O'Connor DamienHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour): Thank you Mr Chairman. Look I acknowledge that this piece of legislation is designed to address an anomaly which was emerging across our transport sector that electric vehicles (EVs) weren't contributing. We've acknowledged that and we did in the previous Government and so we're working towards the best way to do that. I acknowledge the work that was in the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.There are a few questions though that I have to ask. Firstly is the Government committed to a transition through to a low-carbon transport fleet? I think it is important that the Minister stand up and commit to that. On Monday I heard an interesting article on Radio New Zealand—actually it was the CEO of the Motor Trade Association I think—pointing to the reality that with the changes in this piece of legislation there is no incentive for people to move from combustion engines into e-vehicles because at an average of 14000 kilometres it will be about $1064 paid in road-user charges (RUC) which would be equivalent to diesel on the same road. So if the Government is committed to that transition then can the Minister assure us—it's not in this piece of legislation—that he will bring to the House other legislation to provide incentives to move to that lower-carbon fleet? The Motor Trade Association says there is no incentive.If the philosophy of the Government is to offer tax cuts to drive better economic performance—that is that incentives are going to be given to people at the top to perform better and to deliver better outcomes—then it's the same philosophy of incentives for people to take up e-vehicles—which we had in Government through the Clean Car Discount but these have now been removed. So why are people going to move to EVs or plug-in hybrid vehicles?The other question that inevitably rises from this new regime is that people will have trouble buying RUC. If you run a trucking company or you know you're used to doing it yes you can go online but there will be many people who are not computer savvy that will struggle. How will this be policed? How will this be policed and how many people are estimated to drive around without RUC? So that would be my question. How many people are not going to end up paying?The other question is about user-pays. Sure every vehicle that goes on the road should contribute. The relativity is something that I think is important and we're looking at adjustments that were made for plug-in hybrid vehicles versus electric vehicles. I have to say that the Government's been praised for the adjustment but actually the Government didn't do it at all; it was the Opposition that brought it in slipped it through the select committee and now the Government's trying to claim credit for the changes. So maybe the Minister could explain why he thought it should go from 30 to 50 percent discount for plug-in hybrids. That would be a question that he could answer.Can I come back to the question of relativity. If road-user charges are designed to not just be a tax but actually to contribute back into the roading system then this piece of legislation could also have made adjustments across other areas of RUC that might have given us the money needed to fix the potholes. It's been said over the other side there about fixing roads and potholes. Can I just say that a heavy vehicle is 625 times greater impact on the road than a light vehicle—625. Can I ask why the Minister didn't look at making the adjustments given the dilapidation of the roads—because because in 2012 the National Government increased the weights and then decreased the funding for roading. If we're trying to catch up why did the Minister not bring in some adjustment so that the $785 million paid in RUC by heavy vehicles compared to the $1.8 billion paid by light vehicles isn't completely out of sync with their impact on the road? If we are to talk about user pays which is what this is about for electric vehicles—and we accept that—then you have to apply that principle across the board so why didn't the Minister look at making those adjustments or indeed is that part of the Budget that we're going to face in May presumably?These are a number of questions. The other one is that we come back to the core question: is the Government committed to a decarbonisation of the transport fleet and why has the Minister not made the other adjustments in the anomalies currently faced across the whole roading network and for rural roads in particular where you've got a high percentage of heavy vehicles and a lot of degradation of the roading network? How do we know that this increase in income through RUC from EVs is going to go towards the rebuilding and the restoration of those roads?