Falloon AndrewANDREW FALLOON (National—Rangitata): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'll just be taking a short call this afternoon on this Land Transport (NZTA) Legislation Amendment Bill. As we've heard this afternoon the National Party will be supporting it—at least to first reading—and the real reason for that is because we do recognise that the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) does have a number of challenges ahead of them. Probably from my perspective one of the biggest challenges they have unfortunately has been this $5 billion cut they've had to face to their State highway budget and what that's meant is that they've had to scale back dramatically on some of the projects that they would have liked to do. The one that sticks out in my mind as I've said in an earlier contribution this afternoon is the ride between Ashburton and Christchurch which unfortunately is the second most dangerous highway in the country for fatalities and serious crashes.What's interesting—as we also heard in the debate earlier this afternoon—is that what came out of the select committee appearance by the NZTA last week is that they've spent only 48 percent of their road safety budget. Now this is a Government that when they came in cut all of this money out of the road safety budget. They literally said that road safety is our number one priority" and yet the NZTA has spent only 48 percent of their road safety budget. That's had a real impact unfortunately all over the country of course. But I just think about one intersection in my electorate in particular and that's the intersection between State Highway 79 and State Highway 1. That's essentially where the traffic from Queenstown and Mount Cook comes through Geraldine and then turns on to the main highway and generally heads north through to Christchurch. What we know is that that intersection's had more crashes on it this year than the last five years.So I've written to the NZTA numerous times—because I'm no longer allowed to meet with them according to Phil Twyford the Minister opposite; he won't let me anymore—asking for them to upgrade that intersection to do some proper work on that intersection to square up that intersection because what we know is that far too often people are turning left out of that intersection and treating it as a merging lane and not as a proper intersection and that's unfortunately leading to far too many crashes. Unfortunately they haven't done that; they've claimed they don't have the money for it—but now of course we know that they do. Now of course we know that they've spent only 48 percent of their road safety budget. So they do have the money to do it. It's an extraordinary failure by the NZTA to make our roads safer. But it's no surprise because it sounds like the NZTA is pretty chaotic under this Minister. We know that they've lost a chief executive they've lost a chair and in fact the Minister has sacked the entire board of the NZTA in recent months.So we will support this bill because we see it as one small opportunity perhaps for the regulatory environment in the NZTA to be improved. I can only hope that that happens under this Government; if it won't then certainly under the next. Thank you."