Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:612;Page:9320] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 I congratulate the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee which I now chair on the work it has done on this bill. Like the two previous speakers I would like to acknowledge the work of Helen Duncan. I hope she is listening today to the outcome of the work that the committee has done. 
It is interesting to be able to follow a National Party speaker on a Land Transport Management Bill. Most of the National members are not old enough to remember National’s last attempts when it was in power but I have not forgotten. When I became the Minister of Transport I found a dusty room full of rubbish called “ 
Better Transport Better Roads 
”. That document was vilified by everybody in this country and there is only one brave soul on the Opposition side of the House who is still promoting it. He has been suspended from the National Party but he was still brave enough to get out there this year and tell Auckland people at a meeting I went to on the North Shore that that is the real answer. The National Party people who turned up to that meeting did not have a prayer; they did not have anything to say about transport to those interested local body people. Why? Because as with everything else the National Party does not yet have a policy on transport. National members say we should give them some time. They have been working on it for 15 years and they still have not come up with any answers—not a sausage. We can see that up and down the country after 9 long years of that party and a few of its cohorts being in power. There was a transport deficit in this country that people are still seeing and still bemoaning. 
This Government in 4 years already has a proud history and track record of overcoming many of those transport problems. What were they? Mr Key who will speak for the National Party will ask why we do not have efficiency right at the front of this bill. That will be in his speech. I offered some advice to Mr Key at the select committee. I said he should go to Northland and to the East Cape. This is where Governments told people to plant trees in order to become rich. Those people were told the trees would grow to maturity in about 20-odd years would then be cut down and taken away and the people would make a fortune. Well the theory was correct. The problem was that the previous National Government neglected to build any roads on which to transport the logs that were cut down in Northland and on the East Coast. Why? Because efficiency ruled National’s so-called transport policy. The only way to get a road built in the Northland and East Cape areas would have been if enough people had died on those roads. That was how that Government decided on the funding of roads—enough deaths on a road equalled a new road. 
If we went to Auckland where I live we could not travel very fast because the roads had become more and more clogged with 5 percent more traffic going on them every year. What was National’s solution? Nobody had died. People could not move because of the congestion so they were safe and that Government said it was sorry but it was not going to build a single project in Auckland in 9 years—and it did not except for a road for Murray McCully called the Albany to Puhoi realignment (ALPURT) to enable him to get to his Northland bach. That is why National built that road; it was pure pork-barrel politics. The previous National Government built that motorway to get people out of Auckland but forgot to join it to anything so that they could get to it. People had to spend an hour moving through Auckland’s snail-like traffic to get up to the brand new motorway built to enable Murray McCully to get to his holiday home in the north. Efficiency will be what the National Party says is missing from the purpose of this bill. I invite Mr Key to get out there do his job and head a little bit north where he will see what efficiency did to sensible decision-making. It was overwhelmed by the madness of the cost-benefit ratio system which made no sense to anybody in this country except for the National Party politicians who were too lazy to get on and design anything different. 
When I became the Minister of Transport I went around the country and listened to people. A Minister of Transport who listened! That was a new thing for local government and transport interests. They had not had one who did that for so long with Mr Williamson and Mrs Shipley that it was a very rare event to have somebody who was prepared to listen. Out of that listening came the policy that has been put into this bill by the current Minister and is now before the House. It will deal with a great many of the problems that transport faces and that New Zealanders face throughout this country. 
Again National rubbishes the fact that some money will be spent on public transport. When National was in power public transport funding was frozen for 5 years at a particular point in time. Why? Because the National Party’s position was: “Public transport is going to be a small difference and the projects that are on the books are very expensive.” Since we became the Government public transport funding in this country has doubled. We now have about 25 percent growth in the use of public transport. That is people on a bus on a train or on a ferry—not in a car clogging up a motorway. Opposition members say it is terrible that we are spending money on something other than a road. Well they would have people clogging up the motorways and moving nowhere rather than have the very valuable transport corridors in Wellington and Auckland used to take significant numbers of people and put them in trains instead. It is far friendlier to the environment and much better for the business traffic that is trying to get around those cities if more people use public transport. 
According to the National Party it is a crime to use the money to fund public transport and ease congestion. Where else in the world is that approach taken? Absolutely nowhere but in New Zealand under the National Party’s policy. Members should talk to the private sector operators who are running public transport. Stagecoach one of the big bus companies that operates internationally cannot believe the growth it is achieving in Auckland because it is so much better than anywhere else in the world. The company’s chairman regularly comes down here and is just open-mouthed at the results his company is getting in terms of carrying more people. More New Zealanders are using public transport. What is wrong with that? Absolutely nothing! The most common-sense approach to a roading system that is clogged is to get more people off it and using an alternative. That is far more efficient than to have everybody sit in cars all on their own clogging up a motorway and polluting the environment. We have to offer choice and that is what this bill is about. 
This bill is about looking for the sensible choices and the sensible choices are in many cases roads. That is why in Auckland right now there is motorway building like we have not been seen in Auckland for 15 years. The major choke point of the Auckland motorway system the “Spaghetti Junction” area is actually having work done on it. It had been left absolutely devoid of any plans—no money; nothing—by the previous National Government. National just said it was too hard to fix that choke point so it would go and build another road somewhere in the rest of the country because somebody had had a terrible accident on it. It was too hard for National to figure out how to solve that curly problem in the middle of Auckland. 
The people down on the Auckland waterfront said to me that they need a motorway to go down to the port. At the moment it stops about 3 kilometres short of it. That motorway junction is well under way; Mr Swain opened a major piece of it not so long ago. Trying to go to Auckland airport via the Puhinui way through Papatoetoe was a big problem. What is there now is a very new and very very efficient interchange which was badly needed. The plans for Auckland are many. Opposition members ask: “What about the rest of the country?”. Bill English said that if Aucklanders want more roading projects in Auckland then they should pay for them. He did not say that 5 years ago; he said that last February. So the message from Mr Sowry rings very loudly in Aucklanders’ ears compared with his leader’s snub to Auckland ratepayers and taxpayers. 
I see that on the weekend a wonderful road between Tauranga and Rotorua cutting 30 minutes from the travel time has just been opened. The local mayors applauded that as a wonderful project. So I say to Mr Brown that this Government is looking after that part of the country. This Government has also listened to the people of the Waikato who said the cart track we have called State Highway 1 between Auckland and Waikato is no good. The previous National Government left it for so much time while so many people died on it that it looked more like a cemetery than a State highway. Now I drive from Auckland to Waikato and hear all the grizzles about the roadworks that go on for kilometre after kilometre. 
This is a good bill. It is practical and it backs up the Government’s actions with a law that will take us into the future. I congratulate the Minister and the select committee on their fine work. This is a forward-looking bill and is balanced in its outlook. It takes common-sense solutions and it will be good for all New Zealanders long into the future. When that  
Better Transport Better Roads 
 document is in a museum as an oddity this Government will be seen as having got on done the work and listened to the people in local government and in the transport industry who knew what they were talking about. As a result we have a very fine bill for this Parliament to pass.