Twyford Phil: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeTwyford Phil: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 21 July 2015. Volume:707;Page:5158. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]PHIL TWYFORD (Labour—Te Atatū):The story of this National Government’s transport policy deserves to be told and it goes something like this. This Government under Steven Joyce’s leadership as a transport Minister in its early years took the transport budget which amounts to about $3.5 billion a year and decided to politicise it and treat it as a party political slush fund for the National Party. That is what it did. It was an act of supreme cynicism and it made the decision against the advice of officials against the advice of all of the best benefit-cost ratios all of the analysis to pour billions of dollars into a handful of hand-picked motorway projects that had not even been subject to the most basic economic analysis when this Government committed the money for those projects—a handful of urban motorway projects.It was pork-barrel politics on an industrial scale and that is the defining quality of this Government’s transport policy. The result of that has been that every other category of the transport budget whether it is urban public transport or local roads in regional New Zealand has been cut and squeezed and neglected for the last 7 years. This Government has been willing to run down and neglect a multibillion-dollar asset that belongs to the people of this country in the form of the local roads and State highways. It has been content to neglect the transport needs of our country’s biggest city making itself this National Government a brake on Auckland’s economic growth and prosperity.We did the figures when the Government policy statement on transport came out and then again when the National Land Transport Fund came out and what those numbers show is that for regional New Zealand outside of the main urban centres spending on roads has dropped by 13 percent in real terms between 2008 and 2013. That amounts to a real cut of $163 million. That is a reduction in the spending on local and regional roads by this National Government during its 7 years in office so far—a 13 percent cut in real terms.What is the upshot? The consequence of that cut in funding to regional New Zealand’s roads is that the roads themselves fall into disrepair and pose a threat to the safety of people using those roads in regional New Zealand and this National Government having blamed councils all around New Zealand for the last 7 years for being profligate spenders all its transport policy has done is load more and more pressure on to the ratepayers in regional New Zealand.Take Southland—about 10000 ratepayers—they have had a massive dairying boom there over the last decade or so. They have the largest roading network outside the Auckland super-city and yet they have had successive cuts to their local road funding. Eric Roy the former member for Invercargill was in the Southland Times explaining to his constituents why their road funding was cut by this National Government. He was very candid—that is what I liked about Eric Roy. He said that until we have built all the roads of national significance the roads in Southland are just going to have to wait.That is a message that he could have delivered to any town any community throughout this country because that has been the effect of this Government’s transport policy on regional New Zealand. The regions are missing out. If you look at average funding per person nationwide the average is $648 per person. In the regions it is only $566 per person. Per kilometre nationwide there is an average spend of $11430 under National. In the regions it is only $9230. The regions are getting done like a dog’s dinner under National.The second thing I wanted to say is that in the last election as we have repeatedly seen from this Government it was dragged kicking and screaming it was embarrassed publicly and then finally it threw a little bone to try to keep people quiet and it announced $212 million of regional road funding. But the following year in the Budget it allocated only $97 million for those roads although it promised $212 million. How cynical can you get? We saw this speaking of cynicism with the bridges of Northland—