Woods Megan: General DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: General Debate[Sitting date: 16 October 2013. Volume:694;Page:13943. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): There can be no surer sign that you have a lame duck an incompetent Government opposite than when what we can discuss in this House is governed by what is currently before the courts. We have a Minister of Education who cannot and will not answer questions on her failure to run a real process around the closure and merger of schools. We now have Nick Smith taking about 20 minutes out of this general debate trying to shut down discussion—Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! [Interruption] Order! The member cannot refer to points of order that have actually been addressed.Dr MEGAN WOODS: We now are limited in what we can discuss about the fact that there is a Minister who is facing charges in a court about his conduct around electoral fraud. So we have Ministers from this Government all over the place. One is up the river in a cabbage boat.The one whom I want to talk about today to continue on that transport theme is the one who is being a significant roadblock in the recovery of Christchurch. Eight months ago Gerry Brownlee the Minister for Canterbury Earthquake Recovery—and the Minister of Transport I will add—went out and promised that we would have a workable transport strategy for the recovery of the central city of Christchurch. That was according to Minister Brownlee going to be an important milestone in the recovery of Christchurch. Well Minister we are still waiting. Your milestone is nothing but a millstone. You have not delivered it. In November of last year you released to much fanfare a transport strategy for discussion. People duly submitted as they do when there is a plan out and in February that all came back. Minister Brownlee was to have taken that to Cabinet in March or April of this year. He has not done that.Let us go through the time line. On 27 June the Minister announced the cost-sharing arrangement with the Christchurch City Council for this transport strategy. There was money already allocated in Budget 2013 for the Crown’s share of getting the transport system in Christchurch right. On 1 July Brownlee’s office received advice from the Canterbury Earthquake Recovery Authority that the office needed to crack on with this and that what it was doing was slowing down the recovery of Christchurch. Minister Brownlee received a briefing that showed that the approval of the transport plan was now urgently required to enable the commissioning of key works needed to support the early delivery of the anchor projects in the central city. Was this enough to spur Minister Brownlee into action? No it certainly was not. Minister Brownlee despite advice on 1 July that he needed to crack on with things still has yet to take that paper to Cabinet. Meanwhile Christchurch’s recovery and Canterbury’s recovery are significantly stalled.What do we have from the Minister now? Well the Minister hopes—he hopes—to sign this off by Christmas. So imagine this: it is 4 p.m. on Christmas Eve and Gerry Brownlee is frantically running around trying to deliver the last of the Christmas presents on his list. “I know” he thinks—David Shearer: Ho ho ho.Dr MEGAN WOODS: Ho ho ho. Thank you Mr Shearer. “A workable transport system for the Christchurch central city is perhaps something I should deliver on. I have been promising it for quite some time now but I cannot bring myself to wrap it and let it go.”Well Minister Brownlee Christchurch’s recovery is being slowed down by your failure to deliver this paper and to deliver this plan. You have got the paper sitting there—you have not Mr Deputy Speaker but the Minister has the paper sitting there. It needs to be signed off. We cannot afford to have the kind of slowing down inChristchurch both figuratively and literally that the Minister’s failure to act on this is delivering. An approved transport plan at the centre of our city is not a “nice-to-have”; it is fundamental to our recovery as a city and as a province. His own officials are telling him that it is urgent. His own officials are telling him to crack on with it get on with it and not allow the slow-down. Every person who drives around Christchurch knows we have a broken transport system.