Willis ScottSCOTT WILLIS (Green): Thank you Mr Chair and thank you to the Minister for informing us about the approach taken by the Government. It is I guess one way to do things to ensure that down the track legislation can be improved. But wouldn't it be simpler to improve what we've got here right now when we have such a valuable discussion and amendments that are on the Table or will be on the Table to be discussed? I think there's an opportunity here to fix up something that was clearly rushed through poorly thought-out and simply there to tick some boxes off through urgency. I think we can forgive or overlook that box-ticking was mostly rejecting solutions when we've got an opportunity to do something a bit better. And here I think we do have an opportunity to make things better relatively simply.As my Labour colleague pointed out just now electric vehicles (EVs) are lighter and have less impact on roads than utes and sport utility vehicles (SUVs). Utes and SUVs are usually over three tonnes on the roads; EVs are usually under two tonnes. We could have thresholds that would provide a fairer rate and that's in my colleague Julie Anne Genter's proposed Amendment Paper No. 23 which creates new thresholds for all vehicles for road-user charge (RUC) charges. This includes vehicles which are between zero and two tonnes—$70 per 1000 kilometres—and vehicles above two tonnes but not heavier than 3.5 tonnes: $78 per 1000 kilometres. The current road-user charge rate is $76 per 1000 kilometres for vehicles between zero and 3.5 tonnes. So the intention with that amendment is to have fairer road-user charge rates recognising that EVs are less impactful on our roads than heavier vehicles. This is simply an evidence-based amendment. It makes sense.And more to that there are other issues here with our current rate where we're charging every vehicle or every vehicle that has a road-user charge no matter where they're driven. And we know that our rural roads are not good roads. Our rural roads are in a poor quality typically but the money that people who drive on those roads pay does not go to fixing up those rural roads. It tends to go to overbridges to making more urban roads to fixing up our urban highways to fixing up roads of somebody's significance. And this is where the unfairness and the idiocy in this approach demonstrates itself. We can do so much better by thinking about what is a fair way and ensuring we have clarity about who's paying for what with the road-user charges.So the amendments that my colleague Julie Anne Genter has put forward are something that I would urge the Minister to consider seriously. We are here to make good legislation not to push through an agenda to tick boxes to prove that something can be done within 100 days. We should be here in a serious place to make a difference for our communities to make a difference for our rural communities as well as our urban communities to make sure that people can have transport options that are fair and equitable rather than building overbridges in Auckland—not that I've got anything against Auckland but I'd quite like some support for the deep South as well. And I'd like some support for our rural communities in the deep South—Otago Southland—where there are people who want to decarbonise and are being put off by this sloppy bit of legislation.So we've got an opportunity here to fix it up to improve it not down the track not somewhere later but here and now. This is something that we could do if we're willing to listen and pay attention and to make good legislation together. So I just urge the Minister to consider what's on the Table to think about what's on offer to think about working collectively working in Parliament to do better legislation than we've got right now and that can make a difference for our communities though there's nothing to lose here. Well I don't think there's anything to lose here. And I'd hope the Minister would see this as an offer that's coming from our side.