Williamson Maurice: Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Williamson Maurice: Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Volume:618;Page:13992] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 For the benefit of the people who were listening to that debate they need to know that the previous speaker was the member for Tukituki the Hon Rick Barker who showed about as much interest in solving Auckland’s problems as—I will not even begin to go there. The reading of his speech was appalling the context was hopeless and there was no passion. I do not think there is a member—[ 
Interruption 
] Now Labour members are showing some passion now we are getting them rarked up. How come the Minister did not show that when he was reading the bill? 
I think that anybody who has either lived in or visited Auckland is in no doubt that the one issue that now consumes Aucklanders’ minds is solving the transport dilemma. Auckland has perpetual gridlock. It used to occur only at peak times at very specific points in the corridor but as traffic volumes have grown year on year it now happens anywhere anytime. We need only for a tin of paint to fall off the back of a utility or for someone to have a little bit of a nose-to-tail ding and the gridlock works its way right through the network. 
So I was really pleased when the Government announced in December a package to solve the problems in Auckland. One thing the Government announced that I thought really read well was that Auckland needed one agency to deal with its transport matters. I think most members from Auckland would agree that that is the general public’s view. There is a plethora of agencies at present that deal with Auckland transport. Let us go through them. There are seven territorial authorities such as Pukekohe—or Franklin as it is called at the bottom—through to Manukau City which is New Zealand’s most progressive city according to Sir Barry Curtis. We have Waitakere we have Auckland City we have North Shore and we have Rodney—there is just a plethora of these city councils that are all currently responsible for roading. One would expect that to change and that they would now be gone under this new bill because we do not want seven of them. No they are not. No there will still be seven councils responsible for local roading in Auckland. 
There is a heap more agencies. Let us go through them. There is Transfund and Transit the two major Government agencies that are respectively the funding arm and the provider of State highways in New Zealand. Surely they would go under this bill. There would not be a need for Transit in Auckland anymore if one body was running Auckland transport. Oh no when we look at this bill and check it again sorry but there is still a Transit. The same old boundary problems have applied year after year whereby one local council wants this and another one wants that and Transit which runs in the middle wants a third option. The bill will not solve any of those things. 
But there are lots more. I said something to my wife the other night about ARTNL. She asked: “Who’s ARTNL?”. I said that ARTNL was the Auckland Regional Transport Network Ltd and did she not know that. No she had never heard of it. I bet that if we went out there and did a survey of people about the Auckland Regional Transport Network Ltd they would not have a clue what it is. It is the organisation that provides things like railways stations some of the rolling stock and the— 
John Key 
: Shopping malls. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: The shopping malls at Britomart Place—that was a good one from Mr Key. But will Auckland Regional Transport Network Ltd go under this bill? No it will not go. We will still have Auckland Regional Transport Network Ltd. I am getting really confused. The Government said that only one body would be responsible for Auckland’s roads. Here is a great one. TrackCo will be the owner of all the railway lines in Auckland. Surely it would be integrated into the Auckland Regional Transport Authority so that the authority could make decisions about transport networks. No. Again TrackCo will still exist. I am getting really perplexed. Connex runs the trains. Will Connex go? How about— 
John Key 
: They’re French. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: They are French they might go. Let us take the ferries. We have Fullers Auckland Subritzky on the Hauraki Gulf and I think there is Pacific Ferries. I think there are three ferry operators. Will they all be amalgamated with the Auckland Regional Transport Authority running the ferries? No. What about all the different bus companies—Stagecoach and out my way Howick and Eastern Buses? No they will still be running buses and so on. What about public transport funding mechanisms—will they change? No. 
This bill is the biggest con the world has ever seen. The Government came out with an announcement—and I have its words if members want me to read them out. The Prime Minister was one of the announcers: “What Auckland needs is one agency to fix its transport.” National agrees. We wholeheartedly agree with that statement made by the Prime Minister. 
