Swarbrick ChlöeCHLÖE SWARBRICK (Green—Auckland Central): E te Māngai tēnā koe tēnā koutou e te Whare. I guess just to wind back the pretence a little bit this is something which I regularly bang on in this House about: we are all ideological. That's the point. We all have ideologies and values that underpin the policies that we put forward because everything that we do in this place is about trade-offs and about whose side we stand on and about the kinds of outcomes that we want for society. They're the same things that we'll take to the hustings through to October. So again all political parties all politicians are ideological.The ideological line in this House and as we're hearing peppered throughout this debate is largely whether people or whether New Zealand—whether cities and towns around this country—would like to see our public transport operated primarily by private interests as has been the case under the Public Transport Operating Model—or the PTOM—which is being changed by this new model which allows choice Mr Doocey in the form of for the first time the ability for our local authorities to own the public transport network and those buses those depots or otherwise.So now that we've said that I'd also like to address some of the points made by the National Party about how somehow this is all fire and wrath and rule and a terrible situation if this thing goes through because it's demonstrative of the fact that the buses are being cancelled at the moment. Mate the buses are being cancelled at the moment under the Public Transport Operating Model which privatises public transport in Auckland and actually as a result of this slash-and-burn budget as proposed by Mayor Wayne Brown at Auckland Council to permanently cut over a thousand buses a day. So I'd just like to once again make a call-out to Auckland-based colleagues to join me later tonight on a meeting about how we can try and actually prevent that with greater investment in public transport.So to the core of this legislation: the Greens have actually advocated for some of the things contained in this particularly that point around the ability for our local authorities to actually publicly own their public transport in the first place for a really long time. We actually put out a petition as led by my colleague the Hon Julie Anne Genter a few years ago on the basis of bus driver pay and conditions and the fact that there was not alltoomuch public control over those because of the fact that under the PTOM there was a requirement to contract out. That is as colleagues on this side of the House have been demonstrating precisely why we've seen that downward pressure on those wages and on those conditions.I guess that takes us to one of those God forbid ideological questions of what it is that we're talking about when we're talking about public goods or public services and what it is that we want when we're talking about this public infrastructure.And I guess just to weave through a few of the other examples in the public sphere where we have sought to privatise to really perverse outcomes. It's not only in public transport; we've also seen it in the likes of housing for example where in the 1980s and 1990s we saw the sell-off of our State houses and the introduction of the accommodation supplement because hey the private market was going to sort it out—they were all charity and otherwise! And guess what! What we've seen is that the accommodation supplement which the Government continues to pay up to the tune of approximately $2 billion a year is a subsidy for private landlords.Then I don't know look at the early childhood sector where we've seen the continued privatisation in that space to the effect that now we've got a 62 percent privatisation. We continue to pay amongst the highest amounts as a Government into the early childhood sector yet somehow for some reason New Zealanders continue to pay amongst the most expensive costs for childcare in the developed world. Why is that? Because of this private intermediary and that is exactly the thing that the National Party continues to advocate for the retention of and it is why people across Tāmaki-makau-rau and in my patch in Auckland Central and across the country continue to pay far too much but also for nowhere near enough serviceability on their public transport.I think that's perhaps the greatest lie of the trickle-down economics mythology that continues to be peddled by this side of the House and that's that somehow we'll get an affordable or efficient outcome by continuing to contract out—ironically to contractors who they've also declared war on—and somehow get greater affordability and greater efficiency when somebody else has to make money on top of what you are contracting out. The maths simply does not add up and that's frankly why we're getting these really perverse outcomes in reality.I'd also just in my closing remarks like to allude to some of the comments made by Mr Doocey in particular about how this was purely ideology" and what we were seeing was the "rebuking of officials' advice." I'd like to refer Mr Doocey and the National Party to a 300-odd page Official Information Act (OIA) request which I'm more than happy to table in this House which is all of the advice that the former Minister of Transport Steven Joyce under the former National Government received on not exempting the Fullers ferry route to Waiheke from the Public Transport Operating Model.Under the Public Transport Operating Model there is the ability for the Minister to provide exemptions in statute. That is from that Public Transport Operating Model which is largely one that requires contracting out and the privatisation of public services there is also the ability to exempt certain public transport routes from complying even to those standards of transparency serviceability supposed affordability and otherwise.Here we have this 300-odd page OIA where officials time and time and time again were telling the former National Government and Minister of Transport then Steven Joyce that it made no sense to exempt the Waiheke route from compliance within the Public Transport Operating Model. None the less for no apparent reason other than one that we can perhaps connect the dots on in this House the Minister then forged ahead and that is a mess which to this day we are continuing to try and unpack. It is therefore the only public transport route currently in this country which is considered necessary by the local authority—that is by Auckland Council and Auckland Transport—as integral to the public transport route but excluded from the Public Transport Operating Model. So that's just one very niche and very local but specific issue which I'd really like to drive home when we're talking about ideology and influence on legislation.At the end of the day this really just boils down to whether we are willing to enable public services to be owned publicly. The Greens say "It's about damned time.""