Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. This is a really good bill. It's a move in the right direction. I have to start by congratulating the Hon Michael Wood for all the effort that led to this bill finally coming to the House and to the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and all the members—Shanan Halbert and all the Labour members. I think that we did really good work at the select committee and made further improvements to the bill.Ultimately New Zealanders want better public transport. They do. We've just seen a poll of New Zealanders which said 72 percent wanted to see the priority as more investment in public transport rail and coastal shipping; not new roads. People in New Zealand are crying out for options that don't force them into using a car for every single trip; spending $8000 a year on average owning and operating a car. They want more people-friendly cities where their kids can have more independence to get around as we once had. We can do all of that.Now the most outrageous thing to me is that the members speaking on the right say they care about economic efficiency and outcomes and yet they keep proposing failed models that won't get those outcomes they say they want.Let's just have a little bit of history about this bill how we ended up having to come to this bill. In the 1990s we had a National Government that forced local councils to sell off bus operations and to privatise the operation of bus services and that led to the lowest level of public transport use in the history of New Zealand really in the mid-1990s. Of course that's only just started getting built back up particularly after the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority—Hon Judith Collins: The 1990s! Oh dear oh dear 1990s! How could she know?Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I've seen the graph with the data. I mean I know this is a huge mystery to the National Party that you could actually look at evidence and data; they just rely on their reckons based on their experience. But I actually look at data the Hon Judith Collins and the data shows that public transport was at an absolute low in the 1990s after being at incredibly high levels in the 1950s when we had electric trams across many of our cities. But anyway I digress.After the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority we started to see some improvements to public transport in Auckland. I mean Wellington because it had its rail network electrified a long time ago actually maintained relatively high levels of public transport and had clean electric trolley buses running until 2018—it's a shame that those got ripped out and I did my best to stop that.Before Steven Joyce came in there was the Public Transport Management Act which was passed by the Labour-led Government. What's interesting about that is they brought three options to the House and there was option one option two and option three. Option three gave the regional councils or the public transport authorities the most power to use the data to plan a good public transport network that would serve the people of their communities. Interestingly Simon Court probably doesn't know this but Jeanette Fitzsimons called up Rodney Hide and the ACT Party and convinced them that even though they were kind of generally opposed to public transport that if public money was going into public transport it made sense to get most value for the community out of that public money. That's why the ACT Party supported option three which actually the Labour Government wasn't supporting but option three ended up passing which was great and then National got in.Here's the thing about National: they can't seem to differentiate between what is good for private business and what is good for the community and people. That makes it very hard for them because ultimately they think that rich people getting richer profits being privatised and maximised—that's what they're really here for; that's what they're here for. They like to say that it will benefit the community but we know we have decades of evidence that that's not true and I think the average person on the street knows that that when the supermarkets are banking $1 million a day in excess profit that's not good for people shopping at the supermarket. And when bus operators are making profits—we don't even know their level of profit—that means people aren't getting the best value for money out of that investment in public transport services.So the way we can do public transport better is by enabling more public ownership particularly of strategic assets like bus depots. I don't think there's a single person on this side of the House that's been involved in public transport operations but I can tell you that the strategic location of a bus depot makes it effectively a monopoly for one operator the owner of that bus depot when bidding for certain contracts because it would take too long to try to run more buses to that area. Therefore you don't actually get competition. The whole idea of trying to get proper competition of what is a natural monopoly—a public transport network—flies in the face of any economic rationality. But of course we do know that the Hon Steven Joyce failed all his economic papers at university and got a degree in zoology so I guess that's why he didn't grasp that concept and also the concept that it's difficult to commercialise the benefits of investment in public transport. The people who benefit the most are not the people riding on those public transport services it's not the people operating the public transport services; it is the people who are using the road who have less congestion because every person on a bus takes up way less room than another car. The major thing that is making it difficult for people to drive around on our roads in cars and trucks is other people in cars. If those people in cars who want to take public transport—and we know a whole bunch of them do—if we provide a frequent reliable effective and affordable service they will take it and they always have; they always have. Everywhere we've invested in good public transport like the Northern Busway which the Green Party advocated for and the National Party opposed; like electrification of Auckland's rail network which is how I joined the Green Party and campaigned for that massive success; like the City Rail Link which I tried to convince the Hon Gerry Brownlee to invest in sooner and he dragged his heels and eventually the National Government realised they had to do it but it was five years too late—all of that is successful investment in public transport that benefits everyone including our climate.But we are not going to get better public transport through allowing private operators like Infratil who owned NZ Bus and flogged off the incredibly strategically important Kilbirnie bus depot which was originally a public asset; they sold that off they sold their bus operations to some overseas equities fund—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Who sold it to them? Labour that's who.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: No; it was—Hon Gerry Brownlee: 1989; they did.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well OK. Therefore the 1980s Labour Government—Hon Gerry Brownlee: Get the history right.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Would that member please desist with the barrage of interjections the Hon Gerry—Hon Gerry Brownlee: I was just helping.ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): No. The member will stand withdraw and apologise.Hon Gerry Brownlee: Withdraw and apologise.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: We can all agree that the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand were a failed experiment in neoliberalism and the idea that the private sector is always better and that allowing private—Simon Court: No ACT doesn't agree. No.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: OK the ACT Party doesn't agree with that. They're in denial about many things including the reality and threat of climate change and of the failure of neoliberalism to deliver benefits to everyone. That's why Roger Douglas is denouncing the current ACT Party.New Zealanders want positive solutions. The reality is: investment in public transport for public good benefits everyone. It benefits the people who use that public transport it connects our communities it benefits business it reduces the fiscal burden on households who have to own as many cars and it enables more people to move at peak times. So enabling public ownership of strategic assets is long overdue whether that's the vehicles themselves or bus depots. It will help us get more efficient services and provide better value to the community for our investment in public transport. That's why this bill is a very good bill. I'm very sorry to hear that the National and ACT Parties won't be supporting it but I do think it is a lesson for the people at home that if you vote for either of these two parties you are not going to get practical transport solutions; you're going to get a failed ideology that cannot understand the concept of public investment for public good of protecting our environment our climate and our health; to understand all of these things are interrelated and we can make better choices that will benefit us now and in the long term.