Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Williamson Maurice: Public Transport Management Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:650;Page:18767] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I will carry on from the very good speech my colleague Pansy Wong made. I guess first of all for the benefit of the adoring listeners out there who tune in on a regular basis to hear my wonderful oratory my almost Barack Obama - like oratory on this matter I think it is clear that we should—[ 
Interruption 
] We will not go into pigs and lipstick; we will just stay well clear of all of that. That can best be left for another day. What I will run past the adoring listeners and the public out there is just simply what this bill is about and what its title should be. I think that the public who have been listening—and thousands of them were listening last night to this debate—have been confused about what option A option B and option C or what option B+ are. Really it is simply this. In any one particular jurisdiction—let us take Auckland for example—there are public transport operators. They may be ferry or rail operations but in most cases we are talking about bus operations. On some routes on some days and at certain times there are enough patrons of those services for the companies to be able to operate them as straight commercial businesses. They can go out and buy their buses they can pay for them they can mark them up in whatever colours they like they can publish fares and a timetable and so on and they can go about their business just as one would if one was starting a taxi company a courier company or whatever. Then there are other services in that same city on other days at other times or on other routes that simply do not have enough people using them to make any commercial operation viable. But it is clear that those services should be provided in order to try to keep a public transport network going. 
The first of those services are called commercial services. They can be run by anybody in the private sector and those operators can make a really good return on their investment—and they do. The others are called contracted services where the regional council has put in some of its own money and a very big chunk of the Government money coming from the National Land Transport Fund to go out and buy a subsidy. The Government decided that there was too much I think funny business going on from some of the bus companies and so on which were getting too much power in the negotiations and were playing some silly bugger games and it decided that it was time to give the regional councils a better balance about how they could negotiate those services. The Government quite properly set about consulting and negotiating with the various people in the industry. It negotiated with the Bus and Coach Association which is the representative body of the bus and coach industry and with a number of other players. Those players all reported to me at the time that they thought the talks had gone well the consultation had gone well and that everybody had come to an agreed position called option B. 
Option B was the halfway house. It is the old George Gair line: if one is given two solutions one always goes for the one in the middle. So option B” was that one in the middle that would be a compromise by all parties. Everyone could live with it. The bus companies were a bit upset as they thought that it went too far and I think that the Government thought that it had about the right balance and everyone said that they could live with it. If we look at the Cabinet paper from February 2007 we see that it lays out a whole series of decisions that one could easily map with one-to-one mapping using isomorphic mapping on a one-to-one basis to show what option B was. It was a great Cabinet minute and when the industry saw that Cabinet minute come out it was pleased. 
In the introductory copy of the bill when it was finally introduced to Parliament the Minister’s own foreword stated that the Government had looked at option C but it had ruled it out as being unworkable. It is not the National Party’s view; this is what the Minister stated in the foreword and in the records of this Parliament. And we agreed. But what the bus and coach people were then quite concerned about was the legislation that they had before them did not do quite a one-to-one mapping of option B. It was sort of an option B on steroids. It had a bit more added in a few little places which made quite a difference. So during the course of the select committee hearing we went through I think a process of trying to bring that legislation back and getting it to line up. 
The title of the bill the Public Transport Management Bill should now quite rightly I think be the “Public Deception Management Bill”. Those people were told: “This is what you will get.” The Minister’s foreword to the bill said that the Government rejects option C. Then out of the blue something really really interesting happened. We found that New Zealand Bus Ltd had got a very very highly qualified lawyer in the form of Professor Taggart. We found that Professor Taggart had gone to the Regulations Review Committee and raised some quite serious concerns. The Legislative Advisory Committee which is headed by Geoffrey Palmer had raised those same concerns about Parliament and its delegation of powers down to a body underneath the level of Parliament. What we did not know at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee as we considered this bill was that the Regulations Review Committee when it heard that advice had some serious concerns about it so much so that that multiparty committee decided to write to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and point out the areas of the bill it had some serious concerns about and wanted addressed. As I have said during the debate on earlier parts of this bill if that advice had simply been “tick the box” stuff “remove clause C add clause D take out clause E” then I guess we would not have needed to have any consideration of it because it would have been a case of following the dots and doing it. But part of the advice was that the committee should give consideration to how it would best manage it. It was a very wide and open brief to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee about what its members should do to tidy up the legislation. I repeat that. It was not “tick the box follow the dots” stuff. It was a more wide-ranging brief that needed some consideration. 
It turned out—it was somebody’s fault; I do know whose fault it was and I do not think we will ever know—that that letter from the Regulations Review Committee never got to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. So while we did the whole consideration and deliberation process on the bill we were blissfully unaware of that issue. Only after the committee had completed its consideration and then its deliberation and reported the bill back to this House did it become clear that something was wrong. So the National Party did I think what is the only logical thing that should have happened to this bill—and a lot of anger has been created because it did not happen—and that was say that the bill should come back to the committee. It was not the Minister’s fault or the Government’s fault. Somebody in the bureaucracy had screwed up. The committee should have been given a chance to take account of that advice incorporate it into the bill and bring the bill back to the House. I know that Labour members then got into a tailspin because they were running out of time and did not know how many more parliamentary days they had. I said I would give them a watertight commitment. I want the Minister to ask the chairperson of that committee if she wants to whether we have ever reneged on any commitment we have ever given. We have stuck to our word—watertight. We said: “Bring that bill back for 1 day— 
Hon Annette King 
: You were given a week’s notice. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: No. We were not given any. The Minister says we were given a week’s notice but we were given no notice at all. We said: “Bring that bill back for 1 day to the committee and we will work to get whatever the Regulations Review Committee wants done to it and then we will report it back.” But oh no Labour members voted that down. They said: “No way.” So there is democracy—gone. So this could be a breach of any democratic process. The title of the bill could be the “Breach of Democracy Bill”. Then the Government members said it did not matter because they had fixed it up. 
Hon Mark Gosche 
: That cheque from Infratil must be a big one. 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON 
: The Government said it did not matter because it had fixed it up. That is what Mark Gosche says. So when a select committee which is supposed to consider and scrutinise a bill carefully supposed to scrutinise it carefully and supposed to look at all the advice—including advice it had not yet received from another committee—and then make decisions about what it incorporates and what it does not Mark Gosche says: “Don’t worry about that. We’ve got this under control. We’ll do it unilaterally and by the way we’ve done a cosy little deal with the Greens in return for a whole lot of other things that are going on around this place at present in terms of support.” And the Government members will wheel back under the guise of some Supplementary Order Papers in the name of the Greens option C. 
How can we stay with the title Public Transport Management Bill? My colleague Pansy Wong is desperately right. This bill should be called the “Public Deception Management Bill”. Labour said in the introduction speech in the explanatory note of the first bill that it rejects option C because it is unworkable. That is what Labour said. Only because there was one submission from the Auckland Regional Transport Authority that was absolutely adamant under the chairmanship of the Auckland Regional Council’s Mike Lee who would love to own the bus company again did the Labour Government decide that.