Editorial: Third-party cover should be made mandatory

Surely Transport Minister Steven Joyce is not serious when he suggests the Government is reconsidering the introduction of compulsory third-party vehicle insurance because most people have it. Officials have given him a survey in which only 7.6 per cent of respondents admitted to having no car insurance or were unaware whether they did.

Leaving aside the reliability of the survey, the results say nothing about the need for a law. Third-party insurance covers damage the insurer might cause to another vehicle. It is, or should be, a minimum obligation every road-user owes to all others. The fact that most people recognise this without compulsion is no reason not to make it so.

On that principle, there would be no reason to legislate against all sorts of offences that the vast majority of people by nature would not commit.

A survey of voluntary compliance has so little to say about the merits of compulsion that it is a mystery why it was commissioned. Mr Joyce said that while its result "does not mean we are ruling out compulsory third-party insurance, it does mean the proposal may not deliver the benefits that might have been expected".

It sounds like the survey was a bureaucratic cost-benefit exercise, an impression reinforced by the fact that it was conducted as part of a road-safety policy review that last year produced a set of mostly sound proposals for public discussion.

Third-party vehicle insurance was one of them. It has long been a mystery that it has not been mandatory. This survey suggests that compulsory third-party insurance, like the long overdue cellphone ban, has been a casualty of transport officials' benefit criteria. Mr Joyce imposed common sense on cellphones. He should do so again.