Genter Julie Anne: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9789. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I will also speak to Supplementary Order Paper 235 brought to the Committee by Iain Lees-Galloway. I have to commend Mr Lees-Galloway for bringing this Supplementary Order Paper to the Committee. I do hope that the Government will be listening with an open mind because I know that the Government says that one of its priorities is to get good value from the amount of money that taxpayers are putting into public transport and also to get good value for money for those public transport passengers who are paying fares.As Mr Lees-Galloway quite rightly explained the impact of the transitional measures in this bill the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill at the moment will be that many regional councils will have to roll over existing contracts for a period of several years. This could end up costing them millions of dollars. The only people who benefit from the transitional measures are the existing bus operators. They will essentially be in an extremely strong position where they will be able to negotiate what is good for them at the expense of ratepayers and at the expense of taxpayers.It is very perplexing to me that the New Zealand Transport Agency has not listened to the concerns raised by regional councils on this issue as the New Zealand Transport Agency is using some of its own money to pay for public transport services. What we saw earlier this year was that the Otago Regional Council went ahead to tender for contracts for some of its bus services. It was able to negotiate savings in the order of millions of dollars. Then the New Zealand Transport Agency told the Otago Regional Council that it would not be providing the council with a subsidy for its public transport services which normally it has as of right because it did not follow the model that the agency had decided to go with. That would have meant rolling over contracts for the Otago Regional Council until 2016 rather than going to competitive tender.If this Government actually believes in competition and in getting good value for money then I think it must support these absolutely reasonable changes put forward in Supplementary Order Paper 235 because they will enable regional councils to tender for contracts in the interim period until they have gone ahead and established their new public transport plans and are able to contract under those in several years’ time. At stake is millions of taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ dollars. It is really an opportunity I thinkfor the Government to show its commitment to value for money and to demonstrate that it is not actually going to simply listen to the demands of profitable bus operators that do not want to have to compete.Speaking to other parts of Part 1 I would like to raise the issue of the purpose of the Land Transport Management Act. A number of submitters on the bill understood the Government’s interest in simplifying the existing purpose but it is important to realise that actually the land transport system has a wide variety of effects on New Zealand’s well-being. The land transport system cannot be considered alone when in fact the land transport system—the roads that we put in place the public transport that we have in place the rail network all of that—contributes to a number of other areas that the Government is directly responsible for. For example in the area of public health there has been an enormous amount of research demonstrating that the transport choices that people have available to them impact directly on their health. This is a ticking time bomb for the New Zealand public health system because in neighbourhoods where children are unable to walk and cycle safely to school and they have to be driven they are much more likely to be overweight and to not get enough activity. Therefore in the future they are much more likely to suffer from chronic diseases and we all know that chronic diseases like diabetes and heart disease are on the increase in New Zealand. They are on the increase in most rich countries and a certain portion of that increase is directly due to the lack of activity that happens when you have a transport system that is entirely or overwhelmingly reliant on private vehicles—there are decreasing levels of physical activity. I encourage the Government to listen carefully to the recommendations of doctors nurses and other public health professionals associations that have been speaking out on this issue and saying that actually we do need to take into account the health impacts of our transport system.There are a number of other co-benefits that need to be taken into account when we are deciding what transport projects we invest in and prioritise. One of these is carbon emissions. Our transport sector is the single biggest contributor to our carbon emissions. It has been the fastest-growing area of carbon emissions and the overwhelming majority of our imports of oil goes on transport. This has a wide variety of impacts such as the need we have to reduce our carbon emissions in the future—that is undeniable. We will have to do that. We need to take that into account when we are planning transport projects that are going to last 30 40 50 or 100 years into the future. How are they going to enable New Zealand to reduce its carbon emissions?But there is an added economic benefit to reducing carbon emissions and that is that we reduce our oil imports. New Zealand’s oil bill last year was $8 billion. For the past decade we have not increased much if at all the amount of oil that we have been importing. We are using the same amount of oil that we did in the early part of the last decade but we are spending more than twice as much on it. Our oil imports have gone from under $4 billion to $8 billion last year. All of that contributes to our current account deficit. It is not good for the New Zealand economy to be so reliant on imported oil. If the value of the New Zealand dollar was more realistic than it is at the moment—it is hovering towards 0.9 on the US dollar—petrol prices would be through the roof and we would have significant harm to our economy because households and businesses simply would not be able to get where they need to go without spending a ton of money on petrol. We are already spending a lot of money on petrol—$8 billion. We would be spending even more if the New Zealand dollar was at a more realistic exchange rate.So changing the purpose of the Act to consider only a few narrow transport criteria rather than the broader impacts that transport has on our public health system on New Zealanders’ well-being and on our economy is very short-sighted. Unfortunately it is quite a typical characteristic of this Government to not understand the interrelationshipsbetween the different things that we are doing. It may make decisions now that seem to make sense from a transport point of view but actually they do not because the vast majority of the transport budget is being spent on a few big motorway projects that do not even come out good on the Government’s own narrow assessment of transport benefits. Those projects have very low benefit-cost ratios even when you do not consider the wider impacts. So maybe it is not a problem of the Government not understanding the interrelationships but one of simply not caring about what the economic impacts of our transport spend are going to be and instead wanting to build a few big shiny new projects because it thinks they will make it look good.I was really struck by the submitters who came to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee who all seemed to sing from the same song sheet. Submission after submission after submission said that it is really important to consider the wider impacts of transport in the purpose of the Land Transport Management Act. Amending the purpose of the Land Transport Management Act to reduce it to get rid of words that are really important like those about affordability and about the impact on public health and environmental sustainability and safety is going to very much narrow the considerations that should be and can be taken into consideration when we are prioritising our transport budget for different projects. Thank you.