Woods MeganHon Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I'm happy to take a call on this bill and signal not only Labour's support as my colleague the Labour spokesperson for transport Tangi Utikere did but also set out some of the questions that we think are really important to explore as we go through that. I would like to signal that given the importance and the complexity of this I do think that four weeks at the select committee is a very light period of time in order to get the expertise to come to bear on what are important questions.We heard the Minister who introduced this bill making wild claims that no work has been done on this in the previous Government and then in the next breath talking about the work the previous Government had been doing around road-user charges (RUCs) come 1 March 2024. So this is a long-term piece of work and indeed there was a piece of consultation that went out I think two years ago around what the future of the road-user charge would beSo we have before us today a piece of legislation which really deals with that gnarly issue of the definition of what it is. So the primary piece of legislation that we're looking in has hard-wired into it definitions of what electric vehicles are and this was legislation of course that was put in place before some of the technology that we have today—before we had purely electric and plug-in hybrids and had the plethora of technological options that we have today in the fact that we do have decarbonising transport.What I really want to stress is that when Labour was doing this work we saw this very much as a suite of policies extending this exemption out for the light vehicles through to 1 March 2024 being part of how we did drive that massive uptake of electric vehicles in New Zealand that is going to be needed to meet our emissions budgets to reduce our carbon our greenhouse gas emissions.We saw it as sitting alongside things like the Clean Car Discount so that we could ensure that more New Zealanders could have access to not only lower emissions but lower-cost forms of transport. That was really important. Also that sat alongside the work that we were doing around electric vehicle charging and the massive boost that we gave to the Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority in terms of how it rolled out our charging infrastructure around New Zealand. These all need to be seen as an interrelated package that needs to go together and when this bill goes to the select committee our members will be asking questions—what will removing this now do to the uptake of electric vehicles? How will that sit alongside the targets that sit inside emissions budget 1 but also the work that's been done around the second emissions reduction? How are we going to achieve those targets which the Government is saying it is committed to achieving? What are policy implications from a greenhouse gas emission perspective of this piece of legislation?The other thing that I'd like the Government to consider as this bill goes to the select committee is that this is a piece of legislation that is looking at definitions which as I said is one of the gnarly pieces in the policy work in this area. We know that 44 percent of our energy-related emissions in New Zealand comes from the transport sector and 20 percent of all of New Zealand's greenhouse gas emissions come from transport and the bulk of vehicle fleet light-duty passenger vehicles are the vast majority. Heavy vehicles only make up 4 percent and this piece of legislation is only looking at heavy vehicles and light vehicles. But we know that 4 percent of heavy vehicles make up 25 percent of transport's total emissions. And there was work done by the previous Government—in fact in the consultation that went out on that issue of definitions about the fact that we now have new fuels that were never envisioned when the legislation was written in terms of fuel-cell technology hydrogen when it comes to heavy-fleet vehicles. I think we are missing a vital opportunity to think more broadly about how it is. Do we now say we're going to bring in the RUC for the light-vehicle fleet? That time has come. But we should be putting in place to decarbonise that much more difficult part of our transport sector—the heavy-vehicle fleet—hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles. What do we need to do and what is the future policy work we need to do to achieve what we have all signed up to in emissions budgets 1 2 and 3.