Beaumont Carol: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16767. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):Thank you very much—Hon Maurice Williamson: See if you can top those last two speeches.CAROL BEAUMONT: Oh I do not even want to begin to try to do that. I am rising as my colleagues have to speak in favour of what is a very sensible piece of legislation the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. Its history is not so sensible but what is in here makes sense. This bill makes amendments to both the Land Transport Act and the Road User Charges Act and in doing so its primary purpose really is to enable regulations to be made exempting road-user charge vehicles that are not required to be registered from road-user charges. That is vehicles that are exempt from road-user charges make very little use of roads but make a sufficient contribution to the costs they impose on the road network through the vehicle licence fee. However some vehicles are likely to impose higher costs on the road network than are covered by the standard licence fee. That is the situation that this bill seeks to rectify. There has been quite a lot of conversation about tractors and fast tractors and that appears to be the main vehicle concerned in this situation.The bill also looks at offence provisions to breaches of conditions associated with section 40 of the Road User Charges Act. It proposes to add offence provisions to support the enforcement of conditions associated with exemptions under section 40. That is all very interesting. Then there are seven minor technical amendments to the Road User Charges Act to improve the operation of it. That may sound quite boring but as probably everybody in this House would agree road-user charges are important and it is important that we get this right which leads me to the very interesting history of this bill.Others have mentioned it but I took the step of reading the first reading speeches—or at least some of them—on this bill because I thought gee it is interesting what people were saying there and what a fascinating history it is indeed. It does show me as a member of this House the real value I guess of the Regulations Review Committee because what happened in a nutshell was that the original road-user charges legislation actually did not get it right. The Government did not get it right.Hon Trevor Mallard: Again.CAROL BEAUMONT: Well it did not get it right a few times really. I looked at Maryan Street’s speech because she made a very interesting contribution in the first reading talking about how delighted she was to see this piece of legislation come before the House even under urgency—even under urgency which as other colleagues have mentioned did seem a somewhat strange thing—because she was the chair of the Regulations Review Committee and had seen all the to-ing and fro-ing that took place leading up to this bill.Basically what happened was that officials decided to try to fix up problems with earlier legislation by regulation. The Ministry of Transport decided to introduce regulation “pending outstanding policy decisions on how best to manage” these exemptions. As she said: “In other words the Government had not done it in the legislation.” What happened as was quite correctly pointed out was that the officials did not have the power to do that. That was pointed out by the Regulations Review Committee. It is very interesting that instead of trying to deal with it properly it was disallowed—I believe that that is the term. I am just trying to find it again—yes disallowed. Charles Chauvel moved that. Instead of trying to get it right properly the Minister of Transport just had another go at trying to do it by some sort of back-door means. That is quite interesting. The Minister concerned was Gerry Brownlee. So it is actually again interesting.I want to quote Maryan Street’s first reading speech. She said: “What happened after the disallowance of the regulation? The Minister reinstated it. It was not any better the second time—it was not any better. So we have a complete litany of ineptitude—a complete litany of ineptitude.” That was the Minister Gerry Brownlee. I do not want to be unkind but I am aware that if Christchurch colleagues were with me in this House right now they would say that that sort of description of that Minister is probably not too far off the mark. [Interruption] Oh there is a Christchurch colleague here right behind me. Poto Williams is indeed confirming that in terms of the behaviour of that Minister and the way that he has managed the situation in Christchurch perhaps that same description—“a complete litany of ineptitude”—may well apply.Getting back to what happened with this bill and the regulations and so on leading up to where we are today I want to say that the legislation was wrong in the first place. Regulation was put in place that was not allowable. It was disallowed. Then because there was no debate on that there was further regulation that was disallowed. Then finally there was legislation introduced and we have the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. I think members throughout the House and anybody listening to this will find that quite interesting. I do not know how common that sort of farce is but I found it very interesting.Just going on to the detail really and why this is important I think it is important that we have a modernised and simplified road-user charge system that has appropriate provisions for compliance as well as appropriate monitoring mechanisms. This bill seeks to do that. Also the Government needs to ensure that the road-user charges are fair and reflect the amount of time the vehicle is actually on the road. This is where we talk about these high-speed tractors. I notice in looking at first reading speeches that there appears to have been quite a lot of conversation between some members on different tractor brands. I do not intend to get into that having no strong view on the matter.On a more serious note Kiwis are being hit in the pocket by increasing petrol tax and increasing road-user charges so that the Government can pay for its gold-plated roads of national significance. I think it is important as politicians that we think about transport infrastructure in a much more comprehensive and strategic way than this Government appears to have been doing. What sort of transport system do we need in 20 years’ 30 years’ and 50 years’ time? We do not believe that the roads of national significance will deliver on that. We need a much more strategic approach to transport direction and in fact it needs to be part of a strategic approach to economic development. That is something we are not seeing from this Government.I do want to note that I thought the contribution from the MP Mike Sabin was interesting. He talked about roads and why we needed roads. He talked about logs and milk. Well yes logs and milk are very important in our economy—Hon Trevor Mallard: Ask Judith.CAROL BEAUMONT: That is true. Judith Collins will certainly vouch for the milk part. But we do need to get past thinking about our economy as solely logs and milk. We need to be looking at the value-adding. We need to create a smart economy. We need a manufacturing base in this country. This Government fails to deal with those sorts of questions. It fails to look at the role of Government working in partnership with business and in partnership with unions to develop a comprehensive economic development strategy for our country where we can create really good-quality jobs that deliver decent incomes to our people instead of what is happening at the moment where wage rates are an absolute disgrace. People cannot live on wages in many many cases. The wages are simply insufficient to meet their costs—the family’s costs. That is just wrong and that has not always been the case in this country. Some people maybe think that it has been. We have not always been a low-wage economy. We have at times in fact had very similar wage levels to our Australian compatriots. Coming back to the bill I want to say that we do need a strategic approach in transport and a strategic approach in the economy to ensure that we get those better wages.A couple of people have talked about local roads and I also would just like to comment that local roads are a critical part of our infrastructure as well and are essential for regional development. But the other thing—and something that the Government seems to have a lot of problems with when it is focused solely on its roads of national significance—is the importance of our rail network. The rail network should be the backbone of our transport system because we know that the problem with roads is that they get full very quickly. All these roads—we build them they are OK for a while and then they get full. What do we do? We build more roads. We need to ensure that we have a rail network that actually can support our economy including our manufacturing industry.