Wong Pansy: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wong Pansy: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 July 2008. Volume:648;Page:17075. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 What a dramatic start there was this afternoon to the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill. I feel that a more appropriate title would be the “Belatedly Looking After the Workers Bill” because at the eleventh hour after the transaction had gone through—the Labour Government is paying nearly $700 million plus the $100 - million odd for the loan plus the rent holiday; it is probably a billion-dollar transaction all up to buy back the railways—Labour found out that it had forgotten about the workers. At the eleventh hour today as part of this bill the Minister of Finance had to introduce Supplementary Order Paper 211 to ensure the Toll workers—[ 
Interruption 
] Actually if the ex-Tauranga member would like to speak he had better take a call. The ex-Tauranga member always likes to chip away without standing up—[ 
Interruption 
] 
The bill could be renamed the “New Zealand First Cave in Bill” too. Apparently in Part 1 the New Zealand First members stood up and said no way were they going to vote for this bill if the Labour Government was not going to remove the wording about the principles of the Treaty of Waitangi. But what happened? They voted for the bill anyway. It is like flying a white flag—[ 
Interruption 
] Exactly! That party’s members say they will do what they have come here to do but when it comes to the crunch they cave in lie down and accept what exists. 
Let us get back to the railway workers. The Labour Government in 11 hours just suddenly remembered that during all the dealing the negotiations and pleasing the Australian shareholders when it paid a hefty price to buy back the railway it forgot about the workers. So National will support the Supplementary Order Paper to make sure the workers in the Toll company who are being transferred into the Crown entity KiwiRail will continue their contributions to Government superannuation. That was quite a dramatic start to this bill by a Government that always claims it looks after the workers. Actually it forgot about them during a very important transaction. 
The other thing I would like once again to reinforce relates to Local Government New Zealand raising serious concerns about the lack of a partnership approach in the introduction of this bill. I was very pleased that the Minister in the chair Annette King actually took a call. I raised a question with her about the Government policy statement. She explained that the issuing of the Government policy statement has been changed to a 3-year cycle to coincide with the local government planning cycle so that local government can take the Government’s direction into account. That makes sense except as Local Government New Zealand pointed out it sounds as though the policy is coming from the top down and the Government is to set out the priorities. 
What local authorities really want to see is a genuine partnership whereby the Government consults them before the policy statement is issued so that a local priority or a regional priority actually gets a fair hearing before it is too late. A certain local priority for a project may be agreed to but that might be overridden because of the Government policy statement. Local Government New Zealand therefore expressed concern—and I am not sure at this stage whether anything has been amended so that we have something here that will ease its concern—about the lack of a genuine partnership approach. 
So although the title Land Transport Management Amendment Bill sounds very bland the content of the bill is really significant. It is significant in the sense that there is concern about the super-bureaucracy that will be created with the New Zealand Transport Agency.