell all those out, but suffice to say, they very much flow from those decisions having been made earlier in the legislation, for example, with the new infringement offence of failing or refusing to undergo an oral fluid screening test.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Minister. I know that we’re on the last part. I have one question to do with clause 36(5), which is to do with the amendments to the Land Transport (Offences and Penalties) Regulations 1999. In subclause (5), it does say that after section 59(1) of the Land Transport Act, insert three additional offences for penalty when it comes to demerit points. Now, we have discussed this in terms of the other forms of offences, banning driving, etc., but I think this is the section where we’re talking about some of the additional penalties that a person who is non-compliant in terms of wanting to undertake the oral test will face, both in terms of maximum penalty infringement fines or, alternatively, demerit points.

I just want to check with the Minister, in regards to these three additional sections that are introduced: are they in line with other parts of that particular schedule in terms of demerit points? Seventy-five demerit points is reasonably significant, so for that to be simply due to non-compliance seems to be a very high penalty for, comparatively speaking, a lower offence, in comparison to some others that I’m seeing in terms of Schedule 2. I guess the rationale is around what benchmarking or consistency measures the Minister or the officials took when determining the 75 demerit points.

Thank you very much, Madam Chair. I appreciate the question from the member. In lieu of any, or perhaps pending any, detailed advice that I might receive in terms of the extent to which these penalties of 75 demerit points would be considered to be in line with other demerit point levels or penalties more generally, I think, if I may say, that the point is really more that the Government views the seriousness of those offences—for example, failing or refusing to remain at a specified place or to accompany an enforcement officer without delay—as being sufficiently serious to merit that degree of penalty with those 75 demerit points.

In terms of alignment relative to other penalties that are existing within the regulations, I think the point is more so that we want to send a signal that these are actions or behaviours that we don’t wish to condone, and so a sufficiently serious message should be sent in respect of those.

We now come to the Schedule. The question is that the Schedule stand part.