ROAD SAFETY AMENDMENT (DRINKING WHILE DRIVING) BILL 2011

Mr SOUTHWICK (Caulfield) -- I rise to speak on the Road Safety Amendment (Drinking while Driving) Bill 2011. This is a very important bill that has been brought to the Parliament in haste to ensure that we can get this legislation through in time for the busy Christmas period -- the time when people celebrate and have fun but unfortunately also the time when we see lots of road trauma and increased fatalities on our roads. I would also like to take this opportunity to congratulate the Attorney-General, who is currently at the table, and the Premier, on bringing this bill to the chamber because it seeks to close an important loophole in the law that currently allows drivers to drink alcohol while driving a vehicle.

The bill amends the Road Safety Act 1986 to make it an offence for any person to consume alcohol while driving a vehicle or while acting as an accompanying driver instructing a learner driver to drive. These new drinking while driving infringement offences will carry a penalty of 10 penalty units or a penalty on a traffic infringement notice of 2 penalty units.

This piece of legislation that we are currently bringing before the chamber is all about sending a very important message to our drivers. It is telling drivers that it is unacceptable to drink while driving and that drivers need to act responsibly when they are behind the wheel. Quite often we have young passengers with us on the road. The last thing we want young passengers to see is a driver driving down the road with a beer in their hand, potentially sending a message to that young person that that sort of behaviour is acceptable.

I would like to take this opportunity to mention that I am pleased that the opposition is supporting this bill. I think it is important that it recognises that we need to send this very clear message to all drivers about how important it is to save lives and reduce the number of road fatalities. Certainly there has been bipartisan support for this over a long time -- for many years in fact -- when it comes to reducing the road toll, which is what we are fundamentally talking about here.

I would like to add that it was very interesting to hear the contribution of the member for Ripon, who spent most of his time attacking the legislation and talking about how on many occasions he would have a beer on the way home and how he could not see any reason at all for bringing in this legislation. In addition to that, on 3AW this morning we heard Shaun Leane, a member for the Eastern Metropolitan Region in the other place, speaking casually about pulling into a bottle shop on the way home and buying a traveller. These are not the sorts of behaviours that we, as elected members of Parliament, should be promoting. It is not the sort of example we should be setting, and we should not be saying that this sort of behaviour is appropriate and should be tolerated. I think we should be leading by example. I would question both of these sorts of comments, which were made in this house and on radio quite frivolously and without showing any level of responsibility.

I would also like to make a point in relation to the contributions of the members for Monbulk and Tarneit, who spoke about the difficulty of enforcing the proposed amendments and said it is difficult in some cases to distinguish between a can of Jim Beam and a can of Coke Zero. Being difficult does not mean we should not do it, and there are many times when you have to make the hard decisions and lead by example with good policy. That is what this government is all about -- leading by example, with good policy, and sending a very clear message. I also add that just by bringing this to the attention of the house -- not through lots of dollars spent on advertising campaigns, which was done under the previous government -- and by talking about the legislation, already in a couple of weeks we have had headlines that are talking about behaviour.

The headlines that people have been reading are all about educating others that this sort of behaviour is not tolerable, and they include an article in the Herald Sun on 22 November that was headed 'Victorian Premier Ted Baillieu to close drink-driving loophole', an article in the Age on the same day headed 'Baillieu to fix drink-driving loophole', and another article about a ban on drink-driving behind the wheel. These sorts of headlines in our newspapers are more powerful than any advertisement on page 3 or all the other sorts of messaging you get. We know for a fact that it is good, sound messaging that changes the way in which people behave and that we need reinforcement to be portrayed very clearly in the media and then spoken about in the homes.

Finally, I would like to say that this sort of behaviour needs to change. We need to educate our young people. We need to educate them that this is intolerable and that drink driving certainly is not acceptable in the state of Victoria. I commend the bill to the house.