Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. I would like to speak to some of the comments that have been made in the debate by both sides. The reality is that the Government has choices and there are other options to help alleviate the cost of living particularly for those households who are most affected that would be better overall better for the climate better for those people and better for the economy than this bill.The proposal to continue extending subsidies for fossil fuels through this bill which reduces the price of road-user charges and is commensurate with the reduction in fuel excise duty is effectively a subsidy for fossil fuels. It's that fossil fuel use that's one of the main drivers for human-caused climate change and we're already seeing the impacts of human-caused climate change in the flooding and in the cyclone and we will continue to see more and worse impacts from climate change until we reduce fossil fuel use globally. In New Zealand there's a huge opportunity because our transport system is incredibly inefficient. Government spends somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion a year on the roads but households have to spend four or five times as much to use the roads and I think that that fact is often taken for granted. It's underappreciated that New Zealand's households and businesses are spending many billions—tens of billions—of dollars on vehicles and fuel to run them. We're importing all of that from overseas. It is a direct productivity drain on our economy that we don't have a transport system that enables movement of people and goods at lower cost which most other countries have. They have lower per capita transport costs because they've invested in a complete network which includes rail public transport services walking and cycling in neighbourhoods and around schools. All of these things reduce the cost of transport they reduce emissions there's huge co-benefits to it and New Zealand simply hasn't done that. So when Mr Bennett for example talks about the roads of national significance let's just talk about what this really means because in the nine years that National was in Government and the five years since the seven roads of national significance" were highways in our highest population urban areas. They were robbing money from the regional roads. The roads of national significance are in the Auckland region the Hamilton region the Tauranga region the Wellington region and Christchurch. Now they basically enable more residential development on the fringe of the urban area which enables more car commuting which makes traffic worse in the city and that's what they're about.In that 12 years I believe it's about 200 kilometres of State highway that were delivered—200 kilometres. That caters for less than 4 percent of all vehicle trips. If as Mr Bennett asserts we were going to take the roads of national significance approach to improving vehicle journeys and safety it would literally take 300 years of the National Government to address the roading network in our country. Now 300 years from now we aren't going to be using fossil fuels to get around; I mean within 20 or 30 years we're going to have to stop. Although my colleague Simon Court did say many sensible things about pointing out how this was not an economically productive policy or a good way of addressing cost of living the one difference I think—and this is just probably because he hasn't actually looked at the numbers—is that if we were to have direct charging for the types of roads that the National Party's talking about they could not pay for themselves. The whole reason we don't have toll roads for Transmission Gully and for the highway north of Auckland is because every time they look at charging they realise that not enough people would be willing to pay the cost. That's what tells you it's not the best use of money. Now we have a roading network and we need to spend a lot more money maintaining it and making sure it's fit for purpose; that is absolutely true. But spending billions on urban highways which the Labour Government has unfortunately doubled down on since 2020 is not the right way to do this. And so Mr Bennett the National Party are just absolutely wrong when they say that the National Land Transport Fund is being used to pay for light rail. It's not true. The National Land Transport Fund over the past few years has been spent predominantly on State highways and those State highways started costing more money to build even before there was a change of Government. So you know the $200 million on the Kāpiti Expressway—almost immediately it needed to be completely ripped up and resurfaced. That was a roads of national significance project delivered under the National Government. The New Zealand Land Transport Agency Waka Kotahi was already starting to fail in its ability to deliver highways.Hon David Bennett: You were the Minister.Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: And then there was a change of Government—no no no; not when this happened David Bennett. You've got the timing wrong. All that news about the cost of the Kāpiti Expressway and the resurfacing—same with the Waikato Expressway—it's all down to National Party mismanagement of Waka Kotahi. That is why. I just want to point out that there's 25 to 44 percent of household income being spent on transport. That is because the Government has not sufficiently invested in good passenger transport. Now if we actually invested more public money in revitalising our rail network which New Zealanders are begging for right across the country in the rural areas we would have a more resilient transport system that gives people choice so that when the road's closed we can quickly fix up the rail line and it's actually faster to fix up but also that our transport system's using less fossil fuels which are causing climate change. It is a case where the environmental right choice is the economic right choice for New Zealand. That's why I've never understood New Zealand's transport policy and the political debate around it is firmly stuck in the 20th century largely because of the National Party. So here is an opportunity an opportunity to help those New Zealanders struggling with the cost of living. Even if their only choice because of a failure of Government policy is to use a private vehicle and to power that with fossil fuels we would benefit those low and medium income households more if we gave them direct cash transfers which could be used on petrol or diesel or could be used on food—because food prices are also up and one of the major factors—or it could be used on rent. The Government could be doing more to control rent prices while we try to build supply and increase the public housing supply. So subsidising fossil fuels is not the answer.The majority of the cost of this to Government is going to benefit—well not the majority but the largest share. Many times more of the dollars will be benefiting the wealthiest New Zealanders who are the least affected by cost of living. We need to target it to the people who need it most. We can do that with cash transfers and we need to continue—actually we need to start truly investing in a multimodal transport network because I'm sorry to say despite the fantasies of the National Party most of the money is still going on highways. Those highways cost more than ever. I have to agree that the New Zealand Upgrade Programme funding mainly being used on highways was not very smart. It's mainly highways in urban areas and it has mainly just inflated the cost of delivering those highways because the sector was already at capacity and then the Government threw a whole lot more cash at it to ask them to deliver more roads but actually we're just getting the same roads for more money. So look we just have to think long term and there's huge opportunities here. We can have more livable cities. We can have a more resilient transport system. We can tackle this challenge of climate change. But the only way we're going to do that is by trying to tell the truth to New Zealanders and not settling for these short-term half measures. They're like a short-term sugar hit that ultimately take us backwards and the wealthiest New Zealanders benefit much more than the poorest New Zealanders from this policy. The oil companies the petrol companies will benefit to a certain extent and our National Land Transport Fund is not sufficiently funded to pay for the maintenance and the rebuilds and repairs that we need on our roading network. It's kind of amazing how extreme the National Party's rhetoric is around what the Green Party's position is because all we're saying is some of the roads that they've promised are not the most cost-effective way to solve people's mobility problems and that we would like to see the money invested in things that actually would give people real choice that would reduce their reliance on private vehicles and fossil fuels because that actually benefits people to have that choice. But in order to do that we need to invest in the networks that have never been delivered and that is: protected bike lanes in our cities joined up with high frequency clean public transport that is frequent all day every day even on the weekend so it can provide a real alternative to a car—and of course investing and maintaining and protecting roads in our rural areas. But that doesn't mean gold-plated four-lane roads that would take 300 years to deliver."