Bennett David: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Bennett David: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
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DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 I thank the Minister for that introduction to the bill which was a synopsis of what has been put into the legislation. I think that before we talk about the bill it is important to look at the background behind it. The land transport sector has been vaunted by this Government as something it has put a lot of money into. Government members have always gone out there and said that they have put a lot of money into land transport and they have given comparative figures on the spending between now and the 1990s. Well some home truths need to come out about that transport funding. 
This bill is the direct result of the inefficient use of funding on a scale that has been demonstrated in a number of reports that have come through to the Minister of Transport. This legislation is a direct result of those reports. It all started with the Ministerial Advisory Group on Roading Costs. Its report was basically a destruction of the Minister her achievements in this area Transit and Land Transport New Zealand. It was scathing in the sense that those organisations involved in land transport were not providing the value for money that people would expect of the sector. It was a huge hit on the Government and on the Minister because transport policy had been a flagship policy in which the Government had said it had been doing so well. The fact that its own people came out and said that it was underperforming that it had no idea of where it was spending its money and that it had no accountability—and what is more no governance over that spending—has resulted in this bill. 
The Ministerial Advisory Group on Roading Costs was set up as an independent panel to look at funding of roading costs in New Zealand. Things have to get pretty bad for a Government to set up an independent panel in the first place but when that independent panel basically slates the Government it tells us that the Government is not doing a very good job. That is the history behind this bill. 
The transport sector has had some money thrown at it but on a percentage basis it is still less than what National put into it. It is a sector that has not delivered. Considering the money that has gone into it it has not delivered. The sector has been plagued by cost overruns and by inefficiencies in planning direction and governance. The ministerial advisory group’s findings led to the Next Steps review. The Minister used this review to say basically: “Well I know there is a problem; let’s do something about it.” Well she should have been doing something about that years ago. These problems did not come up overnight. They have been obvious to people in the sector for a number of years. This Government has sat on those problems year after year and it has not delivered. The Government just says it will do this and that in its Budgets and for pure political convenience it has not actually looked at how it is spending its money. 
The Next Steps review was equally scathing of the Government. It set out some findings. It found that the central regional and local land transport plans are not fully aligned. It found that expenditure pressures are not being addressed strategically. It found that there was inconsistent planning and funding for policies which distorts incentives within the sector; that the roles of Government land transport agencies remain unclear; and that some functions are duplicated. It is another big cross against this Minister and this Government for inefficiencies in this sector. 
Then the Government came up with this legislation. This is supposed to be the answer to those problems. Well this legislation has not been thought through. There are a number of difficulties in it which need to be addressed through this process—through the select committee and by the Government. But the Government will not address the hard issues that need to be sorted out; it will address only some of the minor ones and we will come back to those hard issues that are not being addressed in this legislation. But having said that there are some good things that needed to be done and have been done. 
We need to see some planning in land transport. If members talk to anyone in the land transport sector they will find that their major problem is that they do not have consistency of planning and they do not know what will happen in the next 3 to 6 years the next 10 to 20 years or the next 20 to 30 years. So we welcome the legislation’s provisions in relation to planning. Those achievements in relation to planning are valuable and they are needed in the land transport sector. They are only part of the solution but they are one of the parts that the National Party will support; it is something that has been waiting to be done for a number of years. 
When we look at what we do find problems with we see that one of those things is the issue of regional fuel taxes. The history behind those regional fuel taxes involves State Highway 20 a major road in Auckland. A poll of the Auckland community found that the community did not want to pay a toll. The result of the community not wanting to pay a toll was that the Government decided it could not put a toll on people as it was politically incorrect so it decided that it would have a regional petrol tax. So everybody has to pay a regional petrol tax to pay for the road—a road that somehow goes through the Prime Minister’s electorate no doubt. The rationale behind it—and it is fine if one lives in Auckland—is that the tax would be possibly 10c 5c of which would be for public transport and that partly would to pay for electrification in Auckland. 
That is fine for Auckland but what about other regions around the country that do not have such pressing public transport needs? If members look at the situation in the Waikato they might wonder what the point is of having a regional petrol tax of 10c with 5c of it having to go to public transport. Our big issue in the Waikato is building the Waikato Expressway. That would be where we would want to put the 10c of regional fuel tax. We would not want to put 5c of that into public transport in the Waikato. 
We have Mr Duynhoven here. I would love to see him go to his regional council in Taranaki and ask that council what it wants. I bet the council would tell him that it wants the whole 10c for its own roads. I tell the Minister that it would not want to have to spend 5c on public transport. The Minister should go and ask his constituents this weekend what they want. They will tell him that they do not want that regional fuel tax to be 10c that is broken down to 5c for public transport and 5c for roading. They want the whole 10c put on roading because that is the big issue in Taranaki. If the Minister drove into New Plymouth between 3 and 5 in the afternoon he would realise the congestion problems of getting into the city that he represents. He is not letting the constituents in his city use the regional petrol tax in the manner that they want so there needs to be some degree of amendment to that regional petrol tax to take into account the differing needs around the country. That is something we hope will be addressed through a Supplementary Order Paper during the Committee stage. 
The other part of the legislation that we have great difficulty with is in the merger of the office of the Director of Land Transport and Transit New Zealand. Certainly there is need for reform in this area and nobody is in any doubt about that. However the merger goes back to what was set up a number of years ago. Those organisations were actually divided for a reason. They were divided so that the provider arm and the funder arm were in separate bodies. That is quite a rational division and that is what local government lobbied for. They were joined at one stage and local government went to central government and said: “No we can’t make that work; we want it divided.” So it was divided. Now the Government is bringing that situation back. Well it will get the same problems we had 10 or 20 years ago; it is just dressing them up differently. Those problems will just be in a new vehicle and it will take a couple of years for them to come through. 
This Government needs to take a good hard look at its transport policy. This bill is a quick-fix measure. It has taken a year of reports to identify the problems and suddenly within a couple of months the Government can merge these organisations together and get it sorted out. Well it does not work like that. The Government needs to do some more strategic planning in the reorganisation of the transport sector. It needs to take a good look at what the actual issues are. The actual issues are that the big roads—the big political roads—are not getting built. This change in framework will not solve that problem. This Government is taking a quick-fix solution here and that means that all those organisations that are now having to be merged are actually going through tremendous pressure. Those organisations do not know where they stand and they see great difficulty in the proposals of this legislation. The National Party has great difficult in supporting those parts of the legislation. 
Debate interrupted.