Hodgson Pete: Transport Legislation Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Hodgson Pete: Transport Legislation Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16897] 
Hon PETE HODGSON (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 It did not take long—we are only two calls into the Committee stage and the Opposition parties are attacking the bill from precisely the opposite sides of the argument. United they are not. The first speaker Maurice Williamson stood up and said that the legislation is extremely good except for a problem in one area the only one area that caused the National Party concern—that is we will end up with safety at unreasonable cost because the words “safety at reasonable cost” which members seem to know and love and cannot allow themselves to be detached from have been removed. The first speaker was particularly distressed about that. There would be safety at unreasonable cost and all the submissions said that said the first speaker. The second speaker Deborah Coddington stood up and said that her party would not support the bill. She said that the problem was safety and the reason she did not like the bill was that safety had been downgraded. There would not be enough safety according to her. So the first speaker said there will be too much and the second speaker said there will not be enough. As is often the case the National Party and the ACT party did not get their shall we say act together.  
When we come to the submissions we find unsurprisingly that they also are of the view that there is too much or too little safety. But a very significant number of submitters thought that the bill was just fine. The select committee having listened to the submissions decided to make some changes. The changes were as follows: there would be no going away from the fact that the future of transport will be a whole lot more integrated than its past and there would be no going away from the five objectives of the Land Transport Management Act but in case someone was in doubt as to whether the Government had gone soft on safety we decided in the case of the Civil Aviation Authority to put in the words “maintain and improve”. I ask members of this hallowed Chamber whether “maintain and improve” sounds like a reduction in safety. I do not quite get why “maintain and improve” would be a reduction.  
So it would seem that the ACT party probably has had its prayers answered. Probably the Government moved probably the select committee got the words right probably the ACT party got up in mistake—but wait the aforementioned National Party speaker an earlier Minister of Transport is not assuaged. He is anxious that a current or future Minister might get up one morning and say: “Verily everyone will walk to work” and we would end up with safety at unreasonable cost. That is the argument the member is running and I think he has made a mistake. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: No the submitters made that point too.  
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Yes some of them did. Some of them ran with the opposite point and some of them ran with a third point which is that the bill is just fine. So let us not have it said in this Chamber that all submitters were of one view. They were not. They were all over the place pretty much like the Opposition because they knew what safety at reasonable cost meant—they had had years to get used to it. This is what safety at reasonable cost delivers—if I can go to the same extreme as the National Party contributor did when he opened the debate on the Committee stage: a future whereby traffic jams are just fine because no one will get hurt. If motorways clog up there will be no deaths. There will be no transport or progress but there will be no deaths. That is a logical position to take. That argument is absolutely as extreme as the member’s. I would not have bothered running the argument had the member not run his extreme argument. Or indeed let us get people off their bikes—not withstanding an outbreak of type 2 diabetes or obesity as mentioned by the Minister of Health—in case they get run over by a car. So if we do not have integrated thinking we will end up with some crazy arguments and in our past we have. 
 There has been a decision to straighten the curve there occasioned only by the fact that we have decided to put a higher dollar value on human life. A human life 10 years ago was worth about a quarter of a million dollars. I cannot bring to mind what a human life is worth these days but I think the latest figure ever used was more like $2 million. So a person who was a member of the board of Transit and was going down his or her safety programme to see what engineering should be undertaken would—until the money ran out—simply go down a list of projects that started with the highest cost-benefit ratio and went to the lowest. One needed to leave one’s brain at the door; it was not necessary at the meeting. Of course under National Party funding regimes people did not get very far down the list before running out of money either.  
Now we have a more integrated approach that requires people to think differently. It requires people to take into account a range of factors and to amalgamate them. It moves us away from a safety and efficiency history. It takes us away from fragmentation. It takes us away from: “Let’s do safety here and let’s do economic undertakings there.” and from “Let’s look after human health here and let’s look after the environment somewhere else.” It requires us to integrate our thinking. Now it is pretty clear that some members of the House are not very happy with that. Perhaps they are not able to do that integrated thinking. 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: We’re supportive of it. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Oh they are supportive of it?  
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Of an integrated transport system yes. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Well that is great. So let us integrate safety which means we cannot have safety at reasonable cost alone; we have to have safety as a matter of balance against the other four objectives. Let us have safety integrated into people’s thinking because when we have that we come up with solutions that are somewhat more innovative than simply going down a listed schedule of “B/C ratios” until we run out of money.