Bennett David: Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Bennett David: Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 17 June 2009. Volume:655;Page:4435. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) 
: 
 I think it is a very wise choice by the Green members to send the bill to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It is a very fine committee. It has great chairmanship and a great membership. It will do a fine job. But saying that the bill should go to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is the only good thing that the Green member said; the Green Party disappoints me in this case. 
The Green Party should be representing new ideas and seeing the vision of the future. It should be a party that tries to take this Parliament towards some goals and ambitions that Parliament is not ready to move towards. That is the whole idea of what one expects from a Green Party. However this Green Party is looking back at a technology that is going out of business. The whole assumption of this legislation that the Green Party is putting forward is that cars run on fossil fuels and therefore roads are no good because cars run on roads. That is the assumption the Green Party is making. It is making the assumption that cars run on fossil fuels. That was true 50 years ago but a party of vision a party that looks to the future would understand that there is technology there is development and cars will not run on fossil fuels in 50 years’ time. Cars will run on different fuel sources. The Green members will not admit that. They are looking to the past. They say that the automobile industry can only ever have one source of fuel and that is fossil fuel. 
I disagree completely that that is the way things are going. Anybody who had an idea of what is going on in the automobile industry would see that the big investment now is in non - fossil fuel car energy sources. If we look at what is happening in the US automobile industry we will see that the big car makers are shutting down. They are being made to come back and produce electric cars because that is the market of the future. In 50 years’ time the most efficient form of transport will be the roads and the roads will have electric cars on them. That is the future of the world in transport. 
The Greens are looking backwards at an old technology. They are not taking into account the way in which the world is progressing the way in which the big automobile industry is progressing or even the way in which fuel companies are progressing. Do members not remember that BP changed its name from British Petroleum to “Beyond Petroleum”? What was the reason for that? The branding was done because the company knew that there was going to be a different future. The Green Party will be consigned to the small ranks of political destiny if it does not think outside the square and if it does not look at technology and use that for green purposes. 
The National Government is willing to accept technology and we are working towards it. Today in question time the great Minister of Transport in this National Government put out the policy on electric cars. We made an incentive for electric cars to become part of the New Zealand transport mix. National is looking forward at technology. We are looking forward at delivering a green vision for transport. We are not looking back at old technology at old ways of doing things and at an old party political philosophy which is what the Green Party aspires to. That is the difference between National and the Greens and the people of New Zealand know that. They know the future and the world economy knows the future. 
An electric car is the best investment that a young person could make. In the next generation the richest person in the world will not be the Bill Gates of our generation. The richest person in the world will be the person who cracks the issue of how to get fuel sources into automobiles in the next 10 years. That person will be the new Bill Gates of this world. That person will find a way of transferring energy into what we use as our main mode of transport. If anybody can crack that—and someone will crack it—it will become the big opportunity in transport in the future of the world and in this economy going forward. 
That is an opportunity that many countries are taking up. If we look at countries like India and the US they are investing huge amounts of money in technology to get electric cars to a commercial stage. They probably have the technology now but to make it commercial is a different ball game. There are incentives to buy electric cars. At the last US election people got a discount if they bought an electric car. That was one of the big policy planks of some of the political parties. They know the future. They are not looking at old policy and old dreams about fossil fuels driving our transport sector. They are looking at the future of our transport sector but the Green Party denies that. 
The Green Party is hell-bent on the measure that the only answer to solve our transport woes in regard to environmental concerns is public transport. I remember that in Hamilton at the last election Labour Party members jumped on that bandwagon. They went into the election campaign saying: “We want to have the greenest way of travelling from Hamilton to Auckland.” They proposed a rail link between Hamilton and Auckland because they thought that was what the Greens had always said was the best way of doing it. Little did they know that the only part of the main trunk line that is not electrified is from Hamilton to Auckland. Those members would have dirty diesel trains on that line with no people on them. Would that be environmentally friendly? No! That is the nature of the debate that the Green are having. 
The Greens do not understand public transport. They do not understand what it actually means. They say: “Let’s look at cities like Los Angeles and Toronto.” I ask those members what the populations are of those cities. They should think about that. Public transport works very well where there are large densities of population. It does not work as well where there are spread-out cities or where there are cities of a smaller size within 2 hours of each other. That does not work well with public transport. 
I had the fortunate experience of going on Mexican public transport in January. In Mexico people can go any way around Mexico City from point to point for one peso. That is because there are nearly 30 million people in that city. Their officials can deliver a train system where people can go into a train and it is literally packed. Those trains go all the time and they are efficient smart and clean. The reason for that is that there are the numbers of people required to make it work which is what public transport demands. It demands high concentrations of people. 
The other thing I want to look at in relation to this legislation is what the National Government is actually doing. National is actually investing in the infrastructure of New Zealand. We are looking forward and we are investing in our roading structure. The previous Labour Government did not invest in road construction going forward. Labour spent money on the maintenance of roads not on the construction of roads. That is the difference between these two political parties when we look each party’s roading policy. National wants to build roads that will have clean green vehicles on them in the next 50 years. That will save people time and expense in travel and it will provide jobs in the short term as we build those projects going through the economic recession. 
In all ways our economic policy is interrelated with our transport policy and it is environmentally friendly at the same time. We cannot help but win with that policy. That is the nature of it. We have considered the options and we have come up with a policy that is effective yet environmentally conscious. We have taken into account the need to invest in public transport and we have done so. We are continuing the electrification in Auckland; we are not making grandiose promises that are not reality. We are looking at what can be done to make public transport as efficient and effective as we can but we also realise what the future of transport will be and our roads are going to be important parts of that because those roads will have clean green efficient electric cars on them before this generation is out. That is the future of transport and that is the future of environmental consciousness.