Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you. The ACT Party does support this bill because it provides the opportunity to introduce better instruments at the behest of the Minister which will specify how to comply with rules or regulations. But the underlying issue is that some of the rules and regulations are still unfit for purpose. Now we've heard from other members of the House about why they think this is such a good idea to give the Minister of Transport more powers. But ACT does have significant reservations and these reservations have also been raised by submitters. Some of the submitters were concerned that the ability for the Minister to grant the power to organisations like the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to create their own regulatory instruments would lead to excessive prescription of how organisations that make things and build things such as buses and coaches the thousands of trucks and trailers that are constructed and modified every year—that the specifications for these would end up being written by a Government department in Wellington rather than trusting those businesses which know exactly what type of logging truck or freight truck they want and are prepared to pay an engineer and a fabricator to build them exactly what they want and then to have it certified as safe. And some of those concerns were that giving these additional powers to the Minister and thereby to allow him through his agencies to make these rules was overly prescriptive. We know that some of the things in this bill are important. For example in a maritime sense it might be entirely worthy to require certain types of vessels to carry lifejackets and for people to wear them and that's entirely worthy. But what we see here is a risk and that risk is that agencies like Te Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency have in the past demonstrated an inability to keep the roads safe and actually to fulfil the regulatory responsibilities that they already have. We know that NZTA has failed in its duties to check on trucks and other things that they were required to check on and certify and that over many years these issues went unidentified and unresolved. And when they finally were brought to the attention of the NZTA following serious injuries and fatalities when some poorly constructed trailers and other components failed NZTA rather than looking at its own obligations as a regulator and whether they had fulfilled those obligations appear to have gone on a witch hunt after certain people in the industry for failing to fulfil their obligations. It is very very important—and ACT would want to make the point—that people who are making things manufacturing things must do so safely but those Government organisations responsible for auditing and checking they have to do their job as well. That's why we vote them budgets and that's what the people of New Zealand expect them to do. We have heard concerns from different stakeholders not just through the select committee process but also through the media organisations who were so afraid of the repercussions of speaking out against NZTA and some of the behaviours that they'd witnessed and been subjected to that they resorted to using a burner phone to communicate with Radio New Zealand journalists to raise their concerns about the performance of NZTA and the likely implications of some of these reforms. That must be almost unheard of in terms of New Zealand Government agencies creating such a culture of fear amongst those who they are intending and have a responsibility to regulate. Some of the submitters who were prepared to put their views on record pointed out something that seems very obvious to many of us that where you have designers designing components and manufacturers making them—say for trucks and trailers and coaches and buses which might be used as school buses or in public transport—it is very very important that the designers are competent and that they follow best practice. And in order to demonstrate that they are competent those designers must have sufficient professional development and training and certification of their own. Some of the submitters pointed out that in NZTA's current approach and in their practice they have completely ignored the requirements for a professional practice aspect around certification of trucks and trailers and buses and other mechanical equipment and instead chosen to essentially give a certain group of certifiers powers over others and these certifiers are often people who are getting towards the end of their career. They may have learnt on the job. They may know what good welding and good technique looks like in the factory but they haven't had the benefit of professional engineering oversight of their careers and they haven't had the benefit of professional development. So what the submitters proposed and what we haven't heard yet from the Minister is whether a professional practice essentially like a mechanical engineering or a civil engineering discipline could be created around the certification process. Because if there are going to be thousands of trucks and buses and trailers and log trucks and bulk trucks on our roads and those being manufactured new and being adapted and modified every year then we would want to know that the people certifying them aren't just people who've come from the factory floor or from the shop but they are actually people who understand engineering design processes safety in design—all of those things that we've learnt how important they are through the Christchurch earthquakes Pike River and other disasters which have shone a very bright light on the role of professional engineers' training and continuing professional development as well as the regulatory auditing function. So what ACT would propose is that while we do support this bill the Minister and the agencies that Minister is responsible for focus their efforts not just on compliance not just on auditing not just on enforcement but on identifying those skills gaps and those opportunities to increase the level of knowledge in the industry and actually to set out a pathway for those people who are working on the shop floor who are working in the factories making these trucks and buses and trailers and so forth—that they can actually have a pathway to a vocation. Because currently there is no vocational qualification for somebody who's an expert welder to go on to become an expert certifier. It's simply something that they achieve when NZTA for example issues them a letter. So what ACT would advocate for is better education and for the agencies involved in certification to identify where those gaps are in education and training and to propose better vocational education qualifications if that's necessary and also a process to review the practice of these designers and fabricators so that they can receive the benefit of continuing professional development as they go about their vitally important work. And it is vitally important work because not only do we need this equipment to be safe but we also need more trucks on the road to cart more quarry products and aggregates from those quarries to cement plants and then the concrete to the house building sites and to the roads and even to the railways that our colleagues in the Green Party and previous and current Labour Ministers are so fond of—those railways which will consume hundreds of thousands if not millions of tonnes of concrete and other products; this year expected to run to 4 million cubic metres or 10 million tonnes of concrete coming from batching plants in trucks on the roads. And you can't make concrete without getting the rock from the quarry to the batching plant and the cement from the cement kiln to the batching plant. So it's vitally important not just for safety but for our economy to get this right. So the ACT party does support this bill but with reservations and with a laser focus on improving it for safety but also for the purposes of delivering the economic benefits that trucks and buses on the road and dare I say even trains on the tracks can offer to New Zealand. Thank you Madam Speaker.