Catchpole Brent: Transport Legislation Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Catchpole Brent: Transport Legislation Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:621;Page:16907] 
BRENT CATCHPOLE (NZ First) 
: 
 I would like to take a call on behalf of New Zealand First on this Transport Legislation Bill and pick up on a few points I have been listening to with regard to airline safety. We are concerned about the safety of airlines—everybody is—but airlines are controlled by international safety rules and regulations and we deal with only the landing side of things. Airlines have to be controlled internationally because they are expected to fly internationally. Therefore the whole legislation around airlines is quite a separate issue. 
As far as the search and rescue side of things goes that is controlled here in New Zealand. We do our own search and rescue operations. This legislation is designed to give a much better process for our search and rescue organisations. It will make it a lot easier for them to operate under the regulations we have in place. 
I will now move on to the safety of roads and the state of our roads. We have heard that a large percentage of the deaths on our roads can be directly attributed to the condition of the roads. That is correct. One has only to drive on some of our roads to find that Transit the funding organisation—Transfund—and the local regional authorities have not provided the funding to upgrade certain sections of the road. They keep putting it off hoping that perhaps new legislation will come in that will allow the improvements to be funded from elsewhere. Each organisation keeps passing the buck. Transfund keeps shuffling the money backwards and forwards between projects and not getting on with them. Therefore a lot of projects are sitting on the drawing board and have not been completed. The need for funding has been put aside. A large chunk of funding goes into the consolidated account from our petrol tax; New Zealand First believes that it should be put towards roading. That is what it is collected for. 
What is happening around the local communities now is that speed limits are being reduced rather than roads being upgraded. I have come across reduced speed limits as of 1 November from 100 kilometres an hour to 80 kilometres an hour simply because those particular roads are not suitable for a driving speed of 100 kilometres an hour. Although that reduction is a fine thing why are those roads not being upgraded? Perhaps it is because the communities around that area are expanding at such a rate that the authorities are holding off putting funding in place until they know exactly how large the volume of traffic will be. 
A third thing we mentioned was the state of the rail-tracks. The rail-tracks in New Zealand are in an abysmal state because money has not been spent on upgrading them. My colleague Peter Brown mentioned an area around Tauranga but I am well aware that areas around Papakura in south Auckland have problems with subsidence under tracks. That subsidence has been reported and has been marked off by the authorities that look after the tracks but the tracks have not been repaired. Everybody is silent; members are shocked. Sooner or later further subsidence under those tracks will end up in a train dropping from the tracks into somebody’s backyard; it could well be a member’s backyard if his or her property backs on to those tracks—[ 
Interruption 
] Maurice Williamson is calling out; he may well have been pinching stones from underneath the tracks to build his stone wall out the front of his house! The rail-track and the roading are not getting the funding that they should. 
I would like to pick up on Lindsay Tisch’s comments assist and assure him those words have been struck out.