Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill

Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill Second Reading Debate resumed. RACHEL BOYACK (Labour—Nelson) (17:36): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on what was titled the “Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill and is now being renamed the “Maritime Transport (Lifejackets on Recreational Craft) Amendment Bill. Mr Speaker, can I just quickly indulge the House on a different matter, because last week I attended a basketball game in Palmerston North between my two favourite teams, the Manawatū Jets and the Nelson Giants, and I promised my friend Mr Utikere that whoever lost the game had to congratulate the other in the House. And so, I do that tonight. Even though I grew up in Palmerston North, I still strongly support the Nelson Giants and wish them well for this Saturday. Having led the game for three of the four quarters and then going into two sets of extra time, it was a fantastic game, and I congratulate my colleague. So, there, I did it. It is a pleasure to take a call on this bill— ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): He hasn’t turned his back on you, I notice. RACHEL BOYACK: —as MP for Nelson. We, like many parts of New Zealand, are part of a country that is surrounded by water, and where many people spend time out on the water for recreation purposes and for commercial purposes. This is a very good bill, and one which I support. Can I congratulate the various members who have been in charge of the bill, the Hon Cameron Brewer and now the Hon Dr Shane Reti, and, of course, the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, because they did an excellent job, in my view, of listening to submitters. The bill originally was intended for—as it said on the tin—children and young people, but if you look at the statistics, there is very clear evidence to show that the greatest risk on our waters is adults who don’t wear life jackets. Others have mentioned the statistics—I will just briefly, to have it on the record: there have been eight recreational boating fatalities of children under 15 since 2015, compared with 161 for people over 15; and 94 percent of craft-related drowning fatalities in 2024 involved people not wearing a life jacket, and so we know that life jackets save lives. The conversations I’ve had with our local coastguard and with our local harbourmaster is that they support this bill. In Nelson and Tasman, we have two very closely located areas under the two different councils, with separate by-laws; they’re very close to each other, but not 100 percent identical to each other. That’s the case around the country. It’s been left to regional councils to make those determinations. A boatie could be going from one region to another on the same day and they’d have a change of by-law throughout that time. What the harbourmaster said to me is that what would be really helpful would be nationwide consistency. That’s actually the most useful thing to do. Alongside actually making life jackets compulsory—for adults as well as children and young people—what this bill does is it actually puts some nationwide consistency in place, which is going to be really helpful for enforcement but, also, for education purposes. I do want to congratulate those MPs on the committee and MPs across the House who then had conversations around changing the scope of the bill quite considerably for actually taking the time to listen to the feedback. I think this is a change that is probably overdue. On that note, I commend it to the House. DAN BIDOIS (National—Northcote) (17:40): I appreciate the tone of this debate, because we have a debate here about a serious issue. There aren’t many bills in Parliament that you can genuinely say save lives, but this is one of them. As my friend and colleague Dr Shane Reti pointed out, we have terrible cases of drownings in New Zealand: 383 drownings since 2000, and roughly 80 percent of those drownings were found to have no lifejackets that were worn. In economics, we talk about causation, and it’s very clear the causation between wearing a lifejacket and saving a life. So this is a serious bill, and it is good to see that unanimous support has been found for this bill in Parliament. I must say, as a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I’ve learnt a lot, actually, through the select committee process. I’ve learnt about various different definitions of lifejackets, different definitions of boat sizes, what “underway” means and what being anchored means and so forth. It has been a real privilege to understand the current piecemeal rules that we have. The former speaker Rachel Boyack actually just mentioned those. It was very regionalised—regionalised in a way where every region had their own bespoke rules. So if you were a harbourmaster going through from one region to another, oddly enough you’d actually have to, in theory, change the rules as you head from those different regions. So this is about standardisation and about saving lives. I do want to mention the members who have brought this bill to the House: so Dr Shane Reti and Cameron Brewer. But I also do want to mention Alfred Ngaro, because he was, I think, on record as perhaps the first former member to— Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Don’t mention him! DAN BIDOIS: What’s that? Hon Dr Duncan Webb: Don’t mention him! DAN BIDOIS: Oh, Alfred actually raised this as a member’s bill when he was in Opposition. If you guys can recall, he actually wore a lifejacket in the House to raise the profile of this issue. So I do want to acknowledge him, and I wish him luck in his candidacy and for his contribution to this bill. As part of the select committee process, I think Carlos actually spoke really well about how the select committee process worked. I do want to thank those that submitted initially on this bill, because what we heard very clearly is that there was a strong consensus to widen the scope