Hughes Gareth: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Hughes Gareth: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:674;Page:20428] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Chairperson Tisch. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. On Saturday night some 18000 Aucklanders boarded a train to Eden Park to enjoy a good game of rugby. It was good to see Dan Carter practising that drop goal which might come in handy in the Rugby World Cup. It was good to see the rail network coping with such a huge number of people. But we saw delays of 30 minutes sometimes longer because the bottleneck in Auckland is the Britomart Transport Centre. Of course we can get only 12000 people through the Britomart Transport Centre; the capacity problem is that it is a dead-end station. The massive missed opportunity of the 1920s 1950s 1970s and 2000s was not to construct the central business district rail link but to double the capacity of the station which would have transformed downtown Auckland and transformed the rail network. The context of course is that we have the Rugby World Cup which is a fantastic opportunity. But people will be disappointed when they see our dinky little diesel trains no railway to the airport and no plan to progress Auckland’s major asset. 
Faced with an economic and ecological crisis this Government however has gone down a road to nowhere borrowing billions of dollars for its expensive motorways and acting as a roadblock to the smart transport alternatives that we need. In fact the Government’s plans are failing to deliver economic development or sustainability. What we need is a smart transport policy that delivers jobs and clean green economic development. The Minister of Transport asked me today what a smart transport policy is and I say it is a balanced budget that looks across all the transport modes it is resilient it is future-proofed and lastly it gives people options. When we face high oil prices this Government says we should buy a hybrid or an electric car. Not many Kiwis I know can go out and do that. So I asked the Minister why he is acting as such a roadblock to Auckland’s aspirations to develop its transport network. 
Of course the problem stems from the fact that this Government refuses to fund Auckland’s ambitions. The pantry is bare because the Government has spent all the money on State highways. It refuses to fund regional fuel taxes which is Auckland’s own revenue stream and it is leaving it up to rates or potentially asset sales in the future. Of course on top of this we have a significant funding shortfall recently uncovered for Auckland transport. We have seen this Government ramp up the rail access charges. We have seen it pile on the interest for the electric multiple units and we constantly hear in this House that the Government is spending $1.6 billion on rail. Yet at the same time we have also seen massive patronage growth of 21 percent in the last year. 
The big picture coming from the Government in the last few months has been the Government policy statement for transport funding planned for the next 10 years. Again what we are seeing is considerably unbalanced. For every dollar that this Government is spending on all the walking and cycling projects and on all the buses and trains it is borrowing $6 and pouring it into State highways. If we look across the OECD we see that we are spending 82 percent of our transport budget on roads. In the UK that figure is only 55 percent. In Sweden which actually has an oil reduction strategy it is down to 45 percent. We are seeing the Government spending an average of only $372 million on public transport infrastructure over those 10 years yet we are seeing a total spend of $19.3 billion for State highways. That is absolutely unbalanced. We are seeing cuts to some activity classes road safety and planning and something that I cannot quite fathom: we will see better data recording coming from the Government policy statement by having only one activity class in the future. 
The context of course is that we have falling road traffic across the country. We are seeing oil prices increase. We see that being the major driver of inflation which is now at the highest rate that we have had in 20 years. We have also seen new research findings come out in only the last month that 700 Aucklanders are dying prematurely as a result of the air pollution stemming from cars. The report from Auckland Council’s Kristen Webster the principal specialist air-quality expert found that we are seeing 700 premature deaths and 1.16 million days being lost due to poor health. We should be focusing on those issues in our transport plan. Instead we are seeing a not smart transport plan from this Government to borrow billions of dollars to pour into expensive motorways when we are seeing traffic falling we are seeing the price of petrol increasing and we are seeing patronage on public transport increasing by more than 20 percent. We are seeing a monument in tar and asphalt to 1950s transport speaking—a colossus of roads. 
Lastly the solutions we need are transport choice and an inspiring vision for our future. The Green Party view is that we are wasting billions of dollars on expensive motorways locking us into a car and oil - dependent future. We need to set a moratorium on motorways. We need to redirect the transport budget into a balanced transport system that takes into account all the transport modes including buses walking cycling and sea freight. That is the answer.