Twyford Phil: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Customs and Excise (Budget Measures—Motor Spirits) Amendment Bill — First Reading Second Reading In Committee Third Reading[Sitting date: 16 May 2013. Volume:690;Page:10347. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū): You would think from listening to the last contribution from Gerry Brownlee that this is a bill that is all about fiscal rectitude that is sensible and that is making just the right amount of money necessary to continue the Government’s sensible programme of road building. Well nothing—nothing—could be further from the truth because this is not only an illegitimate tax grab as we have already said but it is only one of a suite of greedy voracious money-grubbing efforts that this Government and this Minister are making to fund the Government’s out-of-control and bloated motorway building programme.We are talking today about a tax that is going to raise the petrol excise as it says in Part 1 by 3c every year for the next 3 years. If members have got the regulatory impact statement in front of them they will see on page 4 quite an interesting outline of alternative funding options that officials recommended the Minister and Cabinet consider. It sets out a number of possible ways that the New Zealand Transport Agency could get the funding it needs to continue this out-of-control motorway funding programme that we have been talking about. It includes tolling and it includes long-term borrowing. Of course we know it includes public-private partnerships which is how the Government is going to do the Transmission Gully project at the cost of an extra $2.3 billion to the taxpayer. That is $2.3 billion on top of the project cost just so that Gerry Brownlee can try to get Transmission Gully up and running before the Government changes.The Government not only chose the option of this tax grab through the petrol excise but chose half a dozen other options as well to throw more and more taxpayer cash at this motorway building programme. Gerry Brownlee walks into a pie shop and he sees a smoked fish pie a kumara pie a meat pie and a cheese pie. He does not choose just the smoked fish pie because he likes that one the best; he chooses all the pies in the shop. Every single option has been chosen by this Government to throw more and more taxpayer cash at this out-of-control motorway building programme.We have seen public-private partnerships. The Minister asked the officials to go away and come back with a project that could experiment with the public-private partnership model. The Government decided to go ahead with it at the cost of an additional $2.3 billion. What an extraordinary waste. The Land Transport Management Amendment Bill is going to clear the way for more public-private partnerships and more tolling and the Government is giving itself the power which it has never had before to do long-term borrowing for these kinds of motorway transport projects.We are talking about the petrol excise tax and the fact that the Government has chosen one particular way in this bill to refill the coffers that have been so depleted by this motorway building programme but it is not the only way. We need to be aware that the Government is getting extra money from all over the place in order to front-load the motorway building programme to get as many of these gold-plated projects up and running like the Pūhoi to Wellsford “Holiday Highway” and the Kapiti Expressway. It is desperate to get all these projects up and running to rev up the bulldozers and sign the contracts before a Labour-Green Government comes to office at the end of 2014.We are not against all these funding options. We are not against the idea of for instance long-term borrowing. It makes sense to borrow long term to fund major infrastructure projects that will benefit future generations. But we are utterly opposed to a measure like this bill which is pouring taxpayer cash into a transport programme that is unbalanced and unwise. It is going to saddle future generations with more and more debt simply in order to fund the building of white elephant motorway projects that werehand-picked by this Government as colleagues have previously said as part of a political strategy to get National elected in 2008. These projects have never been subjected to Treasury’sBetter Business Cases for Capital Proposals guidelines. Under this Minister and his predecessor the transport sector has been some kind of financial Bermuda Triangle. Vast wheelbarrow-loads of cash have been poured into it with not the slightest bit of the financial accountability that we would expect from every other part of the public sector.