Horan Brendan: General Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Horan Brendan: General Debate 
[Sitting date: 15 August 2012. Volume:682;Page:4397. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
BRENDAN HORAN (NZ First) 
: 
 Rail is a critical—[ 
Interruption 
] 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Order! I apologise to the honourable member but the previous debate has concluded. I want to hear from Brendan Horan. 
BRENDAN HORAN 
: Thank you Mr Speaker. Rail is a critical part of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure. Right now its future is being compromised and undermined. New Zealand First considers that there is a strong case for a public inquiry into the state of the rail network because of a long list of issues that need to be addressed. 
Considering that this is Rail Safety Week let us first consider safety. New Zealand First has brought to the public’s attention and to this House the issue of rotting rail sleepers. A lot of people do not really understand what that means—what is a rotten railway sleeper? Well sleepers were brought in from Peru. There are thousands of them and the truth is that they do not know how many are really out there. They have workers coming into the yards they have had them coming into the yards and they have had work outsourced so contractors have been going into the yards grabbing sleepers and then going and trying to do maintenance. 
Yesterday I spoke in the House and alerted the House about the safety issues involving sleepers that may be at many of the road crossings in New Zealand. But what does that mean? It means that if we have a fully laden train coming to a road crossing and let us say that road is running parallel to the railway line and those sleepers collapse we will have a derailment. We could have a catastrophic derailment if that happens in peak hour. I can say to those people from Tauranga who are watching today that you need only think about the Bayfair Drive roundabout and the roundabout that is a little bit further down near Baypark. There you have a kilometre and in peak hour traffic you could have hundreds of deaths. This needs to be investigated. 
Let us look at some of the other issues and the locomotives. Of 20 brand new locomotives only one is actually working to its potential. The main distance between the failure rate of those locomotives is 14800 kilometres whereas some of the 50-year-old locomotives that KiwiRail has go for 80000 kilometres before they have to have that essential check. We have locomotives that do not work and one of those 20 brand new locomotives has not been seen on the railways tracks—no they have turned it into parts. They are using a brand new locomotive for parts. 
Then we take a look at the wagons which are an absolute disaster. These wagons were designed apparently by some KiwiRail people and they have a bubble in them. They have the bubble because when they put a container on it the bubble lowers and you have a flat platform then they use the locking levers and lock that container into place. But if you have light material within the container they cannot lock it because the bubble is still there. What KiwiRail workers are having to do is to drive a large forklift on top of the container to squash it down so they can then lock it. This is unsafe. This is ridiculous. It is quite simply a mistake in the design of these 500 railway wagons that were brought from China. It is ridiculous. We are getting a lot of damage within KiwiRail because of this. You have these locking mechanisms breaking you have brake failure and you have bearings failing. All of these are very very important safety issues. 
Things are so bad that when they are doing maintenance on a locomotive they have to leave the engine running but they cannot open the engine bay doors because they are extremely worried that they are going to have fans disintegrating—more safety worries. Let us also look at the job losses that we have with 181 KiwiRail workers being made redundant by October. This is part of a 3-year plan to get rid of 370 jobs. How can that be good for the economy? What happens to those families who have been made redundant? Well some of those workers will be able to go into the workforce but others will end up going on welfare. 
The list of issues I have mentioned today—I have a whole lot more—all add up to a compelling case for a full inquiry into the state of New Zealand’s railways.