Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): It is a pleasure to rise in support of the Energy Innovation (Electric Vehicles and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. It is quite incredible: speeches in general pieces of legislation often go to show the fundamental philosophies that parties in a Government or potential Government have. The previous speaker from New Zealand First Tracey Martin pointed out—she has just been talking about special vehicle lanes—the highly centralised top-down authoritarian control model of a New Zealand First Government or a Government New Zealand First might be a party in. Instead of celebrating and supporting giving choice about the use of special vehicle lanes by electric vehicles to the local roading authorities which were either the councils for local roads or the New Zealand Transport Authority (NZTA) for highways—instead of giving them the choice to make a decision for what is relevant for a given town or a given stretch of highway—no; the answer over there is to get Government to have a blanket rule presumably for everyone to do what it wants.Well I celebrate the idea that we are saying Let us do some things make some incremental changes and offer some incentives that will help to shift some of the fleet away from non-renewable energy—fossil fuels—to electric vehicles and in this particular case heavy vehicles." We have already done work on light passenger vehicles. It is the incentives that can help people to make that decision to switch to these sorts of vehicles giving them a bit of an exemption for a period of time on road-user charges which are a real charge for them and also giving them the potential use of special vehicle lanes.But if we are going to permit special vehicle lanes then I agree wholly that it should be the local authorities that get to make that decision. For example just here in Wellington most of the bus lanes—those special vehicle lanes in Wellington—are already permitted to be used by buses obviously but also by taxis cyclists and motorcyclists except for a couple and they are restricted to bus only. If you had central government going to set out an edict for the use of these lanes across the country what is the chance that it will catch those particular instances around the country? I would say zero.The best way of making sure that you can potentially open this lane usage in a way that makes sense is to let the local authorities make that decision and apply it as best for their localities. The reality is that it is a small incentive. Having lived in Wellington for many years with very narrow windy roads let me assure the House that if there were an incentive to be able to use a special vehicle lane I would consider that as a road user here a very real incentive. Having been stuck in places like Glenmore Street just up the road here in rush-hour traffic I would welcome the ability to be able to use a bus lane and would see that as an advantage of choosing that sort of a vehicle. This bill also does some work around the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority levy which will make sense about broadening the potential uses of the levy that is collected all with the idea of course of helping to reduce emissions and promote energy efficiency. It is a bill that is meant and intended to give only incremental improvements but those incremental improvements will provide small reasons for people to look to shift their vehicle usage—in this instance particularly around heavy vehicles and domestic light vehicles as I previously noted. It is a very sensible pragmatic way forward and I commend the bill to the House."