Page 3431 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 17 August 2010
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Road Transport (Drink Driving) Legislation Amendment Bill 2010
Debate resumed from 24 June 2010, on motion by Mr Stanhope:
That this bill be agreed to in principle.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Minister for Transport, Minister for Territory and Municipal Services, Minister for Business and Economic Development, Minister for Land and Property Services, Minister for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs and Minister for the Arts and Heritage) (5.08): Pursuant to standing order 152, I move:
That order of the day No 1, executive business, be discharged from the Notice Paper.
In discharging the Road Transport (Drink Driving) Legislation Amendment Bill 2010 from the notice paper, I do want to make it clear that the government is in no way abandoning its commitment to reform drink-driving laws in the territory. By way of explanation, the withdrawn bill contained amendments that would have substantially amended or replaced several sections in the Road Transport (Alcohol and Drugs) Act 1997 that will be amended by the recently enacted Road Transport (Alcohol and Drugs) (Random Drug Testing) Amendment Bill 2009, including section 5, which deals with approval of screening devices and instruments; section 6, which deals with approval of operators, analysts and laboratories; section 11, which deals with detention for breath analysis and now oral fluid analysis; section 12, which deals with breath analysis and now oral fluid analysis; section 14, which deals with restrictions on screening tests and analyses; section 15, which deals with taking blood samples from people in custody; section 15A, which deals with analysis of blood samples; section 16, which deals with medical examinations; section 41, which deals with evidentiary certificates; and the dictionary. The discharged bill, if it had been passed, would have displaced these provisions of the Road Transport (Alcohol and Drugs) (Random Drug Testing) Amendment Bill, thereby leaving significant gaps in the roadside drug-testing legislation and making it ineffective.
The government is committed to ensuring that the recently passed random drug-testing act is implemented and to have proceeded with this bill really was not consistent with that determination. As a result of the passage of that legislation, these particular amendments really are no longer operable in the way in which they were intended. We are re-crafting them and it is my intention to reintroduce the bill but in a way that does not impact on the random drug-testing legislation. I hope to be in a position to do that—I think at this stage our expectation is that we will be able to do that—at the next sitting, in September. And that is the basis for the withdrawal of these particular provisions.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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