Genter Julie Anne: Budget Debate 
Text is subject to correction 
Genter Julie Anne: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 31 May 2012. Volume:680;Page:2780. Text is subject to correction.] 
JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Speaker. Talofa lava. I would like to start by responding to some comments made by the Hon Phil Heatley and Dr Paul Hutchison. 
Hon Phil Heatley 
: That would be me. 
JULIE ANNE GENTER 
: Thank you so much for your acknowledgment but I think those members misremember what happened. The instigation of the home insulation project was actually entirely the idea and initiative of my brilliant colleague and former co-leader Jeanette Fitzsimons who convinced the former Labour Government to fund it with $1 billion which is significantly more than what the National Government ended up doing. 
Hon Phil Heatley 
: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. I am not quite sure how to test that but that has never been reflected in the books. 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson) 
: No. The member will be seated. This is a debatable issue. [ 
Interruption 
] I am on my feet. This is the reaction to the Budget. It is a wide-ranging debate and the issue that she is speaking about is debatable. Any member following from National can refute it or otherwise. [ 
Interruption 
] Order! I am on my feet. The member can refute it and in response the member is entitled to say what she likes within reason. 
JULIE ANNE GENTER 
: Tena koe Mr Speaker. I think the Hon Phil Heatley will find in media reports shortly after the 2008 election that Prime Minister John Key said that he would be axing the home insulation fund. It was only the persistence of Jeanette Fitzsimons that convinced the Government to take up this smart idea and I invite the Government to take up more smart green ideas because we have many.  
When one considers the lost opportunities in this Budget it is quite easy to feel rather depressed that most New Zealanders are not going to be better off and certainly not future generations of New Zealanders. But it is none the less a pleasure for me to take a call because I am very enthusiastic about the opportunities that we have before us. We have great opportunities particularly in the area of transport. One of the easiest ways to reduce our debt to improve our economic productivity and to reduce household costs as well as to get better outcomes in health and in air and water quality is to reform our transportation market. So a few facts. Our transportation system is costing us a whole lot of money. This is not political; it is just a fact. It is costing us a lot of money. Last year New Zealand households and businesses—and members on the Government side can ask the Parliamentary Library for this information—spent $11 billion on imported cars and fuel to run them. This is a huge contribution to our current account deficit and it is ongoing. There is a huge cost of off-street parking which has been shifted from the transport sector to the real estate sector. That cost is conservatively estimated at $10 billion annually—$10 billion because of bad Government regulation. I would think that that Government would be very interested in reducing some of the bad Government regulation that is imposing huge costs on developers and on businesses and on households. I invite the Government to inquire and get some information about how it can improve economic productivity by reducing bad Government regulations.  
It is not just households and businesses and the real estate sector that are spending billions on our transport system. Transport funding is also the single largest outlay of local government in New Zealand so if the Government is concerned about reducing rates and confining local government to how much it can raise rates it should probably look at what changes to the transportation sector could limit the amount of rates that local government needs to raise. Of course central government is continuing to spend billions every year about $3 billion from the National Land Transport Fund on capital investment and operations in transport. But for some mysterious reason the Government lists infrastructure investment as one of the things it is doing to improve economic productivity and the vast majority of its national infrastructure plan is a new spend on State highways. So it is $12 billion to $14 billion over the next 10 years. [ 
Interruption 
] If Government members listened maybe they would understand what I am saying but they are not listening; they are just talking. The mystery is how these motorways are going to improve economic productivity because there is actually no evidence.  
There is no evidence to suggest the Government is going to improve economic productivity. In fact there is a lot of evidence that suggests the Government will do the exact opposite. We heard from the Minister of Finance last week in the House in response to questions from Dr Russel Norman that these motorways were never subject to Treasury’s  
Better Business Cases for Capital Proposals 
 guidelines. The National Party campaigned on these motorways without any investigation of the costs or the benefits or the impact on the economy and it has massively reprioritised the entire national transport budget just to pay for them. It says that right here in this document. Here is the 4-year budget plan from the Ministry of Transport and it says about the so-called roads of national significance—or National Party significance—that funding has been sourced from within the National Land Transport Fund by a major reprioritisation of expenditure. What this means is that in order to pay for these political projects—where there is no evidence that they are going to have a positive impact on the economy—we are going to be spending less money on road policing we are spending less money on local roads we are spending less money on road maintenance and renewal and very very little money on smart public transport and walking and cycling.  
So it is a question of priorities—it is a question of priorities. The truth is—[ 
Interruption 
] I am trying to get to it but Government members are apparently not interested in listening. I think it is easy for New Zealanders and Government members who do not understand anything about transport or traffic engineering to think “Oh well sure another motorway couldn’t hurt. It’d come in handy if there was a crash or congestion on other roads. It’ll mean I’m less likely to get stuck in a traffic jam. It’ll mean that we can get out of Wellington if there’s an earthquake.” Except that is not the case. That is just not the case. Motorways have never reduced congestion—not in Auckland not in anywhere else in the world. 
There is a paradigm shift and it is an opportunity for the Government. This is an opportunity for the Government. There is a paradigm shift in how we define and address transport problems. Look at Southern California for example. No region has spent more on motorways than Southern California. And what has it led to? The worst road congestion in the entire United States more road crashes per capita than anywhere else longer commutes a huge burden of under-maintained infrastructure and a stagnant economy not to mention huge costs to households just to get around. And they have extremely poor land affordability. It is completely understandable why this has happened. It is because the traditional approach to traffic engineering prioritises the flow of vehicles. It does not look at the movement of people and goods. It does not look at what the opportunity cost is of using up 30 to 50 percent of the land in our towns and cities just on transport infrastructure.  
It is really funny to hear from Government MPs that there is wastefulness in public transport because sometimes buses which are running at all times of the day are really crowded at peak time and may be near empty at other parts of the day. But that is a network that enables people to move around a city all day and it is far more efficient than the unbalanced vehicle-oriented system we have right now. What about the wastefulness of nearly empty arterials and motorways outside peak? What about the land in our town centres lying fallow as empty off-street car-parks that exist only because district plan regulations force developers to put them there? Members of the House I invite you to walk along upper Symonds Street in Auckland at 8 p.m. at night and look over the tarmac-covered landscape that is nearly empty of anything at all. That is some of the most valuable land in our city yet it is not used for an economically productive use most of the time. It is not used for commerce trade dwellings or recreation. We have given over huge amounts of highly valuable land in our towns and cities to our transport system and the traffic engineers and transport economists who do the modelling and evaluation of these projects never include this massive opportunity cost in the assessment of projects.  
The Budget shows that even though the Government says that it understands that public transport is a cheaper way to reduce congestion and to move more people and goods it is not actually putting its money where its mouth is. And this is just in the last year; it is going to get worse over the next 10 years. The red bit on this chart is how much the Government is spending on public transport in Auckland Wellington and Christchurch combined and here is the amount it is spending on State highways. It is unbalanced—it is unbalanced—it does not give New Zealanders a choice and it is costing us a whole lot of money. Every other part of our transport system as I have said is languishing under National’s transport programme and this is imposing huge costs on local government. The Green Party has done a very robust analysis and I invite Government members to sit down with me; I am happy to explain it to them. We found we can save money. We can spend less on expensive new infrastructure. We can use our existing infrastructure better. We can free up valuable land in our town centres for development. And we can move more people and goods at lower cost. This will be 100 times better not just for our economy— 
The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch) 
: I am sorry to interrupt the honourable member. Her time has expired.