Twyford Phil: Address in Reply 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Twyford Phil: Address in Reply 
[Sitting date: 07 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:116. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Assistant Speaker Robertson. Now I have heard everything! Now I have really heard everything! I never ever thought I would come to this House and hear David Bennett invoking the great Eastern philosophers in support of National’s economic policy which the rest of us have come to think of as cut cut public services; sell sell our assets; and hope. I never ever thought I would hear this but every day is a new day and that always makes it exciting to come to the House. You never know what you are going to hear from members on that side of the House.  
Where is the bold rhetoric? Where is the brighter future that we heard so much about? Where is it now? Like a fake suntan that has worn off the perennially relaxed Prime Minister is no longer wearing his permanent smile. In fact in recent weeks he has looked decidedly tired and grumpy. And the reason is that National has run out of ideas. It is all getting a bit hard for the Prime Minister and members on that side of the House.  
I looked in vain during the election campaign for National’s campaign advertisements showing Mr Key in the Westpac Stadium talking about all the New Zealanders who are heading to Australia. Do you know why we did not see images of Mr Key in the Westpac Stadium? Why? Because there is not a stadium big enough in this country to signify the sheer volume of New Zealanders who are leaving permanently for Australia: 113000—113000—New Zealanders have left this country permanently to go to Australia since this Government first took office. Last year 36900 New Zealanders made up the net migration to Australia—the highest ever recorded. Why did they leave? They left and they are leaving because they have lost hope in this Government. The world has changed but National’s thinking National’s policies and its answers has not changed. This Government has run out of ideas. Just like the definition of a psychotic who keeps on trying the same old thing National keeps on hoping that the results will be different.  
I want to give the House a couple of examples of how National has run out of ideas—how it has run out of steam and it just keeps on trying the same old things. Last week the Ministry of Transport released its briefing to the incoming Ministers and it made very interesting reading. What those officials in the Ministry of Transport told us—their analysis and their data made it very clear—is that the centrepiece of this Government’s transport policy for the last 3 years the roads of significance to National otherwise known as the RONZ is tipped to become increasingly insignificant because the world is changing and National has not woken up to that fact. What the briefing showed us was that this Government is going to be increasingly unable to fund the commitments that it has made to build the roads of national significance. There is a divergence in the budgeted cost of these seven gold-plated motorway projects and the other four that the Government proposes to add to the list. The divergence is between the budgeted cost and the Government’s ability to fund the construction of those motorways from the normal sources of transport revenue.  
The fact is that with a flat economy and rising oil prices people are driving less. They are choosing to take public transport increasingly and because they are driving less the Government’s transport revenue through road-user charges and through the petrol excise is falling proportionately to the size of the economy and the commitments that this Government has made to build the roads of national significance. So on one hand you have got a growing divergence between the Government’s commitments and its ability to pay for them and on the other hand no one can afford to drive on these motorways because of the cost of petrol. It is bizarre that at the very time when New Zealanders are choosing to drive less and demand for public transport is growing this Government has redoubled its commitment to the so-called roads of national significance. It shows no sign of wavering from its total obsession with building gold-plated motorway projects which rob every other major category in the transport budget including local roads rural roads road safety and urban public transport. They have no qualms—the members on that side of the House—about robbing every other budget category to fund their roads of National Government significance.  
Now you would think at a time of rising oil prices that it might be a good thing to think about the long-term resilience of our transport sector over the next 10 20 30 years. But what this Government is doing is precisely the opposite. By refusing to support Auckland’s plans and aspirations for a modern public transport system by refusing to stump up with its share of the funding needed for the city rail link in Auckland and by insisting on going ahead with the discredited Puhoi to Wellsford “Holiday Highway” this Government is making the country more and more dependent on imported oil at the very time that we should be thinking about making our transport sector more resilient and having a more balanced transport policy that invests in public transport in rail and in coastal shipping. But the Government sadly does not see the logic of that; it is building roads like there is no tomorrow. Even though traffic demand traffic volume has been more or less static for the last 4 or 5 years it refuses to recognise the demand for public transport at a time when more and more people are getting buses and trains to work.  
The second example that I want to give also relates to transport and it is specifically about Auckland. It has been really instructive in the last few weeks. The  
New Zealand Herald  
has run an interesting series of stories about some of the big challenges facing our country’s biggest city. I hope members on that side of the House have read over the last couple of days what the  
New Zealand Herald  
has said about our unfair tax system and how it is driving ever-higher levels of social inequality. But one of the other really interesting articles that the  
New Zealand Herald  
has had in the last week or two highlighted last week that Auckland our country’s largest city will face midday traffic jams in the next 20 years—midday traffic jams—because the programme of road building that had been carried out by Labour when we were in Government and that has been continued under this Government simply will not on its own solve the problem of traffic congestion. The changes the effect of the road-building programme over the last couple of years are expected according to the Ministry of Transport to reduce congestion by only 14 percent by 2021. Congestion will be reduced by only 14 percent by 2021.  
If there was ever a wake-up call that the National Government’s mantra of roads and suburban sprawl will not deliver a workable future for our country’s biggest city this is it. But National is blind to the demands and deaf to the aspirations of Aucklanders who want to live in a livable city. They want to be able to move around their city. National’s only recipe is to build more and more motorways and add more and more lanes to the existing motorway. It will not take on board the idea that we have to build a more balanced integrated intermodal transport system that actually gives people the real opportunity to leave their cars at home and free up the roads for the rest of us. Spaghetti Junction the single-biggest motorway interchange in the southern hemisphere completed only a few years ago is already at full capacity in peak hour at both times of the day—and the National Government wants to build more and more motorways across the city most of them heading into the central city. Well you do not need to be a rocket scientist to know that that simply will not work. We have to invest heavily in public transport to ease congestion and provide a more balanced transport system. Unfortunately National has run out of ideas and all it wants to do is do the same thing over and over again.