Twyford PhilDEBATE ON PRIME MINISTER'S STATEMENTDebate resumed from 19 February.Hon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister for Economic Development): I am very proud to be a member of the Jacinda Ardern - led Government of infrastructure. As the Prime Minister said last week the claim that our Government is the Government of infrastructure is undeniable. It's interesting to wonder colleagues why whenever we say that on this side of the House that side of the House yowl like scalded cats.Here is the case. We've established an infrastructure commission Te Waihanga—thank you Shane Jones. We are giving the industry the long-term pipeline of work that they've been asking for. The New Zealand Upgrade Programme has delivered a decade-long programme of infrastructure investment. We've introduced the Infrastructure Funding and Financing Bill to allow long-term private debt financing of the three waters and the roads to enable urban development. We've invested $2.5 billion into health rebuilding mental health wards child health services at Starship maternity services and a new hospital in Dunedin. We've put $1.5 billion into schools and that means 726 new classrooms from one end of this country to the other—Angie Warren-Clark: How many? Hon PHIL TWYFORD: —726 classrooms—and for the first time ever we have a fully funded plan to keep up school infrastructure with population growth. We've created more than 4250 public housing places. That is State housing community-provided housing—an extra 4250. We currently have 3480 State and community houses under construction. Our Government is building more housing right now than any Government has since the mid-1970s and I am proud to be part of a team of housing Ministers who are making that happen. Now the icing on the cake was the New Zealand Upgrade Programme a $12 billion 10-year programme of infrastructure investments upgrading our roads our rail our hospitals and our schools. Why is it that we can do this? The answer is that Grant Robertson's careful financial management has put the country in a position where we can make investments in productivity-enhancing infrastructure on a scale that has not been seen in many decades—$6.8 billion of transport infrastructure that will speed up travel times and that will allow people to move around our cities with greater ease. It will help get trucks off the road and move more freight by rail. Now contrast this with the record of the previous Government who put out press releases promising to build a number of roads that they never designated they never planned properly and they certainly did not fund. Hon Member: Ghost roads. Hon PHIL TWYFORD: They were ghost roads. National said that they would do it and they could do it but they didn't. It's a case of woulda coulda shoulda". For example take Mill Road in Auckland. National promised that they would build four lanes of highway on Mill Road but they didn't do it and what's worse is that their planning was faulty. They were planning on just building a road with four lanes of traffic. Everyone knows that those would have filled up with cars magically overnight. Cyclists would have been competing in the road corridor with trucks. Public transport would have been caught up in traffic jams with all the cars. By contrast our futureproofing approach to transport infrastructure has seen a new style of highways being put in place. There will be in all of the State highway projects that we announced in the New Zealand Upgrade Programme dedicated separated walking and cycling pathways alongside those State highways and even more important than that the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) will be putting in place what they call managed lanes in the United States with dedicated lanes for freight for high-occupancy vehicles and for public transport. These are smart changes that will futureproof this hundred-year infrastructure for future generations. But unfortunately the National Party are stuck in the past. [Interruption] Their policy wants to take us back to the 1950s. In fact the 1950s called the other day Brett Hudson and said "We want our transport policy back. Tell the National Party." Our Government is futureproofing New Zealand for the 21st century. Under the last Government they were spending every year 40 percent of the transport budget—about $4 billion a year; 40 percent of that—on a handful of hand-picked motorway projects and the upshot of that was that every other part of the transport system like road maintenance was neglected. That's why we've inherited so many potholes on the roads. The councils didn't have enough central government subsidy for local road improvements. Public transport stood still—and in fact it went backwards in many areas—under that Government and in KiwiRail's words they were left in a state of "managed decline". The rest of the transport sector was allowed to wither on the vine. We had to fight for five years to convince them to build the City Rail Link. If we'd been elected five years earlier the City Rail Link would probably be open now and it would be transporting up to 54000 people every hour in and out of the central business district of Auckland. Imagine what that would have done to the productivity of our country's biggest city. Their policy would have led to a 50 percent blowout in deaths and serious injuries between 2013 and 2017-18—a 50 percent increase in deaths and serious injuries—because they poured all the money into a few gold-plated motorways instead of investing in a balanced way across the transport system and now they're saying they want to cancel Auckland light rail. A project that 91 percent of Automobile Association members—91 percent of motorists—in Auckland want to see built and National are saying that they will cancel it. In the 2½ years that we've been in office we have added in Auckland $10 billion to the 10-year transport plan for Auckland. We inherited a plan from the National Government from Simon Bridges who was the Minister of Transport then. There was a $6 billion hole in it—a $6 billion fiscal hole. We filled that hole and we've added another $4 billion—that's a 50 percent $10 billion increase into solving Auckland's transport problems—and because of the extra investment our Government's made Auckland reached 3.77 million cycle trips last year. That's a 6.2 percent increase year on year in cycling in our biggest city. Auckland recently hit 102 million public transport journeys in the last 12 months—102 million. That's the biggest number of public transport journeys Auckland's had since the early 1950s when they tore up the tram tracks. NZTA expects because of our Government's investment in public transport in our major cities to see an 11 percent increase nationwide in public transport journeys. Not only that we're investing in safety: $1.4 billion to upgrade 3300 kilometres of local roads and State highways. It's projected to save 160 deaths and serious injuries every year. We are upgrading and making safe some of the most dangerous parts of the roading network right across New Zealand.We've got rail back on track. In two years we've made a $4 billion commitment to making our rail network the backbone of a sustainable 21st century transport system. It's how we're going to get trucks off the road and move freight more efficiently and sustainably. It's how we're going to move people more efficiently with fewer vehicles in our cities and it's how we are going to fight climate change. But the National Party they just want to take us back to the bad old days. They've got no new ideas. In fact their transport policy was recently just to re-announce the ghost roads that they promised in 2017. That's their idea of a modern transport policy. They're just re-announcing ghost roads and some of them have never even been NZTA projects—they're just plucked out of the air. They have elevated pork barrel politics to an art form. They have no new ideas. This Government is the Government of infrastructure and we are taking New Zealand forward."