Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:650;Page:18772] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I will complete my comments with regard to how the Public Transport Management Bill actually got to where it is at. As this bill came back to the House and we then began the Committee stage the whole breach of process along the way has become clear. 
The Government puts great store on consulting. It had consulted widely and had got to an agreed position but the bill that is currently in the Committee is not anything like that. 
Hon Annette King 
: Quite wrong. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: The Government put it through Cabinet and the Cabinet minute shows the position that was agreed to. So when Annette King says “Quite wrong.” she should tell us why Cabinet made the agreements that it made. They were things that people could live with and that National would have voted for. There we are: National would have voted for the Labour Cabinet’s decisions. I make it clear in the Committee now that National would have voted for the Labour Cabinet’s decisions. 
Then it gets worse. We ended up with the bill going through the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee where one submitter the Auckland Regional Transport Authority was furious in wanting option C. We did not get that through. The Labour members did not have enough of a majority for that and Peter Brown I think quite sensibly would not support option C so the Labour members did not get it. But in terms of the title before National hammers it home that we think this is the “Public Deception Bill” I ask the Minister this: who wrote these words? Who wrote these words in the explanatory note of the bill for its introduction: “Prohibiting all commercial services in a region would reduce opportunities for public transport operators to innovate and would reduce the control operators have over their businesses thus potentially undermining business confidence. For these reasons option C is not preferred.”? I can only assume the Minister wrote that. It is her bill. It is in her name and I can only assume that the Minister—because of the way that legislation goes—put that out. 
We can imagine how aggrieved the industry feels when it was consulted and was told that no the Government was going to go with option B. The industry saw the Cabinet green come out in February 2007 and it was in favour of option B—a one-to-one mapping of all of the issues in exactly the way the industry thought they should be addressed. When they saw the bill they found it had gone way beyond option B to “Option B on steroids”. They try to get that reined back. My amendments were as best I can tell—and if the Minister had ever wanted to she could have pointed out why this was not the case—my best attempt to try to bring the bill back to being a one-to-one alignment between a one-to-one isomorphic mapping of option B as agreed to by Cabinet and what the bill should have said. Labour voted down every one of those amendments so it clearly will not do what it had committed to the industry it would do and it will not deliver what the Bus and Coach Association (New Zealand) Inc. had thought it was going to get. Then it turns out that a grubby little deal had been done whereby the Greens put up Supplementary Order Paper 249 in the name of Jeanette Fitzsimons which was probably written out of the Minister’s office or with officials’ help to get it to where it is at and which brings back option C—absolutely in full force it brings back option C. 
If this is not the “Public Deception Bill”—and if that is not the title the bill should have—then I do not know what is. How can people have any confidence in the Government after consulting it getting to an agreed position seeing a Cabinet minute come out being told: “This is where we’re going.” and saying: “OK. Well we can live with that.” only to find out they are to get their throats cut by a deliberate deceptive process? It was a process whereby even one of the select committees of this Parliament after writing advice about something did not have that advice incorporated in the consideration of and deliberation on the bill by the relevant subject select committee. If that does not qualify the bill for being called the “Public Deception Bill of the Year” then I do not know what will. In fact it will go to the awards show next year as the greatest example of public deception. 
So I agree with my colleague Pansy Wong that the title Public Transport Management Bill is wrong and I say that people out there in the public transport sector will be very worried if this Government ever consults them again in the future. What was the point of doing that? What was the point of the consultation? If the Labour Government had wanted to do what Mike Lee and the Auckland Regional Transport Authority people wanted why did it not just go ahead and do that to start with? Why did the Government not actually cut out the middleman and the select committee—well it actually did that in the end because we did not even deliberate on or consider the stuff from the Regulations Review Committee—and just bring in option C bang it through under urgency on one day which is what we are doing to the bill now and say: “There you are. Forget democracy.”? At least that would have been an honest way of doing it.