Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green—Rongotai): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker; thank you very much. Better things are possible. I know the vast majority of New Zealanders—86 percent of them—live in urban areas. Solving our urban transport problems will benefit the entire country. The way that we do that has to be one that is actually effective. And when we invest in fast frequent buses and trains when they're affordable when public transport works for people they take it. Everywhere we've done this in Aotearoa New Zealand it has worked.It doesn't just work in our larger cities; it works in smaller towns too. In Queenstown for example they dropped the bus fares to $2 for a flat fare made the transfer free made the buses run every 15 minutes and what happened? They raised more revenue than when the bus fares were higher. More people were using the bus and that meant less congestion and crowding on our roads. That worked in rural New Zealand and Queenstown has actually a very small population. It worked in Dunedin. It's like—public transport works but it doesn't work if you have no idea what you're doing which is clearly the case with this current Minister of Transport.Right now people don't have options but to use a car even when it's for short trips in our towns and cities. The majority of our car trips are very short distances in urban areas. If we could lift and take away this burden of having to own so many cars from New Zealanders and some of them can't drive like anyone under the age of 16 some older New Zealanders and some New Zealanders with disabilities aren't able to drive. When we make it possible for them to get around without having to rely on their parents or their caregivers driving them then again we free up the roads that we have and they work better.It's hard to explain the enormous cost burden that has been put on New Zealander from a transport system that forces them to use cars for every trip. But we now have the highest car ownership rate in the entire world. And our entire dairy exports—$19 billion—do not pay for our annual imports of vehicles and fuel to run them which is now at $22 billion. So although it is a beautiful dream of the 1950s that building urban highways or more roads will somehow as the last speaker said end poverty and improve housing the reality is we've 70 years of evidence that this doesn't work. What is better for people is to move more people and goods with fewer vehicles and less fuel—that's a direct productivity gain to New Zealand.Ultimately the main driving value here is giving people freedom and independence. The way we do that is to invest in better public transport in our towns and cities to price the transport appropriately. That means if lowering the fares leads to more revenue then lower the fares. But right now we have totally extreme and failed policies of last century proposed in the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport. Submissions on this close on Tuesday next week after the Easter weekend. I encourage all New Zealanders to have a look at the Government Policy Statement and submit on it because there is no way that we are going to solve our transport challenges and our housing challenges by continuing to do the things that people did all through the second half of the 20th century that led to higher reliance on private vehicles most of which are parked 96 percent of the time not being used and less balance and less choice.The reality is while National goes around claiming that they care about freedom and choice and economic productivity the reality is every action they are taking will achieve the exact opposite of what they claim to care about and anyone who knows anything at all about urban transportation or transportation economics knows this. So New Zealanders need to get in and submit and call for something that is rational and reasonable. But more importantly we need to start thinking about our children. The Minister was on NZ Q+A on the weekend and he was forced to admit that putting speed limits up to 50 from 30 kilometres an hour around schools only saves 15 seconds—that's 1 percent of the average car journey. That's not balance because it means that if a pedestrian or vulnerable road user is struck by a car they have a 300 percent increased chance of fatality.The reality is better things are possible but we need to take a different approach to transport and we need to put people and the planet first.The debate having concluded the motion lapsed.