Page 2852 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 June 2010
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MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (10.25): Before we get to the detail stage I would like to draw out a number of points which obviously have been discussed this morning in the chamber and other forums. Firstly, I go to the advice from the human rights commissioner which was circulated this morning. There are a couple of key points that need to be made and I will go through them briefly.
The advice lists a number of human rights engaged by this bill. The ACT Human Rights Act is clear that no right is absolute and that a limitation will be allowed where it can be justified. The heart of the advice from the commissioner and of other correspondence we have received goes to the evidence that drugs impair driving. There is discrepancy over whether the evidence is strong enough that drugs do impair driving.
Using the human rights framework set out by section 28 of our Human Rights Act, we need to look at the strength of the evidence to see if it warrants a limitation on a person’s human rights. This is the critical point. Limitations on human rights must be shown to be justified by reference to evidence. The Greens are across this evidence and we know that there are two key things. The first is that drugs do impair driving, and there is strong evidence which shows that. In relation to THC, the accident research centre at Monash University performed a review of recent research and found in relation to THC that detriments associated with cannabis include increased braking time, increased lateral deviation, increased number of obstacles hit, increased speed variability and impaired secondary task performance.
In relation to ecstasy, the Australian Drug Foundation reported in their 2007 paper “Drugs and driving in Australia” that MDMA ecstasy use impairs specific cognitive performance, has a moderate negative impact on vehicle control and a decreased sense of risk taking. Further, MDMA use was associated with impaired ability to maintain a lateral position of the vehicle in traffic. With regard to amphetamine this was associated with:
drifting out of the lane of travel, weaving, speeding, drifting off the road and high-speed collisions. These driving behaviours are consistent with some of the usual side effects of amphetamine use, such as increased risk-taking, motor restlessness, aggression, disorientation and lack of coordination …
The second key issue is that the evidence is not advanced enough to show at what level of concentration each specific drug impairs driving to the same extent that we know 0.05 blood alcohol concentration impacts on driving. From a human rights perspective, the Greens have made the decision to support this bill on the basis of the information I have just outlined. We know that a driver on the road who has one of three drugs in their body is more likely to be involved in a crash. We believe the evidence does warrant the intrusion on human rights and that, as a result, the bill is consistent with section 28 of the Human Rights Act and the act as a whole.
I know that we will be going through each of the amendments in detail, but I will briefly outline the four main issues which go to our amendments. They all relate to the principles which we outlined in the submission to the government’s bill and which I mentioned during the in-principle debate on this bill. The first is changing the prescribed level to a presence and non-presence test. We believe that this legislation
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