Hughes Gareth: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeHughes Gareth: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10336. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GARETH HUGHES (Green): Kia ora Mr Speaker. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to support this bill the Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill and to offer a positive transport vision for Aotearoa New Zealand in contrast to the National Government. We support a modest increase in the fuel excise levy signalled well in advance. We think that 3c a year over 3 years is realistic given that we are in the lower half of the OECD fuel excise levels.Andrew Williams: Selling out.GARETH HUGHES: Selling out? What we are talking about is giving New Zealanders a clear signal which is to invest in efficient vehicles invest in innovation like electric vehicles and hybrid vehicles and invest in better public transport. The problem is of course that the Government is not backing this up because the Government is still stuck in the 1960s. Gerry Brownlee still has a 1960s approach to transport. Gerry Brownlee—or as I call him New Zealand’s “Colossus of Roads”—is spending the lion’s share of the transport budget on just seven new motorways. It is unbalanced it is ideological and it is fiscally reckless.What the Government wants to do is borrow to build $12 billion worth of only seven roads. It has got poor business cases. Half of them have got negative benefit-cost ratios. There has been no Treasury analysis. What it is doing is not spending any extra money on public transport infrastructure investment. It is closing the regional rail lines and this is the problem that has led to the situation of why we are having this bill passed under urgency now. Because fewer people are driving we have got traffic down petrol up and public transport going through the roof. Fewer people are driving and fewer people are paying the fuel taxes. So the Government has to keep on borrowing an extra $1 billion and keep putting up the fuel taxes to keep spending money on the roads which we know Kiwis are driving on less.So I have got this vision of Gerry Brownlee with his arm out of the window screaming down the road to nowhere pedal to the metal. He does not know where he is going. He is too embarrassed to ask for directions. Bill English in the back seat should speak up because New Zealand cannot afford to be making decisions like this. Mr Brownlee you should ask for advice and get a map to a better future. Bill English should speak up about this. The Government has made a big deal of the surplus but what we really should be looking at is the current account deficit. It is 5 percent of GDP and it is going to be 6.5 percent soon. We are second to only Turkey at the moment in terms of the OECD. We are on track to have the worst-performing current account deficit in the OECD by 2017. We are going to be borrowing $17 billion in deficit which requires settling off the assets and borrowing more. We have got thesecond-largest current account deficit in the OECD. So if New Zealand was a household or a business what we are doing at the moment is losing $10 billion a year. We are on track to hit a $208 billion net overseas debt by 2017.The problem of course is that more motorways—especially the ones where half of them had negative benefit-cost ratios—are not going to help with these significant structural economic problems. What we should be doing is focusing on the tradable sector focusing on innovation and focusing on competition. You know we should be focusing on reducing electricity prices through things like NZ Power. We should be looking at helping our businesses—supporting Kiwibank and the finance sector costs. We should be supporting the manufacturers which are haemorrhaging jobs at the moment yet what we know from the Government’s $12 billion spend on just seven roads is that its jobs estimate is that each job is going to cost between $500000 and $1 million. Jobs are an important question and roads and motorways are not the answer to that question.We should invest in the right infrastructure in things like a second internet cable things like better public transport and not these uneconomic motorways which the Government has to borrow to build. The Government is borrowing billions to pick winners in the motorways. This is like Julius Vogel in the 1880s borrowing millions of pounds offshore to build bullock tracks. It is looking to the 1960s. It is not what smart economies are doing at the moment. That is where the Greens are offering a positive alternative a positive solution.We want to give Kiwis choice—things like a central business district rail link for Auckland. Auckland is expected to grow by an extra million people—75 percent of the country’s growth will be in Auckland over the next 30 years—and what we know is that the central business district rail link is going to transform the public transport infrastructure in Auckland. It is going to unlock the potential of the central business district. It is going to massively help the development of the inner city where we know most of the productivity gains are. This is going to unlock the city of Auckland. It is going to take 15 million kilometres of vehicle trips off the road by 2040 according to the Auckland Council. It is a great plan. It is a positive plan. This is where we should be investing—in smart infrastructure. So although we support the modest fuel excise levies increase contained in this bill what we do not support is what the money is going to be spent on. We have got a smarter vision for this country and I believe that New Zealanders stand behind us in it. Kia ora.