English Bill: Public Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
English Bill: Public Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18242. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (Deputy Leader—National) 
: 
 In the context of the last couple of weeks I did not think I would be saying this but I will say it now: “Thank you New Zealand First.” It may be part of a rotten coalition that is going down the tubes but it has saved New Zealand from the extreme Labour vision for public transport. Just so the House is quite clear option C was a grubby little deal done between the member for Maungakiekie and the chairman of the Auckland Regional Council Mike Lee with the Prime Minister’s oversight which would effectively have given Mike Lee direct control of not just hundreds of millions of dollars of public subsidy but also of hundreds of millions of dollars of private assets.  
I do not quite know what other people think but my experience of the Auckland Regional Council is that it is not the most flexible responsive and responsible entity in the country. New Zealand First saw what a huge problem this would be and it vetoed option C which is what the Labour Party wanted and we should be grateful for that. I tell members who else should be grateful for it: passengers. I have listened to Government members who have now given two speeches about public transport and they never mentioned the word “passengers”. We have heard all about bureaucrats and all about plans and all about tickets and all about what great legislation it is but we have not heard anything about the people who use public transport.  
Even if one goes with the bill which is option B+—that is option B with some of the features of option C—it is still a planner’s dream. If we go with this the only way people will be able to get a bus service from one part of Auckland to somewhere else is by turning up to the meetings knowing how to make submissions and sitting through a 2-year process to get the regional public transport plan changed—and we know how difficult that will be—and then hoping that some bureaucrat somewhere agrees that a person should be allowed to have a bus service. Even though it is completely commercially viable planners have to agree that it has to fit in with their nice neat tidy plan about how the world should work. Then one might get a new bus service.  
This is at a time when oil prices have gone through the roof and public demand for public transport is higher than it has ever been and growing faster than it has ever been. So just when it has to be innovative and dynamic Parliament will take control of public transport in Auckland. It actually works fine everywhere else. Wellington and Christchurch are running just fine under the current rules. In fact there is quite a bit of innovation going on. In Wellington the Snapper card is really going to take off. It did not need the Government to pass legislation to get the Snapper card and the inevitably integrated ticketing which is a good idea if people want to use it. But people in Auckland will get a new bus route when the Auckland Regional Council gets round to changing its plans to a 2-year or 3-year process.  
What about the people who are most dependent on public transport? They do not have the time or the money to be public busybodies going off to give submissions and sitting through long boring meetings because they are working every hour in the day that that household can work to keep body and soul together and to pay their bills. That is the reality of people—passengers users—whom the Government has not talked about in 20 minutes of speeches on the parliamentary consideration of this bill. The Government thinks public transport is for the people who plan it. It thinks public transport is for consultants. It thinks public transport is there to go down the road of the large failed integrated ticketing projects in Australia which in Sydney and Melbourne have fallen apart. This is exactly the vision that the Auckland Regional Council is trying to pursue—to spend $100 million on it when it has failed in Sydney. The Wellington Regional Council has put in the Snapper card at no public cost. It has been successful and the council did not need legislation to pass it.  
This is a Labour Party dream: how to make sure that we turn our public transport service into all those things that are the worst aspects of public service. Right now our public transport works because it is a combination of public subsidy some legislative oversight and private sector operators who run it who are able to innovate who are able to start new bus routes and who are able to see public transport not just as a utility but as a service for the public that should operate the way the public want it to work.  
For instance if one lives in the wrong place in Auckland where the planners are dead keen on this new urbanism and intensification the planners think everyone should live in high-rise buildings next to a railway station. Well even if they are right—and I think they are wrong; that is not the right carbon or environmental outcome—most people do not think so. The planners are trying to direct our public transport systems to do something that will not suit most people as in 95 percent of people because 95 percent of people do not live in high-rise buildings next to big car parks and railway stations which is the model. They do not; they live out in the suburbs often a long way from work; and with oil prices the way they are they need new and innovative public transport. This bill is designed for political control for inertia for endless complicated planning processes. It is designed to privilege those people who have the capacity to take part in this bureaucratic morass.  
I can tell members that the new urbanist planners will have much more influence on the shape of public transport under this bill than the people who use the service—the 1 million Aucklanders who want good and better public transport. And up to now they have been able to get it. The bus-only route to the North Shore appears very expensive. It is mostly empty but in terms of public transport measures it has been quite successful. It did not need this legislation to do it.  
The other effect of this legislation will be if we are not careful a downgrading in investment. You know one of the reasons people do not like using public transport is that it is just not attractive. In the past the buses and the trains have been dowdy and smelly so people avoid them if they can. That is often the case—it is as simple as that. 
There need to be people running these services so that investment in quality public transport and a good experience will earn some rewards from that investment. That is how we will get buses painted in a way that is attractive ticketing systems that are easy to use and reliable and integrated ticketing across whole systems—when there is a financial incentive for success. This bill is heading in exactly the other direction because Labour believes that anyone—[ 
Interruption 
] There we go. Anyone who makes a profit must have ripped someone off; that is what Labour believes. This bill is designed to create the lowest common denominator. Instead of a dynamic and responsive public transport system that responds to the fact that oil prices are going through the roof we are going to get a stodgy lowest-common-denominator over-planned over-politicised public transport system. It may be the dream of Labour to spend millions and millions and to pass laws to satisfy the planners and the bureaucrats but National is with the passengers. We want a system that responds to the needs of the passengers—the people who get on the people who use it and the people who cannot afford to fill their cars. I can tell members that no one in Auckland believes that the Auckland Regional Council is interested in the passengers and I can tell Sue Moroney that no one in Auckland believes that Labour is interested in them. They know that Labour is much more interested in the Auckland Regional Council getting bigger and fatter than in people getting better public transport. That is why National is opposed to this bill.