This bill does nothing of the sort. There is more. There is the Auckland Regional Council. To be fair one body that will go is Infrastructure Auckland. That is one. But it will be replaced by Auckland Regional Holdings which is the same sort of organisation—it owns assets on behalf of the public to fund transport and stormwater drains. How can we make any great change by replacing one body called Infrastructure Auckland which owns the Ports of Auckland shares and the America’s Cup village? How can that fix Auckland’s problems? The bill states that it will go but instead of being gone the bill just replaces that organisation with another one. 
I can refer members of this House and the public to no better diagrams than the spaghetti diagrams that the Automobile Association has drawn. Those diagrams make the Cook Islands’ wiring diagrams for tax evasion look simple. There are just lines responsibilities squares and boxes all over the page. The Government—the Prime Minister Michael Cullen Paul Swain Chris Carter and Judith Tizard—came out in December with its announcement saying that it was hopeless; that it could not fix Auckland’s problems with a governance system in which there were a multitude of organisations. 
Which ones have gone? Let us go through them again. Have any of the seven territorial local authorities gone? No they will all still be responsible for local roading and so on. Will the regional council be gone? No it will still be there. Has Auckland Regional Transport Network Ltd gone? No it will still be there. Is Transit gone? No it will still be there. Is Transfund gone? No it is there. Is TrackCo gone? No it will still be there and it will not be part of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority. TrackCo is not part of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and Transit is not part of it. So the biggest funders of some of the major suppliers of infrastructure and transport solutions in Auckland are not included. How mad is that? 
The Government said that it would bring in one body to solve Auckland’s transport problems. National would have been fully supportive of a Government move to do that because I do not think anyone in this House would deny that it is a serious problem. The serious problem lies around this multiplicity of various bodies all with their own little hobby horse. For goodness' sake! Thank God these organisations do not run railway lines or we would have had seven different gauges of roads in Auckland with every one of the local authorities wanting to have their own little bit. And now we have fights about whether North Shore will get its busway because Auckland City does not want that and so on. 
What the goal should have been and what this grubby little bill should have done was to bring all the bodies into one and to drop Transit and TrackCo in there. But I do not seem to be able to get through to the Government that we have this artificial delineation of some roads. In my electorate of Pakuranga we have a thing called the Pakuranga Highway. It is six lanes wide—three lanes either way. It carries more traffic than any other road barring motorways in a day. I think the number of 64000 cars was the last car count I saw for that highway. It is massive. Is that a State highway—that massive big wide huge arterial road? No it is not. Pakuranga Highway is a local road funded and run by Manukau City. Yet I can take members of this House out into the boondocks of the back of Taihape and they will find a State highway run by Transit. So “State highway” does not mean main road or artery and when we get to those main arteries in Auckland—and the Pakuranga Highway has to be an absolutely central part of that road network; but it is not a Transit road—Transit will be included in some roads but it is not included in that body. 
Now one would have to be some sort of mad scientist to sit down with a clean white sheet of paper and say as I am sure the Government was told by its advisers that Auckland’s one problem is that it has far far too many bodies making decisions—far too many. That is Auckland’s one problem and what we need to tell Madam Prime Minister and Ministers is that the best thing they could do is bring a bill to this House that brought all those bodies into one. We could then have centralised decisions that prioritised what was needed first and which of the roads would happen. That is what would really have been quite a sensible move. 
I was talking to the New South Wales Minister for Transport in Sydney and when I told him how many bodies were responsible for the funding of roads here— 
Clayton Cosgrove 
: Name him. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: Carl Scully is his name if the member wants to know. He is a good guy. I have been to a number of ministerial conferences with him. When I told him of the number of bodies that will be responsible for funding transport here in Auckland he just laughed. He said that I could not be serious and that we would make no progress whatsoever. 
In conclusion I want to say that the National Opposition will most vehemently be opposing this bill. Sometimes we just oppose some legislation. [ 
Interruption 
] Well there is Judith Tizard saying that we are opposed to solving Auckland’s problems. This bill does nothing to solve Auckland’s problems. It just adds one more body called the Auckland Regional Transport Authority to the huge list of other bodies there and gives a few more jobs for the boys. The National Party is totally opposed to the bill.