Williams ArenaARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Mr Speaker thank you for the opportunity to begin this debate on the bill. Look I want to acknowledge the Minister for his approach to not only the committee stage but being flexible and adaptive in what has been generally a really good working process for working through what is a very detailed piece of legislation. He's come to the House he's accepted the changes put by Opposition members in select committee and I want to congratulate him on that and the way that he took on questions in the committee stage in a back and forth that really helped Opposition members engage with this work. Even though he cannot thank me for my contribution to his legislative programme I can thank him.This is a good bill and Labour will be supporting it. It began in 2022 when the Government of the time went out to consultation on an appropriate discount for electric vehicles (EVs) that were using the roading network to take into account the cost of using the roading network as a whole. But that was alongside the Clean Car Discount and other policies which incentivised not only the uptake of EVs and plug-in hybrid vehicles but also the cost to Aotearoa as a whole of our transport fleet and the large proportion of emissions that transport represents in New Zealand's total contribution to our emissions as a country. So we then have this piece of legislation which did not consider as part of the policy rationale for setting a discount those things that go along with incentivising people to pick up cars that are more efficient in terms of emissions. And that is something that Opposition members grappled with in the committee stage and in the select committee room and it's something we would like to revisit with the Minister when he calls for support from across the House for the universal road-user charges regime. It's important that we understand the policy considerations around pricing what individuals pay when they use not only the roading network but New Zealand's transport system as a whole when they are using a private vehicle.I'm not going to drag this call out because it is important to acknowledge that we support this bill and this is work that has been a long time coming. What I want to flag though is that these decisions are not just having an impact on future users of EVs and plug-in hybrid EVs; this was a set of decisions that also affects about 25000 people who have plug-in hybrid vehicles now and many more users who are using purely EVs.And I want to make the point and this has been made by a number of my colleagues at various different points in the House about how we make law which affects people who already have made an investment. I hope that we get out of the habit of using urgency in those situations when people have either made a very significant investment in an expensive car for their household that they expect to last for the next 10 years based on the economics of having that car or for their business. Because this deeply affects taxi drivers it affects Uber drivers it affects the profitability of their business and particularly for taxi drivers the amount of time that they have to be working to make their fixed costs make sense if they have invested heavily in an EV like a Tesla.So I hope that in future when we're making decisions as a House about what sorts of bills we grant urgency to that we can give due consideration to those people who are affected by this and have told us in select committee with only 24 hours to prepare a submission that they would be hanging up the keys of their EVs because the discount didn't make sense for them to continue to use it.Grant McCallum: Had to be done by 1 April.ARENA WILLIAMS: And I hear calls from the other side of the House. Mr Grant McCallum has said that it had to be done by 1 April. That's true. This piece of legislation has been extended—I think it's four times. I have it here. Yes it's been extended four times and that is generally accepted practice and something that Labour members would have supported in order to get this right.The only reason why we would be sort of accepting a process like this this time is that we've heard that it is transitional. And we heard in the select committee—advisers from the Ministry of Transport and Waka Kotahi told the committee that they had been asked to prepare advice that would go to Cabinet in June about this issue. We expect the Government to continue on with that work in that kind of time frame so that this is genuinely transitional and so that the wider policy considerations can be taken into account. That's why I'm happy to commend this bill. I thank the Minister for his constructive work and I look forward to working on it together.