King MattMATT KING (National—Northland): It's a pleasure to speak on the transport Estimates debate. I just want to talk just briefly about the road versus rail and I want to relate it to Northland. We've had rail lines up there for decades going into the North and it's never made money the whole time we've had a rail line in Northland. So I'm talking about specifically rail to Northland OK? For rail to pay its way or to compete with trucks it has to have bulk and it has to have distance and in Northland we don't have either. The only thing we've got is bulk—that's the logging. The distance from the scattered forests we've got in Northland to Northport which is where all the logs leave is just not long enough to have them ever compete with trucks. The logs have to get loaded on to trucks in the forests and it will never be economic to transfer that to rail to make rail pay its way in Northland. So this debate that we keep having about rail in Northland is flogging a dead horse. They have never made money. I believe back in the day there was a time when the trucks were legislated against and so basically trains had the monopoly—they had it over trucks. But since that's been removed trucks hands down beat rail especially in Northland. Now I'm not against rail in any way shape or form but in Northland it just doesn't work. I used to run a business and I needed parts overnight and I had to have them—that's the way we operated; that's the way most businesses operate. There's no way that trains can compete with trucks in that area. So this truck versus train debate in my experience is a dead duck. But I want to talk about the Hon Phil Twyford. He says—and his Government—that they support economic growth safety and resilience when it comes to roading and they start by canning the safest most resilient economic driver of growth in Northland: the roads of national significance. Because you know why? It's a National Party initiative. It's as simple as that. It comes down to pure economics. They wished they had got it. Whey wished they had got it but National grabbed it. It works all over the world—everywhere. If you talk about four-laning in Queensland and in Sydney wherever they build a four-lane highway out of the city it's boom times everywhere. So it's happening all over the world.But let's talk about the road toll. We've experienced the worst road toll in close to a decade so the roads are dangerous—Hon Dr Nick Smith: In 20 years.MATT KING: In 20 years is it? Yep. Well in the Dome Valley we've got a stretch of road called The Killing Fields" where dozens have died. It's not fit for purpose. They're proposing a landfill for the area which will mean 200 to 300 extra trucks a day. The roads of national significance that we were building were going to bypass that stretch of road—but no. Phil Twyford calls it gold-plating but then he's going to spend money on a tram from the city down Dominion Road—not even to the airport just to Onehunga. That's all. He's going to spend a fortune on that and that's last century's technology and I imagine by the time they get to build it if they do costs will blow out just like the City Rail Link. Now let's talk about the billions—this Government has diverted billions of dollars out of the roading budget from the New Zealand Transport Agency into the Shane Jones slush fund so they can spend millions not billions on projects all over Northland and you know what that's for. So my argument is that State Highway 1 in Northland is not fit for purpose. It's outgrown. There's no point in fixing up an existing road. It won't cut it. Dr Shane Reti: Sticks.MATT KING: We have to—and this Government's answer is reflectorised sticks going down the middle of the road and those rumble strips. I'm rolling over those rumble strips all over Northland at the moment. That is their answer to road safety in Northland but they can the safest most resilient roads that there are in exchange for plastic strips. So in Northland we the four councils identified that the highway the four-laning was a driver of economic growth but this Government decides that they're going to concentrate on Auckland-centric things. So Northland is going to miss out with this Government. Phil Twyford likes to use the words "re-evaluate" "review" and his favourite "recalibrate" and that basically means slash and burn—cut it slashing and burning. So they're cancelling our roads. They're going to spend it all in Auckland. Northland's going to be in a losing situation. It's not going to win."