Williamson Maurice: Transport Legislation Bill — First Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Transport Legislation Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:619;Page:14897] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I say at the outset to the Minister and to the House that the National Party will support this legislation—certainly in going to the select committee and probably right through the House—because it is a step in the right direction in terms of making what I think are some sensible modifications that are required. My history in the transport portfolio goes right back to the early 1990s when as a Minister in Cabinet I oversaw what I thought was some quite sensible restructuring of what was a monolith in those days: one huge Ministry of Transport which had everything in it. It was a little bit like the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Nobody knew what it was what it did or how the staff did what they did but it had thousands of people in it. We went about breaking that ministry up into its various component parts. I think we got most of that right although this bill today takes one extra step which I support. 
We tried to break the operational elements of transport into their particular components by setting up a Civil Aviation Authority whose job was to go out and manage safety practices within the civil aviation world and a Maritime Safety Authority whose job was to deal with the transport sector in maritime terms. There was another body—the name of which I still have trouble in using because of the counselling I had to receive over what it did to me along the way—called the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think one of the reasons that authority was such a difficult organisation to deal with was that it had some control over policy as well as the operational side of land transport. The pleasure I feel today in seeing this bill can be expressed by saying that responsibility for transport policy has to come back into the Ministry of Transport where the Minister has some say over things can express some guidance about what Government policies are and can see policies develop. Policy should not be developed at an arm’s length from the Minister or we will have the situation of a Crown entity going ahead and doing its own thing and then leaving time bombs for the Minister to wake up to in the morning and find they have just exploded on him or her. 
I will give an example of that. I was woken early one morning when I was the Minister by a journalist from National Radio’s  
Morning Report 
 who asked whether I wanted to comment on the latest discussion document the Land Transport Safety Authority had released which was about safety helmets for motorcar drivers. I really thought that someone was pulling my leg. 
Darren Hughes 
: But it wasn’t? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No. That was the problem. My first instinct because I was bleary-eyed after a very late night was that it must be the first of April. But it was not; it was something like October. So it was not that. I thought the incident could not be happening to me. First of all I thought that it was not a  
Morning Repor 
t journalist who was asking me to comment but one of my colleagues who was playing a trick on me. But it was not; the call concerned a genuine discussion document. Somebody in the Land Transport Safety Authority had had a light bulb go off in his or her head and had thought that because helmets had worked on motorbikes and were stopping head injuries the authority should put out a paper without telling the Minister—the authority was supposed to have a no-surprises regime whereby the Minister knew things were coming but I was not told of this—with a proposal that the authority would require safety helmets for motorcar drivers. 
Now I want members to think about the implications of that. They can take the example of a Remuera housewife who pops down to the town centre and has a lovely $300 hairdo done. It is just beautiful—coiffed to magnificence. She is off to a ball that night. She would get out to her BMW a 7 series be about to head off home and she would have to put on the old safety helmet. So I told the person on  
Morning Report 
—and sadly the reporter used the line over the air so it got me into a bit of trouble—that the person from the Land Transport Safety Authority who had put out such a hopeless piece of nothingness would find it difficult to sit down for the rest of the week. But that sort of stuff went on. 
The other thing I am still getting counselling for was the window-tinting regulations an issue that went on and on. The Land Transport Safety Authority was setting policy about how much tint one could put on windows and—members will love this—it even said that in vans with rows of seats running back behind the driver it would make a concession. It said it would let people tint the windows that were further back than the driver but that they had to put an opaque partition behind the driver so the driver could not turn around and look out of those windows. That is what the authority said. We went through a nightmare with that outfit. The regulations went to the Regulations Review Committee. I hoped that the committee would kill them but it did not and we went around and around. So I have to say that today is one of those days when the empire strikes back and I feel good about this bill. I congratulate the Minister on this bit of the bill at least because policy—the real determination about the things we want to be done—is to be brought back into the ministry. 
I would still want to keep some form of blowtorch on the performance of the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think that it has improved dramatically; let me give it a bit of a shot in the arm as well. I think the new director David Wright has improved the operation of the authority and made it better but there is still more room for improvement. This bill is a good step in that direction. I think there should be the same situation with regard to every one of the operational agencies: the Land Transport Safety Authority the Civil Aviation Authority and the Maritime Safety Authority. They should deal with operational matters only and not start to get into the madness and lunacy of policy setting. They are not equipped to set policy and it used to always come back on the Minister’s plate as if it was the Minister’s fault and the Minister was to blame even when he or she had not been told the agency was thinking of doing something. 
