Twyford Phil: General Debate 
Twyford Phil: General Debate 
[Volume:654;Page:2938] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour) 
: 
 I want Hansard to record how gratified and touched I am to be the subject of so much attention from the benches opposite and such high-quality contributions to parliamentary debate. The member from Northland fresh from 21 years in the House has finally been made a Minister outside Cabinet; it is really great—it is fantastic—to have an aspiration to have a role model and I want members to know how much it means to me. 
This Mt Albert by-election will focus very much on the subject of transport and public transport. The voters of Mt Albert are concluding as we speak that the National Government’s sole aim in the area of transport over the last 6 months has been to stuff up Auckland’s transport plans. It has abolished the regional fuel tax and has thrown into question an array of local transport projects including integrated ticketing and countless railway stations across Auckland. The regional fuel tax was going to be one of the key sources of funding for the Waterview Connection. But what we have seen is National members defaulting to their traditional mode of working hand in glove with the roads lobby. We can smell the bitumen on their breath. And $420 million was shifted in the dead of night out of non - State highway classes—for that we can read “public transport”—straight into the State highway network. This will not escape the attention of the voters of Mt Albert. 
On top of this the Minister has called into question the Waterview Connection. In fact Steven Joyce has been cooking the books. He has inflated the financing costs which have never been included in any of the calculations so far on the Waterview Connection. He has thrown into the pot new road connections for the project that were never in the original design and he has decided arbitrarily that there needs to be three-lane tunnels instead of two-lane tunnels. What is clearly going on here is that he is softening up the voters of Mt Albert to a vastly inferior solution for the Waterview Connection. He is rejecting the tunnel option of two lanes each which would thus affect fewer homes. It would have meant that only about half the number of homes would have to be demolished—sorry I find the silence opposite a bit unnerving. The tunnel option would have saved Oakley Creek a beautiful creek that winds its way through Oakley park which has the largest waterfall on the Auckland isthmus. 
I want to read to members some very lucid commentary from this morning’s  
New Zealand Herald 
: “If the Government comes out with an el cheapo neighbourhood-ruining overland solution for the Waterview Connection … it will suggest National’s market research shows they haven’t a chance of winning the Mt Albert byelection. And that being so then a plague on this Labour-voting backwater we’ll give them the motorway from hell and divert the money to more National-friendly places. Perhaps to build dams for more biddable Canterbury farmers as demanded back in February by the Minister of Finance Bill English’s kid brother Conor in his guise as chief executive of Federated Farmers.” 
It is very clear when we look at the story of the Waterview Connection that National is simply not listening. As my colleague Darren Hughes pointed out the Waterview Connection is the most consulted project in New Zealand history. Thousands of people have been consulted and let me tell members what they have told the Government. In the second half of 2008 in the final stage of consultation there were 747 responses from the public and 25 from local authorities. Of all those responses 76 percent supported the twin-tunnel option. But does National care? Does it care what the people of Mt Albert think? No it does not.