Pugh Maureen; Rurawhe AdrianMAUREEN PUGH (National): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. I stand in opposition to this Land Transport (Rail) Legislation Bill today—not that it would surprise the members on the other side of the House. Now just to be really clear I am not opposed to rail; in fact it does have a place in making sure that we do have the relevant modes of transport in this country. In fact I've got quite a history in connection with rail in my own backyard on the coast. Even as a really small child—and that was a few summers ago—we would be driven out to the end of the line where my dad would pick us up in an old steam train. He was the fireman on a steam train. And I've got no slack on my pants as a result. But he would pick us up there as kids and he would put us in the steam train and we would travel back to town where we'd get picked up again at the other end. And so I have really fond memories of riding in those heaving beasts with the unique smell that is really hard to explain. But there was a uniqueness about those machines back in those days.Of course they were shifting bulk lots of coal and product out of the West Coast when the place was still being built and a great support to the coal industry it was in those days. And Sunday nights our treat on a Sunday night was to go over to the sheds—and they were just called the sheds". A bit like Thomas the Tank Engine I guess they were all lined up along the back of the shed. Our job was to go in and light the fires in the boilers so that the steam would be building up overnight and so when the drivers came along in the morning the trains were all warmed up and the fires were all chugging away nicely. So I do have a real soft spot for rail but I also have a soft spot for being economically responsible. Now on the West Coast we have a great dependence still on the rail network so I'm not even suggesting for a moment that we do not support it. For instance we've got at the moment around 1.5 million tonnes of coal coming out of the West Coast by rail and that's going into places like dairy companies hospitals and schools all around the country to keep their boilers going and 50-plus wagons of milk powder and product going off out of the local dairy company and there is nothing more exciting than sitting there waiting on this train to go past when you're at the railway crossing and you've got 50 wagons. I call it the cash train as it leaves town taking all this product away and creating wealth for the West Coast. We also use smaller volumes of logs going off the coast as well and rail is an efficient way of moving all of that stuff but it is in tandem with the road freight industry as well.Now if you think about the rail network and particularly the one that I'm familiar with I have used that my whole life as a passenger. Back in those days you could get a one-way trip in the "Press car". The "Press car" used to leave Christchurch about 2 a.m. and its sole purpose was to deliver the Press to the West Coast and you could get a ticket on that for about $3 back in those days.Hon Member: Sure it wasn't £3?MAUREEN PUGH: Three dollars—three dollars. But again it was there for a specific purpose but I doubt very much that that service generated very much profit for New Zealand railways back in those days. But when you think about the terrain that we also have our rail network in—and you know the one that I'm most familiar with is the Ōtira line that is from Greymouth to Christchurch and it passes through a mountainous area. The whole country of course is long and skinny and you know we're called the Shaky Isles for a reason—and that's because we've got the massive Alpine Fault on our side and other faults that pop up around the country. Because we've got so many mountains it means we've also got a huge number of tunnels. It makes the network very vulnerable to natural events and so it is going to be one of those networks I'm afraid that when the Alpine shift does decide to happen that it is going to be a mode of transport that will be years and years even decades before or if it is ever rebuilt. A classic example is last year when a small slip started moving just north of Greymouth and it compromised the rail line. That line was out of action for six weeks—massive disruption to the freight service but it sat in partnership with the road freight industry and so we still managed to get the product out. So we cannot have one over another. But I do have some concerns about this bill. There is no question that we need long-term planning for things like this and things like the rail network. But I would suggest that the industry is probably better placed to work on those long-term plans because we know what happens when politicians get involved in making decisions and long-term investments in things like this: we end up with a line like the one from Napier to Wairoa that's cost over $6 million—and one train. And I would even hazard a guess that for every individual piece of freight that was on that train—if there was any; if it wasn't just a trial run—it would have been cheaper to have put every little individual piece into an individual helicopter and fly it to its destination because this line is so inefficient and such a waste of money. So let the industry guide where it wants to head and leave the politicians out of it and be the enablers of these things not the decision makers where they are not actually the experts. But any decision that is made has to be economic. It has to make sense. And you cannot force change upon an industry unless you are going to have levers. And these are the things that I would have most concern about because what are those levers going to be? Are road-user charges going to go up because that's the only way that this cross-subsidy can happen between road freight and rail freight; road users and rail users. So if we've got an inefficient system on one side and an efficient system on the other and you want to blend the two together of course there's going to be cross-subsidy. And if you want to reinvest or further invest in the inefficient system then the road system has to be able to increase its fees in order to make that cross-subsidy happen. Or will another lever be that we'll simply let the roads run down to a point where it is not efficient for trucks to use them? And it's not just about letting them run down so that we can't even drive our cars on them but for trucks to use roads there are small issues that can happen: camber it can be small slumps that happen. They may not bother you in a car but when you've got 40 tonnes of freight on your trailer and you're hitting those and punching those out it actually causes problems and damage on the vehicles. So will that be a lever that is used? And of course one of the other levers that the Government has already used is to cancel some of the big and crucial roading projects and the 5 million people that we have in this country are continuing to be mobile and you cannot force them into change. So we have to be really careful about the decisions that are being made by this Government. I will just very quickly turn my mind to the support that we actually do have in rail. We know that we are the best economic managers in this Parliament. National has a track record of being economically and fiscally adept. But what we don't want to do is to condemn this country to a network that it will never be able to afford that the users of it will be constantly topping up in terms of financial contribution and we'll get to the point where we have sabotaged our truck networks our freight companies—to the point where they are no longer efficient. And perhaps that is another lever that this Government is anticipating using. I do not support this bill. They can't deliver on light rail—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Adrian Rurawhe): Order! The member's time has expired."