Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister for Economic Development): Thank you Madam Speaker. It's a pleasure to be speaking in support of this bill. I want to acknowledge the excellent work and the leadership of the Hon Shane Jones in bringing forward this work. It's good to see that the bill has been able to attract support from across the House.I think all members will be well aware of the productivity-enhancing benefits of well-chosen infrastructure. I think there are three examples I want to cite: transport which is a hotly contested area of infrastructure policy right now but I think we would all agree in this House no matter our differences about priorities and particular modes that transport infrastructure can play a key part in not only connecting regions and providing a supply chain for our export and import economy but also well-chosen transport infrastructure can make our cities work and can make them economically efficient.The three waters are critically important. My colleague the Hon Nanaia Mahuta has got a huge reform project under way working with local government to tackle long-overdue problems in the provision and delivery of water services across the country. You know without good infrastructure investment for the three waters our cities and towns cannot grow. It's a major impediment to their development if the ability to lay down the pipes for the three waters is not there.The other really great example I think is broadband. There's no question that the unbundling of Telecom's old monopoly under the Clark Labour Government and the successful roll-out of ultra-fast broadband has had a transformative effect on our economy. I'm happy to give credit to the former Government for the ultra-fast broadband roll-out. But those two elements—the unbundling of Telecom and ultra-fast broadband—have led to the development of one of our most successful fastest-growing and important industries and that's digital technologies. It's an incredibly important industry for the future of New Zealand.I want to just also consider for a moment the history of infrastructure provision which I think it's kind of worthwhile remembering that for the best part of three decades as New Zealand's economy went into a decline through the late 1960s there was some stagnation through the 1960s and 1970s the kind of crisis of the mid-1970s the very tumultuous time for the 1980s and 1990s as we went through a couple of decades of painful economic adjustment; all through that time successive Governments stopped investing in infrastructure as they struggled to get the Government accounts into order.By the time of the turning of the millennium the early 2000s the Clark-Cullen Government was in power this country faced a massive infrastructure deficit because of successive Governments failing to invest in the transport system in hospitals in schools—you name it. What we saw under Helen Clark and Michael Cullen was that they turned the taps on. As the Government books got back into order they started investing massively in hospitals and schools around the country. They started—for the first time in a long long time—investing in the roading network and in public transport in Auckland with the highly successful Northern Busway and major upgrades to the Auckland rail system.Now it's true that in spite of our different priorities the Key Government continued investing in transport; mostly in a handful of very very expensive urban expressway projects. But I'm not going to dispute the value of some of those projects. The Waikato Expressway started under Annette King and will be completed under this coalition Government; delivering fantastic road connectivity to the people of the Waikato. The Key Government continued it and our coalition Government—with a different set of priorities but nevertheless a greater than ever commitment to delivering nation-building 21st century infrastructure for this country that is absolutely vital to future proof our economy and to set it up for the growth and prosperity that we all desire for it. We have embarked on a huge programme of schools and hospitals investment and a different mix of transport projects but nevertheless we see the importance of really good investment in transport.But now it's time for this country to take a smarter approach to the way that we think plan and invest in infrastructure and that's what I think is great about the work that the Hon Shane Jones has done in this area. He is drawing on with this bill and with the establishment of Te Waihanga the infrastructure commission the best of international thinking and practice from Canada from Scotland and other parts of the UK and from Australia at a federal and state level where arm's-length somewhat independent public agencies have been established to build a policy space for thinking about infrastructure one step removed from the hurly burly of partisan politics—a bridge to the private sector to try to tap into the creativity the thinking and resources in the private sector to build a long-term pipeline of investment and to try to build consensus around the strategy and the underlying principles behind a long-term infrastructure plan.That I think is a very valuable endeavour and I want to acknowledge the very helpful advice and influence that we were able to garner from the Australians: a number of the state—they call them i-bodies—infrastructure bodies and Infrastructure Australia the federal organisation who were willing to share with us their experiences. They're all structured slightly differently they've got a slightly different mandate but they all share the goal of having an arm's-length non-partisan body to build expertise and to develop the long term strategy for infrastructure investment.The big tasks I think that Te Waihanga will be grappling with: what is the pipeline? As we compete in an Australasian and an international market for expertise for skills and indeed for investment we have to build a multi-year pipeline that gives the market certainty and allows people to plan and allows the firms particularly in our domestic and Australasian market to build the capability that they need. We need to strengthen our analysis and sharpen our thinking around productivity. It's easy to waste vast amounts of money building infrastructure that might sound good or look good or be an attractive option for a politician to announce and cut a ribbon but we need to be much more ruthless and disciplined about analysing the relative and comparative productivity effects of different kinds of infrastructure. That in a capital-constrained country like ours is the most important thing.The other thing I want to mention that will undoubtedly be part of what the infrastructure commission grapples with is how we get the best out of public-private partnerships (PPPs) and public-private cooperation. The debates of a decade ago about PPPs and whether they were a good thing or not are largely redundant now. Capital has never been cheaper. We can borrow almost at zero interest for 30 years for 50 years so there is no need any more to reach for elaborate complex private sector financing arrangements because it's very easy to borrow for the right projects. The challenge that this generation faces for infrastructure is how to generate the revenue to pay off the debt to service the debt. That is the thing that we have to grapple with and it's my hope that the commission will be engaged in that debate. We have to find new ways of generating the revenue to support these kinds of investments and there's a number of places where that revenue can come from but the debate has well and truly moved on from the preoccupation with private financing arrangements that were such a feature of infrastructure policy debates a decade ago.I'm pleased to hear from the select committee that there was an overwhelmingly positive response to the bill from submitters and a couple of minor tweaks to strengthen the information-gathering powers of the commission and applying those powers also to local government because it's very important that local government and central government—that we aggregate their infrastructure work and see it as one public sector.