Don't get me wrong, I understand why drink driving is illegal and have no issues with that ... But if you know, why is there a different BAC level depending on if you are on your own licence or on your P's is it purely a diving experience thing
Because alcohol would affect you the same regardless of what licence you hold
All good, and I agree. The licence makes no difference to the physical impairment you have, the amount of alcohol does.
It’s a hang up from the days before log books and so forth required to progress from P licences to Open licences. It was presumed P platers being less experienced would be less able to handle a BAC of 0.05%.
Back in the day, you held your P’s for 3 years and progressed automatically to your Open. Now there is much more to going to it, and ever more complicated rules around coming back from licence suspension / disqualification and so forth.
Personally in a weird way, I think that limit sets people up to fail, from a court perspective. There is no scaled level of offending with say, using a handheld mobile phone or with respect to drug driving (Cannabis, Methamphetamine etc).
Yet alcohol concentrations vary from the unofficial 0.02% for P platers to the official 0.05% limit for Open licenced drivers. It leads to a situation where people start to try and work out what their limit might be or where people automatically assume they will be fine, as Segeyaro likely did and end up in court.
To be honest, I think it would be fairer to make one limit for drivers. 0.05% for Open licences and 0.00% for everyone else. All professional drivers now must be 0.00% and there is no apparent misunderstandings of this rule, but the changes between licence classification and limits and so forth I think is confusing and entirely unnecessary.
As it seems 007 could attest, 0.02% or less is such a low level of alcohol present, some reach it with less than 1 light beer being consumed.
To me, make it black and white and come up with some regulatory diversionary scheme for those low levels of alcohol reading. We also are required to issue a licence suspension notice when charging for drink driving. In the first instance obviously to prevent people drink driving again (legally, not physically obviously) but then as a preventative measure to try to have people avoid drink driving in the first instance, which is in place until they attend court.
The diversionary scheme could have the same thing. The low level drink driver had their licence suspended, until they attend and complete the diversionary session. Puts a regulatory penalty on the offender (ie: no licence for a few weeks / month), should help free up courts from having to deal with minor matters and not send otherwise decent people to court.
Under 0.05% the first time, you get a 28 day suspension of your licence and attendance at a diversion scheme. Over 0.05% or 2 or more under 0.05% results and you get to see what all the fuss about Magistrates Courts is about...
Make it nice and simple for everyone.
