Lees-Galloway Iain: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeLees-Galloway Iain: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Second Reading In Committee[Sitting date: 08 May 2013. Volume:689;Page:9799. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY (Labour—Palmerston North): First I would like to say that in my first contribution on this Part 1 of the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill in the first 5 minutes that I got I spoke to my Supplementary Order Paper 235. That is a very serious Supplementary Order Paper. It is a serious amendment that regional councils want to see happen and I think that the Government members owe it to regional councils to get up and say what their position is. So whether you are for it or against it please let us know and please let local government know what your position is what the position of the Government is and why. I think that is the very least that Government members could actually undertake. But no what we have had is Mr O’Connor taking a closure motion and it looked like Mr Sabin was quite keen to take one as well without a single member of the Government benches taking a single call on this bill. That I think tells you exactly how ashamed they are of this legislation in the fact that they do not even want to get up and tell us about it.I want to talk about my other Supplementary Order Paper 234 which would restore the original purpose of the Act. Basically what National is doing by changing the purpose of this Act is giving central government absolute control over what roading projects—sorry a slip of the tongue there but it really does reflect what this Government wants which is roads roads roads and mega-roads. Actually it is not about roads; it is about mega-highways and that is it. That is what the purpose is.The word in particular that I think is really missing from the new purpose which would be restored if my amendment was adopted by the Committee is that word “integrated”. Probably the most important word that is going to be missing from the Act now is having an “integrated” transport system. I thought that some of the contributions from the National Party members in the second reading of this bill were a bit thick to be honest—a bit thick. I know what they are trying to do. They are trying to position Opposition parties and trying to play politics here. But let us have a sensible serious conversation about our transport needs because what David Bennett tried to say is that the Opposition parties hate roads. Well guess what Mr Bennett? Under that Government under the National Government local roads up and down this country are being completely overlooked. There are roads in my electorate that need to be built and need to be maintained and they will not be. The New Zealand Transport Agency has turned down the funding it has said no to the local councils because all the money—all the money—is going to the roads of national significance.So I do not accept it when National Party members get up and say they are interested in roads and they are interested in economic development and they are interested in supporting the regions when regional roads and local roads up and down New Zealandare falling apart and not being supported. This Government does not care about an integrated transport system. It does not care about an integrated transport system and it refuses to have a law that says that when funding decisions are made about transport the economic viability the environmental viability and the social sustainability of infrastructure need to be taken into account—not even economic viability. Of course we know that the only projects that this Government supports—its monster motorways—are not even economically viable let alone considering their impact on the environment or their impact on local communities. That is why this Government does not want to support the idea of having an integrated transport system.Any transport system needs roads. If you look at a transport need and you look at the variety of solutions available sometimes it will be a highway. Sometimes that will be the right response. Sometimes it will be a road. I think of the Western Link Road which Mr Faafoi’s electorate is not going to get—the Western Link Road which Mr Faafoi’s electorate is not going to get. There are the roads in Palmerston North that would support the central distribution transport hub which we are not going to get. There is the road that Andrew Little wants in Taranaki which Taranaki is not going to get under this Government. All the Government is interested in are the roads of national significance not local roads not regional roads and certainly not rail or coastal shipping—certainly not rail or coastal shipping. Sometimes those will be the answers as well. Sometimes if we think about the economic benefits or we think about the social benefits or we think about the safety of getting freight off roads and on to rail or on to coastal shipping that will be the right answer.But what this bill does is it creates a situation where that will never be the answer. The analysis that the New Zealand Transport Agency has to undertake will never come up with the answer that a railroad is the right answer or that greater use of coastal shipping is the right answer. That is because the National Party wants to control the National Land Transport Fund so that it can look after its mates—its mates in the trucking industry and its mates who want to make money out of public-private partnerships.The other thing that this bill does is it supports greater borrowing to pay for those unaffordable roads and it supports uneconomic ludicrous economically mad public-private partnerships like the one at Transmission Gully. Let us look at Transmission Gully as an example of the foolishness of this Government. Labour actually supports building Transmission Gully. Labour supports building Transmission Gully; it is something that we would do. But we think it should cost $1 billion not $3 billion. The National Party wants it to cost $3 billion. It wants to charge New Zealanders $2 billion more than is necessary to build Transmission Gully. Why? So it can do it by public-private partnership. There is no evidence. The Government has not been able to produce a shred of evidence that building Transmission Gully by public-private partnership will be safer more efficient more effective or most important cheaper. It cannot demonstrate that. In fact Government members are so nervous about this that when the Labour Party requested information under the Official Information Act they gave us information but they removed the public sector comparator. They removed the bit that says how much it would cost to build under the traditional procurement model. I wonder why that is. I wonder why they are not prepared to tell us that number. I bet—I bet anything you like—that the reason is that the public sector comparator comes out much much better than the public-private partnership. You do not even need to guess at this. You have just to look at the New Zealand Transport Agency’s predictions for transport costs over the next 30 years. It put in a special line that accounted for building Transmission Gully by public-private partnership and that line showed that it was going to cost $2 billion more than building it under the traditional model.So the New Zealand Transport Agency knows it. Government members know it. Why on earth are they doing it New Zealanders can only guess but I would like to offer one possibility and that is that they like providing low-risk high-return investment opportunities to their mates in the banking sector. That is what they have done with Mighty River Power and that is what they are doing with the Transmission Gully public-private partnership. This bill is all about National tightening its control over the land transport system so that it can look after its mates and cherry-pick projects for itself not run a sensible analysis of each project and choose them on their merits.David Bennett was going on about the Waikato Expressway and my position on that. I came to Hamilton I spoke to people and do you know what I said? I said: “We have to take a look at this Mr Bennett. We have to take a look at this and we have to run a sensible economic analysis of the project.”David Bennett: You’re not going to do it.IAIN LEES-GALLOWAY: If you do not like that Mr Bennett if you do not like the idea of a sensible economic analysis being run on a transport project that simply reveals that this Government just wants to cherry-pick projects whether or not they make sense whether or not they are good for the taxpayer whether or not they are good for local ratepayers whether or not they are good for the environment whether or not they are socially acceptable and whether or not they are the socially right thing to do. This National Government just does not believe in evidence and proper analysis; it just picks ideas out of the air and picks and chooses its own ideas. That is what this bill is all about. We had a system whereby the New Zealand Transport Agency had to sit down and do a rigorous analysis of what projects should be supported. That is what Labour had to bring in after 10 years of National building road after road after road after road. Labour came in and said we needed an integrated transport system and that is what we set up. But all this does is go back to the old days the fossilised view of the National Party of the 1950s—