of it. That is why we actually heard from submitters and then took it to the Business Committee to see if we could widen the scope. Then we put it out to more submissions and heard from the public. As a result, we came up with some pretty impressive changes from the select committee process. As has been outlined, those changes include extending the lifejacket mandate for all ages. That is in part to save more lives, because the lives lost at sea are disproportionately older adults—it’s not young children, it’s actually older adults that are disproportionately lost. And when you break it down by gender, it’s actually older men. I think it speaks to the culture of New Zealand, where it’s older men who aren’t wearing lifejackets, and therefore are putting their own lives and the lives of their families at risk. We’ve widened the scope and said that people of all ages will need to be using these lifejackets. We’re keeping the definition and we’ve expanded the definition of “underway”, which is a technical definition that most boaties understand. If you’re anchored, then you don’t need to wear a lifejacket, but if you’re not, you’re expected to be under way, you’re moving, and therefore you are expected to be wearing a lifejacket. There are technical definitions of what is a lifejacket in the bill. As we heard in select committee, there are different flotation devices. We actually had an exhibition of different lifejackets— Andy Foster: Great photos! DAN BIDOIS: Yes—and different devices, and it was really helpful. So I do want to thank Maritime New Zealand for helping to educate select committee members. They have done a really good job of helping to bring us up to speed on the technology and the current rules. As my friend and colleague Dr Carlos Cheung has mentioned, this is about culture change. It’s not just about legislation; it’s about a culture change. Really, what we want to do is use the legislation to drive culture change in this country. Much like when you get into a car—I’m a bit old-fashioned, but when I was raised in this country, it’s just what you do when you get into a car: you put your seatbelt on. What we want in this country is just common practice, when you get in a boat and you’re going out for the day—whether it’s in a lake or in the sea—you just put a lifejacket on; that’s all we want to see in this country. The legislation is there as a guide and as a stick, but as we know, there’s limited resources to police and enforce these laws. They will be enforced, but it is actually about driving a shift in culture in this country. So that is really the intent behind this is to help shift the mood and the culture of this in New Zealand. Other changes I think from select committee have been, actually, extensively explained by Shane Reti. I do just want to talk about and thank the members of the select committee for their hard work—ably led by Andy Foster. Andy’s been really engaged in this process, as I think all of us have been, but I appreciate your contribution, Andy, in pushing and guiding the select committee to the changes that we’ve got here today. I want to thank the submitters, because we had people who submitted on the first round and then had to resubmit, and that’s not easy to get people to do. They’re busy leading busy lives. I want to thank the members of the public who submitted on both occasions as part of that process. As Carlos Cheung mentioned, this is a case of democracy in action. We listened to submitters. People in the public that think that select committees— Celia Wade-Brown: Try it—see how good it is! DAN BIDOIS: How good select committees can be. I think there was a lot of cross-bipartisan work together on this right across Parliament. So I really appreciate members of the public for getting behind and becoming part of this process, because there were a lot of submissions. In the first round of submissions, there were 158 submitters, and then the second round was 128. We did hear submissions on both. We’ve come out of that process with some changes around definitions. We’ve changed the title of the bill. So we don’t have to have a lengthy debate about title and commencement, hopefully. It’s now simply called the “lifejacket bill”. We’ve changed that from the Life Jackets for Children and Young Persons Bill. So hopefully that’s clear for the public to understand. Look, there is a desire to get this in place for this summer, so that Kiwis up and down the country, when they’re celebrating the return of the National-led coalition Government, they can actually go about their lives and start enacting this. But this also gives an opportunity for regulators—the likes of Maritime New Zealand—to really start to ramp up the education campaign, because there will be a desire and a need for education and awareness of the new rules. This really literally is a case of fixing the basics and building the future. I know it’s a member’s bill, but it is all part of our Government’s plan to fix the basics and build the future. So it is my pleasure, on behalf of this side of the House, to be commending this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): Just before I call the next speaker, Mr Bidois, I didn’t want to interrupt you—quite a liberal use of first names. Just maintain the dignity of the House by using full names, not making it sound like a public bar on a Saturday night. HELEN WHITE (Labour—Mt Albert) (17:50): Thank you, Mr Speaker. First of all, I want to congratulate all those involved in bringing this bill to the House. I dipped into the select committee process, probably to sub in for someone, and this bill was actually being discussed in its early stages, so it’s great to see it here. I wanted to start with a personal experience. When I was about six, my mother got a phone call from a friend, and she worked with a beautiful woman called Alice McGlashan, and her son Sandy had gone missing. He drowned; he and his two friends drowned. It was a terrible learning experience of how that impacts on an