Hughes Gareth: Road User Charges Bill — First Reading 
Hughes Gareth: Road User Charges Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:670;Page:16779] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Assistant Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou kia ora. I acknowledge the new transport spokesperson for Labour Shane Jones and also the excellent work that Darien Fenton has done on truck safety in this Parliament. 
Members might not know this about me but growing up in Gisborne I was a boy racer. I am not the typical Greenie who is opposed to every single road and who hugs trees. I am not sure whether I am the only member in this House who can change a car engine but I can. So I am a Green who loves roads and this speech is about why it is important we focus on our roads but do so with a balanced approach. It is great—[ 
Interruption 
]. The House is so enraptured I cannot hear a word a single person has said so I will keep on going with my speech. 
It is good to be in front of this House discussing the Road User Charges Bill. I will talk a bit about the bill but more importantly about the agenda. It is not just about the small mostly common-sense changes that are happening; the big picture is the stuff the Minister is deciding behind closed doors the stuff that the New Zealand Transport Agency is implementing. That is what I want to talk about. 
We have heard a few mentions already tonight about the Road Transport Forum New Zealand; we have heard in hushed tones about Ken Shirley. We know they are powerful interests but I am proud to be standing here as the member from the party that does not accept a cent from the Road Transport Forum. I never have and I never will. We know how powerful that group is. It mobilised 4400 cars to shut down some of our biggest cities to get what it wanted. Although I am a supporter of non-violent direct action I know how powerful and influential a group it is. 
I will provide a bit of a context. Although I was a boy racer and I loved burning around in my Mark I red Ford Escort with mag wheels some of the context of what I am providing to this House is the idea that this House is wasting billions of dollars on uneconomic motorways. That is locking us into a car and truck-dependent future. I mean where is the balance? For every dollar we are spending in this House on walking cycling buses and trains we are pouring six bucks into new unaffordable motorways. For the 85 percent of Kiwis who cycle we are spending only 10 percent. We are lacking that joined-up thinking. We are talking about roads of national significance; why are we not talking about “corridors of national significance” which we believe are smart transport investments? But that is just not what we are seeing from this Government. 
We will support this bill being referred to a select committee because there are some important questions we want to ask. Let us be honest: this bill is pretty non-controversial. However it is important because what we do with our freight industry in New Zealand will have a huge bearing on our kids’ future. The amount of freight carried by truck in New Zealand is estimated to grow by 75 percent into the mid-2030s and road-user charges the main way in which we get revenue is spent by us. Even older than I am the road-user charge regulations came in in 1978 when Muldoon was still tramping around this Chamber. We are one of the few countries in the world that still has road-user charges. Many other countries have just moved on. As the Road Transport Forum has pointed out we are spending $120 million in administration which the forum says is just wasted. 
This bill takes a user-pays approach to our road trucks which the Greens support when it comes to commercial vehicles. There are a lot of them. There are 580000 heavy trucks under this road-user charge which are all diesel vehicles. This bill will not increase or decrease the amount that people are paying but it will make evasion more difficult. That is a good thing considering that the charge cost us about $30 million last year. 
We have heard an interesting debate on the charging of the maximum weight and I am still open to the arguments about that. On one side we heard from Darien Fenton that it will penalise some truckies but on the other side it could act as an incentive for trucks to be fully loaded. That would mean more efficient trucks on our roads and hopefully fewer trucks and more safety so I am still open to that argument. The legislation will introduce a framework for electronic payment which could facilitate more accurate charging. That is good and could reduce compliance costs. 
Where the bill drops the ball I think is in going in favour of rewarding fuel efficiency. The Minister of Transport says that he does not want that included in the road-user charge but we have seen this Government exempt road-user charges from electric vehicles. We need to make sure of—and this is one thing I will be keeping an eagle eye out for in the select committee—the impact that that will have on efficient compact cars. MINI talked about the current system which it calls the small car advantage minimalism or SCAM approach to small compact cars. We need to have more small compact efficient diesel cars. It would be interesting to ask about biofuels. I have a mate who drives around town in a chip-fat fuelled biodiesel car. We need to ask questions about how we will be impacting on that. We do not want to penalise those who are doing a good job in being more efficient on our roads. 
The key thing I want to approach in this speech is the question of what we will do with the income from road-user charges. Where will we spend those tens or hundreds of millions of dollars? That is what I will look at because three big things are making the trucking industry in New Zealand very very happy. The first is the potential closure of four regional rail lines. The second is the heavy truck—what I call the juggernaut truck—vehicle mass rule change earlier last year. Lastly there is the hugest investment in our country’s transport history: the roads of national significance. 
First of all I will look at regional rail closures. My home town of Gisborne is facing the closure of the Napier to Gisborne rail line and three other regional rail routes are facing closure. Closure would be a boon to trucks. In Gisborne and up on the East Coast we are facing a wall of wood from maturing pine plantations. The wood needs to get to port to be exported somehow but if we close that rail route in the next couple of years the only option will be to transport it on trucks on the roads. But that would make our roads less safe make us more oil-dependent and be worse for the climate. These rail lines are community assets long-standing assets. In our history people have actually died building those rail lines. They are also considerable community economic assets for regions like my home region Gisborne in going forward into the future. 
This Government last year introduced the heavy truck rule for up to 53-tonne 22-metre trucks. Those trucks do have an impact and they will have an increasingly huge impact on our roads on the road toll and also on the viability of rail and coastal shipping. Already heavy trucks are involved in 16 percent of our crashes even though they account for only 4 percent of our fleet and it is Kiwi motorists and cyclists who will be facing those heavy juggernaut trucks and the risks they entail. Ratepayers are the big losers from this legislation as they will subsidise the heavy truck industry in terms of bridge maintenance and road maintenance at the same time that this Government has raided the road maintenance budget to fund its grandiose roads of national significance. 
Looking at the seven roads of national significance projects I see an $11 billion gamble from the Minister. It is uneconomic. Many of them have negative benefit-cost ratios and as we saw from independent earlier estimates some of them had benefit-cost ratios as low as 0.4. I would get laughed out of a council meeting if I went to a council to propose something with a benefit-cost ratio of 0.4. I do not believe that the Minister is getting away with it. For the amount of money we are not getting a good return on our investment. I have tabled reports in this House from the OECD that show there are more jobs more macroeconomic benefits and twice as many jobs per dollar spent when we invest in public transport road maintenance or local roads. We should not be pouring all our money into motorways. I think the key point is that even Don Brash is opposed to some of those roads. As part of the 2025 Taskforce he said that there was no evidence that projects like Transmission Gully would provide a net benefit to the economy. 
The fact is that the way we are going about transport planning in New Zealand is not joined up it does not look at the climate it does not value our dependence on oil and it just promotes a huge growth in the amount of freight carried on our roads. The irony is that the Government could do smarter things like have a joined-up approach and invest in things like our regional rail lines to break those set decades of negative feedback—death cycles as they are called. If we invested in things like a central business district rail link to get cars off Auckland’s streets that would benefit motorists and trucking companies more than the uneconomic unwanted terrible for the climate roads of national significance and all the really dumb decisions this Government is making when it comes to transport. Kia ora.