Beaumont Carol: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Beaumont Carol: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5350] 
CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Deputy Speaker. I offer my apologies to the previous speaker David Bennett for interrupting his speech but he was supposedly speaking on the Road User Charges Amendment Bill and I intend to look at that bill in a bit of detail. But before I do that I note that the previous speaker the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which I am a member of has just given the most bizarre speech I have heard in my parliamentary career so far. I honestly do not quite know how he managed to get the topic of communism into that speech but let me stand here with some pride and say that yes Labour is the party that believes in fairness social justice and sustainability. Frankly if that is in comparison with a Government that gives tax cuts to the rich and increases funding for private schools at the same time as reducing funding for very important things like adult and community education then I really do wonder. 
Contrary to what the previous speaker said the Labour Party did invest a significant amount in both roads and public transport. The previous Labour Government did a lot in the transport area. As much as the previous speaker may try to rewrite history he will find if he looks at funding for roading in Auckland for example—which was absolutely ignored by the previous National Government—he will see that significant changes were made under the previous Government. The current National Government has of course moved the emphasis in transport funding away from public transport and on to roads. And that gets me back to road-user charges. The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee read submissions on the Road User Charges Amendment Bill and that was because there was not enough time for anybody to actually come and present their submissions to the committee so that we could debate the issues and ask questions. 
The bill amends the Road User Charges Act 1977 in order to achieve two outcomes. The first is the exemption of light electric motor vehicles from the requirement to pay road user charges as my colleague Darien Fenton outlined previously and the second is the provision of notice of increases to road-user charges with the road-user licences for heavy motor vehicles expiring 1 month after an increase comes into effect. The select committee examined the bill and recommended that it be passed and it did not recommend any amendments to the House. Advice was taken from Ministry of Transport officials during that process. A number of issues were raised by submitters in written submissions. The Motor Industry Association suggested that if the road-user charges system continued in its present form consideration would need to be given to either an exemption or a modified rate for plug-in hybrid vehicles. That is something Labour agreed with. Secondly committee members had some concerns around the drafting of new section 21(2) inserted by clause 6. Again we agreed that the wording was a little bit unclear in respect of whether licences issued before the increase took effect are subject to expiry and we dealt with that. The third area was as Ms Fenton has already outlined the time frame for exemption of electric vehicles. 
Why is this legislation being rushed through? That is one of the questions we need to ask ourselves as Darien Fenton mentioned previously. The report-back period was just under 1 month with a 2-week adjournment included in that and still there has been no explanation for it. It is all very well for Government members to jump up and down and say the Government is an action-orientated Government. Only in very limited circumstances does the Government need to rush through legislation it seems to me. During my relatively short period in this House my experience of the select committee process has been a very positive one. I think it is a very fine feature of our system. The submissions that are made to select committees the opportunity for people to come along and make oral submissions to a committee and the ability of select committees to then question those submitters are very important parts of our parliamentary process in New Zealand. It is a process that provides the people of this country with confidence in the system. It gives them the right to be heard on legislation that is being put through the House. I have no understanding at all about why this bill is being rushed through and why people have not been able to make oral submissions. That means we do not get the proper scrutiny of legislation that one would expect to see from this Parliament. There has been a bit of a common practice it seems of rushing things through under this National Government. So I sincerely urge members across the House to make every effort to ensure that legislation is given proper scrutiny. 
 I will focus the rest of my speech on the road-user charges part of this bill. Labour instigated the road-user charges review because there had not been a review for 18 years. During that period of time as members might expect the ratio of trucks to cars had changed enormously as had the weights being carried by those trucks. The upshot of that was a greater inequity between trucking firms and private vehicle motorists over who should pay for road maintenance. Darien Fenton outlined to us that more is happening in that space that the Government is looking at allowing further heavier trucks on our roads increasing the damage that trucks do. The Government also looked at initiatives like Sea Change which provided a strategy for moving heavy freight by sea using clean technology—unlike what the previous speaker David Bennett was talking about—and completely wiped its hands of them. The Government said it was not going to have a bar of that strategy. So the Government will get rid of strategies like Sea Change which would potentially take really heavy freight off the roads and it will instead put heavier trucks on our roads. 
I will go back to the history of the road-user charges review. When Labour was in Government we faced the situation where truck drivers got extremely agitated about the putting up of road-user charges with no notice. But that was done for a very important reason: on the previous occasion when notice had been given there was a great deal of purchasing of road-user charge certificates. A large amount of Crown revenue was lost through forward-purchasing. This bill clearly tries to put in place some sort of middle ground. I think that is appropriate. I think it is appropriate that there is notice. I think it is appropriate that a real effort is made to ensure that there is no bleeding out of Government revenue. Goodness knows we all know it is important in these hard economic times that Government revenue is maintained. The previous Minister of Transport Annette King met with Road Transport Forum New Zealand over that whole process. She said that the Government would work with them to put in place a process that was fair. The objective as I mentioned was not only to increase road-user charges without a great loss of revenue to the Crown but also to give sufficient notice to truckies. This bill has finally come in and it has arisen from the inquiry initiated by the Hon Annette King. I will make a side point. There was a lot of huff and puff before about this Government being action-orientated. Well in fact this is yet another bill that is effectively the result of the previous Government. 
I will just finish up by talking about the fact that people who purchase under the provisions of this bill their road-user charge certificate in the notice period allowed prior to the price increase will have only 1 month to use them. The bill will close the loophole whereby people could go out and pre-purchase a lot of road-user charges at the old rate use them indefinitely and thereby save themselves money. I think it is a good common-sense provision. It provides some fairness and equity all round and of course that is what Labour is about. It is not about the  
Communist Manifesto 
 I say to Mr David Bennett; it is about fairness equity and sustainability.