When this reform was first announced I was a bit fearful that it would go much further than it has and I am pleased it has not done that. There was a whole lot of talk about setting up one huge roading operation that did the provision of both roading and the funding for roading again and I am pleased the Minister did not go in that way. As a former Minister I separated the purchasing and the provision of roading and I still think there is some sense to that. I still think that it was wrong that Transit which had all the money was also the arbiter of how much went towards State highways—which it ran—and how much went into local roading subsidies alternatives to roads subsidies for buses and ferries and the public passenger transport subsidy. It seemed ridiculous that Transit was both the judge and jury in terms of the process it was involved in. It was receiving all the money in its coffers and then deciding whether to fund a project it proposed itself or to fund a project proposed by other people. That was the reason for splitting the Transit operation which we did in 1996 I think. We did that to make sure that we had both a purchaser of services—be they State highways or local roads—and a provider of State highways. That was being done within Transit but in fact Transfund had a lot of flexibility about how it went about its purchasing. 
I do not have a problem with Transfund being merged into the operational side of the Land Transport Safety Authority. It is really a merger in name only and I am sure there will still be a department or a division within the authority that is responsible for the purchasing of roading outcomes and alternatives to roading. So maybe that really is just an efficiency gain in terms of some overheads—not needing to have two directors and two boards. I will watch with interest to see that Transfund does not get subsumed into that operation and lose some of the efficiency gains that it could generate if the purchasing is done properly. But overall in the first half of this bill with regard to the reforms I think that the Government has moved in the right direction. I am happy to say that is so and that this bill is not the cataclysmic massive restructuring that some of the industry were fearful of. I have found that most people within the industry sector think that in principle at least this is the right way to go. We will watch the situation obviously as the bill goes through the select committee. We will listen to the submissions and there may be some tidying-up of detail around the fringes that needs to be done. 
The other area of the bill concerns the coordination of search and rescue which I think is desperately needed. One of the problems in the old civil aviation legislation was that the Civil Aviation Authority was given the mandate to run the whole search and rescue operation. Clearly it has a proper role to play in terms of a lot of the accidents we have; any aircraft accidents would obviously have to have some guidance and control from that authority. But there have been some examples—for instance a situation where there was quite significant loss of life off Oamaru in a boating tragedy—where it was clear if one was thinking about it that the Maritime Safety Authority might have been a better agency to have an overall brief to watch over how that search and rescue operation was conducted and who was in charge of it. Again I think it is probably right that responsibility for search and rescue operations is being brought back to the Minister to make some determinations. This legislation will pull out the mandate that the Civil Aviation Authority has had and put it back with the Minister—or at least that it is what I understand the legislation will look like. It will give the Minister the right to determine the agencies responsible for search and rescue what they should do and where the various boundaries lie in terms of what the various agencies do. Again it is quite a sensible move. 
However I will just recap in the last minute that I have by saying once again that the most important thing whenever Government agencies are functioning is to have—[ 
Interruption 
] Goodness me what was that? My watch says—OK never mind. I have 2 more minutes so that means I have 12 minutes for this speech. 
Darren Hughes 
: Start again. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No no—I have more important stories to tell if members would like to hear them. 
Opposition Member 
: Go ahead. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: “Go ahead.” says the whip. Yes I have even more stories to tell if members want me to. They will really stop members from sleeping at night. 
The other thing that I would want is some more accountability in the Land Transport Safety Authority with regard to specific outcomes. Today in the House I think I heard the Minister of Police wax lyrical about the road toll coming down. Well I say to the Minister that the road toll is not coming down. I ask him to go and look at the graph. The road toll came down progressively during the 1990s and into the beginning of the 2000s but it has since turned and is now heading back up. I think some very serious questions need to be asked of the police with regard to their enforcement of the road code because I think there is some really ludicrous stuff going on including situations where speed cameras are pinging people for driving at 1 kilometre an hour over the tolerance level. Those people are law-abiding citizens—for example a vicar on his or her way to church—and that makes the public angry. It makes the public very angry because those drivers were not endangering people but were travelling along at the normal speeds that others were travelling at but the speed cameras were just clicking away. I also put some onus back on to the Land Transport Safety Authority for some of that. Its focus has often been on the bizarre and the extreme and it has lost sight of what the major gains are in terms of road safety what best practice is and which international practices are to be followed. I think that as we are a small country that really does not have a great deal of say crash testing and stress testing ability and so on we should be very sensible and look to learn from the experience of alternative jurisdictions. 
So overall I think this bill is halfway towards being reasonable legislation. The National Party certainly will support its referral to a select committee and we will take great interest in what members of the public have to say in their submissions.