Hughes Gareth: Road User Charges Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Road User Charges Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:374. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. It is good to take a call on the Road User Charges Bill. I have a pretty hard act to follow. We have had comedy hour from Melissa Lee and then Chris Hipkins in the House. I would like to acknowledge you Mr Deputy Speaker and all the new members. I would like to acknowledge the new Minister of Transport Gerry Brownlee. I called the last Minister of Transport the “Colossus of Roads” but I will not say what we will be calling the new Minister of Transport. 
This country is facing a debt crisis an unemployment crisis and a climate crisis and what do we hear from the Government? We hear “Drill it mine it sell it.” and about the Road User Charges Bill. I mean at a time when we have got so many important issues facing our country this bill really does define “tinkering around the edges”. The Greens will be supporting this bill however because there are some marginal environmental and economic benefits accruing from it. I am surprised that New Zealand First is not supporting the bill. I think that had New Zealand First been here through the select committee process it might have taken a different approach. We are glad to be supporting this bill but in the end this is the story of missed opportunities.  
Annette King asked a very powerful question which was whether we are going to see protests when the regulations are formed and the new road-user charges increase. I say I doubt it. I doubt it because we know that the road lobby is the single biggest donor to the National Party. We know that the Government is borrowing $19 billion to pour into motorways benefitting truckies. This Government has made decisions from the juggernaut heavy trucks through to delaying the petrol and fuel excise and road-user charge rises accruing from rising international oil prices. If the trucking industry has a best mate it is definitely the National Party. So I do not think we will be seeing protests from the trucking industry like we saw under Annette King’s watch but when it comes to the regulations around small cars—those 200 small light diesels—I think we might in fact see protests from those small efficient diesels around the country because what they are going to see is their road-user charges increasing. By how much we do not know because that is entirely up to the new Minister of Transport to decide. What the officials in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee advised us is that the charges are going to be increasing.  
What we saw was essentially like a wealth swap with those heaviest trucks giving the most to the National Party I guess. Those trucks will be paying the least amount of road-user charges. But it is those small light efficient diesels that will be paying the most. They might be paying around $32 extra over 15000 kilometres. That is not a huge amount. What we are seeing is that wealth transfer. The smallest and the most efficient vehicles are the ones we should be encouraging in order to conserve our oil to protect our balance of trade to enhance our economy to reduce our emissions and to protect our environment. We should be encouraging those vehicles but they are the ones subsidising—and I do use the word “subsidising”—those heavy trucks that the Government wants to protect so much.  
We do support the bill for the reasons that it is going to be simpler and it is hopefully going to make a dent in that $120 million that massive administration cost which comes from the road-user charges. We support this switch to the maximum weight and this is where our support really comes from. When you have the trucks charged on their maximum weight what we want to see is these trucks being used as efficiently as fully as possible so that we do not see what we have at the moment which is trucks with numerous axles—because of past flaws in the road-user charges regime—being carted around the country empty because that is the way the road-user charges prioritise it. 
We are glad the bill maintains the electric car subsidies. I guess we know all these issues—the balance of trade problems the massive 16 percent oil imports all the problems facing our country—but the Government has got only 40 electric cars on our roads. In the end this is a missed opportunity. The Road User Charges Act is older than I am. We are the only country in the world with a road-user charges scheme. We could have actually embraced innovation. We hear about technology about information technologies this Government is so-called embracing but when it comes to embracing new technology on this bill—when we could be using electronic monitoring or real-time charging—we are instead going away from a smart approach to a dumb approach. We are going to an averaging model that is not going to send those incentives. It is a massive missed opportunity. We are not probably going to see an opportunity to reform this in our generation in a decade. It is a massive missed opportunity. But we will be supporting it for the reasons I outlined. Thank you.