Fitzsimons Jeanette: Public Transport Management Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Public Transport Management Bill — First Reading 
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JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The Greens support this bill. It contains a number of measures we have been pushing for for some years to improve public transport systems. We know it has been on the Government agenda for a long time to remedy those deficiencies and we are glad to see that it has finally made it to the House. 
A public transport future can contribute substantially to our quality of life. When we compare fighting our way through congested traffic one person to a car waiting at traffic lights poor air quality and noise with sitting on a fast train or on a bus on a dedicated busway able to read able to listen to music able to talk to one’s neighbours and no responsibility for driving clearly the second is a much better way to move around. But unfortunately public transport is not always like that. 
The Greens have been pushing for years to do two things that make it possible for a lot of people to leave their cars at home and use public transport instead. The first thing is that there needs to be more public transport. We need to build the infrastructure which we are now finally going do in terms of electrifying the Auckland rail and putting more resources into the infrastructure in Wellington and we need to make it easier to use the services we have and to improve those services. It is on that second point that this bill will contribute quite a lot. 
We know that the future for motoring will become more difficult and more expensive both as a result of the end of cheap oil and the rising prices that will follow that and as a result of accelerating climate change and prices on carbon. But it is not just because of those gloomy ideas that we need to foster public transport it is also because it can contribute so positively to a good quality of life. 
I know people who have come from the country to Auckland with a real commitment to using public transport to get around who have been totally stymied. They need a different ticket for every bus company that runs there. Even on the same route they may need a different kind of ticket from one day to the next depending on who is running the service at that time. The buses do not connect very well with the trains. Neither connect very well with the ferries. The Land Transport Management Act the drafting of which the Greens worked on with the Labour Government in a previous term requires an integrated transport system and this bill will contribute to achieving that by providing that a regional council can require all those transport operators to cooperate in integrated ticketing. 
The difference it would make to travel around a large city by being able to get one ticket and use it on all of the public transport services is enormous. Many many years ago that was seen as quite a difficult technical task to achieve. It is no longer a difficult technical task. Many other cities do it. It can be done with a simple swipe system. It is time it happened. The Auckland Regional Council has been trying to get it to happen for years but the transport service operators will not cooperate. This gives them the power to make it happen and it is certainly not before time. It gives the regional council power to set the quality and the frequency of services and to demand that they be met. 
We have this funny residue from the attempts to apply the market and competition to public transport services which never really worked whereby a company that believes it can run a commercial service with no subsidy is left entirely free to run that service any way it likes—or not run it—or after claiming it can run it suddenly to give very short notice to the regional council that it will stop running it unless it is subsidised. That is completely unacceptable. Every time members of the travelling public get caught up in one of those messes and they go and buy a cheap car they did not have before or they go back to travelling by car we do not get those people back on public transport for a very long time. So we need to make the service reliable. We need to make it comfortable and clean. We need to make it frequent. People need to know that when they get on the train or the bus they will get where they need to go on time and have a pleasant journey. 
This allows the regional councils to set the quality of the services even if they are not being subsidised—the ones that they licence—and it allows them to investigate just where public money is going in subsidised services to make sure the public are getting a good deal. It also allows them to set emissions standards for the vehicles that operate public transport services. It is not a good look as we move to tell motorists around the end of this year that vehicles that come into the country will have to meet certain emission standards to not apply the same standards to public transport vehicles. Visitors to this country comment on the black smoke they see coming out of exhaust pipes and comment on the quality of our urban air. Many years ago it used to be the case that the Department of Health had a view that we did not need to worry about air pollution in New Zealand because New Zealand cities were “well ventilated”. I remember that statement very clearly from back in the 1980s: that we did not have air pollution problems because New Zealand cities were well ventilated. It made them sound a little bit like a public toilet. In fact that ventilation is not preventing the fact that air quality in New Zealand cities is dropping below what is recommended by the World Health Organization. So we need to clean up the air and lead the way with our public transport vehicles so that they are seen to be clean and when full mean that another 40 or so cars are off the road. That cleans up the air even further. 
The bill also makes it possible for councils to get data about who is using the buses and how often. One thing I have certainly learnt from the last 2 years of leading the Government’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy is that we cannot make policy and cannot make targets if we cannot get good data. In that field there are still a number of areas where we do not have good enough numbers and we do not know exactly what the experience is and that really limits what we can do in terms of setting policy. This bill makes it much easier for regional councils to find out their patronage numbers and costs and adapt their policies and set frequencies and requirements accordingly. 
The Greens support this bill unreservedly. We look forward to debate on some of the issues in the select committee. We particularly support those issues that I have talked about and look forward to supporting the bill on its third reading as soon as possible.