Williamson Maurice: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:632;Page:4177] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (Deputy Chairperson of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee) 
: 
 I am delighted to take a call on transport. I apologise to the House if I sound as though I am beating the same old drum but tonight in the very short period of time I have I will deal with just one very brief part of transport—probably the most important part—which is roading and roading infrastructure. 
I will start by saying something positive about the Budget because I think it is important to say that the National Party has been beating the drum for some time with the message that in these times of economic surplus when the Government has a lot of money in excess of what it is spending our view has been that at least what was being collected from motorists by way of petrol tax road-user charges and motor vehicle registrations should be spent on the roads. We have run that campaign for some years now. The very first of the red and blue billboards at the last election basically stated that. And finally in Budget 2006—and this is where I give some credit to the Minister of Transport Annette King before I get on to some other issues where I do not think there is much credit due—the Minister of Finance came out and announced that over the next 5 years the Government would be spending $13.4 billion on our roading network or on land transport although most of that is for roading and collecting only $13.1 billion. That means that over the next 5 years the Government will be spending around $60 million a year more on land transport than it collects from those three forms of revenue. 
I congratulate the Minister on that. I doubt whether any political party in this House would actually expect the State to spend more than that on the roads. We have finally got the Government there. When Labour runs the line that it has been spending lots on infrastructure for years I can only show members of the Committee graphs like the one I am holding. It shows that in the Labour Government’s first full year in office it actually spent less on land transport than National had spent and that in the next 2 to 3 years when the figures are corrected for inflation spending was actually under the previous level in real terms. So the crocodile tears from the Government about it spending more than National on roading have not been true for some time. But finally I think the Government has done something right. 
I would like to ask the Minister a really important question. If by this acknowledgment that in the next decade or so the roading infrastructure of this country will be so desperately in need of public funding that the Government will need to spend all the revenue from petrol tax road-user charges and motor vehicle registrations on it—in fact as I said before the Government is spending fractionally more than that—why will the Minister not just move away from her ideological position and say that the Government is dedicating the money? The public would love the Government to do that. The Government is actually doing so anyway; that is what the funding level is. The Government has said there is to be a 5-year rolling ongoing funding package. I doubt whether any Government—and I can tell members that when the National Government comes to power in 2008 it will not reduce the sum of money— 
Hon Rick Barker 
: Dreamer! 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No I am sorry but if there is any dreamer in the House it may be Mr Barker. When the National Party comes to power in 2008 it will not drop the funding for roading. The public will then have some sense of security because they will know that what they pay at the pumps will not go off to pay for other things but will pay for land transport. 
I say to the Minister that the Government has got one leg of the tripod sorted—and I have congratulated it on that—which is the public money allocated to roading. But the tripod will not stand without the other two important legs being fixed. One of them is the Resource Management Act and the Land Transport Management Act with regard to the absolute bureaucratic nightmare that it is to try to gain consent for a new road. I say to the Minister she should go and look at something like the M7 in Sydney which is a 40-kilometre motorway with three lanes going either way. It had a public consultation and consenting process that took 9 months. She should go and look at the Mitcham-Frankston ConnectEast road in Melbourne which is 39 kilometres long with three lanes either way and big tunnels going through metropolitan Melbourne. I am not talking about rural and remote areas—something like the Albany-Puhoi road or Transmission Gully—I am talking about metropolitan Melbourne. The public consultation process took 9 months from go to whoa and building the road took 3 years. It was the same with the M7 in Sydney. 
Yet the chief executive of Transit has told the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that in New Zealand it now takes considerably longer to gain consent for a new road than it does to build it. And when we asked whether that was true of everywhere else around the world he said he knew of nowhere else where it was anywhere near that level. The rule of thumb was that the consent period was normally about one-third of the construction time so that if building a road took 3 years the consultation time would be about 1 year. Or if the building time was 6 years consultation might take 2 years. I say to the Minister that if she is to get the tripod to stand up—she has one of the legs sorted and I have congratulated her on that one—then somebody in this House will have to be brave enough to say to Parliament that we must have a national strategic importance process for some of the network highways and arterial roads that are both State highways and network arterials. We must amend the Resource Management Act so that there is a special process an exemption in order to see some of those roads built within a realistic time frame. 
