Curran Clare: Infrastructure Bill — First Reading 
Curran Clare: Infrastructure Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:656;Page:5854] 
CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South) 
: 
 I shall take a call on the first reading of the Infrastructure Bill. The bill is the Government’s attempt to lift New Zealand’s national productivity and improve New Zealand’s future economic growth. 
I shall put the bill in context. I am the Opposition spokesperson on communications and information technology. It is incumbent on Labour and on me to be across all forms of social media and new technological advances in this important industry so I want to read a posting on Facebook that I came across tonight while preparing this speech. It seems particularly relevant: “Unemployment doubles workers get zero percent wage increases food and electricity prices continue rising Bill English has a $900 a week housing allowance Sir Roger Douglas gets free trips to visit his family in the UK and while Telecom engineers have their jobs contracted out their CEO is handed a cool five big ones. That’s about $13698 every single day of the year. Our society continues to get sicker.” That just about sums things up. 
I shall talk a bit about the bill then I will talk more broadly about some infrastructure challenges for our nation. Labour supports the bill although we reserve the right to question or oppose individual clauses. The bill appears sensible in its intent and was the result of a review process which the previous Labour Government had started. Labour has some reservations about some provisions in the bill particularly Part 4 which repeals the Affordability Housing: Enabling Territorial Authorities Act 2008. Broadly the bill deals with three areas. The first is utility access to roads motorways and rail corridors which among other things involves amendments to the Telecommunications Act 2001. It also includes changes to the New Zealand Railways Corporation and repeals as I said the affordable housing legislation enacted in 2008. 
The previous Labour Government always recognised the importance of good infrastructure for economic development. Infrastructure is hugely important and getting it right is especially important. Infrastructure can be defined as the basic physical and organisational structures needed for the operation of a society or an enterprise or the services and facilities necessary for an economy to function. As the global recession has bitten many Governments around the world have poured funds into infrastructure spending in an effort to stimulate the economy and save jobs. Many sources quote that total infrastructure spending around the world will reach $35 trillion over the next 20 years. Saving jobs and stimulating the economy are important roles for any Government and in times of recession they are an absolute. This Government has waited for too long to introduce legislation to stimulate the economy and the Job Summit that was so talked about failed to act as fast as was imagined. My electorate of Dunedin South has seen the effects of the recession. In the last 12 to 18 months there have been multiple closures of plants. There has been no Government-led initiative since this Government was elected to provide jobs for any of those people. So far it has all been tinkering around the edges. 
Today I want to talk about an important piece of infrastructure that is in limbo but before I do that I will put a few facts out there. National will spend $7.5 billion on infrastructure over the next 5 years $3 billion of which will be spent on roading in the next 3 years. That is nearly half although it does include the $1.5 billion to be spent on broadband. Over the Labour Government’s nine Budgets which we have heard about already tonight annual funding for roading more than doubled from $850 million in 1999 to over $1.9 billion in 2008 but annual investment in public transport in 2008 was over 15 times greater than that of 1999—15 times! This Government will not be going down that route. There are some commitments to public transport but mainly in Auckland; around the rest of the country it will not be a top priority. That is a tragedy and a missed opportunity for our nation. 
Instead roading is the main priority of the Minister of Transport—that is roading for the North Island. In the Budget earlier this year the Minister announced an extra billion dollars for the seven roads of national significance. Of those seven roads the only South Island project is the Christchurch motorway. There is nothing at all from further south. As the representative for one of two Dunedin electorates with a highway heading south out of town in need of urgent attention I have to say that our part of New Zealand does not seem to be a priority. In fact there is no infrastructure spending at all of any note anywhere south of Christchurch. So it is all about roads. 
At some point the Minister will get round to that other important piece of infrastructure that is currently languishing while he is making up his mind what to do about it and that is ultra-fast broadband which is an important utility and is fast becoming an essential service for all New Zealanders in their homes their schools and their workplaces. The National Government was elected more than 9 months ago. A central component of National’s campaign strategy was its $1.5 billion commitment to roll out ultra-fast broadband to 75 percent of New Zealand homes within 10 years. It was its big-ticket campaign pledge. The first thing the new Government did was axe the existing broadband programme introduced by the Labour Government the Broadband Investment Fund which had dozens of regional broadband projects poised to roll out and had widespread support in the industry. Members heard my colleague David Cunliffe talk about that earlier. The new Government axed that programme and there is now a vacuum in the industry. It took this Government until the end of March to release its investment proposal for consultation. Since then there has been nothing. We are now approaching the end of August and there is no indication of how and when this Government will start rolling out broadband. 
This Government has a dilemma—several dilemmas. The first is whether to choose between a Telecom-led roll-out or a growing coalition of electricity lines companies and independent fibre operators called the Regional Fibre Group. Choosing the Telecom-led roll-out would be somewhat controversial given what is happening right now with the country’s biggest telecommunications company. Telecom is embroiled in an escalating drama with its own workforce of 900 service technicians and engineers in Northland and Auckland—unionised and un-unionised—who are fighting attempts to turn them into dependent contractors of Visionstream the new contractor awarded the contract. Essentially these employees will lose the protection provided to them as employees and will be forced to buy their own equipment and vehicles to pay for their own holiday and sick leave entitlements and to accept all the other financial obligations and risks associated with their own employment costing them 50 to 66 percent of their income. They will be at the mercy of the parent contractor with their remuneration based on how many jobs they can get through rather than the quality of their work. There are real and genuine concerns that that will have a devastating effect on Telecom’s skilled workforce at a time when it is needed most and on the services that Telecom delivers. 
Last week myself and Trevor Mallard our spokesperson on labour sent an open letter to Wayne Boyd the Telecom chair asking him not to put Telecom at risk to intervene in the dispute between Visionstream and the service technicians and to re-examine the terms of the contract. New Zealanders expect that Telecom will act as an efficient customer-focused communications provider and a responsible corporate citizen. We also expect the Government to take a close interest given that it needs a skilled workforce to roll out its ultra-fast broadband. We know that there are industry players who have grave concerns about these issues. Momentum is growing. There is growing alarm within the industry about the risk to the skilled workforce Telecom’s ability to deliver on its regulatory undertakings and its ability to deliver a quality service to its customers. Surely that is a matter for the Government. MPs across the country including National MPs are raising concerns about the contracts that these workers are being force to sign. One of them—Northland MP John Carter—personally acknowledged to me today that he is advising technicians in his electorate not to sign that the Visionstream contract is a crock. 
The second dilemma that this Government has is that it cannot deliver on its election pledge. It left out the entire rural sector. It knows now that that was a huge mistake. So what does it do? It looks likely that it will come up with a new proposal that is about equitable distribution of broadband across the country investing in the rural sector where our primary production exports are dependent on—[ 
Interruption 
]; and that is good—our having a technological competitive edge and where the social benefits of broadband access will make such a difference to rural communities. But if the Government does that what will happen to the campaign pledge? Seventy-five percent of New Zealanders certainly will not have broadband in their homes within 10 years so that pledge is out the window I say to Mr Joyce and Mr English. If broadband is going to be rolled out in the rural sector as well that is a reason to put Telecom firmly in the frame for that roll-out.