Ivan Dean, Speeches Index

Thursday 19 November 2009

ROAD SAFETY (ALCOHOL AND DRUGS) AMENDMENT BILL 2009

Mr DEAN ( Windermere ) - Madam President, I am not surprised that this bill comes before us. I have said for a long time that the penalties for drug driving have been absolutely lenient to say the least and a bit of a farce. In actual fact, the penalties have been so lenient as is identified here that when police have been dealing with these matters they have been anxious in fact to find other offences that are being committed to charge these people with like speeding and other traffic offences that are also involved rather than charging them with the drug driving.

That is the reason I came into this House a while back and asked questions in relation to the penalties for drug driving and the comparison between drug driving and alcohol exceeding 0.05. I could never just quite understand it and neither could the police. I had a lot of police come to me about it saying that something had to be done about it because it was just a farcical situation, so I am very pleased to see this legislation come forward and very clearly, Madam President, I will be supporting the bill.

It is all very well having the penalties in place but unless the police have the resources to police this properly the penalties really are meaningless. The reason I say that is that there has been an issue raised with me, and I have also raised that in this House, concerning the availability of the devices, the DrugWipe 5 packs that are used by the police to test for drugs in the blood of the person. If that proves positive they are then taken for a blood test and so on, to get confirmation of that.

Despite answers to my questions about the number of these units available, I know from very reliable sources that they are not as readily available as we have been told, and certainly in the regional areas where police had to be very careful with these devices and where and when they used them. The cost of a unit to drug-test a driver is $50. Very clearly there is an impact on regional budgets. With the screws being placed on police to cut their budget, like everybody else, there have to be gains made somewhere.

Nothing to do with road safety should be impacted on, Madam President, to make gains for a budget and if that is indeed the situation it would be appalling. Road safety is a number one item at present, with the number of road deaths that we have had this year compared with last year and the year before and the year before. I would never ever support police being interfered with in their ability to carry out their road safety duties, and that very clearly was impacting. The unfortunate thing about it is that I cannot bring evidence in to show that because it would put the jobs of a number of police on the line or bring on disciplinary action. That is how concerned police were, and a number of them came to me about this situation.

I am very pleased that the Commissioner of Police gave the answers that he did give to those questions. If there was a dearth of these drug wipe devices available to police then I hope that the situation has been rectified.

The penalties now I think will certainly inspire police. They will now want to catch up with as many of these people as they can - as they wanted to before, but if there was another offence that they could get these people on that probably had a greater penalty, they would focus on that whilst perhaps the drug driving offence was what they should probably have been focusing on.

It is good legislation. I spoke to the minister in relation to this the other day and he asked whether or not I would be supporting it. I said I welcomed it, the police welcome it and why would I not as it is to do with road safety. It is good legislation and I commend the Government for bringing it forward quickly. At this time of the year we need it to be proclaimed very quickly and I guess that will happen and should happen before Christmas so that we can allow the police to do their job effectively.

Bill read the second time and taken through the remaining stages.

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