King Annette: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
King Annette: Supplementary Estimates — Imprest Supply Debate 
[Volume:632;Page:3705] 
Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of State Services) 
: 
 I rise to speak on the Appropriation (2005/06 Supplementary Estimates) Bill. At this time a Government can set out its agenda and look at how that relates to its main priorities. Before I do so I want to refute something Bill English said. He claimed that the Prime Minister controls certain events and who gets invited to them. I absolutely refute that. It is the sort of nasty little thing some people in Opposition will say. I am just sorry that Bill English wants to be one of those nasty people. I can tell this House that Bill English was invited to an event in Lawrence recently—not controlled—and his apology was read out. He had a much more important event to go to than the one in Lawrence. He was going to a National Party conference which obviously was far more important than the Lawrence event. However he would like to make out that in fact he was not invited. He was invited and I know of many occasions to which he was invited when I was Minister of Health and to which he may or may not have turned up. 
He might like to consider that people who invite him do not take kindly to being abused when he arrives. Recently he did exactly that. At the opening of the velodrome he abused the master of ceremonies because he claimed he was not recognised properly. So before Bill English slates the Prime Minister in this House and makes up stories he should consider his own actions and what he does in his own electorate. This is not the place to be a lion; the place to be a lion is his own electorate where he should turn up to events he is invited to and make them a priority. 
Today I want to talk about two of my four portfolios. I wish to talk about Vote Transport and Vote Police and how they relate to the Government’s three main themes: economic transformation families young and old and national identity. I would like to begin with transport. As the new Minister of Transport I was particularly lucky to receive a major boost for transport in the last Budget. In fact I was very lucky in police as well with a major boost in the police budget thanks to our work with New Zealand First and our arrangement with it. 
The Budget 2006 transport package really is an investment in the future. The Government is trying to deal with past neglect. It is true that infrastructure investment is sadly lacking in New Zealand. I think it is fair to say that it is sadly lacking in the Auckland area particularly. We have to acknowledge a lack of investment in Auckland. Auckland did not get its proper share of money and investment over a decade in the 1990s and we need to ensure that Auckland catches up. Auckland is a powerhouse of our economy and an important part of New Zealand. Over a third of the people of New Zealand live there. Although the rest of New Zealand is of course important one neglects Auckland at one’s peril. So part of what the Government is doing with the transport budget is to invest in the deficit gap in transport. 
The thing about infrastructure investment is that it must be ongoing; it cannot be stop-start. One cannot put a bit of money in then stop look around and wait to see what will happen. Unfortunately we saw a lot of stopping in the 1990s and not much starting—National stopped and we started. So we have investment going into transport infrastructure. I know that many members of this House welcome that because they know that it is so important not only for their regions but also particularly for the Auckland area. An extra $1.3 billion of investment is guaranteed to go into the State highway programme to be locked in for the next 5 years. That is a major change to what has been done in transport in the past. We have usually had a 1-year Budget cycle. It is very difficult to have ongoing infrastructural development planning and strategy when one does not know what the funding will be from one year to the next. 
As this House knows the outlook around funding has been uncertain because funding is related to money that comes in from excise duty from road-user charges and so on and that fluctuates. That made it very hard to plan what roads would be built and how they would be funded in the future. In this Budget we see for the first time the funding locked in over a 5-year period to bring forward projects that were on the 10-year plans of Transit and Land Transport New Zealand—to say that those projects will be done in that 5-year period and to put the funding behind it. 
A very important part of that is that we will spend all the money that comes in from road-user charges and excise duty. Not only will we spend it all but also over the next 5 years we will invest $300 million more than what comes in from those charges. That is important. The National Party says it was committed to doing that—it was committed to moving petrol tax to fund roads over a 6-year period. That was just petrol tax. We have done that now and over the next 5 years an extra $300 million will go into funding New Zealand’s transport infrastructure. That is a very large investment—in fact it is an unprecedented level of spending on land transport. It will increase by $13.4 billion over the next 5 years to guarantee and accelerate the country’s largest-ever road-building programme. 
I have been asked why we have not spent more on passenger transport and public transport. I have to say that the answer is yes we should spend more—and we are spending more—but I remind the House that public transport never had a high profile in the 1990s. I have looked back at investment in public transport. Maybe it did not seem so important then but throughout the 1990s funding for public transport was frozen at around $40 million a year. Members need to know that the annual spending on public transport has increased by over 700 percent since 1999 from $43 million to an estimated $360 million in 2006-07. Of course I think we can do even better in public transport. As we look at our needs over the years going forward passenger transport and public transport are very important indeed. But the truth is that alongside public transport we still need the roads for the buses to travel on and so on. 
In the few minutes I have left I want to speak about the New Zealand Police. As a country we can be very proud of the New Zealand Police. If we look around the world we will see that other police forces do not necessarily have the integrity of our police. They are not necessarily as well trained and well coached as our police. I believe that the investment the Government puts in over the next 4 years will be very important indeed as we train 1000 more sworn police and 250 more non-sworn police over that period of time. 
 As I said extra police funding came out of our confidence and supply agreement with New Zealand First. The total funding for this initiative in the Budget and through to 2008 is likely to reach around $500 million. That is a huge investment into New Zealand Police. What is important is not only having the additional human resource but also how we actually use those police in helping our communities. I believe that the important thing is the engagement the police have with communities the community safety initiatives they undertake and the prevention and early intervention of our police to try to prevent the sorts of crimes we see happening in our communities. The police have a big role to play in that. 
I have seen—in my short time as Minister—some very very good projects around New Zealand where police work closely with communities. I ask members to take the example of Neighbourhood Support or Community Patrols. I opened their conference just a week ago in Rotorua. We had 300 to 400 people involved in Community Patrol—the eyes and ears of the police—scattered all around New Zealand and working very hard on behalf of but with the police. I think that sort of approach is very important as we go into the future.