Twyford PhilHon PHIL TWYFORD (Minister for Economic Development): Well it's a great pleasure to be able to follow on from that member Paul Goldsmith. I want to make some comments about the definition of community expectations" in Part 1. But first just let me say how much I appreciate the work that the Hon Shane Jones has put in bringing this bill to the House. There's been a lot of policy debate over the last two years some very productive exchanges with the Australian colleagues from the federal and state infrastructure bodies whose work has provided much of the inspiration for this not to mention similar enterprises in Canada and Scotland and elsewhere.I think probably where we all agree in this House is that smart investment in quality infrastructure is absolutely critical to support the lifestyles and the prosperity that we all aspire to. After that we start to get into some interesting debates. I wanted to respond to some of the things that Paul Goldsmith said in talking about the community expectations about infrastructure and what we hope the commission will do.So in relation to the benefits that we might get from infrastructure and services we've had some interesting debates in this country over the last few years. Just to give the committee an example: one of the things over the last two years has been our Government's view that when we're thinking about investing billions of dollars in infrastructure particularly for our cities in the case of transport networks and three waters instead of taking kind of a random project-by-project approach to thinking about infrastructure we should look at the whole region or the whole city as a complex system and ask ourselves what kind of city do we want to shape and leave for the next generation and then what kind of infrastructure do we need to deliver on that vision. That's the approach that our Government took with the Auckland Transport Alignment Project where we inherited from the former Government a 10-year plan for Auckland that had a $6 billion funding hole in it. What we delivered in partnership with Auckland Council was a fully funded 10-year transport plan with $28 billion worth of funding a truly multimodal transport plan designed to support the kind of economic growth—particularly urban intensification around transit corridors. That's a very different approach to funnelling all of the available money into hand-picked motorway projects which was the predominant way that the former Government thought about infrastructure.So that's a very different approach and it's my hope that when we think about the added value that the Infrastructure Commission can bring to this area about the benefits and the outcomes that we want from investing in infrastructure that's precisely the kind of thinking. It's really about productivity. That's the lens through which we should be viewing potential infrastructure investments. Yep infrastructure can be a great stimulus for the economy but we should be thinking about what kind of infrastructure will give us the best bang for buck in terms of making the economy work better and delivering the kinds of communities that our people want.Let me give you another example—again under the "community expectations" in clause 3(a) of Part 1: the question about how infrastructure is built and maintained. Well we saw under the last Government a classic example of a Government that loved to build big concrete things that it could announce and point to right? But in order to devote 40 percent of the annual transport budget to these new expressway projects they starved every other part of the transport budget including road maintenance. Folks that is why when you drive around our local roads and State highways around this country they are in a terrible shape. It is because that Government sweated the asset—they sweated the asset—until the asset almost died because they were more interested in building fantastic new concrete monuments to their hubris that they failed to actually invest in the massive roading network that we have inherited from former generations and that we have an obligation to maintain and look after. And that's not a sentimental thing; that's an economic imperative. When you've got these big State assets that are vital to the economic wellbeing of the country you have to invest in them you have to maintain them and you have to look after them. Otherwise you incur huge economic losses. I'll leave it there."