Williamson Maurice: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWilliamson Maurice: General Debate[Sitting date: 10 October 2007. Volume:642;Page:12234. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga): Today we have heard the greatest rewrite of New Zealand’s history that I have ever been involved in—that is the definition of what is a public-private partnership. That is what we heard from Annette King today in order to get herself off the hook after some stupid comment made by Steve Maharey that Labour would not let public-private partnerships occur even when building roads. Let us remember that every Labour Government in the states of Australia has involved public-private partnerships so it is not as if they are just for a Tory regime. The Labour Government in the United Kingdom built the M6 Toll with a public-private partnership. Socialist Governments throughout Europe have used public-private partnerships. But finally Steve Maharey who knows better than anybody else has said “No I have ruled them out.” He did that in a press release and Annette King had to get herself off the hook today so she redefined public-private partnerships. She said: “That is where the private sector—you know the chippies and the bricklayers—go in and they actually build it but the public sector the Government funds it.”Well I have news for Annette King—that is how it has always been in the history of this country. Under Michael Joseph Savage there were public-private partnerships under that definition. In other words the Government funded new schools but the private sector carpenters went in and did the actual work of building them.Dr Wayne Mapp: Sir James Fletcher.Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Sir James Fletcher went in and did quite well out of them. I want to know from Annette King why the Government passed the Land Transport Management Act of 2003 which it said enabled public-private partnerships. Labour members said that that was great legislation. Darren Hughes said: “I welcome the public-private partnerships that are part of this bill.” But according to Annette King today the only thing that is a public-private partnership under Labour is a partnership when the State pays for it and the private sector contractors with their trucks asphalt and tarseal make it. Well I can tell Mr Hughes that that has always been the case. We did not need a Land Transport Management Act in 2003 because the Government has always funded the roads. Transit does not build a road; Transit actually manages it funds it and so on but it gets the private sector to build it. So what we have heard today has been the greatest rewrite in history.I want my colleagues in this House to know that every school that has been built in this country and every hospital that has been built in this country—in fact every prison and that will be of great interest to a number of people—has been built as a public-private partnership if we use Annette King’s definition. The State has put up the money but the chippies the carpenters the plumbers and the electricians working on those buildings have not all been Government employees; they have been private sector guys who came along and did the contracts to build them. This is the greatest obfuscation I have ever seen.But I want to cover one other issue today. Headlines in theNew Zealand Heraldtoday state: “Motorway work has not helped crawl”. It is not talking about the Labour Party; it is talking about the speed at which traffic now moves in Auckland. The article states that the average speed at which traffic now moves has dropped to 34 kilometres an hour across the whole 300 kilometre network of Auckland’s roading—the lowest ever. It is the lowest ever. The average speed has dropped to 34 kilometres an hour across the whole 300 kilometre network. Labour has perpetuated a couple of myths here. It says that it has put so much more money into roading. Well I think thateveryone knows that with inflation every year the amount of money spent on roading has gone up. When National was in power the amount spent on roading every year went up and even under Labour—sorry I do not want to mislead the House: under Labour there was one year when the actual amount of money spent went down.But everyone knows that as a percentage of the economy if that amount of money were to grow we should have seen it. If members look at the graph I have here they will see what percentage was being spent on roading by Labour as a percentage of our GDP. It was less. It was less than when National was in power during the whole of the 1990s—and those members opposite do not like that. If it were true and if they had solved the roading problem so Auckland no longer had the adoring drive time audience who are out there now listening to me—drivers who are stuck in their cars and will be for hours—then they would not have seen the article by MatthewDearnaly in theNew Zealand Heraldtoday stating that the average speed of the traffic on our motorway network has got to its lowest level ever.The reason is that this Government has not put anywhere near enough investment in. More important it has today totally ruled out any private sector money for roading. That is a disgrace.