Locke Keith: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and  State Enterprises — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and  State Enterprises — In Committee 
[Volume:638;Page:8807] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Greens are pleased to be able to speak on the financial review of Land Transport New Zealand. The Green Party under its agreement with Labour in the last Parliament helped to rearrange Land Transport New Zealand through the Land Transport Management Act and out of that came Land Transport New Zealand as a management and funding body.  
A land transport strategy was developed to guide Land Transport New Zealand involving such criteria as the contribution of the mode of transport—the particular project—to economic development to environmental protection and to the health of people their safety and their mobility. If we look at all those criteria we see that they apply more directly to public transport to walking and to cycling which are clearly healthier have fewer polluting fumes are safer etc. The better our public transport system is the greater the contribution will be to the economy of our cities and our country.  
On all of those grounds the direction of Land Transport New Zealand should have been twisting more away from road building to developing alternatives to individual car use through public transport walking and cycling. It is true that in Land Transport New Zealand’s annual report one will find that increased attention has been paid to such things as walking and cycling and to how that body will implement the major components of the report called  
Getting there—on foot by cycle 
. Some progress has been made as is indicated in the report. But we see from the figures that the total funding of $4.4 million for walking and cycling projects funded 36.7 kilometres of walkways and cycleways which is not all that much really for a country of the size of New Zealand. The report then goes on to talk about this involving cycle plans and things like that.  
Fifty-five school travel plans were funded which is of course a good start but there are a lot more schools than that in the country. Forty-one workplace travel plans were funded. So although some progress has been made there is a long way to go towards really developing alternatives to using cars to get to work school etc.  
Then there is the section on spending on public transport—$209 million in that financial year out of $1700 million altogether in terms of what was funded. So that is 12 percent going to public transport which is still a very small proportion particularly when public transport has fallen behind so much in New Zealand. That is particularly the case in Auckland where I am living at the present time. That is a small proportion—12 percent—of spending on public transport. We then had the problem that when the Budget came forth towards the end of that financial year it announced a $1.5 billion roading package which made that imbalance worse.  
Often when the Greens question the Government on this imbalance between public transport spending and road construction we are told that public transport spending has gone up percentage-wise a lot more than road expenditure has over the period of the Labour Government—which is true in percentage terms. But actually when we look at the figures we see that the gap between road spending and public transport spending in straight dollar amounts has widened. We look at the projections further out and see that the gap is widening all the time and that is not good enough.  
One of the problems is the guidelines that Land Transport New Zealand has been operating under in terms of how it either subsidises or pays for road construction and public transport infrastructure. There is what is called the financial assistance rate which means that State highways are fully funded—