Williamson Maurice: Railways Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Railways Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:625;Page:19899] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I am very happy to take a call in the second reading of the Railways Bill and I want to make a few points about it. First of all the National Party is prepared to support this legislation as it came back from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee because I think a process was finally followed that this House would be pleased with but I do not think that members can be pleased with how it started out. The House and the select committee were presented with an initial bill that I think had had an appalling level of consultation with the various industry players. 
As everyone in this House knows the very semantics of the wording we use can often make a big difference. I know that Dr Michael Cullen knows that changing just one word can alter the meaning of an entire agreement or bill. Dr Cullen knows that; he is an expert at the changing of one word. 
We ended up in this case with a bill that operators such as Toll Holdings were really quite outraged about. Its representatives said to the select committee: “If only we had been able to be consulted with and been able to have our side of things heard and with just a small amount of change to some of the semantics and some of the wording—where you have ‘all reasonable steps’ and ‘all practicable steps taken’—we could have lived with a lot of this. But in the way it is currently worded it will just be an absolute bunfight.” I have to say that all sorts of things about safety in the workplace had to be adhered to which in some cases as far as I could tell were contradictory to the actual Health and Safety in Employment Act. 
It seemed to the select committee that there was a way around that and that the officials should have gone away and talked because we had a very good basis for the bill. That was the Wilson report. I am very happy to say that I think the Wilson report was of substance. It had some value and we were hoping that we could turn the Wilson report into a legislative vehicle. That is what I think we have ended up with. As the Minister who just spoke in the second reading said there is a high-level safety case in relation to all the operators who work on a railway line. 
We need to understand what the big difference is with railways now. Instead of there being just the former one operator that both ran the carriages and trains and owned the line and so on—likeNew Zealand Rail as it used to be for years or like Tranz Rail as it then called itself—we have split up the railway line. I guess the best analogy for that is the situation with the roads where a particular body owns the roads. In the case of the State highways it is Transit on behalf of the Government and all the players that want to operate on those roads like trucking companies and private motorists pay for specific access to use those roads. With rail we will see a range of different operators from the big Toll Holdings which is the biggest operator to Connex which is running trains in Auckland to smaller companies and to the hobbyist railways where trains run for only a few kilometres on a little spur somewhere. So the legislation is required. 
I make the case again that the National Party was very happy about the legislation but as the Minister has said there is a Supplementary Order Paper to come. I have just been able to look at it. We were not aware of this Supplementary Order Paper even though this legislation was introduced back in 2003 and the select committee I repeat reported back to the House on 9 August 2004. There has been plenty of time if the Government had wanted to have some cooperation on the Supplementary Order Paper to let members of the Opposition see it before today before we suddenly bring this bill in and bang it through under urgency. 
I have looked at this Supplementary Order Paper and as with some Supplementary Order Papers I see that it is reasonably trivial. There is some stuff in it that now calls the authority Land Transport New Zealand because when the bill was introduced the authority was the Land Transport Safety Authority. Of course no one will object to that but how about something like the proposed new clause 48(a) that gives the Minister the power to make rules concerning “… rail vehicles railway premises or railway infrastructure:”? The bill as introduced under clause 51(a) provided that ordinary rules could be made amongst other things to “regulate the use of railway lines and empower access providers to control restrict and prohibit the use of a railway line and to close railway lines in specified circumstances or on specified occasions.” But quite serious concern was expressed about that. 
The select committee members I think worked very cooperatively—Lynne Pillay is in the House today and I think that she will agree that the select committee worked very cooperatively—to get the bill to where it is but what do I see in this Supplementary Order Paper? The select committee had deleted that power because on evidence on balance and across the board of all operators who made that submission it was something that should not have been in the bill. But what do I see now? I see that Supplementary Order Paper 353 proposes to reinstate it. 
The Minister is saying that he does not care what was said in the submissions from all the various interested players at the committee hearing. He does not care about what the officials finally advised the committee or indeed what members of the committee across Labour the Greens National and ACT—four parties or maybe even five parties; I do not think that United Future was represented on the committee—all agreed to and agreed to in a very cooperative style. No—remembering that the bill was reported back on 9 August 2004 we now have a situation where the Minister has come back with a Supplementary Order Paper and has shoved that provision back in. 
Now I have to say that that really tests our resolve to try to work cooperatively. I think that sending the officials away to work with the various players—mainly Toll because it is the main game in town but also a number of others—got us a bill that was tidy and a report back we could all sign up to. It got us into a space where we were comfortable—but now this has happened. It is actually a sort of Michael Cullen on steroids trick. This is not just changing one word; this is coming back and changing the entire intent of the bill by whamming in a Supplementary Order Paper in at the last minute. 
I will be talking a little more to some of my colleagues about how we will deal with this bill at the Committee of the whole House stage. But at this point I say that the bill as reported back from the select committee does great credit to all members of that committee to the officials and to the people outside who have to run the rail system. If this bill were passed as it came back from the committee we would have a safer rail system in which people would know their responsibilities more clearly. The chain of command would be established as to who was responsible for the railway lines for the land on the side of the railway lines for the operation of the rolling stock for the health and safety of workers on the railways and members of the public who come near a railway line by way of using a railway crossing or walking beside it and for the rights of individuals to enter on to railways land or to walk off it. 
This bill would cover all of that in what I think is a very tidy fashion—but not when the Government in the form of the Minister just says it does not care what everybody has agreed to or how long the process took place: “I know best; I am in charge. ‘We won. You lost. Eat that!’ Here is a Supplementary Order Paper at the last minute.”