Genter Julie Anne: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9795. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): I rise to speak on Part 1 of the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill particularly right now on clause 9 which amends section 10 of the principle Act to allow the Government to borrow for the National Land Transport Fund. I would like to talk about my concerns about allowing the Government to borrow to pay for projects in the National Land Transport Fund.Firstly at the moment the Government has a very unbalanced transport spend. Over $1 billion is being spent on new State highways. That is over a third of the total transport budget and very small amounts of money are being allocated to all the other areas that we need to attend to as part of our transport network. That includes the maintenance of our existing local roads the maintenance and renewals of our existing State highways and there is a tiny tiny proportion of money going into walking and cycling.If you look at the National Land Transport Plan for the next 3 years there is actually almost no money being put into new public transport infrastructure. At the moment we have a Government that does not understand that the transport system is a network and the best way to get a good outcome from a network is to make sure that it is balanced. The best way to free up our existing roads for those who need to drive is to allow a small number of people to be able to walk and cycle safely—like children walking and cycling safely to schools so their parents do not have to congest the roads at peak time because they have to drop them off—and to allow a small number of people in our congested urban areas to switch to public transport. Not everybody needs to use public transport walk or cycle to benefit from the investment in having that alternative. Unfortunately there is no evidence anywhere in the world that expanding road capacity or building new roads will improve economic productivity or reduce congestion. In fact there was a letter written to the secretary of transportation in the UK just a few months ago by 32 leading transport professionals and academics people who have worked in this industry for 40 years saying actually “We are concerned that our current methodsof planning for transport infrastructure and evaluating the economic impacts do not take into account the reality that has been observed everywhere that building new inter-urban roads worsens congestion and does nothing to improve economic productivity.”So essentially by allowing this Government to borrow to pay for its unbalanced and backwards transport priorities what is going to happen is future New Zealanders and future Governments will have less money available to spend on the transport projects we actually need. That is because none of the projects the Government is proposing and is going to spend billions of dollars on will actually generate new revenue. Although in theory it may make sense for example to borrow to pay for some of Auckland’s transport infrastructure because we are expecting huge growth in Auckland and therefore there will be future ratepayers and taxpayers who will benefit from that infrastructure investment and we need to plan ahead of that growth what the Government is planning to do is to borrow to pay for Transmission Gully. It is going to borrow through the private sector through a private-public partnership which actually is essentially just taking out a loan from the private sector. So instead of paying 4 percent—and the Government could realistically borrow at 4 percent—it will be paying 12 percent to 14 percent or 10 percent to 12 percent so that the private investors have a guaranteed return for the 25 years of the life of the project.What National is doing is spending future taxpayers’ money now. It wants to expand the amount of money available to them to throw away at senseless transport projects that will not benefit the economy unfortunately and yet future taxpayers will have to pay these back with interest—with excessive interest in the case of the public-private partnerships—and they will not have the money available to maintain our existing road network. They will not have the money available to invest in the very vital alternatives that people in urban areas are crying out for. Everywhere we have invested in congestion-free public transport alternatives it has been wildly successful. We can see that with the northern busway and we can see that with the investments that have been made in the Auckland rail network so far. We have had huge growth in both of those areas much higher than what was modelled. That has led to declining traffic volumes on State highways which means there are fewer problems with congestion.