Brown Simeon; O'Connor GregSIMEON BROWN (National—Pakuranga): Thank you Mr Speaker for the opportunity to take a call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill which the National Party continues to oppose. We oppose this legislation because this is an example of more central planning and control of public transport services in New Zealand by a Government without actually having a plan on how it is going to achieve better public transport. And in fact this piece of legislation in my opinion is going to put things backward because what it does is it effectively takes away the key requirements for operating a public transport service—that it must be done in a commercial way where it goes through competitive tenders and where we know that there is good value for taxpayers money coming through that process. What this legislation does is it effectively puts in place a whole new regime which dramatically changes that approach which has been in place. The Government stands up and says Well we need to change the system because effectively what we've had is we've had low use of public transport in recent years and we need to therefore throw everything out." Well I wanted to put it straight on the record: this Government is responsible for the reasons why we have such poor patronage on our public transport network at this stage. And it is the former Minister of Transport who put this bill to the House who was also the Minister of Immigration who took 12 months too long to make sure that there would be enough bus drivers available to actually operate our public transport networks in New Zealand. And so this Government says "Well it's all about wages and it's all about emissions and it's all about frequency." Well actually what they failed to think about was: how do we make sure we've got enough bus drivers in the country to be able to actually operate the public transport network? It's even worse for our ferry services where they have to wait even longer because of how long it's taken for the Government to actually change the immigration settings to be able to get ferry workers to be able to operate ferry services in New Zealand. So we listened to officials throughout the process when this was before the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and the question that was for me most interesting was the question around whether those issues that the Government said needed to be fixed could have been negotiated through the Public Transport Operating Model. The question around whether you could negotiate that the services that were operated by public transport operators had to be using for example electric buses—well yes; the answer was yes you could include that as a requirement in the tendering process. Could you describe in the tendering process particular pay and conditions? The answer was yes. Could you put in place particular minimums of frequency? The answer was yes. And so all of the issues that the Government says needed to be fixed could all be managed through the tendering process under the Public Transport Operating Model legislation as it exists today and does not require the Government to be passing new legislation.But in the meantime what this legislation is doing is then taking things a step further. They are throwing out some of the key principles around how public transport operations should be undertaken in New Zealand and changing those principles dramatically. For example one of the principles which is being removed is: "The incentives should exist to reduce reliance on public subsidies to cover the cost of providing public transport services." Making sure that public transport services are operating efficiently—no longer a requirement. We went through this at select committee. In terms of the new principles they have a new principle which says the investment needs to be efficient but then the following clause says "providing public transport services assists in furthering the principles … (a) to (d)" and of course efficiency comes under (e). So it's no longer required to actually be considered as part of making sure that taxpayers' money when it's being put towards public transport is actually operating in an efficient manner.There are of course further changes which this bill does which came up through select committee and there are a number of submitters who raised concerns around this but the bill allows for in-house provision of public transport servicing with no tendering process required. The regulatory impact statement revealed that the Ministry of Transport had a differing preferred option to the Minister regarding this particular point—basically said it's not going to work in terms of achieving better outcomes for public transport users. But no the Government ignored that advice and instead has decided that public transport operators should be able to operate public transport services in-house without a tendering process which effectively means we're going to go back to the bad old days where public transport effectively operates within an opaque—no one really knows how it's being funded and there will be no real clear measures and outcomes put in place. And that is going to be something which I don't think is going to deliver better public transport services for New Zealanders.As I discussed the issue around bus driver wages that issue can already be resolved through the negotiation process and the tendering process. It didn't require a legislative change to actually address that. But I think the biggest issue really comes down to the fact that this Government is now saying to regional councils that instead of going out there and tendering instead of having to go through a competitive process to operate a public transport service making sure that the ratepayer and the taxpayer are getting good value for money that the outcomes that are being required through that tendering process are being robustly tested against what the market can provide instead of that approach being taken to public transport operation in New Zealand what this legislation says effectively is that the regional transport operators—regional councils—will effectively be able to just decide to run that in-house. They'll own it they'll run it they'll operate it and I can tell you what it will not work in New Zealand and things will go backwards mark my words on that. And so the National Party continues to oppose this piece of legislation. We share the concerns around what a number of players in the industry raised that competition creates efficiency and removing that competition removes that efficiency and ultimately means that taxpayers and ratepayers don't get the value for money and don't get the service delivery. If we're going to achieve the increased patronage which we all aspire for our public transport operations if we're going to get more people using buses and trains and ferries it's not going to work if you operate an inefficient service run in-house by a council. It needs to go through a competitive process and that is exactly what this legislation ultimately overturns.So the National Party thanks those who submitted on this piece of legislation and the process that this went through via the select committee. We have not been convinced of the need for change through this legislation and we continue to oppose this bill.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question is that the motion be agreed to."