Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Thank you Minister of Transport. I always appreciate the level of detail that you go into in your explanations but it does raise some other issues. This regulatory impact assessment which is a post-implementation assessment of a policy implemented at very short notice in March 2022 took 10 months to develop and is a retrospective analysis as you point out of a policy decision implemented in March 2022. It seems extraordinary that between March 2022 and January 2023 nobody asked and nobody received the back-up documentation—the post-implementation regulatory analysis—that would have enabled the Minister to take to Cabinet a document that said This is what it's done in the period March 2022 to January 2023."This looks back on the period prior to March 2022 and it doesn't include any information as far as I can tell as to whether the policy worked to deliver benefits to people during a cost of living crisis—people who had transport price pressures whether they were freight operators whether they were companies that deliver food to supermarkets or haul quarry rock around to build roads for example. It's not clear why it took 10 months and it's not clear whether the Cabinet decision that you referred to—the first Cabinet meeting of this year—had up-to-date information and whether there was any assessment of what happens next after this bill is passed and what potentially happens in the period of up to five years that this legislation would have effect. So that's of great concern to the ACT Party and no doubt would be of great concern to people who are interested in how the Government makes decisions about how it spends its money.Then we just want to come to item 11 on page 6—"Financial hardship concerns are primarily dealt with outside the transport system"—and that's according to the official report the post-implementation analysis you referred to. Item 11: "The rates of petrol excise duty and road user charges are set to achieve a revenue target (to fund planned transport expenditure levels)." Well given that the Minister is proposing a cut to the amount of money that's collected and having announced in the past 24 hours $250 million to go to Waka Kotahi to fund the reconstruction of our transport networks those vital links that have been damaged and before any thorough assessment has been undertaken as to what the overall cost it's going to take to rebuild those main trunk roads that connect our regions—$250 million is pretty much just to scrape silt off the road as far as I can tell. Yet the Minister is proposing to cut the amount of money that's collected and yet at the same time we have this huge demand for funding that's going to come.So Minister I'd like you to consider what projects would you cut or defer in the way that an incoming Labour Government did in 2017 with projects like East West Link for example; the Waikato Expressway for example; the deferral for ever of the four-laning from Whangārei to Port Marsden for example; the Takitimu North Link project which is now being delivered after being deferred by Labour—half the road for twice the price; the same for Penlink. Which projects does the Minister consider should be deferred or cancelled in order to fund this enormous expenditure that's coming? And does it make any sense at all given the situation we're facing to be potentially cutting road-user charges at a time when we need the revenue to fix our roads and make them more resilient?Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): In respect of some of the member Simon Court's questions that relate to the bill in the broadest sense the timing of the post-implementation review as I understand it—officials did want to assess the policy after it had been in place for a reasonable period of time in order to be able to draw judgments about its effectiveness. It would have been very difficult for them to have done that after only a short period of time of the policy being in place and I think it was reasonable for them to make those observations and pull together a report towards the end of 2022 and then report to Cabinet.The member claims that there is no information here about whether the policy was actually a good policy that delivered benefits. I'd draw his attention to page 21 of the review "Section 4: Effectiveness of the policy" which specifically canvasses whether the policy was effective and the header on page 22 which says "The reduction to petrol excise duty has largely been passed on at the pump and resulted in lower petrol prices". So the assessment there is that the policy was indeed effective at lowering the prices that Kiwis paid at the pump. The member's other questions really do relate to broader transport investment decisions across the portfolio that are outside of the ambit of this piece of legislation."