Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister for Economic Development): Well I too am pleased to make a contribution in this third reading debate to the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission/Te Waihanga Bill. It is in our view a great opportunity for New Zealand to lift its game when it comes to planning investment and construction of infrastructure. It's important I think for two reasons. The first is that we spend a lot of our national wealth on infrastructure—a lot. In transport alone we're spending $4.5 billion a year. Most of that is capital spend on transport infrastructure every year. Think about what we do in relation to the building of our social infrastructure. It is a massive part of our annual spend. The second reason that this is important and that it deserves serious attention is that done well infrastructure can make a really significant difference to our economy and our prosperity. The example I want to give to substantiate that is what we've seen over the last 15 years with the break-up of the Telecom monopoly and the roll-out of ultra-fast broadband. Those two moves together are responsible for the growth of one of our most successful and fast-growing industries. So the the digital economy in New Zealand is really a direct result of in this case a very high-quality infrastructure decision. It was mentioned earlier that this bill is based on the New South Wales model and to a large extent it is. Shane Jones and others of us spent a lot of time with the Australian infrastructure bodies—the arm's length state level and federal infrastructure commissions—that inspired the work that went into this bill. It's really about lifting the standard of debate and of policy making on infrastructure and it's really important in summing up on this third reading to note that the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission/Te Waihanga is fundamentally an advisory body. It's not a police officer that can march into Government departments and Crown entities take over projects rewrite their policies and do their job for them. That's fundamentally why the Supplementary Order Paper that the previous member was speaking about was not supported because it wasn't in keeping with the essential advisory nature of the commission. The brief of the commission really is to develop broad public agreement on long-term infrastructure strategy. I think it's good on all sides of this House that we recognise the value that that could add. I think of some of the debates on infrastructure that we've had over the last 20 years in New Zealand that would have benefited from a seriously good tooled-up arm's-length commission with good policy and analytical capability—the barren debates about public-private partnerships (PPPs) for example where one side of politics and the infrastructure industry are ceaselessly promoting PPPs as if they were some kind of free pot of money that would enable projects to be built when in fact the bigger issues are around the quality of the infrastructure delivery and the ultimate lifetime cost to Government and citizens. We've finally I think reached a stage where PPPs are no longer being touted around as some kind of panacea. There's such a track record in Australia the UK and elsewhere over the last 20 years of them coming to grief. On our side of the House certainly we are very open to private financing initiatives but not out of some kind of religious zeal and not to accommodate the commercial imperative of the private sector infrastructure providers. But when they can actually deliver high-quality projects when they can deliver on the complex challenges that some projects pose and if they can deliver value for money then we're open to them. I think that if we'd had a commission like this we could have advanced that debate much more productively over the last few years. One of the things that this bill offers and the commission will offer I think is a more productive engagement between public and private. Often the Government takes a more conservative approach to these things but it is firmly focused on the public good. This bill sets up a board which deliberately sets out to bring experienced private sector people on to the board so it's the possibility of a really good marriage of public and private. The private sector is often more innovative and often sharper about assessing risk but of course always looking for business looking for more work. Many of the infrastructure providers in the infrastructure industry—there's some great creative talent in our own infrastructure industry but they never saw a PPP that they didn't like or a private financing arrangement. So I think if we can marry those two impulses in a much more constructive way we will actually elevate infrastructure thinking in this country. So the other part of the commission's brief is about direct support for projects. Now we know that our system of Government in New Zealand is highly devolved and delegated so sometimes quite small Government agencies or departments can find themselves undertaking some very large infrastructure projects. They don't necessarily have the capability in-house to do that and there's the potential here for the commission to be called in to provide that capability on behalf of Government departments or Crown entities to take on large-scale infrastructure projects. I think that will be a really big advantage. There's no question that the whole idea of a pipeline of infrastructure projects is essential and I think everybody in the House would agree with that. We have to give certainty to the market. We have to allow people to plan to build capability and build confidence in the infrastructure market. So that part of the commission's brief is really really important. One of the really helpful things that the Finance and Expenditure Committee did was look at extending the information-gathering powers in the bill to local government and that was extremely helpful because we know that some of the trickiest most challenging infrastructure issues that we're facing today involve both central government and local government. My colleague Nanaia Mahuta will attest to just how challenging it is to think through how we can transition our way in the next few years to a sustainable solution to the problem of three waters. The Havelock North contamination episode demonstrated once and for all that local government lacks in many cases the balance sheet and the capability in the case of some smaller councils to properly manage our three waters infrastructure. When people get poisoned by water contamination—contamination of the water table—that is a particularly graphic reminder of this. So Minister Mahuta is working closely with the entire local government sector to find a way through that. It's going to require some different approaches. I think that the commission if it were up and running today would be well placed to assist the Minister and the Department of Internal Affairs in thinking through the creative new approaches different ways to use the balance sheets that already exist within local government to find new institutional ways to build that capability so that every community in New Zealand and every citizen can expect that they will have access to safe clean drinking water that our environment will be protected and that storm water and waste-water systems will be up to the challenges put to them by our towns and cities and to the challenges posed by climate change. The other example I think of around local government is that we're struggling right now as a country to invest in the infrastructure that's needed to support the growth of our towns and cities. It's not just transport; it's three waters and the rest. Our existing policy settings the National Land Transport Programme and the way that councils traditionally have been responsible for providing the infrastructure to support urban expansion—whether it's greenfields or brownfields—is really struggling in our high-growth centres. We have to find new ways of funding financing and planning that infrastructure and I believe that that is exactly the kind of challenge that the commission can assist us with. Another example is the need to build the infrastructure to support decarbonised energy generation and things like public transport and a freight vehicle fleet that is based on hydrogen or electricity and all the infrastructure that's needed to support that. Bill read a third time.