Adams Paul: Railways Bill — First Reading 
Adams Paul: Railways Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:610;Page:7414] 
PAUL ADAMS (United Future) 
: 
 I rise to speak in support of the Railways Bill. United Future is supporting this bill because we believe it is a much-needed common-sense piece of legislation that will enhance the safety of all users of Tranz Rail’s network from railway workers to freight users to suburban commuters. The days when the rail network was fully owned and operated by a single organisation are long gone yet our rail safety regulations do not yet reflect the new reality. New Zealand’s rail system has become increasingly fragmented with Tranz Rail contracting out maintenance and selling off assets including passenger services. Adding to the fragmentation has been the emergence of small independent players such as heritage operators. The fragmentation of New Zealand’s rail network is set to continue apace and may well gain momentum once the ownership of Tranz Rail and the rail tracks has been settled. 
The Railways Bill will establish clear lines of accountability for rail network safety issues. It will also impose robust new safety requirements on rail operators requiring them to be licensed to appoint safety managers and to develop safety plans. The new safety requirements will be backed up by greatly increased penalties for non-compliance and wider monitoring and enforcement powers for the Land Transport Safety Authority. Failure to enact this legislation and thereby to enable the implementation of the new safety regime could well expose New Zealand to the sorts of problems now besetting British Rail. That is the last thing the beleaguered rail industry and indeed the transport sector with its large and growing infrastructure deficit needs right now. 
 No one in the United Kingdom has yet introduced a safety regime along the lines of that being proposed in the House tonight. As a consequence the British rail system is an incomprehensible mishmash of Government interests network owners rail service owners maintenance contractors rail service contractors and a whole host of others. That means that when UK regulatory authorities want to enforce preventive safety requirements by checking rail traffic tracking systems the maintenance of railway lines and equipment or general safety regimes they are often unable to determine who exactly is responsible for any given area. 
The same problem applies to determining issues of responsibility and liability after a serious rail accident has occurred as has been the case several times in recent years. At best this leads to extensive delays similar to those faced by Wellington commuters last summer when Tranz Rail had to slow trains down due to the heat-buckling of some parts of the track. At worst it can lead to serious accidents involving heavy loss of life such as the Paddington rail disaster which was seemingly caused by a preventable signal failure and in which 31 people were killed and 400 others injured. In fact the distressing state of the British rail system led to an interesting debate in the UK Parliament between those who thought Britain had the worst railways in Europe and those who thought they were merely awful. During the same debate Tony Blair was accused of having neglected the rail issue since being elected in 1997. 
Thankfully New Zealand’s rail problems have so far been largely confined to the category of inconvenience rather than outright disaster on the scale of that seen at Paddington. It must be remembered that the impetus for the Railways Bill was a ministerial health and safety inquiry into Tranz Rail convened by the Minister of Labour Margaret Wilson after the death of five Tranz Rail employees in 7 months. Rail safety in New Zealand is a serious issue and we should not simply trust to luck to prevent more of the same or worse from occurring in the future. 
That is not to say that United Future does not have some concerns about this bill and we will continue to monitor those carefully. In particular we are concerned about the compliance cost levels facing small players such as heritage operators. The cost of applying for a licence paying annual licensing fees developing a safety case and paying for approval from the Land Transport Safety Authority could easily become prohibitive. However those concerns have been partially mitigated by various economies that can be made and partially by an effective subsidy that will cover a certain proportion of the cost of the regular safety assessment that heritage operators will be required to undergo. United Future raised this concern with the Government very early on in the process and we are satisfied that reasonable efforts have been made to find practical solutions to the challenges faced by smaller operators without compromising the safety regime that this bill is to put in place. 
Another issue and one which has proved to be the most controversial is the proposal that individual rail safety managers may be liable for death or injury caused as a result of deliberate negligence on their part. However we are comfortable with that provision given that the threshold has been set quite high and that it is necessary if proper lines of accountability for safety are to be established. Quite frankly we do not see anything wrong with holding people personally responsible for their own deliberate actions when any misjudgement or neglect could result in serious property damage or loss of life. I ask the House how robust safety standards—or in fact any standards—are to be enforced without any notion of personal responsibility. 
 This legislation will play a vital role in the future of rail in New Zealand. We believe that rail can play and will continue to play an increasingly important role as part of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure. We would certainly prefer to see as much of that as possible achieved by the market without Government intervention but given the fiasco caused by Tranz Rail’s ownership of the network we realise that some intervention is required to bring the rail network back up to a high standard and assure its future viability. 
Nevertheless rail freight and passenger service operators will continue to operate commercially no matter who owns the tracks and hopefully on an increasingly competitive basis that will see the volume of rail transport increase and the price of freight by volume decrease. But to achieve that we need to get the fundamentals—and particularly the safety and accountability issues—right from the start. This bill is a very good start and we commend it to the House.