Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister of Transport): Thank you Madam Chair for the chance to make a contribution in this annual review debate. I want to thank the chair and the members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and make some comments about transport policy over the year in question. The two big tasks of our transport policy and the various transport agencies that were subject to the annual review at committee: first cleaning up the mess that was left to us by the transport policy of the last Government and tackling some of the long-entrenched difficult issues that this Government has inherited. I'll give the members a case in point: the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) which is the largest of our transport agencies—its mandate was maintaining a land transport system that is effective safe and in the public interest. Well in the year in question the board of the NZTA uncovered the fact that the agency had failed to carry out its regulatory responsibilities to the standard that New Zealanders expect. NZTA was failing in its duty to properly check the companies and the individuals that certify vehicles as being safe for the road. When problems with these companies were identified there was often no follow up. Now public safety has to be paramount. The conduct of the agency in this regard was unacceptable and it's clear from the work that's been done by Meredith Connell—the law firm that was brought in by the board of NZTA to fix up this mess that we inherited—that the agency for a number of years has been treating the people and the companies that it is regulating as their customers. Well they are not their customers. Their customers are the travelling public of New Zealand—they deserve to be able to use our roads and our rail and our public transport systems in the knowledge that the transport system is being kept safe by the regulator. This systemic failure in my view was partly a result of a reduced focus on the agency's regulatory role over the last decade. It's clear that staff were redeployed away from regulation; that there was an emphasis on education and encouragement instead of enforcement. The former Government was asleep at the wheel while this went on for years. Well we have turned this around: 850 files of regulatory lapses that had been left unattended have now been dealt with. The agency put in place Kristy McDonald a QC to investigate the Dargaville Diesel case which was one of the most egregious cases and an independent review by the Ministry of Transport is due to hand down its report shortly. I want to turn to the Ministry of Transport who over the last 12 months have undergone an enormous organisational change as they gear up to deliver the new policy direction contained in this Government's Government Policy Statement on Land Transport in which we signalled a shift in focus towards three things: we made safety the number one priority for the Government right across the entire transport system. Secondly a shift towards prioritising public transport in our cities; we've moved away from a policy that saw the last Government invest 40 percent of the transport budget in a handful of urban motorway projects that carried 4 percent—4 percent—of the journeys. Well we are investing right across the entire transport system in safety and in our cities the priority is to build modern public transport systems that reduce congestion and car dependency and give people genuine choices about how they get around. In terms of safety the number of road deaths blew out between 2013 and 2017 by 55 percent from 253 deaths to 378. That's the equivalent of a Boeing 747 crashing every year. While that was going on 40 percent of the transport budget was spent on a handful of urban motorway projects while people died in huge numbers. Well we're committed to turning that around and just today Associate Minister for Transport Julie Anne Genter has unveiled the first of $101 million of safety improvements on State Highway 2 north of Tauranga as part of a $1.4 billion safety investment across 600 kilometres of our roading network.