Brownlee Gerry: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBrownlee Gerry: Debate on Crown Entities Public Organisations and State Enterprises — In Committee[Sitting date: 17 June 2014. Volume:699;Page:18542. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister of Transport):This is a financial review of the activities of the New Zealand Transport Agency over the past year. Naturally when considering that one might look back and one might look forward. I accept that. But I was particularly distressed today by some of the comments in the speech offered to the House by the Labour spokesperson on transport. What he seems to have missed is that this process is guided—that is the process of the Government policy statement and the work of the New Zealand Transport Agency—by the Land Transport Management Act 2003. I would suggest that if he is to be an effective spokesperson he should go and read that Act so that he does not make some of the extraordinary statements that he made in the House this afternoon.Phil Twyford: Overdue for reform.Hon GERRY BROWNLEE: What I would like to hear from him at some point is that if he thinks that Act needs to be reformed he starts to spell out what it is because all I hear from him is about what Labour is not going to do should the unlikely event of its receiving the opportunity to sit on the Treasury benches occur. Labour is not going to continue with the roads of national significance programme. It is not going to invest in cycle networks as we have. It is not going to invest in pedestrian opportunities as we have and it is not going to have an arrangement that allows local communities to choose where they spend some of the funding that comes from the National Land Transport Fund on their own projects. Anyone can stand in this House and tell people what they are not going to do; to talk about what you are doing and what a Government is doing is a different matter.We have over the last short while since 2012 spent a staggering $945 million—a billion dollars effectively—on public transport. That has been matched by local authorities which have contributed another $770 million. So there you see a huge commitment to public transport for a very small part of the transport task required in New Zealand. We have further said that if we can see that the demand for public transport is on the rise we will be there to fund it. I want to know whether in fact the Labour Party is proposing that it would do away with the $800 million package that we have put together for Auckland to bring forward some of its roading projects. The answer would be yes because Labour does not like roads. It somehow thinks that New Zealand should return to a sort of strange community where we do not make use of roads.When it comes to KiwiRail over a billion dollars so far has been reinvested in that company trying to give it the opportunity to contribute more to the freight task throughout New Zealand. But the reality is that the rails do not run into many of the rural communities in New Zealand where the productivity that comes off our agrarian economy is carried out. So there has to be an ability to move freight by road. What I want to do this afternoon is congratulate the management of KiwiRail on collaborating with road freight companies throughout the country to get a better synergy between the opportunity to move goods over long distances on rail with the capacity to take significant loads by truck to the farm gate and beyond. When Mr Twyford stands up and says there is no big thinking going on here I have got to tell him that out in the wide world people do not necessarily look to the Opposition spokesman’s office to see that big thinking. Thank God they do not because there is none.The reality is that we have a dynamic transport industry in New Zealand and we have a Government that is making investments in the transport infrastructure to ensure that it prospers along with the rest of the economy for years to come. It was the Romans who first worked out that if you want to have a dynamic economy provide roads and that is what we are doing.Report noted.