entire family. It was just such an incredibly terrible event in what was a very beautiful and strong family, and it caused so much harm. That was, really, a really formative experience for me, because, I think, I was about six, and I just don’t think you really understand at that age what the ramifications are of things like that. But I come from a family that are kind of gung-ho. They’re those kinds of men—particularly in my family—who take risks. In fact, one of my uncles died on top of a roof while trying to fix his electricity during a storm. That wasn’t an uncommon thing in New Zealand culture. They were from a farming background, and you got up and you fixed your electricity, despite the fact that that was completely insane. I think that is true, often, around the culture of boating, as well. People have been brought up in this country to take unnecessary risks, and the consequences can be absolutely devastating. So I was really pleased to see this bill come forward and to grow into something that wasn’t just about children; it was about grown adults, because I think that that’s probably the part of the culture which has just been a little bit out of kilter with reality, and it’s really necessary sometimes to nudge people. And we did that with some other law here. Like, one of the ones that I remember most profoundly was the smoke-free law. We changed the culture in New Zealand by changing the law and making it inappropriate to smoke in a public place, and we probably saved a lot of people’s lives and a lot of tragedy as a result. This is another example of that. I thank the Parliament for doing this. It’s obviously something we don’t do every day. We have to be careful when we’re making rules for people, but this is a good one. Thank you very much. SAM UFFINDELL (National—Tauranga) (17:53): Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to hear the speeches from members around the House, in support of this bill, and in support of a bill that is going to make lives more safe for people on our water. We are an island nation. A lot of people in New Zealand spend a lot of time in our local lakes, rivers, harbours, out there in the ocean, whether they be swimming, fishing, pleasure boating, and, as some of my colleagues have mentioned—I think Dr Cheung did it very well when talking about Manukau Harbour, how dangerous that can be. I represent Tauranga, which is, as you well know, an area surrounded by water—Tauranga meaning “safe anchorage”—and there are a significant number of pleasure boaters and recreational fishers who are out there on a regular basis. This bill will deliver a significant change and make things quite clear that if you are below 15 years of age, you must wear a life jacket. For someone with young children, I am always very clear that whenever we are out on the water, children are in life jackets—as should every parent and person in charge of a vessel or out there on the water, be making sure that young ones are protected. Now, assuming this bill proceeds all the way through, that will become a legislative requirement for all New Zealanders. You do see a lot of unnecessary deaths in New Zealand—young people in New Zealand, I think it’s the third-highest cause of accidental death, is drowning. Suze Redmayne: We’re a nation surrounded by water. SAM UFFINDELL: We are a nation surrounded by water, that is right. Even in the Rangitīkei, there is water—probably one of our more mountainous electorates— Suze Redmayne: We’ve got the sea. SAM UFFINDELL: But you do have the sea, and I know that you do live on the cliffs. All jokes aside, it is a very serious matter and it is a bill that we are in favour of. I want to congratulate the member in charge, the Hon Shane Reti; also give mention to the Hon Cameron Brewer, who initially placed this bill into the biscuit tin. I also make mention of Andy Foster, who has helped shepherd this through the select committee process. It’s quite clear from the speeches given so far that the select committee process was a thorough one, that the committee did its job very well and have brought back a strong bill to the House for further consideration. I think, as another speaker said, it is quite rare that you do get everyone in the House coming together on stuff. It’s great that we are able to put safety first, instead of politics, and say “Look, this is a sensible thing for New Zealanders. If you are a young person in motion on the water, on a vessel, on a small vessel, under 6 metres, you must wear a life jacket.” That should have been common sense and common place beforehand; now it will be a requirement. Time will tell, as we look at the drowning statistics of New Zealand. But there will be accidents out there. There will be things that happen that are beyond skippers’ control, or weather conditions come up. In time, this legislation will save young people’s lives, and it will, hopefully, also encourage adults on vessels to consider whether they should be wearing a life jacket as well. Dan Bidois: It applies to adults. SAM UFFINDELL: It applies to adults, as well. Suze Redmayne: Life jackets have got a lot less bulky than they used to be. SAM UFFINDELL: Thanks for the conversation! It will save lives—it will clearly save lives. It will also save many families significant anguish. No one wants to lose a loved one, no one wants to lose a loved one through an accident, and no one wants to lose a loved one in an accident where death was avoidable if only some simple safety precautions had been taken. This is what this bill does. Dr Carlos Cheung: Fixing the basics. SAM UFFINDELL: National is fixing the basics and building the future. I commend this bill to the House. ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O'Connor): The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the meal break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m. Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. This early draft is automatically published - it is not yet complete and reviewed.