Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I very much agree with the previous speaker; a great contribution from Christopher Bishop. This inquiry was into congestion pricing in Auckland but I note that the recommendations from all the members of the committee were to progress legislation to enable New Zealand cities to use congestion pricing as a tool in transport planning therefore not limited to Auckland and there were some specific recommendations about the form that that would take.There are some other recommendations I'll come back to but firstly I just want to talk about the goal here. I think we all share the same goal which is livable communities that support people and goods to move in an efficient way at lower cost with less noise less pollution and less greenhouse gas emissions and especially to enable more space in our city to be used for the things that the city exists for. So like the city exists for people to come together to trade goods services and ideas; for people to live and work and play in. Ultimately moving around the city as people or as goods—it takes up some of the space. That space that we use for movement isn't an end in and of itself. So if we can move more people and goods at lower cost with less space and enable more of the city for the things that it exists for that's a direct productivity gain to New Zealand.Congestion pricing is one tool that can help us achieve that but I would note that congestion is actually not the largest cost incurred to New Zealand by our transport system that is very very heavily—like in an unbalanced way—reliant on private cars. The cost of just private ownership of those cars is a burden to many New Zealanders and if it were possible for them to move around not having to rely on privately owning as many cars that again would be a direct productivity gain to New Zealand.So one of the key recommendations in this report was to use any revenue raised by a congestion pricing scheme to mitigate equity impacts and to reinvest in public and active transport in the region where the charge applies. Now this is really important but it's even more important that we get ahead of the congestion charge. This would probably be where the Greens have been—I think we were probably the first party in this Parliament to have congestion pricing in our transport policy. I do know that a previous transport spokesperson for the National Party Maurice Williamson I believe lost his role as transport spokesperson when he floated the idea of congestion pricing back in 2006 or so. Then Steven Joyce took over and kind of stopped any work on it for quite a while. It took until the very end of National's last term for them to start looking into it.During that time that National was last in Government there was absolute minimal investment in KiwiRail the rail network. It was in a state of managed decline which would be the reason why we're now facing two years of shut down in Auckland. I'm not saying that KiwiRail's without blame here but the reality is that under nine years of National the railway network was in a state of managed decline very little work was done on congestion charging no work was done on a north-western busway when State Highway 16 was planned to be upgraded and therefore that's why Auckland is in this situation of not having enough public transport to meet the demand.The key thing is that if we know that we're going to be using congestion pricing in Auckland or in Wellington it completely changes the business case for the next investments we make in those cities because we know that demand for public transport will increase. We know that the need for small increases to road capacity in some places that are very very expensive in the cities will not be needed because we'll be smoothing out that peak demand.So when you look at Let's Get Wellington Moving which is looking at spending billions of dollars on grade separating cars in some areas of the city already the benefit-cost ratio (BCR) for that project is well below 1—like we're talking 0.2—and that would be even lower if we have congestion pricing. Same for the next additional Waitematā Harbour crossing: if it's a crossing for cars it really doesn't make any sense. The benefit-cost ratio for that project 0.2 you know probably before the cost has even gone up.I hear members to my right yelling about this. They're the ones who claim to care about economic efficiency here but they never do when it comes to cars in the centre of a city. Because if we were charging the direct cost for that road capacity it could not pay for itself. If we are going to have congestion pricing then we need significantly more investment in public transport in our largest cities. That does leave more of the roading budget to go to the regional areas which you would think that the National Party would support. But instead they're the ones arguing for multibillion-dollar low-BCR road projects in the central city. But the Green Party supports this report and looks forward to the legislation.