Genter Julie Anne: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10311. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to take a call on the—Hon Member: What’s it called?JULIE ANNE GENTER: —bill that raises petrol taxes the Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill. This bill raises petrol taxes. Why does National need to put up the petrol tax? It is essentially for two reasons. The first reason and I think this is a reason—[Interruption] Oh I have got a copy thank you Minister Brownlee—[Interruption]The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Order! I would actually like to hear what the member is saying so please give her that courtesy.Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. We just want to know whether she knows which bill she is talking about.The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I am sure she does.JULIE ANNE GENTER: Actually I was very busy reading the regulatory impact statement which we just got on this bill so I did not have the title right in front of me but it is very clear what this bill does. What it does is put up the petrol tax. So why does National need to put up the petrol tax? Firstly it is because people are driving less. They have been driving less since before 2006 and this is very clear in New Zealand Transport Agency data. It shows that the number of vehicles on State highways are down. Vehicle volumes on State highways have been declining and the population has been increasing so that means per capita vehicle kilometres travelled are way down. This is a trend that we have seen all around OECD countries. It is not that surprising. But unfortunately it has not yet been reflected in the Government’s transport funding priorities.The second reason the Government has to put up the petrol tax is that it has mismanaged the transport budget. This is really clear in the regulatory impact statement which says that the priorities that the Government has set specifically for the roads of so-called national significance which are really just three very big very expensive motorway projects that all have benefit to cost ratios of around 1 or less than 1—really only 1 if you exaggerate the benefits. So it has got this huge commitment to building motorways at a time when traffic is declining and people are driving less.This pie chart shows the Government’s budget for new capital investment in infrastructure over the next 3 years. The purple bit is all on new State highways—and of course it is on only the three new State highways which are extremely expensive and have a low benefit to cost ratio. There is a tiny little slice going into local roads so who is going to pick up the tab for local roads? Well it is not road users; it is ratepayers. Road users do not pay directly for capital investment in new roads. If they did we would not be able to fund them. If users of Transmission Gully or the Waikato Expressway were asked to pay directly for the billions of dollars that are going to be put into those projects it would never cover the cost of building those projects. That is why the Government has had to put up the petrol tax.Essentially although we hear it a lot from the Government that roads are user-pays that is not the reality. The reality is that new capital expenditure is funded by users of roads everywhere in the country through marginal increases in petrol tax. That means that the use of the road does not necessarily reflect the cost of it because people do not pay for it directly. Secondly more than 50 percent of all vehicle trips travelled are on local roads. This is data that came through in an Official Information Act request to theMinister of Transport. The Government should know that more than half of all vehicle trips are happening on local roads and local roads are half-funded by ratepayers not directly by road users.So at the moment what we have is a highly vehicle-dependent transport system. That transport system forces us to spend billions of dollars actually increasing our current account deficit because we are importing oil which has become much more expensive. Over the last 10 years oil prices have doubled—they have doubled in the last decade—and for that reason even though we are not importing any more oil and people are driving less we are paying twice as much for it.You would think that if the National Government was concerned about “New Zealand Inc.” it would care about reducing our current account deficit and would see that there is an opportunity to reduce our current account deficit by reducing our reliance on very expensive imported oil. But obviously it does not because what it is doing is prioritising all of the spending in the transport budget on projects that do not give New Zealanders choices. They do not give New Zealanders the choice to save money on oil by taking public transport by walking or cycling or by letting their kids walk and cycle safely to school. That is a very cost-effective opportunity not only to reduce congestion but to allow people to get around to the places they need to go without having to fork out for expensive imported oil and also having to pay more on petrol taxes.Saying that you have to spend all of the petrol tax or road-user charges on new roads is like saying that the alcohol tax should be used to build new bars. It is ridiculous. What we need to do is balance—rebalance—our transport system.What the Green Party would say is that not all taxes are bad. It is important to distinguish between two types of taxes. There are taxes that are just for raising revenue. You can tax employment you can tax income but those are good things. Why would we want to tax good things? We do not want to tax good things just for the purpose of raising revenue. The Green Party’s tax policies would like to see a shift—and this is best-practice economics which I know no one in the National Party has ever been exposed to. If you readThe Economist for example it was saying that higher petrol taxes are a great way to tax away vulnerability. Basically we know petrol is going to be getting more expensive. We know that it is polluting. We know that we have passed 400 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and that that is a major problem for humanity—and you know you would hope that those members would care about the future of humanity.So there is an imperative that we reduce our consumption of fossil fuel and transport is a real opportunity to do that in a win-win way so people can spend less money on getting around. That is good for the economy. We would have less carbon dioxide pollution in the atmosphere which is good because it means humanity can continue to survive for generations into the future and have a high quality of life. So it is imperative that we reduce our dependence on fossil fuels for economic reasons and so that we can survive as a species. Transport offers us this great opportunity.So the Green Party can support a slow moderated increase to the petrol tax as part of a way of enabling our transport system and our economy to become more resilient and less dependent on fossil fuels. Unfortunately the projects that the National Government is prioritising are simply the worst way you could possibly invest in the future of transport right now in 2013. I cannot think of a worse way.We have got all the data that shows us that new roads have diminishing marginal returns. They are not opening up new links to new areas; they are in places where we already have road links. The best use of our money is going to be using our existing road network smarter using it better. Part of that is investing in the complementaryalternatives to the road—which are our rail network which has been severely underinvested in for many many years; coastal shipping; and in our towns and cities safe walking and cycling for children and adults who would like to be able to get around without having to jump in their car and spend a ton of money on petrol—and investing in public transport where it makes sense. It does make a lot of economic sense once you take a broader perspective on the benefits.It is really essential that New Zealanders have choice and this Government is not giving them choice. What it is doing is putting up the petrol tax and then putting all of the money into projects many of them will not even use on a daily basis. You know the percentage of vehicle trips on Transmission Gully will be less than on many arterial roads in Auckland so it will be the Aucklanders who are sitting in traffic because the Government has refused to fund the city rail link and other smart options who will be paying the fuel taxes that will be paying back the loan on Transmission Gully which is going to serve only about 10000 people a day. The rail network in Auckland currently carries 45000 people a day on weekdays and with the city rail link it could carry twice that many people. It could take the equivalent of 12 motorway lanes of traffic off the roads and certainly that is a good use of road users’ money if ever there was one.So what this Government is doing is extremely short-sighted and irresponsible. It is not going to give us a resilient transport system. It is not going to protect the economy from high oil prices. It leaves us in an oil-dependent situation which is going to worsen our current account deficit which is bad for the economy. Thank you.