Key John: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Key John: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:613;Page:9678] 
JOHN KEY (National—Helensville) 
: 
 The Minister as he said just touched on the guts of the bill which will allow generic tolling in this country. Well that is the spin and that is all that will be spinning. Mark my words: no tyres will be spinning on toll roads in New Zealand as a result of this legislation. 
The Minister predicted that we would be opposed to this part because of the need to have a free alternative route. He needs to do his research properly. Every financier who came before the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and there were many—said to us time and time again that they had had huge experience in funding such operations overseas. We had people from Australia who had funded the Sydney tunnel and the Victoria ring route people from the United Kingdom and financiers from all over the world who told us time and time again that if there was a free alternative the toll road would be used only at periods of heavy traffic and that there would not be enough money generated to fund the road. Those are the simple facts of life. 
I might add that Standard and Poor’s released a report some months ago that looked at all the problems with funding toll roads. The report found that in 90 percent of all cases people who were putting up toll roads over-predicted the income they would get—and that was when there was not a free alternative. The banks themselves had to write down that kind of funding because they could not rely on it. 
The Land Transport Management Bill will not be the solution to Auckland’s problems. I was absolutely stunned that the day after this bill came back to the House for its second reading I read in the  
New Zealand Herald 
 that Transit was telling the country it was releasing its 1-year study into an alternative harbour crossing for Auckland. First it told us that it would take 16 years to build—5 years for planning and 11 years for construction. What a joke it is to take 16 years to build a bridge that would be about a quarter of the size of a bridge built very recently from Copenhagen to Sweden which is 16 kilometres long. That bridge was built in 7 years and we are talking about 16 years. Will that work out under this Land Transport Management Bill? I think not. The predicted cost of the Auckland bridge is $3 billion. The reality is that if that bridge were ever built it would take longer than 16 years and would cost $5 billion. 
Members should think about these figures. New-road spending in Auckland is roughly $151 million a year on State highways—and that is calculated on the new revamped numbers. That bridge alone would cost $5 billion dollars and take roughly 33 years of the entire spending in Auckland so it would not happen without some alternative forms of funding. That is why Auckland mayors want the full tool-box—regional petrol taxes and borrowing—and I know that the Minister will deliver it to them in a sneaky piece of legislation. He will whip it in between 15 and 17 December—but I cannot tell members because if I tell them I will have to kill them. 
That is what will happen but it will not happen as a result of this legislation. Why will it not work? Because this bill states that there has to be a free alternative the new bridge would have to be built 500 metres away from the existing bridge. What would people do? Option A would be to take the non-paying alternative and option B to pay four bucks to go over the bridge. It will not happen. That is why I tell the Minister in Sydney they tolled both the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the tunnel. They are not just brighter than we are in Australia but they can do the maths. They can work out that they need all those funding sources and that is what is required if we are seriously to fix Auckland’s road problems. We do not need some woolly-woofter document that is there to shore up the relationship with the Greens. We want serious stuff that will actually fix the roads. 
I now want to discuss consultation. When people came to the select committee time and time again—rightly so—they said that consultation was a nightmare when trying to build anything. Beca Carter those wonderful engineers told us that they allocate up to 7 years to build a road that can take 2 or 3 years to construct.