Twyford Phil: Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill — Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 04 December 2012. Volume:686;Page:7114. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—TeAtatū): Labour is supporting this Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill. Why? Because this is the high point of John Key’s bold and energetic effort to build a brighter future for New Zealand. It is the sharp end this bill of National’s programme to transform the New Zealand economy and tackle the big issues.For anyone who has just tuned in to this debate my apologies. I want to explain that the Subordinate Legislation (Confirmation and Validation) Bill is a bill that will prevent the lapse or expiry of a number of other bits of legislation that have sunset clauses built into them. It deals with such things as the Animal Products Act the Commodity Levies Act the Customs and Excise Act the New Zealand Superannuation and Retirement Income Act road-user charges and the War Pensions Act. What it does essentially is roll over levies rates of taxation and rates of payment.I wanted to follow up really on the comments of a couple of other colleagues who have talked about road-user charges which is one of the bits of subordinate legislation that are covered by this bill. It is worth noting that as well as rolling over the current set of road-user charges as this bill does at this time the Government is actively pursuing raising road-user charges and raising the petrol excise as part of a mad scramble to try to find alternative and additional ways to fund its State highway building programme.The Government has announced that Transmission Gully is going to be funded through a public-private partnership which as has been stated is really just an elaborate way—and an expensive way I should add—of borrowing over a period of time. It is a way of front-ending a huge piece of roading expenditure without having to fund it up front out of the National Land Transport Fund. The Government as well as making it easier to do public-private partnerships is legislating to make it easier to bring in toll roads. All of this is an elaborate strategy to front-end the biggest motorway building programme this country has ever seen. Nobody would object to that if those mega-motorway projects were seen to be good value. But I think people do object to their road-user charges and their petrol excise going on projects of which a number are white elephants that will be a weight around this country’s neck for a long time to come.Many of the roads of national significance are of such poor quality. I raise the example of the Kapiti Expressway which was shown recently in a leaked report produced by the engineering firmBeca Group to have a benefit-cost ratio of 0.2 meaning that at a cost of about $600 million it would take that project 30 years to deliver an economic benefit equivalent to about $120 million. That is an indication of the incredibly low-quality spending in the transport portfolio by this Government.I think that people—including those of the Road Transport Forum who are not known to be critics of building new roads and motorways. Even the Road Transport Forum recently described the roads of national significance as “gold-plated”. When the Road Transport Forum says motorway projects are gold-plated that means I think that there is clearly something wrong with them.The other factor that relates to road-user charges—and Julie Anne Genter commented about this—is that revenue from road-user charges and petrol excise is falling and that is putting additional pressure on the National Land Transport Fund and making it more difficult for the Government to front-end the building of these massive motorway projects. People are driving less and traffic volumes have been static if not falling for a number of years—6 years or so—in New Zealand. It is part of a very well-documented international trend that people are driving less. One of the interesting things about that is that actually the younger generation are driving less. They are choosing tolive in downtown urban communities. They rely on the web much more to provide a sense of community and connectedness now and the car is no longer this universal symbol of freedom and aspiration especially in our larger cities. For all those reasons people are driving less and road-user charges are generating and are set to generate a much smaller and smaller part of the revenue that we need—the $3 billion to $4 billion a year that we are accustomed to spending on our transport system.That raises some real questions of course. It raises questions about the quality and the value for money of our spending on transport and it raises for this Government and future Governments real questions about how we will pay for—how we will generate the revenue for—our transport system. It is clear I think particularly when we think about what is likely to happen with a move to more and more electric vehicles and more people travelling by public transport that diesel tax and petrol tax are not in the medium term to long term going to be able to generate the revenue that we need.Those questions I think should be in the back of our minds in relation to particularly the provision about road-user charges in this rather tame and unexciting but nevertheless necessary bill. Thank you.