van de Molen TimTIM VAN DE MOLEN (National—Waikato): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well if we were to believe that member's view of this it's all sunshine and lollipops if this bill is enacted. Well the simple reality is that it is not and this member is quite clearly unaware of the detail of how we've got to this stage with this particular piece of legislation. So as it's gone through the different steps we have been very clear in our view that there is no need—and in fact that it would be inappropriate—to enable rail access to National Land Transport Fund money which is fundamentally to have the upgrades of roading and the likes.Hon Phil Twyford: It already has access to it.TIM VAN DE MOLEN: Now the Minister says they already have access to it. So if that's the case why are we bothering with this piece of legislation at all Mr Twyford? Clearly—clearly—the Minister is not quite up to speed on it and I appreciate that it's late in the day for him but what the existing legislation enables is that the National Land Transport Fund is to be used for some aspects like train stations or busways that are outside the typical roading stuff but this new bill enables a whole other suite of access to the funding. And so from that perspective we totally oppose that because the fundamental premise on this side of the House is that the National Land Transport Fund is there to fund roading projects and rail in particular should be funded through its own mechanisms in that manner. Now we're not opposed to rail funding and indeed we support rail in the right places but it should be a commercially focused Stated-owned enterprise (SOE). And what we've seen from this Government—the intent—and that's born out through this legislation as well is that KiwiRail moves away from that SOE model to a public-good model. And simply that's not where it should be; that's a fundamental difference in perspectives between the different sides of the House.One of the key concerns I have in relation to this legislation as well is that actually it makes it a little clunky. So what we have brought in here through this is to implement what are called rail network investment plans". So these are a three-year programme of work that gets put forward to sit in the Government policy statement on transport. But the issue here is that the Minister has to sign off this rail network investment plan which then the New Zealand Transport Agency must include in their planning programme; yet they have no ability to influence what's in that plan. There's no flexibility for them to make trade-offs between what might be proposed on the rail side versus the road side and so from that perspective the two just don't align and you can't merge that together into the seamless multimodal transport system that the Minister claims he wants to achieve. It just doesn't make sense; we don't need this piece of legislation. It's not the right thing.One of the other aspects I have concern around now is that given the COVID situation we've seen there has been a significant shortfall in the revenue gained through the National Land Transport Fund and so now if we're providing more of that funding for rail the question is how many more roads are going to miss out. We've already seen $5 billion stripped out of that road funding budget by this Government. We totally oppose this bill and will continue to do so."