Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading 
[Volume:648;Page:16982] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I start by saying that although the National Party will be voting against the legislation we think there are some quite good bits to it. We think this legislation is a bit like the curate’s egg in that it is good in some places and not so good in others. I want to cover the areas where we are in support of the bill and it is a shame that it could not be split into parts so that we could vote on those parts separately. We will get to do that at the Committee stage but we will not be able to do it for the whole legislation. 
First of all there is the issue of hypothecation. The vast bulk of the public out there have not a clue what that is. It sounds like some dreadful disease that only penicillin can cure. But in its simplest form hypothecation is the dedication of everything that is collected from road users going to a dedicated land transport fund so that it can be spent on land transport - type purposes. 
For decades now the view of the general public was that we were just stealing their money. I was certainly on the raw end of some sharp barbed tongues over that and I am sure Labour Ministers in the 1980s would have got it as well. I think the public thought that Ministers were heading off to the Bahamas with a crate of Moët under their arms and spending up large. Of course they were not; the money was going to the consolidated account or to the general accounts and it was being used by the Government to fund education health and all sorts of other things. But that did not ever wash with the public. They all felt that if the money had been collected at the petrol pump from the road-user charges or from motor vehicle registrations then it should be dedicated back to that purpose. 
Treasury hates hypothecation. If there is one thing that stops Treasury staff from sleeping at night it is when we raise the word “hypothecation”. They start asking whether we will have a frigate tax a breast cancer tax and so on—why should one thing get a hypothecation and not the others? But I think it is a good move. It is a move the National Party campaigned for with our billboards at the last election. We thought that the times when the Government accounts were heavily in surplus were the times it should happen—as opposed to the times in the 1990s when the entire accounts of the Government were in deficit and finance Ministers had no scope to release any of the money they were getting from that. I think it was a coming together of all the political parties and the fact that organisations like the Automobile Association had campaigned so heavily for it. 
So there is that and there are a whole lot of things with regard to the aligning of the planning cycle and getting more purpose into how the programmes are constructed with some more certainty. There have been some bizarre examples of 1-year plans where the following year something that was due to start the next year was not even in the next 10-year plan. I think the Taupo eastern arterial route was a great example. In 2005 it was in the plan to start in 2006 and then when the 2006 plan came out it was not even in the next 10-year plan. As people all around the country used to say how can we make any provision for it how can we plan for it and how can we make things work? 
The Government is introducing a new thing called a “GPS” which is not the global positioning system that people might have in their cars but a Government policy statement. I will be interested to watch what the first structure of that comes out like. In theory it is quite a good idea. It sets out what the Government’s plans for investment and funding priorities are for the coming 3 to 6 years and it gives some strategic guidance to the transport sector. I hear about these things—about strategies and general guidance documents and so on—and basically they can be all things to all people from motherhood and apple pie to something of real substance. If the Government policy statement is to be a funding and priority planning - type tool then it will have some substance to it. 
The introduction of the regional land transport programme to rationalise land transport planning documents and to reduce consultation is I think a good point about what this legislation should be doing because the level of consultation across things like road building is absolutely crippling. The consultation has to occur at local level it then has to occur at regional level it has to occur at national level and then quite often it has to go back for a second or third tranche. 
I guess National’s biggest concern with this legislation is not so much some of the stuff that is in it—and I will get to the regional fuel tax and a couple of other bits that we are highly opposed to—but what is not in it. When Labour passed the Land Transport Management Act in 2003 the claims that the National Opposition made at that point were that if the legislation went through as it was it was so restrictive and so prescriptive on private sector participation in the funding and building of roads that it would never happen. 
Peter Brown 
: So it should be! 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: There we are—New Zealand First says: “So it should be!”. They do not think the private sector should be involved in funding the building of new roads. I can tell members that National does. I can tell members that every state Labor Government in Australia uses the private sector to fund roading. So does the Labour Government in the United Kingdom and so do socialist Governments in Europe. In fact Peter Brown would be hard-pressed to tell us of a country in which the private sector is not involved in funding road building. But he still brings his cloth-cap socialist dogma to the idea of private sector funding and he feels that New Zealand should somehow line itself up with Burkina Faso or Zimbabwe—no actually Zimbabwe allows it. Interestingly enough the biggest builder of private sector roads in the world at present is communist China. So Peter Brown is further left than the communists—that is all I can say. 
This bill should have done something about the Land Transport Management Act. This is a Land Transport Management Amendment Bill so it could have. It could have taken out some of the prescriptive dragnets that are in there such as the 35-year concession period. It could have opened that up and made it a bid parameter. It could have allowed some things that the private sector has regularly said it would participate in if they were in the legislation. The private sector has said it would participate in building roads but not while the legislation is as blocked and prescriptive and as restrictive as it is. 
Now I come to some of the stuff in the bill that we are very very opposed to. The first of those is obviously the regional fuel tax. One of the things I found interesting happened at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee last week when we asked Land Transport New Zealand how it was that it finished a financial year with $220 million unspent. It said it was because there are so many little pots of money. It said: “Money that is allocated for this purpose to this region for that cannot now be moved over to another region or another purpose if the project does not come on stream on time.” That is quite clearly a nonsense. If the money is in the account and a project falls over because it does not get its consents or it does not get its ducks in a row or get lined up by the local authority or whatever then surely the funding agency should have the ability to move that money to one of the other projects that is begging to get started. 
What we will be doing with the regional fuel tax is creating yet another small packet of pots so that one region can have it but a region next door may not. That was interesting in itself. We heard a lot of the big trucking operators say that if they are going to be operating out of Auckland which has a regional fuel tax—and the Waikato region does not—then they can set up a fuel base just across the regional border and transport their trucks down there with hardly anything on them and fuel up accordingly. 
Those grey mucky lines in the sand mean that a regional fuel tax can cause major disturbances for a proper regime. More important what is hilarious about this is that we are passing this legislation at a time when the Prime Minister says she knows that New Zealanders’ pockets are under strain. She knows they cannot afford it at present so we will not allow the regional petrol tax to come in next year at any rate. So why are we passing it? Why are we rushing legislation through to allow a regional fuel tax when the Prime Minister says she knows it cannot be afforded by New Zealanders and that she will not be allowing it to occur in the next year? 
I say that there are plenty of other mechanisms to fund land transport. Some of our opponents are now saying: “Oh if you don’t allow a regional fuel tax it means you’re opposed to a whole lot of projects that could be built such as Penlink.” We are not opposed to Penlink at all. We are very much in favour of Penlink the big road project out to the Whangaparaoa Peninsula being built. But a regional fuel tax is not the only mechanism to fund Penlink. It could be a whole range of other instruments that other countries use such as public debt private debt infrastructure bonds a whole range of public-private partnerships and so on. 
The last thing I want to say because I think I have only about 10 seconds left is that for a long time Land Transport New Zealand and Transit were separated. Everyone thought that was a good idea. Now somehow for some reason the Government thinks bringing them back together is a good idea even though it was totally and highly opposed to it at the time.