Williamson Maurice: Third Readings 
Williamson Maurice: Third Readings 
[Volume:622;Page:17229] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 What a disappointing third reading speech that was. Here we have four bills being debated as one and the Minister has had weeks to prepare an erudite exciting blistering defence but I have to say that I have heard the Goons reading stuff late at night on National Radio with more fervour than that Minister can manage. 
National Party members are very sad that we are having to vote against these four bills which started off as one because in the main we support the general thrust of what was trying to be achieved. The previous Minister quite rightly decided after a number of years of the new regime that it was time to review. If we go back to the early 1990s there was just the one monolithic the Ministry of Transport which had been broken up into various components—the Civil Aviation Authority the Maritime Safety Authority the Transport Accident Investigation Commission the Land Transport Safety Authority and a whole range of others. Then Transit was broken up into Transfund and Transit in terms of the State highway. It was clearly time to go back to review and to look at those agencies and at whether there was duplication—or quadruplication in some cases—to see where we could get rationalisation without compromising specific roles. 
The key objective was to do two things. One was to try to make operational issues lie within the operational units and to bring policy issues back to the Ministry of Transport where they should lie and we applaud the Government for doing that. Had National been in power at present I think our review would have come up with a very similar finding. We think that is right. I think it was wrong to leave the Land Transport Safety Authority with some of the control and the powers it had. The authority used to drive me nuts when I was Minister and I used to think that that control should be back in the ministry where the Minister at least has some say—I have to say not all that one would like to have but that will be for another day. However when it came to operational areas where the authority should be working on operational matters the policy function has now been taken out. We applaud that. 
The second thing I was worried about is that it was rumoured the Government might re-merge the funder/provider split within Transit and Transfund. I am delighted to see that it did not do that. There was a worry that this Government would say that it did not need those two separate bodies and that it would now make Transit and Transfund one again. I have to say that would be a great mistake because in the past there were all sorts of accusations—some real some imaginary—that Transit while it was both the funder of all roading and the provider of State highways had a conflict of interest in maybe deciding to do its own roads before it did others. 
So again I was very pleased to see the Government decide not to combine them. It realised that there does not need to be two boards two executive management teams two public relations groups and all the other peripheral systems that go with those agencies. So the proposal was to move the Land Transport Safety Authority and the Transfund funding operation into the one body called Land Transport New Zealand. Again the National Party agrees with that. 
Now anybody listening to my speech would say that until this point it sounds as if I think what has happened is good. The answer to that is yes—absolutely. However I simply cannot understand the Government doing one last thing that has forced us to vote against the legislation. The Government has taken out the absolutely crucial benchmark measure that one has to have in transport which is “safety at reasonable cost”. I will say it again for those who are listening for the first time to this debate that that measure is important when one is making proper judgment calls on decisions about any transport policy. If there was not the “at reasonable cost” measure one proposal that the Minister already could come up with today to save hundreds of deaths on the road would be to set the speed limit at 5 kilometres per hour. The Minister could do that. He could say: “Right we are moving to a 5 kilometres per hour speed limit on the roads.” There would probably be almost no deaths other than from boredom but it would not be at reasonable cost. The economy would collapse New Zealand would not function as a nation and we would not be able to get our goods and services to market. So it would be a stupid law. 
However while there was “safety at reasonable cost” within the legislation where a proper measure could be used whenever a proposal came up—be it realigning a road building a new bridge some new vehicle standards or emission standards or whatever—one could measure the cost. In the case of aviation whether it was to do with certification of aircraft and so on it was quite clearly possible to measure the cost of doing it. One could quite clearly measure what the benefits would be to the economy overall such as whether it would save a number of lives reduce congestion improve traffic flows and so on. 
The old rule of “safety at reasonable cost” simply said: “Go ahead and do it if the benefits to the economy are more than the cost of doing it.” I simply do not know anybody from an apparatchik in the Czechoslovakian Communist party to the extreme John Birch Society of the United States who cannot see that it is a sensible rule. “Do not do it unless the benefits outweigh the costs.” Sometimes the benefits might be three times the cost or it might be four or five times the benefit-cost ratio but at least the benefits of doing something have to be greater than the costs. But here is the rub: the Greens got into the act with their mucky grubby little hands as they do and squeezed the Labour Government. They said: “We don’t like ‘safety at reasonable cost’ because with that in place we’ll never get logs carried from forests on bicycles.” 
Darren Hughes 
: How did you find out? 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: One of the members leaked it to me. The Greens said they wanted that clause out. The Labour Government was reasonably sensible and all the rest of it. I could find no officials’ advice that said to take out the words “safety at reasonable cost”. But it was exactly as the Greens wanted. 
I know that the Prime Minister Helen Clark told people in Auckland including the previous Mayor of Auckland that she regretted letting the Greens get so much of their way on the old land transport management legislation and I say to the Labour Government that it will regret letting the Greens get so much of a say on this legislation as well. I cannot for the life of me understand why the Government is not prepared to use that discipline. And it is a very strong discipline. 
When I was a Minister every time officials got wheeled into my office the first thing I used to flick to was the benefit-cost ratios and I would ask: “What are you suggesting this for? This has got a lunatic cost to the nation and as far as I can see almost no benefit.” So the issue was killed. However other proposals when wheeled up looked good. I have to say that the one I do not think we even got to doing a benefit-cost appraisal on—because I went nuclear on it—was the Land Transport Safety Authority suggestion that we might use safety helmets for motorcar drivers. No economy in the world does that. Anyone who does a benefit-cost ratio would realise just what a stupid proposal that was. However that proposal could raise its ugly head again. 
I want to know from the Minister why he would not want that discipline. Why would he as Minister not want to know he could sleep soundly in bed at night while officials beaver away on the next little light bulb that lights up in their heads knowing that at least they could not go outside the bounds of “safety at reasonable cost”— 
Hon Pete Hodgson 
: We don’t fear them; we just tell them what to do. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: I tell the Minister that he should fear them. He should greatly fear some of the officials within some of these agencies. Be afraid I say to the Minister be very afraid. They sit there daily thinking that because they are being paid they had better come up with another idea—something else that is stupid like the window-tinting issue. If the Minister ever wants to know about losing sleep let the Land Transport Safety Authority take him through the window-tinting issue again and see how he feels about it. Again that window-tinting issue was very clearly able to be dealt with when we looked at what the benefits were to the economy compared with the ludicrous costs that were to be put in place. 
So I say again the National Party will oppose the four bills that come out of the Transport Legislation Bill—the Civil Aviation Amendment Bill (No 2) the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 2) the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill and the Maritime Transport Amendment Bill—for one simple reason: had the Minister been prepared to leave a sensible statement in the legislation that all safety would be delivered at reasonable cost then we would have signed up to it on the day and there would have been no need to have a split vote.