Page 2865 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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made. When you look at the Human Rights Act, what it actually addresses and calls for is that the legislation that is put forward should be a proportionate response.
I will look at the discussion paper, Review of the Road Transport (Alcohol and Drugs) Act 1977 that was released in May 2008. Mr Assistant Speaker Hargreaves, this was probably while you were the minister. It goes to random drug testing and the issue of human rights, and whether you should have random roadside drug testing and how that may impinge on human rights.
The point is that it discusses whether the legislation actually has an important and significant objective. If this legislation was spurious and did not have a very important objective then I think some of the concerns raised may be legitimate. We are not going to test people for things simply because we want to. The point is that the significant objective is about making our roads safer, and you need to balance the human rights of an individual and the privacy concerns of an individual with that important objective.
This is a quote from your document:
Based on the increasing body of research into the impairment effects of drugs on drivers, and the high presence of particular drugs in the bodies of fatally injured drivers … the risk to road safety posed by drug driving is significant enough to satisfy the proportionality test.
So it is saying: is this a proportionate response? And is random roadside drug testing a proportionate response to the risk that is caused by people using drugs? Your own paper, Mr Assistant Speaker, a government document, says, quite clearly, in its advice to the government, that roadside random drug testing is a proportionate response and therefore it meets the requirements of the Human Rights Act. That is your own document. This document goes further in other areas to talk about the effects of impairment and the fact that people that use drugs do in fact suffer from impairment when they are driving, and it gives strong evidence to that effect.
We could probably argue about the human rights impacts for another five years, if we wished to do so. I know that Jon Stanhope has essentially raised these concerns endlessly about the human rights concerns and he is now coming out with evidence from someone who says they are philosophically opposed, or intimates that they are, by saying that they have reservations regarding the human rights compatibility of random roadside drug testing generally.
The point is, Mr Assistant Speaker: have we, in this legislation, done everything we can to make sure that this is a proportional response to a very important issue? I ask you this question, and it comes down to this: whose human rights here are we concerned about? Are we concerned about the human rights also of Alison Ryan and her daughter?
Let us not forget the implications of not bringing this legislation in. The implication of not having an effective regime of roadside random drug testing is that it will cause accidents. It may cause loss of life. That is the proportional response that we need to consider when we are debating this legislation.
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