Russell DeborahHon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm going to begin with a story. It should only take a moment or so but I am going to ask your indulgence for it Madam Chair because I then do want to get into a very specific question—Grant McCallum: Is it a funny story?Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Well who knows what you will think? So it will take me about a minute thirty then I will get to the actual particular point of it.This goes back a long time when Trevor Mallard was Minister of Education—so I'm afraid Minister this might have been before you were born or perhaps not; it's hard to tell.Hon Simeon Brown: No no. He was—Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Not quite not quite. OK but when Trevor Mallard was Minister of Education—Hon Simeon Brown: I remember he shut down a lot of schools.CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): No interjections from here thank you.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Ha ha!CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Don't bait the Minister because he's not allowed to come back at you at that.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: There was a process where a lot of country schools were being closed down—small schools with very small roles—and of course there was a lot of trouble around that from communities. Communities were concerned about it. But one of the things that Trevor Mallard did—or one of his key staffers did—was they went and drove the routes around every single one of the schools that was proposed for closure. So there were some schools which even though the role had fallen a long way and there was another school perhaps within a few kilometres were kept open because it was simply too far to ask a small child to travel on a bus or there was a road that was too dangerous to cross over to drop us in a car.Now the point of that is not—well it was a great thing for Trevor Mallard to do but he acquired the local knowledge for each change he was making so that he could justify it. He really engaged with the changes that he was making. Now that leads me to the question I want to ask because a lot of the changes that are being made—the projects that are being discontinued—are very local and they might matter only to the local people but they matter a great deal to those local people. There are a number here on this list of projects that I want to ask about. I'm going to start with in Project 8 which is being discontinued and I want to understand why the Minister felt that this was suitable for discontinuing.The particular intersection that concerns me on these safety concerns—it was some safety improvements to the intersection of Blockhouse Bay Road and Chalmers Street. Now Minister if you drive up along Blockhouse Bay Road—I have a difficult sense of direction sometimes but Blockhouse Bay Road does run more or less North-South—you're running actually from the Waitematā to the Mānukau in a particular place. As you're driving towards the Mānukau up towards the intersection with Chalmers Street it's a very narrow intersection; it carries a lot of traffic. The road engineers have managed to squeeze a turn-right lane in as well as a straight-through lane but it's a four-way intersection. It goes one street at a time because it is so narrow and so dangerous. As you turn left off Blockhouse Bay Road it goes into New Windsor Road where there is a retirement village—actually it's a Kāinga Ora one—just up on New Windsor Road. Carrying on down through Blockhouse Bay Road it is quite densely populated. From Chalmers Street as you turn right into Chalmers Street it's down the hill across the train line. So you can see why it's an intersection that concerns the locals a great deal.What I want to understand is why we've lost that safety improvement out of the area in which I live and to what extent Minister you took it upon yourself to familiarise yourself with the details of the projects that were being lost and the impacts on the local communities. Now that is the first of the projects I want to ask about—that intersection of Blockhouse Bay Road and Chalmers Street—and I would appreciate some insight as to why people in my community have lost that safety improvement.