Fenton Darien: Road User Charges Bill — In Committee 
Fenton Darien: Road User Charges Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:676;Page:21779] 
DARIEN FENTON (Labour) 
: 
 Part 4 of the Road User Charges Bill is where we get into some disagreement with the Government and there are also concerns from those in the industry who made submissions to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee particularly around the issue of regulations—regulations that will set the bands of the costs for road-user charges. It gets back to that argument we have been putting all the way through this debate about taxation without representation. It is a fundamental part of our Parliament that there should not be imposition of tax which is essentially what road-user charges are without representation. It should not go through our parliamentary system through a regulations process. So I think what we will find is that apart from the calculation of gross vehicle rates in the new calculation and the nominated weights this is the part of the bill that the industry most objects to and I do not blame it actually. 
What we heard through the select committee was that there was a weak consultation process more than 2 years ago which arose after the truckies’ strike before the last election which people have alluded to that I must say was quite politically motivated. Annette King the then Minister of Transport handled it extremely well and set up a committee to look at the whole issue of road-user charges. So part of this bill does come back from the report-back of that committee. It was very very interesting for me after all of that politically charged issue before the last election to have a bill from this Government that now proposes to impose new road-user charges on truckies but without proper parliamentary scrutiny. There was no one who came to the select committee apart from National’s friends who was convinced about this process. They said: “How can we support this bill when we have no idea what the costs will be? We have no idea other than that it is some sort of broad band calculation that was done 2 years ago. We do not know what the costs will be for our industry. We want to have a say in that.” 
I think that is fair enough because we are talking here about big business and also about small business which I thought National supported. This change will have a significant impact on them and I think they have a right to a genuine say on that through a select committee process. But as we know with a regulations process there is a way of dodging around that. So what the industry is calling for is genuine parliamentary scrutiny on these charges. They are saying they do not want these charges imposed through regulation. They want them in the bill as they have been in the past. They want this Government to honour the commitments its members made when they lined up when the truckies went rolling past in the strike in 2008 which as I say was politically motivated— 
Hon David Carter 
: They didn’t like that Government. 
DARIEN FENTON 
: No well they do not like this Government either actually. I have to tell that member that they do not like this Government. They are let down by this Government; they have been let down by this Government. They are saying that this part of the bill is one of the things they are completely opposed to. It is appalling that there will be charges imposed on this industry and the people who actually have to do the work and run their businesses will have very little say. At the end of the day there will not be proper parliamentary scrutiny. 
These charges should be in the bill; they should not be done through the process of regulations that are proposed by the bill. Actually I think there will be quite a few protests when this bill goes through. I certainly know that the truckies are organising themselves not only around the calculation of nominated weights versus gross weights but also about the fact that they will have charges imposed on them when they do not get to have a proper say on it. 
So that is the major objection we have to Part 4. This is why when we came to select committee we reserved our position on this. We reserved our position on this and we will vote against Part 4. There are good things in this bill—