Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Bill — Instruction to CommitteeCWH In Committee 
[Volume:613;Page:9679] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I start off by saying that the Prime Minister said— 
Hon Paul Swain 
: Welcome back. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Let me tell the member that it is hard to make a comeback when one has not been anywhere. 
Peter Brown 
: I raise a point of order Mr Chairperson. I am keen to hear this member speak and I apologise for interrupting. However I draw your attention to the fact that you have gone from a National Opposition member to a National Opposition member—if he is still a member—and that seems to me to be an unusual practice. 
The CHAIRPERSON (H V Ross Robertson) 
: No not so. The reality is that I look at the proportionality of the House and National has twice as many members as any other party in Opposition. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I want to pick up on two things the Prime Minister said at question time today as a start to this speech. First of all she said not to rely on the Labour Party to get roading initiatives right. I think she got that in one. Secondly she said not to listen to the National Party because it never did anything. I tell the Prime Minister that that is wrong. 
Back in the early 1990s when Auckland’s roading was starting to become a problem we began a very long process of trying to engage various stakeholders through what was called the Land Transport Pricing Study which tried to find out what the Road Transport Forum the Taxi Proprietors Federation the Automobile Association local authorities regional authorities and so on thought should happen. We got through to a document by the end of the decade in 1999 called  
Better Transport Better Roads 
. 
Before Labour members start to rip into me about what a hopeless document it was I tell them that I have some wonderful quotes on file from Labour members about me such as “He’s going to privatise our roads with tolls. That’s what this Minister Williamson will do.” and “Don’t you let the National Government get back.” If the Minister tries to deny it I will start with some of the quotes because some of his senior colleagues gave some absolute beauties—for example: “Toll roads are an outrage.”; “The roads should be free.”; “They should be for the public to use at their will.”; “They’re the Queen’s highways.”; and “If you let this Williamson and the National Government back in that’s the outrage you’ll get.” And what do we see in this bill? Toll roads. The Minister had better get the Labour research unit quickly on to the search engines of their computers and start to dig up some of the juicy quotes from his colleagues about how dreadful the privatising of roads by having toll roads would be. 
I have gone through this legislation carefully and I have to say that it really does miss the bus. In fact although it probably has the bus in it it misses the road. That is what it does. The legislation in order to curry favour with the Greens—who seriously believe we can get people out of their motorcars—states that we will not build any more roads or finish all those partly broken arterials in Auckland that simply do not function until they are joined up. Instead we will fund walkways and cycle tracks. That is the Greens’ view of it. 
I tell this Committee and this Minister that every other jurisdiction in the world that has poured huge sums of public money into shifting people into public passenger transport openly acknowledges that the money was wasted because people are wedded to the motorcar. Modern lifestyles demand that if we are to drop the kids here go to the supermarket there pick up something and go to the gym after work public transport that used to work—the old “get up go to work go home go to bed” mentality that some Labour Ministers still employ; in fact they go home to bed in the afternoons—simply does not work now for modern lifestyles. This bill does not recognise that. 
I tell the Minister the one key ingredient that can fix the transport issues is to start pricing roads based on what they truly cost. That is what should be in the bill and I intend to take a number of calls on that issue because it is central to the legislation. If we did not pay for the electricity that we used but just paid a flat rate of $20 a month or something we would leave the lights and everything on all the time. I tell the Minister that on some central arterial routes in downtown metropolitan Auckland it costs a fortune to have traffic moving at peak times. In other places in the country like on a back road at Opotiki on a Sunday afternoon it costs very little yet the same petrol tax is used for the same number of kilometres. 
The legislation will not work unless we do two things. First of all we must free up some private investment. I can tell members that I have not met one private investment company that will have a bar of investing in new roads. If the Minister knows about any I want to hear what they are because I have not heard of any with the restrictions that are in this bill. Why does the Government not say to a private company: “If you want to buy the land if you want to spend the money and if you want to build the road then that’s all right but there will be some restrictions.”? But that is not what it says in this bill.