Genter Julie Anne: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16763. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green):I rise to speak on the second reading of the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill as reported from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. The Green Party has no reason to oppose this bill. It makes a number of technical amendments that fix up some of the mistakes that naturally happen when there is a good deal of reform as there was recently to the road-user charges system.For the benefit of those at home today I will just outline exactly what the objectives of the road-user charges system are. Road-user charges are the fees that are paid by those using heavy vehicles in lieu of paying a petrol tax. Road-user charges contribute about 30 percent to our transport budget as a whole. Since the National Government came into power in fact the share being paid by heavy vehicle users has declined quite significantly and the amount being paid by users of petrol cars through petrol tax has increased quite a bit. So there is a greater portion of the transport budget being paid for by users of light vehicles—petrol vehicles—than there is by users of diesel.According to the documents that were provided by the Ministry of Transport the objectives of the road-user charges system are to support economic efficiency to recover the costs that road users impose on the road network and to be equitable between road users. I have to say that what is really missing from this bill are changes to the road-user charges system that would actually give effect to these objectives. The reality is that at the moment the road-user charges system is not direct—it does not directly charge cost to users in a way that would most directly support economic efficiency—and certainly the way that the transport budget is being spent is not equitable to all road users. It does not take the cost from those who are actually going to be using the road. It does not take the money from those road users and put it into the projects that are being funded.As an example Mr Bennett said earlier in this debate that the roads of national significance were good for the economy and that they were a fair use of road users’ money because it was being used on roads. What he did not say is that the Government’s main priority—these five or six motorways that are yet to be built—carry only a tiny percentage of all daily vehicle trips. So 75 percent of the transport budget is being used on less than 5 percent of vehicle trips. That does not seem like a fair allocation of resources because it is not.In fact road-user charges and petrol tax are not the right way of assessing user charges. Basically the way it works is that the Government sets its priorities based on what its election promises were because it wants to build some shiny infrastructure so that some people in a few smaller towns or rural areas will vote for the National Party. The Government then prioritises and puts all the money into those projects saying that they will be good for the economy even though it has not done any economic analysis. Once the economic analysis shows that the projects are incredibly poor value the Government goes ahead and builds them anyway. The users of the roads are not the ones paying for it. It will be people driving cars and trucks all over New Zealand who will be paying for these motorways that are used by only a tiny percentage of road users.What is really sad about this is the lost opportunity. If the transport budget was allocated in a way that got the most bang for its buck it could reduce transport costs across the board in New Zealand and it could improve choices for people so they had alternatives rather than having to rely on a car for all trips. Also road freight users are actually massively disadvantaged by this system because most of the problems with peak congestion on a State highway network are caused by commuters who have no better option than taking the car. So it is the road freight users who are paying. They are less than 5 percent—less than 5 percent—of the vehicles on those roads at peak time. We have got plenty of roads to move the freight that needs to move on our roads; the problem is that the roads are congested with commuters because they do not have cost-effective alternatives for getting to work. And the road freight users have no choice but to pay because the Government is going to put up the fuel taxes and road-user charges to pay for the projects that it is building now. In the future we will be paying more for these projects and we will not have any choice but to use cars.