Fitzsimons Jeanette: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:643;Page:12827] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Green Party is the only party in this House that has not spent years calling for all tax on petrol to go into roads. We are proud of that position because there is really no more reason why all petrol tax should go into roads than there is why all tax on alcohol should go into booze barns or all tax on cigarettes should go into tobacco factories. There is no particular reason why motor fuel should not be taxed just like any other product or any other source of revenue. 
But there is another reason too why in the past we have not had full hypothecation of revenue from motor fuel. Two major Government studies—each of which has taken years and considerable resources and neither of which has led to any action at all—have looked into the costs that motoring causes to the economy as a whole. Both the Land Transport Pricing Study of the late 1990s and  
The Surface Transport Costs and Charges Study 
 of the early 2000s established a remarkable amount of agreement that the costs of motoring to the public purse that are not paid for out of the National Land Transport Fund and are not covered by petrol excise or road-user charges are very considerable. The minimum amount was around $1200 million a year with the upper limit of the band being considerably above that. These are costs for things like dealing with air pollution water pollution from runoff from building roads climate change noise and all the health and policing costs that are not directly paid for out of the National Land Transport Fund or the accident compensation levy. It is a substantial amount of money and it has always seemed to me rather fair that motorists should pay it. What is not fair is that petrol users have contributed towards that cost and diesel users have not. All road-user charges have been going into the National Land Transport Fund and all petrol excise has not. 
The other thing that has been unfair about the situation is that it is totally untransparent. There is no indication that the money that has been taken as excise and not put into transport projects has in fact been spent on dealing with any of the externalities of roading. It has just disappeared into the general consolidated account. So although the Green Party has never called for full hypothecation and in fact believes that those external costs should be covered by motorists we will not oppose that part of the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill but we will be pushing for payments to be made to cover those external costs out of the National Land Transport Fund itself. 
The Green Party has also been pushing for years for the electrification of the Auckland commuter rail system. It is absolutely the key to better public transport in Auckland. It is the key to an upgraded signalling system; to newer electric units that will be quieter cleaner and more reliable; to a huge increase in capacity on the commuter rail; to greater reliability; and to trains actually running on time. Until we have made that basic step we cannot look at the further developments that are needed such as a connection to the airport and a connection under or through the central city between the southern line and the western line which would start to give us a genuine commuter rail network in Auckland rather than just two lines that do not really talk to each other. 
The problem has always been that under the crazy funding system known as the financial assistance rate central government cannot put anything into a project like this which is clearly of national importance unless regional or local government pays half. The Auckland Regional Council after years of neglect of public transport had got to the stage where it simply could not raise rates any further in order to contribute to decent public transport systems. The money was there in the National Land Transport Fund but it could not be spent because of the rule that regional councils have to raise half. 
It always seemed very peculiar to me that if we wanted to build a State highway or a motorway from one side of Auckland to the other mainly for the use of Aucklanders who want to drive from one side of the city to the other it would be 100 percent funded by central government out of the National Land Transport Fund. But if we wanted to build a railway to do exactly the same thing and carry exactly the same sort of people from one side of Auckland to the other side then Auckland would have to fund half of it. So it is not exactly surprising that for many decades roading has gone ahead and public transport projects have not. 
We now have the situation whereby the way to fund this project seems to be a regional fuel tax. Because the project is such an important key to unlocking the potential for public transport in Auckland the Greens will support this bill. We note however that the Government’s half of the project is to be funded by raising a loan on which Auckland pays all the interest for 30 years. Auckland’s half is to be funded by its providing the capital and interest. That does not sound like a fifty-fifty split to me but anyway this is the way the Government is doing it and this is the way it is proceeding. At least the thing is going to get done. 
The bill as I first saw it allowed the whole of up to 10c of regional fuel tax to be levied by a regional council and all of it put into roading. The Greens said we could not support that. There has been a huge imbalance for many years between the billions spent on roading and the few millions spent on public transport. We have to have a better balance than that. So we settled in the end after some negotiation on no more than 5c for roading and an additional 5c that can be raised for other projects if the regional council wishes as long as they are alternatives to roading and we try to get some balance. We can if we wish raise all of it for public transport. Auckland’s share of the 10c for public transport would be more than 8c but other regions are less likely to do that. 
So what could we do with that other 5c? Of course we could build other public transport systems such as busways and make improvements to rail systems. We could do travel demand management such as computer and network-based carpooling systems school travel plans workplace travel plans better cycle facilities flexible minibuses in smaller cities that are more responsive to demand and ferries. There is a whole range of alternatives to the one person one car model that we are sadly lacking in all of our cities large and small and that should be built with that second 5c. 
It is not clear yet how much of a regional fuel tax that Wellington for example will raise and what it will spend it on. But it is quite clear that no more than 5c can go into that gross white elephant Transmission Gully which will be a sink for money forever without ever actually being built. If they want to raise more than 5c then the other 5c will need to go into some of the greatly needed public transport projects in Wellington. Rail upgrade projects are greatly needed all over the city. Hopefully the regional fuel tax will speed up the introduction of public transport in a number of centres because it is money that is there only if it is used for this sort of purpose in some of the regional cities that have very poor or no public transport at the moment.