I will tell the Minister—she will not remember this; she was not in the portfolio then and probably was not aware of this—that stage one of the Albany-Puhoi project which went through rural farmland in New Zealand took 7 years for the consents process. I have done a calculation on that and I will show it to her if she wants to see it. I have used a spreadsheet and I have prorated the length of the Albany-Puhoi route—it is only two lanes through quite flat rural land—and compared it with the Mitcham-Frankston road in Melbourne which is 39 kilometres long has three lanes and is divided with tunnels through metropolitan Melbourne. If the project is prorated based on length and carriageway and so on then if the Mitcham-Frankston road had been built at the same rate as the Albany-Puhoi project it would have taken 58 years to construct. Australia is doing it in 3 years. So I ask the Minister when we will see anything from her from the Minister for the Environment or from any other Minister about changing the Resource Management Act specifically to see that roading infrastructure is built at a realistic pace. That is the second leg of the tripod. 
We are now the only nation I know of in the developed world—and of many countries in the non-developed world as well—that does not have the private sector as well as the Government funding roading. That is the third leg of the tripod. All three eastern seaboard states in Australia—New South Wales Victoria and Queensland—have massive investment in their roading infrastructure by the private sector. New Zealand does not. All three of those states have Labor Governments interestingly enough. Involving the private sector cannot be a “mad monk of the new right” Tory idea because the Labor parties in New South Wales Queensland and Victoria are doing that. I went to Birmingham in March of this year and saw the M6 toll road which is a magnificent new 27-mile three-lane road built in Tony Blair’s Labour-governed England. The Labour Minister Alistair Darling said the British Government simply cannot come up with the money any more to build the networks the nation needs so it needs the private sector to fund them. Communist China is hardly a right-wing extremist country but it is the biggest builder of private sector roads in the world. 
I would welcome the Minister telling us of another country she knows of that we would see ourselves as being comparable with be it France Germany Spain Italy Austria or the Netherlands that does not have private sector road-building. Yet New Zealand has none and more important we have legislation that actually by its nature stops that from happening. I know a number of private sector investors who would like to invest and who have said there are projects big enough or interesting enough or with a return on investment for them should the Land Transport Management Act not have some of the absolutely ridiculous features that were put in it—not by this Minister; I am not attacking her personally—by the Labour Government to appease the Greens because they were in the driving seat when that legislation was put through Parliament. If anything the Land Transport Management Act needs to be gutted so that we can see not just the public spend at the level it is at—because it is at the right level—but also the Resource Management Act taken to a point where we can have special exemptions in order to get the networks built because built they must be. 
The third thing is that we need to see enough funding coming from the private sector to make us look as though we are in tune and in step with every other nation I can think of. The Minister should look at the Millau bridge in France which is taller than the Eiffel Tower crosses a fantastic valley on the Massif Central and takes over an hour off the north-south journey. The French Government said it just simply could not build it and that the private sector should fund it which it did. The bridge has three lanes going either way and has now become a tourist attraction. People go to the Millau bridge because it is a tourist attraction to see that magnificent piece of engineering. 
Why should we not see that here? We have Macquarie Bank for example—I guess members of the House will not know this. Macquarie Bank is the biggest investor in private roads in the world. Macquarie Bank through Jim McLay and others has said that while the legislation stays as it is in New Zealand the bank will not invest here. 
The Minister must tell the Committee two things. The first is what she will do to reform the Resource Management Act so that realistic consenting periods—periods in line with those in any other jurisdiction we would like to compare ourselves with—will see us build the big networks. I accept that it is fine to leave little local roads to the normal processes. The second thing the Minister must tell us is what she will do in order to see the private sector become a major funder of roading in this country.