Luxon ChristopherCHRISTOPHER LUXON (National—Botany): Look it's a real pleasure to rise in this House on my very first omnibus bill and to support the Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill. I was very excited to hear about the nine submitters to this bill and the fact that it's taken us a year to go through a submission process. I'm new to the House and I've got lots to learn but I just thought the submission process maybe on this one was a touch too long and on some of the other things we debated this week was probably a lot too short really. It's quite novel to have more than two days to discuss a bill and get nine submissions for it. So it's a real pleasure to be here and talk about the great purpose to this bill which is really around making sure we are making sure the transport system is fit for purpose and it's modern and it's a very updated regulatory system. And I know how important that is.Obviously this bill is designed to make sure that we respond to and reduce the risk of regulatory failure and I know how important it is to have very strong regulators in our system whether it be air land or sea and how important that is. And clearly we are trying to address a whole series of different gaps and duplication and areas and inconsistencies within the transport legislation and ensuring that our regulators have all the tools they need to make sure we keep our system up to date relevant and moving forward and reducing compliance costs as well along the way.Certainly I think a lot of this bill when I look at it it's a real common-sense sort of thing when you start to think about the provision for the creation of the transport instruments. As we've alluded to we've spoken about moa signs. I don't know why but it was interesting. We've spoken about traffic control signs. There's safety equipment on vessels which I think is also very important. Driver licence exemptions. So the creation of those transport instruments delegates the accountability further through the chain to a lower level of authority to be able to crack those instruments which is very helpful very important.The second thing it does is sort of clarify and modernise the powers of exemption from the regulators and the rules made under key land and maritime Acts. That's quite good—to make sure there's good consistency between the different pieces of legislation. It increases the board sizes of transport agencies—I don't have a big problem with that. I think fundamentally that's in line with what's good practice in other boards across the country. In the commercial world for sure it's quite normal to have no more than nine members on a board. It increases maximum fines just in the maritime area to align them with what we see on land and air transport. It also increases the time period a vehicle can be impounded to collect evidence after a serious accident or incident and Paul Eagle the ambassador for the Chatham Islands has done an exceptionally good job as we've alluded to making sure the Chatham Islands Council becomes a regional council under the Maritime Transport Act. So really very good things.I guess you know when you look at it you could argue that we're giving additional regulatory making powers to a Minister and that's something that we don't normally support. But actually there is both good and bad regulation and this is certainly I think good regulation. It's good common-sense stuff and it kind of make sense to do it with the aim of safety and better transport in mind.But I think what would be more useful is if we could get into some of the bigger topics that we have facing us because as my colleague and friend Barbara Kuriger talked about there are projects that we would love to see accelerated. And if we could take the same passion and enthusiasm we've seen today for this bill and think about what's happening with the second harbour crossing in Auckland it would be really interesting. It was gutting to learn today that actually there is no real go-forward plan in managing a key strategic asset in our largest city—the Auckland Harbour Bridge. The Auckland Harbour Bridge cannot be structurally strengthened any further. It's going to face restrictions on the heavy load that it can take across that bridge anywhere from 18 months to 20 years from now.The second thing I'd say is there's no plan therefore to build a second tunnel or a second crossing—we don't know whether it's a tunnel a bridge we have no idea of cost timing partner or anything. And as a consequence that just doesn't feel like what a world-class country should be doing in terms of making sure that a strategic asset that supports a city of 2 million people in a country like ours on the bottom of the world with 5 million people in it should be doing. That wouldn't be acceptable I put it to you in Denmark; it wouldn't be acceptable in Singapore Ireland Israel Switzerland. It wouldn't be acceptable in any of those places. So the bottom line is we'd love to see some action in that space.The second thing is that the light rail project where we've cancelled or postponed 15 roads for the last three years to fund this light rail project and now we're back to the drawing board again. Again we're not convinced of what's the mode we're not convinced of the costs we don't know who the partner's going to be we've got no idea about timing. But we've just wasted three years doing absolutely nothing while Aucklanders paid fuel taxes in order to do that and I just think that's another thing that could be improved upon.The last thing I'd say and I know there's some colleagues from Wellington here but the Let's Get Wellington Moving programme has been another transport failure for this Government. So while we're dealing with tidying up a whole bunch of little and small stuff it would be quite good to get on to the strategic stuff the nation-building things that would fundamentally make a difference.So I'm gladly supportive of this bill. We would love to see it pass because we think there's a lot of common-sense amendments in it but we'd love to see some focus from this Government on actually getting things done to make daily lives better for the people of New Zealand by dealing with thinking more strategically about the assets that we need in order to make that happen. Thank you.Hon Julie Anne Genter: Mr Speaker.SPEAKER: I call Paul Eagle.