Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:650;Page:18640] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I want to carry on a little from where I got started in the first couple of calls with regard to why National has put up a series of amendments to the Public Transport Management Bill. I make it absolutely clear now that if the Government were to support the amendments we have put up we would support the legislation. I want to make it even clearer. I believe—I truly truly believe—that the amendments I have put up are a complete and absolute reflection of what the Government agreed to at Cabinet in February 2007. I say that because I have looked at the Cabinet minute I have looked carefully at what it says and I believe that my amendments reflect exactly what Cabinet agreed to. This is not the National Party running its own agenda or—as some of the grubby little comments I have heard coming from some members suggest—some bus company’s agenda. I say to the Minister that if she can find anything in the amendments I have put up that is inconsistent with Cabinet’s agreement in February 2007 then I will accept that we are wrong. 
I repeat so that people listening out there can understand what I am now saying that our amendments are to try to implement what I think was a proper decision—that is option B which then got cannibalised during the process of drafting up the legislation to an option B+ and is now in danger of getting cannibalised even further to becoming option C which is what the Greens want. 
For the sake of the poor old drive time listeners out there who will not have a clue what these options are let me try in a nutshell to give members of this House and the drive time audience a bit of a lesson about what is going on here. There are two forms of bus service in any city. If we take Auckland for example we see that there are those we call commercial services where a private sector operator like the very good Howick and Eastern Buses in my electorate—and even in yours I think Mr Chairperson—operates. They decide that they will run those services because they can make some money by carrying passengers and charging them for it. They are commercial services and for those commercial services they get no subsidy whatsoever. They just do it like any other company out there like a taxi company or a supermarket decides to operate its business. 
Then there are what we call contracted services. I say to those members of the public who understand how the public transport system works that there are specific routes and specific times of day on those routes where it is not commercially viable for a bus company to operate. If it did it would just lose money and go broke—no one would do it. So there needs to be some form of a public passenger transport subsidy paid for those routes. 
Again National is fully supportive of that. We understand that if one wants a viable integrated across-the-network operation one cannot just have buses running between 7 and 9 in the morning and then suddenly nothing until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So the regional councils are given very large sums of money—$350 million I think in this year’s Budget—to use as public transport subsidies. They go out and say that they want to contract with bus companies to provide certain services and in return they will pay a per-passenger subsidy in order to make it viable. 
I want members of the House to understand that those are two very distinct worlds. There is a commercial world where companies put some skin in the game where they invest in their own buses where they decide what they will do and where they go out and charge what fares they like; and then there are the contracted services where the Government or by way of its proxy Government agency the regional councils says that it wants certain contracted services and it will buy them by paying subsidies. 
There is nothing wrong with those two worlds. What is wrong is the degree to which this legislation will now come in as heavy-handed jackboot legislation—and if we go to option C it will not only be heavy-handed jackboot legislation but it will be almost Trotskyite-type stuff—where we will be able to dictate to a private sector bus company not just the stuff that we are contracting with them and paying them a subsidy for. Again that is quite proper and quite right—he who pays the piper should call the tune and if I am the regional council with several tens of millions of dollars of subsidy to subsidise the route then I should have that power. But this legislation is also looking to at least encroach into the stuff that is not being contracted. If option C from the Greens gets in it will give the regional councils total authoritarian power to dictate to a private sector operator who has put his own money at risk and who has built his own business. 
I will finish this speech quite quickly—it will be my last call on this part. All I want to say to the Minister—I am sorry if it sounds like a cracked record but I repeat again—is that we are not trying to get the National Party’s view through these amendments. The changes I have put forward by way of my quite extensive amendments which have had a lot of thought and work go into them— 
Hon Annette King 
: Ha ha! 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Well the Minister laughs. Basically if she thinks my amendments are not worth supporting she is saying that Cabinet which decided on these very issues back in February 2007 was a bunch of dunderheads. This will be really good—I ask those people listening to the debate tonight to listen carefully when the Minister takes the call and to listen to her tell us why my proposed amendments are not a reflection of what Cabinet agreed to. 
There is one last bit that we will get into a lot more in the debate on Part 2 but again I go back to the process. You see when the Regulations Review Committee wrote to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which never received that correspondence it suggested some amendments that the committee might like to consider. I understand why if those amendments were as simple as “delete clause 10” that would not need any deliberation or consideration—it is just saying that clause 10 is wrong and to delete it. If that is the sort of recommendation that had come to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee I accept that the Minister is right and I accept that the chairperson is right: we could have just done it by a lunchtime meeting and said “Well they say ‘take out clause 10; insert this; delete that’.” But the recommendations from the Regulations Review Committee have some things of a nature that I think members of the committee needed to put some work into. An amendment to clause 10(1)(a) was: “clarify the relationship between controls adopted under clause 12 and regional public transport plans to ensure that controls are subject to a consultation procedure before they are adopted.” 
So the recommendation was not to “delete clause 10” or “add the following two words”. It was a recommendation of a very general nature which the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee should have had an opportunity to sit down to consider and ask how best it could clarify that relationship. It is a nebulous recommendation quite broad and far-reaching—and there is more. Yes the committee went on to say we could amend clause 12 to include provisions but it then said we could insert some criteria into clause 52(a)(ii) to again clarify the circumstances in which a commercial service may be exempt from these controls. 
I say again to the Minister in the chair the Hon Annette King that those words are not definitive. They need some thought. How do we clarify that? Members of the select committee who had considered this legislation and listened to all the submissions should have had the opportunity to sit for one sitting day—given that this has been in the pipeline since at least February of last year—and ask how those words could be clarified. 
Some other recommendations that came from the Regulations Review Committee were far more definitive and I think they are fine. One recommendation is to delete clause 10(1)(j) unless a clear need for expeditious amendments to clause 10 by regulations is demonstrated. I think that is fair enough. Another recommendation is to amend clause 12 to include provisions for a merits-based appeal against the imposition of a control by an affected person. Well that is interesting. I do not think it is all that definitive. I think there may be members of this House who have a different view on what provisions could go into that. 
I repeat that this is a very sad day for the democratic process. I ask the Minister and we will watch her like a hawk on this question whether my amendments reflect what her Cabinet agreed to—not the National Party the bus company or anybody else whom the dreadful accusations might come flying at us from. Keith Locke from the Greens should listen carefully to this. This is what Cabinet agreed to in February and I have put up those amendments in order to say that if that is where we go—and we agree with what Labour members put together as a Cabinet and the minute reflects it—then National will actually support this bill in both the Committee stage and the third reading. 
We were told about the stalking horse. Because Peter Brown made it clear he would not support option C we were told almost that night: “Oh guess what? The Minister is doing a deal with the Greens. They’re going to stick up amendments to get option C. The Minister will make out that she had to go with it you know because the Greens are doing it.” 
Hon Annette King 
: No we won’t. We’ll just go with it. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: The Minister says they will go with it. Labour members are going with it so now they have circumvented their old mates in New Zealand First whom they no longer need. They can slap them on the scrapheap and say “OK you are not supporting us on this.” We knew all along that option C was going to come either through a Supplementary Order Paper from the Minister because that most certainly was being considered—