Mackey Moana: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Mackey Moana: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 15 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4402. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 Apparently according to Melissa Lee and the National Government everything is just going great in New Zealand at the moment. 
Melissa Lee 
: It is. 
MOANA MACKEY 
: Oh it is! Everything is fantastic! People are not finding it hard to pay the bills! People are not finding it hard to put food on the table! Everything is hunky-dory in the National Party. Well it might be hunky-dory as they sit there on their parliamentary salaries and their ministerial salaries but they may have forgotten that there are an awful lot of New Zealanders out there who are finding it incredibly tough going at the moment. That kind of speech claiming that everything is going great and the Government has got all the answers just shows why New Zealand is going further and further backwards and why New Zealanders are finding it harder and harder to make ends meet. 
I want to talk particularly about provincial New Zealand and how hard people are finding it in the regions of New Zealand. We have seen a mass exodus over the last year from provincial New Zealand. New Zealand is already one of the most urbanised countries in the world. That is not a healthy state of affairs for a country that relies on agriculture and its primary industries as the backbone of its economy. We need strong growing regional economies. We need them there so that we have the schools the hospitals and the infrastructure that those regional communities need to survive. This National Government just as it did in the 1990s is undermining the very backbone of our country in the provinces. Two and a half thousand people left for Australia from Gisborne and the Hawke’s Bay last year alone; 4000 left from the Bay of Plenty. How is it good for the New Zealand economy to have a mass exodus of young people in particular from provincial New Zealand? 
Then you look at what the Government is doing in roading. Melissa Lee defended motorways. We know why she likes motorways—she thinks they are part of National’s law and order and crime prevention package. But the reality is that the National Government has taken money out of the regional roading fund which used to go to support and help small provincial councils pay for their local roading and put it all into roads of national significance which are mostly around Auckland. In the eastern Bay of Plenty we have a Fonterra factory at Edgecumbe. The local mayor has actually tracked the movements of the trucks that service that Fonterra factory and found that 70 percent of those truck movements are not on State highways; they are on local roads paid for by the local councils—70 percent. So when you undermine that roading network you are undermining the very businesses that keep those provincial communities going. I invite any member of the National Party including our local MP to come to Gisborne and to have a look at the state of the roads in Gisborne. In the city of Gisborne the roads are full of potholes. It is absolutely appalling how the roads have degraded over the last few years and how our council is struggling to pay to repair those roads. 
We have a rail line in Gisborne that the Government is about to close. I am fairly certain it is about to close it from the answers that it has been giving and the fact that it blocked our petition at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. Mayor MengFoon and 10000 people signed a petition calling on the Government to save the Gisborne to Napier rail line. Government members have not even bothered to contact our mayor to tell him that they have stalled that petition because they do not want to deal with it because they are about to close our rail line. Well do you know who one of the biggest users of our rail line is? It is trucking companies. It is counter-intuitive but it is trucking companies because it is so uneconomic to run trucks from Gisborne down to Napier because of the state of the roads because of the difficulty of the terrain because of the wear and tear on the wheels and because of the cost of fuel. So it is trucking companies that are putting their containers on to our rail line. 
Until we had the washout of our rail line we had added four extra trains a week at the beginning of the year. The Hawke’s Bay Regional Council was given a report that said that the Gisborne to Napier rail line cannot cope with demand—it has got nothing to do with lack of demand—because the Government will not provide it with locomotives to run even more trains on that rail line. It is economically viable. It is fixable. For $4 million we could save the Gisborne to Napier rail line and those companies that rely on it to get freight in and out of Gisborne—one of the most isolated parts of the country with one of the most vulnerable roading networks. There was a point in which the road north through the Waioeka Gorge was closed. Because of bad weather the road south was closed the road around the coast was closed the airport was closed and nothing could get in or out of the port. For a few days our rail line was the only link in and out of the Gisborne district until a washout took out the rail line as well. That washout happened because culverts were not being cleaned and so the water was forced through under the rail line instead of where it should have gone. That rail line needs to be saved. It is an integral part of the provincial infrastructure. This National Government continues to undermine regional economies.