John MacDonald: I don't like this carrot-and-stick road safety funding

Canterbury Mornings with John MacDonald

I don’t like the idea of the Government dangling $72 million in front of the cops and saying to them: “You’ll get this if you test the number of drivers we want you to test for drugs and alcohol.”

You might think it’s great that the police are being told what’s expected of them and that some of their funding depends on it. But I don’t.

Don’t get me wrong. There are some great things about this announcement yesterday by the Transport Minister that the Government is cracking down on drunk and stoned drivers..

As someone who thinks we should have a zero alcohol limit for drivers, anything to try and catch the clowns who drive drunk is a good thing in my book.

And the move to roadside testing of drivers for drugs can’t come quick enough. Especially, when you consider the carnage that has been caused by drivers high on drugs.

Here’s a stat that proves it: In 2022 alone, 112 people died in crashes where drugs were involved. That was about 30 percent of all road deaths that year.

So yesterday, Simeon Brown announced that the Government is going to be putting $20 million into a new roadside drug testing regime. This will happen once legislation is passed that will allow police to more easily test drivers for drugs.

The bill is going through the select committee process and submissions are due to close shortly.

The way the legislation is drafted at the moment, anyone who is pulled over and tests positive for drugs won’t be allowed to drive for 12 hours. Samples will be sent off to the laboratory for more sophisticated testing and, if they come back positive as well, the driver will get a fine and demerit points.

The stoners aren’t happy. Or should I say that the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (also known as NORML) aren’t happy. Because they aren’t convinced that the technology used in roadside drug testing is accurate enough.

Green MP Julie-Anne Genter is someone else who has reservations. She says there’s a chance that people who use cannabis legally for pain relief, for example, could get done.

Either way, I think it’s a good thing. And once the legislation is passed, the Government will give the cops the green light and will be expecting them to do 50,000 roadside drug tests a year.

As for the alcohol testing, the Government’s increasing the breath-testing target from 3 million tests to 3.3 million tests per year, and it wants 65 percent of alcohol breath tests to be done at your typical high-risk times for people driving drunk.

He says the police have been a bit haphazard in recent years with breath-testing drivers and wants a more consistent approach.

So yes, it’s great there’s going to be more roadside testing for drunk drivers and it’s brilliant there’s going to be testing for drugged-up drivers, as well.

But, as I said before, I don’t like this “performance” element the Government is attaching to the funding for what it’s calling its Road Policing Investment Programme.

It’s telling the police that they’ll only get $72 million of the funding if they meet the Government's target of 3.3 million roadside alcohol tests a year and 50,000 roadside drug tests a year.

I don’t like it because, even though 65 percent of the tests are to be done at high-risk times, we’ll have the cops either scrambling to do the other 35 percent at times and in places where it becomes nothing more than a box-ticking exercise; or they won’t do other worthwhile stuff because they’ll be busy meeting the target so they can get their funding.

I think it’s a very slippery slope. Because what’s to stop the Government doing the same thing with other elements of police funding? Nothing.

And, while we know the Prime Minister is all about KPIs and quarterly plans, patrolling roads and fighting crime never fits into beautifully-crafted gantt charts and spreadsheets. And I imagine there’ll be plenty of cops who find this carrot-and-stick approach the Government is taking somewhat offensive.

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