Beaumont Carol: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeBeaumont Carol: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour):It is a pleasure indeed to speak to the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill in Part 1 of the Committee stage of this bill. The purpose of this bill is of course—as others will know but just for those listening—to amend the Road User Charges Act to enable regulations to be made exempting road-user charge vehicles that are not required to be registered from road-user charges. Most of the vehicles that are exempt will make very little use of roads and make a sufficient contribution to the cost that they impose on the road network through the vehicle licence fee. In fact the first part of this bill Part 1 amends the Land Transport Act 1998 to enable an additional fee for certain road-user charge vehicles. So that provision is essentially making that additional fee payable in respect of all road-user charge vehicles that are operated on roads and that are exempt from paying road-user charges. That additional fee is to be treated as land transport revenue for the purposes of the Land Transport Management Act. It is meant to be set having regard to the extent of the use of the vehicles on the road and the likely cost that the vehicles will generate when they use that road.This is important and I do not want to relitigate the history but it is an interesting bill this one. We support it. I mean getting the legislation clear and getting it right is important. However it has got an interesting history which I did comment on in my second reading speech so I will not go into it here. The fact of the matter is that we are fixing up a bit of legislation to get it right and that is fine. The actual amendments to the Land Transport Act in Part 1 as I said make sense.But one of the issues that we have got is a question of strategic transport direction. That is what I want to talk about. This is about revenue we collect from vehicles using roads and making sure that it is done in a fair manner that makes sense. But we do need to think about what we are doing overall with our transport system. Our transport system is fundamental both to ensuring that people can get from A to B as they need to but also to ensuring that goods and services can get from A to B as we need them to and it is a significant part of our economic system. We need legislation that makes sure that the costs are shared clearly and equitably but we also need to make sure that this transport system that we have actually enables our economy to grow and that it serves the people of this country.The question we really have is about the revenue being generated from the fees that can be set under this part from road-user charges generally and from petrol tax. All of this is about income that is generated that can then be used on land transport. How that is used is I think a point of great political significance and one on which we have a very significant difference with the Government which has essentially concentrated its thoughts almost exclusively on roads of national significance. From our perspective we need to think about the rail network being the backbone of our transport system. We need to think about local roads as part of the infrastructure that is essential in terms of regional development.I think that whole strategic transport direction question is a really important one which the Government across the Chamber fails to take account of. In fact even in question time today—and I raise this point even though it was not a transport issue—illustrative of this problem was the fact that the Government will not deal with any of the hard questions. We were talking about issues of superannuation about money to invest in New Zealand businesses and about the extent to which we use the income we generate and the money that we need to invest in our businesses and how we do that. Honestly the answers to those questions around superannuation today were a disgrace. Likewise we need the money that is being generated through our road-user charges—through the fees that are flagged in Part 1 of the bill—to be used in a much more strategic manner than the current Government is using them.Members on this side of the Chamber will as I have said be voting for this bill. We do think that transport and getting it right in the transport portfolio is critical and we understand the need to correct the mistakes that have been made. But we think that the Government is going in the wrong direction.Part 1 agreed to.