Tuiono TeanauTEANAU TUIONO (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I am slowly moving towards the light of illumination and I would like to thank Greg O'Connor the previous speaker for all the lights that he has provided on that road to greater wisdom and illumination. We heard amber lights blue lights red lights I was waiting for purple lights and it actually reminded me of—Greg O'Connor: In the Green Party room.TEANAU TUIONO: Ha ha! It reminded me of blue light" discos actually. That's quite appropriate since the member probably hosted and ran a couple of those "blue light" discos—and I know that will be meaningful for those of us around the House that are kids of the 1980s.But holy road congestion! When I took a look at this bill it looked like it had been dreamt up in an Auckland traffic jam because the word "congestion" just leapt off the page to me. I looked at it and as a previous Aucklander I know that for those of us who have been in those Auckland traffic jams you kind of get caught in it. Google Maps says it's about five minutes away but actually it's 50 minutes away and you have all these sorts of ideas. You have all these sorts of daydreams. But what I would suggest is that if we sorted out the congestion problems we could dream about other things—we could dream about other things. We could get back to fantasising maybe on some of our more favourite subjects like gangs or so on and so forth giving more room and ability to dream those bigger dreams.As the Greens we support public and active transport because we know that when you get people out of cars and into other modes of transport that of course actually deals with the congestion issues. It reminds me of a quote I saw on a TED Talk by Enrique Peñalosa where he said "An advanced city is not one where even the poor use cars but rather where even the rich use public transport." So viva public transport—long live public transport.I was heartened by a bit of the media around the new Puhinui transport hub there in South Auckland. As someone who used to live in South Auckland and often returns to the sacred soils of South Auckland to rejuvenate my wairua and spirit I was glad to see that Puhinui had actually been changed around. So I look forward to giving it a go and giving it a whirl because I remember in the mid-1990s when I used to go past Puhinui there wasn't much to look at. So hopefully when those sorts of initiatives get people off the roads and on to rail—because rail is good—and other ways of public and active transport that means that there will be less congestion and we can think about other things.This bill requires the Minister of Transport to make regulations that allow vehicles which are responding to electrical emergencies to be able to display lights which require general traffic to pull over and let the vehicle through. My understanding is that the bill is specifically trying to address an issue that Vector brought up that they were having in Auckland. We know that traffic congestion is consistently causing material delays to crews accessing sites in order to restore safety and ultimately power to customers in unplanned outages and safety events. Emergency responders are sometimes waiting for electric crews to show up to turn on their locations to turn the power off so they can safely respond to an emergency. That's a good thing. I think all around the House we would say that's a good thing. But the thing is do we need primary legislation to be able to do that? Do we need primary legislation to do that? Could this actually be done in the regulations?It is also not clear how significant this problem is. My understanding is that Vector are already closely working with Auckland Transport and have access to bus lanes in the city. Vector says that while this has been a significant help there are still issues with congestion in the way that they want to have red and white flashing lights but I think that conversation needs to continue. It needs to continue because that seems like a more appropriate pathway in order to sort this issue out.Then there is also the safety issues that were picked up over here as well. We've already got a tonne of people on the road with flashing lights different amber lights construction companies mining companies—all these other different vehicles. So that would actually cause a potential safety risk by allowing too many vehicles to have flashing lights. This is the thing and I want to end with this: there are other ways to deal with this issue. We could pick it up in the regulations. There could be more bigger and broader conversations with the agencies involved. We don't need more lights on the roads—it becomes a safety issue—and we don't need our roads looking like a discotheque because that'll just keep things too busy. So unfortunately we cannot support this bill."