Fenton Darien: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 2) Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Third ReadingsText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeFenton Darien: Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 2) Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Third Readings[Sitting date: 17 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17466. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DARIEN FENTON (Labour): It is a pleasure to take a call on the third readings of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 2) and the Road User Charges Amendment Bill. These are the bills that the Land Transport and Road User Charges LegislationAmendment Bill has been divided into. We have been very pleased to help the Government get this legislation through. It has been quite a long saga. I think what it shows is that the Government does not always get things right. We on this side are very generous and happy to give the Government a hand to fix its mistakes.I think the only concern I have about it though is the long period of time the length of the saga around these bills. They go right back to when the Road User Charges Act was amended by the Government back in 2009 I think it was. At that time I was on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. Road-user charges bills are always very interesting to debate and we have a range of people who come along and have views about how we should be charging for the use of the roads. There is always a great deal of interest from a range of road users and submissions can be highly technical. At the time we expressed our concern about the regulation-making powers in that bill and we did warn the Government that it could end up in some tricky territory with it. Of course that is exactly what happened.We have rehearsed the saga of the Regulations Review Committee and the disallowance motion moved originally by the honourable Charles Chauvel and then the unprecedented overriding of that by the Minister of Transport by reintroducing the same regulation the day after it was disallowed I think. Then it was back to the Regulations Review Committee which by that time was ably chaired by my colleague the Hon Maryan Street—Grant Robertson: More than ably.DARIEN FENTON: More than ably—more than ably. And guess what happened. The regulations were disallowed again. This has gone on and on.Last August in the middle of winter in 2013 we were in this House debating the first reading of this legislation under urgency. The provisions in the legislation that the Government were trying to get through by regulation—through the sneaky back door if you like—were due to come into force on 1 August. Of course that could not happen because of the disallowance motion so we ended up under urgency and I do remember very clearly that it was about quarter to midnight when I took my first call on this legislation. I found myself very bemused about why we were debating it under urgency. And could I say that I am still bemused actually given that it is now April and we have finally reached the third reading of this legislation.Jami-Lee Ross: Hurray!DARIEN FENTON: Yes hurray—it is good. As I said we have been delighted to help the Government get this right. There is no doubt about it; there were anomalies in the Road User Charges Act which was brought in by the National Government. The proposals under this legislation are mainly to exempt fast tractors. We had quite an education on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee about what fast tractors are. It was the first time I had ever heard of fast tractors. In fact I thought that all tractors were slow. I thought they crawled along. Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch you probably know more about this than I do but I had never ever seen or heard of such a thing—a tractor that could go over 40 kilometres an hour. I do remember one tractor going very slowly up the steps of Parliament several years ago driven by that very nice member Shane Ardern. What were they protesting about?Grant Robertson: It was about climate change and their ignorance of it.DARIEN FENTON: Oh it was about climate change—that is right.Hon Simon Bridges: What was the name?DARIEN FENTON: It was Myrtle the tractor. It was about climate change and carbon tax. That is right. It just really shows you I suppose how out of touch and backwards looking the National Party was back then.Hon Simon Bridges: Well “backwards” was the word.DARIEN FENTON: The Hon Simon Bridges likes to think he is forwards looking when it comes to things like carbon emissions but I have my doubts about that really particularly when we are passing legislation just before Easter to allow fast tractors to be exempted from road-user charges. Fast tractors are those that operate over 40 kilometres per hour on the road. Instead they will be paying an annual charge in lieu of road-user charges to cover the costs that they impose on the road network.The legislation also proposes to exempt all unregistered vehicles—that is vehicles exempt from registration or not required to be registered and those operating under trade plates—from road-user charges and apply to them an annual charge as well. As I said we have agreed with this. I guess our major objection has been to the way the Minister tried to sneak this through by way of regulation instead of fronting up and saying: “Look I made a mistake.” This very generous Opposition understands that the Government gets it wrong quite often actually and I think we have done our best to cooperate with this and get it through.We agree that we need a modern and simplified road-user charges system that has appropriate provisions for compliance as well as appropriate monitoring mechanisms. The history of the road-user charges system in New Zealand goes back several years—about 30 years I believe. But the interesting thing that I have discovered in the various road-user charges bills that I have been part of debating on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—and the chair over there David Bennett will agree with me on this—is that New Zealand is actually way ahead of the game when it comes to road-user charges. In fact many many countries rely on petrol and diesel tax but what is happening now in Europe is that it is increasingly turning to a road-user charges system particularly for heavy vehicles. If you think about where things are heading in New Zealand and if we think about how—Carol Beaumont: We’re thinking ahead. They don’t do that over there.DARIEN FENTON: No. Well we do. Labour is thinking ahead to what sort of transport system we are going to have in the next 20 or 30 years. The reality is that petrol tax as it is today which funds the roads through hypothecation—thanks to the Hon Annette King who actually brought that in—is declining. It is declining because cars are becoming more efficient and they are using less petrol and also car ownership is going down. So we are going to have to find a different method of funding road-user charges if you like. It may be in fact that all vehicles in the future have a system an electronic system of flagging their use and paying for it. We had a very interesting presentation last night from a company that was talking about electric cars and the future of electric cars. In my mind I thought that where we were going with electric vehicles is that we would have to have plug-in stations all around the country—a bit like petrol stations. But now what is happening with solar power and other methods of renewal energy is that people are going to be able to have their own battery charging systems at home where they will be able to charge their electric vehicle. They are going to become much more accessible to people and over time they will become much less expensive. I also believe that diesel buses and diesel trucks will over time adopt electric technology.So we are going to have to turn our minds to a new system—a completely new system of funding our roads. Certainly we in the Labour Party have been thinking about that and it is a challenging thing because we will have to think about different methods of charging for use of the roads. It is always tricky. People do not like additional charges like network charges or congestion charges. Even people who pay road-user charges on their light diesel vehicles do not like that. So it is a very challenging and demanding consideration but we are going to have to face up to it.So although I am really pleased that the fast tractors are going to be exempted under this bill that is only a temporary solution and I can confidently predict that we will be back sometime—if not us then the next generation perhaps—debating a completely different way of how we fund our roading network our transport network. We can only vaguely imagine how different that is going to be and that is the big challenge. We are happy to support this legislation in the third reading. It has been an interesting debate but I think the debate is about to get a whole lot more interesting around how we fund our transport system.