Locke Keith: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee 
Locke Keith: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:650;Page:18634] 
KEITH LOCKE (Green) 
: 
 The Minister is correct when she says the Green Party is always arguing for more public transport. We will continue to do that and the Public Transport Management Bill will help us to do so. It is a very good bill. It will help regional authorities across the country to properly plan and provide public transport particularly in the bigger cities where one needs to have integration of the various bus services. The Minister mentioned integrated ticketing which is quite important to that as well. 
Jeanette Fitzsimons from the Green Party does have some amendments to this bill on Supplementary Order Paper 249 in her name. Some of them are under Part 1 and I will explain them. Essentially they are to allow the regional authorities to plan the whole bus service and its connections with trains etc. in a way that fits passenger needs. At the moment there is a distinction between subsidised services and commercial services. That does not give councils control over the issues of when and where services are run and the timetables for the commercial services are often out of sync with those for the rest of the system. The amendments that Jeanette Fitzsimons is moving under both Part 1 and Part 2 address that. 
Under Part 1 an amendment to clause 3(2) inserts paragraph (ba) which “confers powers on regional councils to require all or any public transport services in their regions to be provided under contract with them and consequently to discontinue any commercial public transport services provided in their regions that are subject to such a requirement”. An amendment to clause 4 elaborates on that. Essentially that does not mean that one knocks out all the commercial services; some services may continue to be unsubsidised on very popular routes. There is not the same requirement to subsidise them in order to get an operator to bid for them and take them on but there will be a requirement on the commercial operator to tie them in with the whole system. 
In the report back on the bill from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee the Labour members noted that local government in Auckland is united in supporting the addition of option C which is essentially what I have described in Jeanette Fitzsimons’ amendment. The report back stated: “We also received letters of support from other metropolitan regional councils supporting Auckland’s position.” I think that is true. The Greens would have written something like that as well if we had been represented on the select committee for that bill. We would have been very keen to do so but having only six members in the Green caucus means that we cannot be on every committee for every bill. But that does not mean to say we do not think this is an extremely important bill for the progress of public transport. 
That is particularly the case in the big metropolis of Auckland where I come from—and I know Mark Gosche who spoke earlier comes from there too. We have been grinding away on trying to improve public transport in Auckland. The patronage of the bus services has increased and the next step is to plan them better increase their frequency increase their interconnection and have integrated ticketing so that people can hop on the buses very quickly with their single ticket hopefully in an electronic form. I think bus patronage will go up substantially if that is the case. But at the moment some people do not use public transport because of the lack of connectivity—they are waiting between bus services too long etc. This bill is going to address that. I know that the people on the Auckland Regional Council are really keen to promote public transport. All the planners are ready to go and once this bill is passed it will make a big difference to public transport in Auckland which is particularly important. 
There was a question in the House earlier about the price of oil—an exchange between Michael Cullen and Jeanette Fitzsimons. As the price of oil goes up—and although it may be dipping a bit now it will continue in general to go up—and as demand outstrips the supply of oil worldwide we will need to have better public transport systems in place.