Raising the Driver Licensing Age

I  am told that down town in Papatoetoe, there’s a project called Street Talk which is literally getting out on the streets, helping people to be safe. We’re not talking sexual health, we’re not talking child welfare; the safety brand that Manukau Urban Maori Authority is promoting, is road safety.



Street Talk provides drivers with a chance to learn new safety skills, to look at their own performance as a driver and to improve their style, if there’s a case for it. The programme, funded by ACC, helps participants make the right decisions, learn how to manage risk and control, and even includes the provision of child restraints. It’s targeted particularly at Maori and Pasifika persons, and has a specific focus on drivers up to 25 years of age – the key group addressed in this Bill.



At the opposite end of Aotearoa, in Ohai, the locals are doing much the same thing, except that their programme is based at Te Oruanui Marae. A key concern for the locals was that a lot of their younger ones were driving without licences. Whether it be for literacy competency or cash reasons, a lot of the local rangatahi were driving without having sat their licence test.

I read a comment from marae kaiwhakarite, Serena Harris, which blew me away. She was talking about their plans to offer restricted licence driving courses and said, “For some people this is the first time they’ve got 100 percent in anything. The confidence somebody gets from getting their licence is unreal”.

That’s at one end of the scale – rangatahi. At the other end, one of our well known kuia of Tamatekapua at home in Rotorua, Aunty Miro Morrison aged 79, just got her license for goodness sake having driven around for fifty years without one. She got snapped thank goodness, had her car confiscated and decided to attend a course with Lil Emery at Taharangi Marae in Rotorua for free. Now she is away….



So completely different locations; but resounding success stories of Maori groups making a difference in keeping our people safe, young ones in particular.



The focus of this Bill is presumably about much the same thing. Trying to keep our young ones alive, instead of bumping up the national average of car fatalities.



Over the last five years, the Ministry of Transport tell us that 22% of fatal car accidents involved a Maori driver, with an even higher number, 28% of fatal casualties from crashes being Maori – that’s the passengers, the oncoming traffic, the whanau that have the bad luck to be following on behind.



Then there’s what they call the ‘vulnerable’ road users – the cyclists, the pedestrians, the motorcyclists.

It makes for another bizarre irony in the debate around peak oil and seeking to reduce our dependence on cars as the main mode of transport, when you look at the stats for vulnerable road users.



So we need to be doing something, and this Bill is a good place to start. We know who’s getting killed: it’s our young men, daring life out on the roads and too often losing the gamble.



Young men between 15 to 19 years are seven times more likely to be in a fatal car accident than 45-49 year old male drivers.



A high proportion of the fatal crashes for our young drivers (under 29 years) occur on rural roads. Speed is a huge factor in this.



Just looking at my own electorate, in the 2004 National Road Safety Public Attitude Survey, 32 percent of drivers in the Bay of Plenty region said they ‘enjoy driving fast on the open road’. Well that’s all good and fine, but it ain’t so great when you learn that in the Rotorua Area, excessive speed was a factor in 23 percent of injury crashes in 2004.



Taking one year as a case in hand – 2004 – in Rotorua we suffered the cost of 193 road crashes. We lost eight lives that year from car crashes, 33 drivers and passengers were seriously injured, and there were another 153 reported casualties.



One of the things I’ve picked up from the heap of those TV ads telling our mokopuna “if you drink and drive you’re a bloody idiot”, is that the message is slowly but surely sinking in.



But although it seems that drink-driving is becoming an unacceptable practice across the community, there still seems to be a tolerance towards speeding. Teenage boy racers I am told would tell you, that the key to success is all about how fast your machine can go.



Success counts for nothing for those turning up at the cemetery a couple of days later to pay their respects. Not so successful for those turning up to Court to receive their sentence. Not so successful for all those other victims of other crimes of the city which become relegated to a lower priority because the full squad is out with the boy racer squad.



This Bill doesn’t target any of these factors – speed, booze, social pressure, road conditions, education. It’s basically just a Bill to raise the minimum driver licence age from fifteen to sixteen years, and to extend the length of the learner licencing period from six to twelve months.



So will adding a year or six months make the difference? Na… I doubt it.



What will make the difference is the way in which the message gets through. It could be those billboard messages that tell us, “it’s better to be a bit late than arrive dead on time”.



Or it could be what they’re doing down at Whakatu Marae in Nelson, in a driver licence course which had a 100 percent success rate. Can’t get much better than that. The local constable, John O’Donovan, was getting worried about all of the young people in the region who were constantly getting parked up by the cops, their cars impounded, fines thrown at them, and getting caught up in a cycle of offending.



Teacher David TePania was enlisted and before you knew it, 33 students had passed the course. What they found on the programme was that some of the reasons cited for not having licences were learning difficulties and low self-esteem. Yet again more proof that basic literacy skills keep proving to be a common underlying factor in offending.



The interesting thing about this programme, was that although it picked up referrals from the Courts and Police, there was support from the City Council, the Land Transport Safety Authority and Work and Income to get the programme off the ground. And probably the biggest factor of all was that it involved heaps of volunteers, helping out for the greater good.



And that’s where I think a lot of our efforts could be usefully spread as well. Instead of constantly telling our young boys how mad, bad and fast they are, we should be working with the whole whanau, in the interests of whanau wellbeing and safety.



We need to be thinking about how to create the optimum safety environments – increasing the age at which young people can legally purchase alcohol from eighteen years to twenty years was one of these strategies to keep our young alive – but a strategy which the House voted down last year.



We, the Maori Party, bloc voted, all four of us supporting the proposal to raise the legal purchase age to twenty, when it came to the House last November.



I was particularly interested that the Minister of Maori Affairs, and the sponsor for this Bill, Peter Dunne, could overlook the brutal combination of alcohol, age and fatal crash data and vote to keep the purchase age at eighteen. Alcohol is such a huge and potent contributor to fatal crashes that I would have thought that it would be impossible to overlook it.

Although raising the licence age and increasing the time of learner licensing practice will no doubt have an impact in lowering our frightening statistics, there are other actions that can be taken which we hope the select committee will explore. New technologies like alco-locks, education, such as the three great examples offered by Maori groups around the motu that I talked about, or indeed more accessible and affordable public transport options.



Australian and Canadian Graduated Driver licensing schemes for example, require a zero blood alcohol level for young and inexperienced drivers.



The option to reduce the blood alcohol content limit for our young drivers to zero is certainly something that we could do well here to consider - the option to keep our young people alive and with the passengers in their car alive, and the car behind them, the car next to them, the car coming their way is what we are all after I am sure.



Finally, I would hope that all those new mayors in their first meetings with their newly elected councils might be thinking of ways on how to keep our young people alive as well.