Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Everybody should have the right to fully participate in their communities and transport options play a huge part of that. In order to ensure that people can actually get around their towns and cities they need to have options around how they do that not just being locked into cars being one of the options that they have and on top of that with infrastructure that doesn't allow for things like walking and cycling and for our kids to safely be able to go to things like school.What we're seeing right now is a repeal that will cut the revenue-gathering tool that the Government had to be able to fund transport projects and the Government not proposing an alternative. For all the talk around the Government still being committed to public transport the reality is that what we're experiencing is effectively a cut in real funding when it comes to public transport projects effectively locking people particularly in big urban centres to only being able to get around with cars.What is worse is that by cutting revenue streams—that would have enabled greater investment in public transport—and locking in polluting infrastructure carbon-intensive infrastructure and locking people into cars what we are also doing is leaving our communities more prone to severe weather events like the ones that Auckland experienced last year effectively putting more of our communities at risk of climate change.This repeal needs to be put in the broader context of the Government's infrastructure plans. It's been portrayed as a cost of living measure. It's interesting because if I take the words of another Minister in a different debate who when we talked about benefits talked at the time about how no single bill can be taken in isolation—she was talking about a bill that would increase child poverty. And then we see this bill that is being pitched as a cost of living measure when actually the cost of living benefits for our communities of this specific repeal are minimal in the broader context of a Government that is lowering benefit increases attacking workers' wages and doing nothing to genuinely alleviate the high costs of housing. At the same time this bill therefore has to be put into the context of a Government that is doing nothing to alleviate the pressures that people face when it comes to the cost of taking public transport. So all that this bill is doing is cutting a key revenue-gathering tool for infrastructure projects—ideally there should be public transport infrastructure projects—and this Government is proposing no alternatives. We could be looking at general taxation policy to gather revenue for transport infrastructure projects we could be looking at congestion pricing and yet this Government isn't brave enough to put progressive alternatives to commit funding for public transport infrastructure.Anyone who lives in places like Auckland will know how far behind we are when it comes to investing in public transport infrastructure. Rather than playing political football around how slow successive Governments have been at delivering public transport infrastructure we should have a Government that is brave enough to look at the evidence the science and actually the feedback from our communities who are very clear that they want options to get around.People in our schools and kids have been proactive at galvanising and running campaigns around safe walking and cycling infrastructure so they can get to school. The repeal of the regional fuel tax leaves a gap when it comes to the ability to resource those projects on top of a Minister of Transport that has actually waged a war on that safe infrastructure that would have enabled people to have those options.So the Green Party does not support the Land Transport Management (Repeal of Regional Fuel Tax) Amendment Bill for those reasons. The Minister could have been clear about what alternative revenue-gathering tools he was going to propose when he introduced that bill. We don't have that. We just have a bill that has been led by a rhetoric that wasn't grounded on evidence that was pushed through the campaign and also a bill that doesn't allow for the people who are going to be most affected by infrastructure decisions to actually give feedback on this bill. So by having this bill in urgency we're preventing the campaigners—the young people who've been pushing for safe walking and cycling and infrastructure on top of better public transport—from giving their thoughts on actually what should therefore replace this repeal if we're going to have this being taken away from the Government's ability to resource transport projects. We call on the Government to genuinely commit to public transport infrastructure rather than to lock us into climate change policies.