Wood MichaelHon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): I thank the members for their questions and I'll come to some responses to those in a moment. Just at the outset can I thank the select committee for its work on the annual reviews this year acknowledge officials who participated in that process as well and actually most importantly acknowledge the women and men who work across our transport agencies and have had an extremely tough year. I mean everyone has across this country as we've dealt with COVID but the impact and the disruption within our transport systems has been absolutely immense and often it's been very fast policy and operational work from people within transport that has ensured that critical supply chains critical public transport and other things within our transport system have kept functioning as we've dealt with the massive disruption of COVID-19.You look at sectors like maritime and civil aviation for example. Their revenue streams dropped off almost completely as a result of border shut downs. So Government and those agencies have had to work together very very closely and at all times there has been total professionalism from the people involved in the sector both public and private to make sure that we keep New Zealand moving and it's appropriate to acknowledge that.The other acknowledgment I'll make before touching on these questions is just to echo the chair of the select committee Greg O'Connor in his comments about Brian Corban our chair of KiwiRail who unfortunately died within the week who has a long record of service and had I think done an incredible job of overseeing that State-owned enterprise and its transformation to a resilient and reliable provider of rail over the last three years.Mr O'Connor asked a couple of questions the first related to the point I just made around our supply chain. He asked about some of the measures that the Government has undertaken to ensure that our supply chain does keep moving and has kept moving over this challenging period. Probably the key measure that I'd identify there has been the work that we've done in aviation. The International Air Freight Capacity scheme now called the Maintaining International Air Connectivity scheme has been absolutely central to it. I'll acknowledge the previous Minister the Hon Phil Twyford who worked with the sector through the Ministry of Transport to get this scheme up and going last year. Investment of over $300 million recognising that 80 percent to 90 percent of New Zealand's airfreight usually goes in the belly hold beneath passengers—Mr Luxon's aware of these dynamics—and that capacity dropped off when the international air passenger market was killed off in about March of last year. So there needed to be some intervention immediately to make sure that critical imports and exports did continue to flow.We've recently announced a renewal of that scheme an updating of its objectives to make sure that it's appropriate and that has I think been a really critical part of ensuring that those supply chains continue to go—particularly things like pharmaceuticals time-critical exports of seafood fresh produce for example that you can't put on ships that has been getting in and out of our country and has been maintaining a very very high level of our aviation imports and exports.Mr O'Connor also asked more generally about the kind of measures that we can be putting in place to aid the economic recovery. This is critical. This goes a little bit to Mr Woodhouse's question as well. While the New Zealand Upgrade Programme (NZUP) was announced before COVID-19 reared its ugly head transport and the infrastructure spend more generally does have a really important part to play in the economic recovery. So we currently have around about 800 people working on NZUP programmes around the country at the moment. Those are good jobs which are providing income to families and communities supporting economic activity in regions that might have had job losses because of the impact of the pandemic and we'll continue to make those investments as we go along. I can think of individual projects—for example like the Third Main in Auckland employing around about 200 people on a critical project that will improve rail in Auckland—but we're also stimulating the economy keeping people in work.Mr Woodhouse moved on to ask more specifically about the New Zealand Upgrade Programme and he is correct in identifying that we are working through a baselining exercise as a part of the programme. I think that's very appropriate. This is a very significant programme. It's a $6.8 billion package of investments and I think it is very important as we move through some of them—and some of the individual projects within that are extremely large; we're talking many hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases—as we begin to get a clearer understanding of the issues the scope the geotechnical work all of those sorts of things that we just reassure ourselves that we're managing the costs that there's clear understanding between the delivery agencies and the Government about the fundamental scope of what we are trying to achieve.So that's a process that we're working through now. I think it's a robust process. I think it's a prudent process for us to work through but I do note—and this is very very important—that that hasn't stymied the progress of the programme overall. We currently have 13 of those projects under way. There will be further announcements coming out pretty soon that will add to that list as well.Hon Michael Woodhouse: When?Hon MICHAEL WOOD: The member will just have to wait but I can assure him it won't be too far to wait—but 13 projects already under way. So there is a significant amount of work—Hon Michael Woodhouse: And they were the easy ones.Hon MICHAEL WOOD: —employing 800 people at the moment. I just do make the point to the members who are asking those questions that we do have a recent example of a project in Transmission Gully where we've had to sort of tidy things up at the back-end because the initial work on the scoping the geotech making sure that budgets were aligned to the job that we were actually delivering wasn't done at the front-end. I think it's much better that we work through that process clearly now and then we can give absolute clarity about the timings of those projects. But I remain very confined that we have excellent delivery. And we will be delivering on all of those core works that were identified in the programme.