Dylan Thomsen: AA Road Safety Spokesperson on the Government's proposed changes to driver licensing

The Government wants to change our drivers licensing system, but AA believes more improvements are needed to have a greater impact on the youth road toll. 

Among the changes are removing the full licence test, more consequences for drivers who commit traffic offences while on their learner or restricted licence, and a zero-alcohol limit for everyone until they reach a full licence.   

AA Road Safety Spokesperson Dylan Thomsen joins the show to discuss the proposal. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Right.

Speaker 2 (00:00):
Oh, the government wants to change up our driver's licensing
system as looking at a new proposal to new drivers
will only have to take one practical test instead of two.
Restricted drivers with defensive driving and clean records will automatically
gain their full after twelve months. There's a bunch of conditions,
including halving the number of demerit points, and there'll be
a zero percent alcohol breath limit regardless of their age.

(00:21):
So AA Road Safety spokesperson Dylan Thompson joins me, Now,
good morning to you.

Speaker 1 (00:26):
Dylan, good morning.

Speaker 2 (00:28):
So this is good because it's cheaper, but it's bad
because they spend less time supervised driving.

Speaker 1 (00:34):
Well, I think I'd say it's good in that the
government is actually looking at making some significant changes and
we're right on board with zero alcohol limit and more
consequences for learner or restricted drivers breaking the rules. I
think the way I thought it is we think it
could be better if we looked to also make some
changes that requires learners to do a lot more practice

(00:58):
in preparation and training than we currently do in New Zealand.
So if we look overseas, a lot of the countries
it has systems like this with just one on row test.
They have a minimum number of hours of practice and
incentives for people to do professional lessons in driving courses.

Speaker 2 (01:15):
Now, Chris Bishop actually talked about an app, an app
to be your supervised driver. Do you trust that?

Speaker 1 (01:21):
Well, no, it's not an app to be your supervised driver,
but a lot of an Australian states. What they have
is when you're a learner, you can have an app
that records all your practice hours of driving. And what
that will do is if you're the supervising driver with
that person, so that might be mum or dad or
a grandparent or a friend with full license, you get

(01:42):
a message saying this person says they're about to do
a practice drive with you. Is that true? You say yes.
Then the app records the time, the distance and everything
like that to make it easier.

Speaker 2 (01:52):
Fascinating. Will this make it cheaper? Will it reduce the backlog?

Speaker 1 (01:57):
Well, if we had only one test, it would definitely
reduce costs and would mean that, you know, there was
more capacity in the system for focusing on the restricted
test if we if we saw this change. But I
think that that key thing has really got to be
focused on safety and are we doing things that are
actually going to reduce a really high crash rate right

(02:18):
amongst young people in New Zealand.

Speaker 2 (02:20):
Well, Dylan, good on you, thank you for joining us.
Dylan is the AA Road Safety spokesperson.

Speaker 1 (02:25):
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