Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): I am very happy to stand to speak on the Appropriation (2017/18 Estimates) Bill and to reaffirm the Labour Party's opposition to this particular vote. I want to in my comments focus in on the expenditure proposed in the area of transport.The first thing that I want to do actually is pay tribute to Minister Joyce for his speech before and also Minister Bridges in fact. They revealed themselves to possibly be some of the greatest Keynesian economic people in this Parliament because their speeches from beginning to end were simply boasts about how much money they are spending. Of course one of the things that we on this side of the House hear time and time again from this Government is that it is not about the amount of money you spend; it is about the results that you get. How many times have we heard that? And of course who would disagree with that? But it is all very different when it comes to the infrastructure and particularly when it comes to transport. In our opposition to this part of the Estimates we do not oppose the amount of money that is being spent in the area of transport but we absolutely oppose the way that it is being wasted and the way in which this Government is proposing to spend billions of dollars of taxpayers' money for no discernible improvement in our transport network and the significant congestion challenges that many of our cities face.In fact in the hearings in the Finance and Expenditure Committee we had an extraordinary discussion with Minister Joyce who when we quizzed him about the billions of dollars going into projects like the East-West Link and the other roads of national significance that are included in this vote we asked him: Can you tell us"—can you show us—"the evidence or the analysis to demonstrate that these billions of dollars of taxpayers' money will actually improve traffic in Auckland or our major cities?". And he could not point to one piece of evidence or answer that question. He in fact said "Oh it's a good question." as if we were arguing about some trifling matter not billions and billions of dollars and one of the biggest problems in our major city Auckland.Now I was at an event a few nights ago with a senior executive from one of New Zealand's biggest retail companies. He said to me that the biggest problem that his business faces is the fact that it has trucks sitting on Auckland's motorways for hours and hours and hours every single day: wasting productivity wasting profit and wasting his company's time. And every year they have to get out of bed earlier in the day just to get their products from their distribution centres and into their stores and nothing nothing in this vote—the additional $11 billion spent over the next 4 years on transport—will do anything to fix that. Call me old-fashioned but I think that if you are spending $11 billion of taxpayers' money you actually want to have some evidence that it will make a difference.I am very pleased that the previous speaker raised the example of the East-West Link: a $2 billion project funded without proper analysis whereby the Minister will not actually release the most recent cost-benefit ratios of the $2 billion project which unbelievably is building a motorway project along the foreshore of one of Auckland's harbours 5 years after we spent $30 million on a reclamation project to fix up the fact that we built a motorway along the other part of the foreshore of that harbour. And it is a project that will not actually make a difference.What we know will make a difference not just in Auckland but in our other cities is investment in high-quality public transport. But when you go through the report from the committee do you see any reference to that whatsoever? Of course we had the Government dragged kicking and screaming by Auckland into a grudging share of paying for the City Rail Link—a grudging share a grudging 50 percent share—when of course any motorway project gets funded straight out of the National Land Transport Fund. This Government's priorities for expenditure are wrong not because they are not spending enough but because they are spending it in the wrong ways and it will not make a difference.Can I just give one other small example in my remaining time and that is in the area of road safety—something that will concern every single New Zealander. Last year 320 people died on our roads. That road toll after years of decreasing has been increasing over each of the last 3 years. Yet what did we learn in the Estimates process? We learnt that there had been a $12 million reduction in the funding for road policing at the same time as more and more New Zealanders are dying on our roads and at the same time as in many cases regional councils are screaming out for money for basic maintenance and road safety measures on neglected regional roads while Government Ministers satisfy themselves with photo opportunities on uneconomic roads of national significance. We oppose this vote because it is a wrong spend of money and a Labour Government will do so much better. Thank you."