Genter Julie Anne: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 06 June 2013. Volume:690;Page:10878. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): The National Government is missing a huge opportunity to invest in smarter greener infrastructure. Unfortunately the result is going to be that households and businesses spend ever more on transport even as the Government has to raise the petrol tax and has to raise the road-user charges to pay for its political priority projects which will not actually do any good for the New Zealand economy.The previous speaker the Associate Minister of Transport Michael Woodhouse mentioned that the accident rate on our roads has been reducing. It is not that surprising. What is good is that we have seen an increasing safety record on our roads for quite a long time now. I think it has been declining very steadily for the past 20 years.But what is actually happening here is that New Zealanders are driving less. That results in fewer accidents as well. We have got the statistics right here which show that vehicle ownership is starting to decline per capita and vehicle kilometres travelled per capita are declining. This is part of a worldwide trend that has been documented in the United States in Australia and in Europe. In pretty much every rich country we have reached peak vehicle use and now people are starting to look for alternatives. Unfortunately the Government is not investing in those alternatives.We have this opportunity to get a win-win. We have this opportunity to invest in better transport choices which means buses and trains safe walking and cycling and rail freight and coastal shipping. By investing in all of those modes we reduce the cost of congestion on our roads we reduce the cost of ongoing road maintenance and we reduce the number of accidents on the roads as well.Because I know that members in this House say a lot of things that often are not correct in the case of Government members I think it is important to back up what I am saying with some facts and with some graphs. I have some graphs here showing exactly what the National Government’s transport spending is going to be over the next 3 years. For every single category whether it is road safety new public transport infrastructure new walking and cycling infrastructure public transport services local roads local road maintenance or even maintenance and renewal of State highways all of those amounts are very very small. But when you come to the new State highway category look thereis many many times more spending on that than on any other part of our transport sector. That is a very unbalanced approach to transport. It does not take into account the changing trends in how people want and need to get around.It gets worse. If you look at theGovernmentPolicy Statement on Land Transport Funding which goes out 10 years you actually see this number for new State highways increasing increasing increasing. In 2021 when fewer people per capita are going to be driving the Government is going to be spending a record amount on new State highways and no more on public transport infrastructure no more on walking and cycling no more even on road maintenance. I know that you Mr Deputy Speaker are well aware of the challenges to local roads in some of our regions in New Zealand where the amount of money for local roads has had to be reduced to pay for the National Government’s priorities. Unfortunately those priorities just do not stack up economically.I personally am very very concerned because if we look at the National Infrastructure Plan 90 percent of the money in the National Infrastructure Plan—the part that was not to the ultra-fast broadband—is going on a few of these State highways that were picked for electoral reasons by the National Government. When we look at the New Zealand Transport Agency’s own evaluation of the economic benefits of some of these projects it shows that they are simply not going to be good for the economy. They have a low economic efficiency. The Kāpiti Expressway’s is 0.2. That means that for every $1 we spend we lose 80c. We do not even break even on this project. We are just spending money on a road for the sake of it. Transmission Gully is 0.3 to 0.5. The Pūhoi to Wellsford motorway is probably at best 0.8. These are multibillion-dollar projects that will benefit only 4 percent or less of all of the vehicle trips in New Zealand. It does not make sense to spend 75 percent of your money on new transport infrastructure for 4 percent of the vehicle trips.The National Government is not spending money on roads and it is not spending money on productive infrastructure. It has removed all of the other funding from every other category that would give New Zealanders real choices about how to get around and reduce congestion and be good for our exporters who are looking for rail freight options. Instead of doing that it is sticking with its promise the promise it made in Opposition before it looked at the numbers and it is sticking with it for the next few years. For the next 10 years unless we have a change in Government New Zealand we are not going to have real transport choices. We are not going to reduce congestion in Auckland.Just to put it in perspective I made a pie chart because it really does show exactly how unbalanced—Hon Simon Bridges: What sort of pie is that? It’s a blueberry pie.JULIE ANNE GENTER: For the benefit of the Minister of Energy and Resources I am going to explain a pie chart to him. The largest share of new money for transport infrastructure is going on a few new motorways. That does nothing to give Kiwi households and businesses an opportunity to reduce transport costs.Also for the benefit of the National members who do not really grasp economics very well I would like to talk about transport costs. Central government spends about $3 billion a year on transport infrastructure. All of that money for the most part comes from road-user charges and petrol taxes which it has just put up so it can pay for its transport priorities. About $1 billion to $1.5 billion is spent on transport by local councils. That of course comes from New Zealand households’ rates.So you have got local and central governments spending $4 billion to $4.5 billion on transport. The vast majority of that is going on roads and of course because of central government’s fixation with a few very low-value highways most of it is going on just afew motorways that are going to cater for about 4 percent of the vehicle trips. But New Zealand households and businesses are spending at least three times that much. Yes that is right. They are spending over $12 billion a year on vehicles and fuel to run them. That is a direct cost to our economy because it is all imported. It is all contributing to our current account deficit and it is the third-largest item of expenditure for your average household. Your average household is spending money on its house on food and then on transport.If we were able to do the same amount of activity if we were able to get to school to get to work and to trade our goods and reduce some of that money that we are spending on petrol on imported oil and on vehicles that would be a direct gain to the economy. That is the smart green opportunity that the Green Party supports and that is actually mainstream in most countries around the world. If only National members understood if only they had actually travelled and lived overseas. Obviously Minister Steven Joyce and Minister Brownlee from small towns like—[Interruption] They just do not understand; they just do not get it.That is the only conclusion I can come to because Aucklanders would like to have the opportunity to have the city rail link. Whether or not they take the train Aucklanders know that they will benefit from having a world-class public transport system just like every other big city in the world. The city rail link would cost $2.4 billion—probably even less. The city rail link would cost $2 billion but it would revolutionise Auckland’s train system. That small piece of infrastructure is actually going to more than double the capacity of our existing rail network and that makes sense.It makes sense to use our existing infrastructure in a more intelligent way rather than just throw money at some motorways out in the provinces that only a small number of vehicles are going to be using. If I could just sum up by saying that the Green Party is well aware of the economic opportunities we have to use our existing infrastructure in a smarter way and it is actually going to cost less.I have heard Government members today mention that somehow they are getting to surplus. One of things they are not counting in their surplus is the fact that they are tying us into a 25-year loan for Transmission Gully. It is a private loan so it is going to cost us even more than if they just went directly and borrowed the money through the Government. By doing Transmission Gully—a $1 billion project that will deliver maybe $300 million to $500 million in benefits so it is a real money loser—they are going to the private sector for finance. That means that the overseas banks that finance it will have future New Zealanders 25 years from now paying back and the banks will be getting a rate of return of about 12 percent to 15 percent for a project that will carry less than 1 percent of all the vehicle trips in New Zealand.That is the choice. You could pay for a private loan overseas for a project that is not going to make much of a difference to reducing transport costs or reducing congestion or you could have the city rail link. Thank you.