Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): No problem Madam Chair. There's still a very important job to be done debating the Appropriation (2018/19 Confirmation and Validation) Bill and particularly picking up on comments. I'm amazed that we didn't hear any of this from any of the National members. The Minister's comments in relation to the revaluation of KiwiRail—this does deserve some attention.It's a pity that Paul Goldsmith can't hear this but let me give a potted history of the trouble with rail—CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I'm sure he's listening.DAVID SEYMOUR: —in New Zealand because it started off—I recommend to you Madam Chair James Belich's Paradise Reforged where they talk about a bigger prism. This country was supposed to have 50 million New Zealanders and that was the justification for building a railway line from the Bay of Islands to Southland. As it turned out for a variety of reasons I don't have time to go into the population growth did not arise and New Zealanders ended up being a group of people scattered over 1500 kilometres who mainly want to drive.When you live that far apart you love your cars. New Zealanders are some of the biggest buyers of cars and owners of cars in the world and yet political leaders from Benito Mussolini to Julie Anne Genter—they love trains. They want trains to be everywhere. So the Government in its various forms has done everything—gone out of its way—to prop up various kinds of rail network in New Zealand under all sorts of different ownership vehicles and the only thing that's stayed the same is that it's not viable.Running trains from Auckland to Whangarei losing $15 million a year—just that one operation. The Government recently opened a mothballed railway on the East Cape and I understand that in the first three months they ran three trains—three trains. I think Madam Chair is just saying I've got three minutes left—but three trains were able to pass that railway line and that is why it's not viable.It leads to a rather difficult point in the Government's books or at least it did which is this. A commercial valuation: how much would a person pay to buy the stream of value produced by KiwiRail—that is a billion bucks. About a billion dollars—that's all someone would pay to own KiwiRail. Then if you wanted to replace KiwiRail—if you wanted to rebuild the tracks and replace the rolling stock and do all the things that KiwiRail has—that would cost $6.3 billion.Most people would say This is not a good situation to be in—owning something that costs me $6.3 billion but is only worth $1 billion." Most people would say "I'm $5.3 billion in the hole and it's time to cut our losses." But not this Government—oh no no no. They said "Let's call it a community benefit and then we don't have to worry about how valuable it is to anybody. We're going to put on the books the cost of what it would be to replace it." and the amazing thing is that this Government by owning something next to useless that would cost six times more to replace than the value it's actually worth has managed to give itself a $5.3 billion bump in the Government Budget by revaluing it. So they turned a very bad situation for most people into a very good situation. It turns out that owning a useless asset made the Government $5.3 billion wealthier.If only people in the commercial sector could get away with that. I thought it was important to put on record in this debate in this committee that the sophistry the Government has carried out revaluing or at least re-describing an asset that it should have just sold is a perfect example of why Government cannot be trusted as an institution. It never plays by the rules that the commercial sector has applied to it each and every day and it should be reduced in its scope and scale of activities at every opportunity. Thank you Madam Chair.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Anne Tolley): I think the time has come to move to health. Are you going to speak first or are you going to—I call the Hon Dr David Clark."