Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:613;Page:9666] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 It is interesting to listen to the Opposition debate this part which is really the guts of the bill. This is where National should have had Don Brash speak because he could have talked about the real guts of the bill instead of wasting his time on the title. But I suppose he will learn sooner or later. 
The two previous speakers from National and ACT should check their in-trays every now and then for documents from the organisation that funds transport—it is called Transfund. The previous speaker talked about economic development. We can look at the latest edition October 2003 and consider the people of Northland and that very good group of mayors up in Northland. I send my greetings to them particularly to the Mayor of the Kaipara District Council who took me in a helicopter with the Mayor of the Whangarei District Council over Northland’s roading problems. He said there were a lot of forests growing there but no roads to handle them; that tourism was now burgeoning but that people had to drive on gravel roads. What did those people get from the previous National Government to fix that problem? Zilch zero zip nothing! Yet National Party MPs up there just take them for granted. 
There are eight more regional development projects for Northland dealing with the problems of tourism and forestry—the industries that are sharing old broken-down dangerous gravel roads. They looked at trains and did not reject them out of sight but said it could not be done in that part of Northland and everybody agreed. Transfund is funding it. Then I turn the page of this document and see that the Napier-Gisborne rail link is to be funded with $164000. The very poor road between Napier and Gisborne which cannot handle very big heavy trucks will get some relief. Local people are so keen on this link that the Hawke’s Bay Regional Council and the Gisborne District Council are putting up $100000 of ratepayers’ money. Will we get any complaints from motorists about that terrible use of their funds which will put heavy road traffic on to rail where it belongs and not through that windy dangerous piece of road? Will the motorists who travel that road complain that that is a misuse of their funds? 
Mark Peck 
: I don’t think so. 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: Absolutely not! They do not want to get stuck on those narrow dangerous windy roads behind big trucks. They would rather see heavy freight on rail. They would say that that was a good sensible common-sense use of their money. The National Party says no it is not cost-effective and efficient to do that. That is why in its 9 long years in Government it built nothing to solve the problem up in Auckland. Why? Because it had a cost-benefit system that equated a death to $2 million and lots of people were dying elsewhere. The time delay and its cost-benefit measurement did not measure up against road deaths so Auckland just got nothing. The record of the National Party with its love of efficiency was 22 percent 23 percent and 21 percent spending. It let Auckland go; it did not bother. There was nothing sensible about it. 
I will give members one example and they will be very interested in it. The Auckland Harbour Bridge could have had high-occupancy vehicle lanes to relieve a lot of the pressure but nobody would do it. Why not? Because it would have interfered with the cost-benefit ratio on the North Shore busway. They wanted the busway because it was absolutely sensible to have it but if in the meantime they put a high-occupancy vehicle lane on the Auckland Harbour Bridge then they would never have been able to build the busway. That was the madness that National oversaw for 9 years. That was the economic efficiency that Dr Brash is so proud of and that Mr Key and Mr Sowry will speak about. What a shambles! National did not use the opportunities when it was in Government for 9 years and that is why voters rejected it and chucked it out. 
Members on this side of the Chamber will use the money in the best possible way and that is why we are putting these words in the bill—because we want to see decent roads to deal with logging traffic and tourism in Northland. We have to spend money on that. The Government put in 100 percent of the funding of roads in Northland. It did not have to get a cent from the ratepayers that Dr Lockwood Smith is supposed to represent. Did his ratepayers have to spend any money on that? Not a cent! He says that building decent roads in his electorate to deal with tourist and logging traffic—which should not be mixing together on gravel roads—is a terrible waste of money. He also says that we should not dare to take heavy traffic off a skinny little dangerous road between Gisborne and Napier because that is not a sensible thing to do with taxpayers’ money. People will be laughing at the National Party in those parts of New Zealand.