Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I do want to just acknowledge the recent announcement by the Minister of the purchase of the new trains and congratulate my colleague over here the MP for Ōtaki Terisa Ngobi who's also been a huge advocate for that purchase.Look it's very baby steps—though in the right direction. And you know I can't disagree more with the contribution from the member from the National Party. New Zealand currently has an incredibly inefficient transport system and a very costly transport system because we haven't invested in efficient passenger transport services and we haven't invested in communities that are easier to get around without a car. That means that we have to spend a huge amount—all New Zealand households and businesses if they're able to drive have to own a car that's at least thousands of dollars a year to use the roads that Government builds and maintains.Every time that we make it easier for people to use the bus or the train or the ferry or to take a bike or to live in a community where they can walk to things we not only reduce emissions and pollution but we actually give those people more freedom—more freedom to not have to spend thousands of dollars a year on cars and then tons of time sitting in traffic. So that's the project. And I do want to acknowledge that the Minister has done—you know means well and is doing the best in difficult circumstances. But unfortunately if you look at the make-up of the New Zealand Upgrade Programme that's billions of dollars that could be used to transform our public transport network being used on a couple of roads that quite frankly are about greenfields housing development in the worst possible places and not really about improving transport efficiency.I just don't think at this point in time in 2023 particularly given the huge bill that we have following Cyclone Gabrielle that we can afford to keep throwing so much money at just a few highway projects where yes the road does need to be improved and there are safety upgrades that could be made but it doesn't have to carry on in this outrageously expensive overdesigned way when such a small percentage of daily vehicle trips will be used on that particular road.So I think ultimately we are going to have some institutional change I think to get the outcomes that the Government wants from the transport sector. And that is seen very clearly in the disasters we've seen for passenger trains as a result of KiwiRail not sufficiently being on top of the maintenance of our regional rail networks you know in the urban areas—Auckland and Wellington. I just don't understand why the Government did a review of the structure of KiwiRail and came to the conclusion that it should remain a State-owned enterprise (SOE) vertically integrated when clearly that makes it very difficult for the organisation to focus on what is needed to have properly maintained safe railway tracks that are of use to passenger trains when they're very very focused on freight because they're an SOE and then they're required by law basically to focus on profitability and dividend when the true benefit to society in New Zealand isn't in an operating surplus from our freight operations it's the good of having transport connections and infrastructure that takes pressure off the roads that enables more people and goods to move around without having to congest our roading network without having as high congestion and emissions costs.One of the more interesting things I thought out of the select committee was our two inquiries one into congestion pricing—which of course had cross-party support for congestion pricing—and the future of passenger rail which we haven't reported back on yet.What I think is of interest in the congestion pricing debate is that from the parties on the right we hear that they're all for road pricing and congestion pricing but they don't seem to understand that when people face those costs more directly there's going to be huge increased demand for public transport. And that's why we need to shift the investment in our urban areas to public transport so that there's sufficient capacity there to meet the demand. And so you know I guess that will become clear once we bring in the congestion pricing because any city that has brought in congestion pricing has used the vast majority of the revenue to pay for more buses and trains. And that's because it makes economic sense.With the future of passenger rail I think the Green Party would like to see a much more ambitious plan for interconnected services right across the country be they by rail or bus that they qualify for the same sort of public support that public transport services in cities.