Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — Transport Funding—Replacement of Regional Fuel Tax with Increased Fuel Excise Duty and Road-user Charges 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Urgent Debates — Transport Funding—Replacement of Regional Fuel Tax with Increased Fuel Excise Duty and Road-user Charges 
[Volume:653;Page:1981] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 Even the International Energy Agency which has long argued that there will never be any shortage of oil has changed its tune recently and it now says that demand will exceed supply within the next decade. Many very competent analysts think that it already has and that only the world recession and the demand destruction it has caused are disguising that promise. 
New Zealand is an extremely oil-dependent nation—oil-dependent for its trade for its transport and for its production. The high price of oil towards the end of last year contributed to our current account deficit contributed to our high inflation rate as the Finance and Expenditure Committee found in its inquiry and contributed to massive budgetary pressures on households. The price dropped from $2.20 a litre in New Zealand or from US$150 a barrel in August last year only because of a world recession which the oil price had partly contributed to and that then reduced demand to the point where the price dropped. But the price will not stay there if we ever get out of this recession. 
New Zealand is highly car dependent: it has poorly developed public transport it has more kilometres of sealed road per person than pretty well any country in the OECD and it has poor cycle facilities. Transport is the largest source of carbon dioxide emissions in New Zealand and we have the fourth-highest level of climate change emissions per person in the OECD and that is still rising. If ever there was a time to make a case to protect our economy by making our transport system more efficient it is now but we have just seen from this Government in the last week or two the biggest step backwards on transport policy in decades. 
It took Labour much of its 9 years in Government to start to take public transport and alternatives to roading seriously but it eventually did so under pressure from the Greens. For years I have put up with being treated like an imbecile in the House—”But Jeanette buses need roads too.”—as though I was somehow arguing that we should do away with roads altogether. But the Greens and I have always argued for changing the balance of new spending between roads and the alternatives to them to give us the security of some alternative means of transport for both freight and people. Eventually Labour got it and at the end of its 9 years it reached a ratio of spending of only $5 on roads for each $1 on all the alternatives put together—public transport walking cycling and travel demand management etc. Of course that $5:$1 ratio is far too high but the new Government policy statement on land transport funding that this Government has issued raises that to between $7:$1 and $9:$1. That is a recipe for gridlock for a blowout in our oil bill and for rising carbon emissions. 
The projected spending by this Government on public transport infrastructure according to its own figures is set to fall from $144 million a year to $45 million a year. That is decimation; only one-tenth of what is being spent in the current year is proposed to be spent next year. The announcement about removing the regional fuel tax and replacing it with a national fuel tax was framed very cleverly as an argument about who should pay for Auckland’s transport projects. Never mind that ever since 1990 and until the last 3 years Auckland has contributed more petrol tax to the general fund than it has received back in all transport spending so the rest of the country is in Auckland’s debt. However the framing of that announcement as being simply about who should pay disguises the much more important issues of what actually should be built and what should be funded. 
The Government has announced an extra billion dollars for new State motorways. Where will that billion dollars come from? It is actually not all new funding because $420 million of it—nearly half of it—will be coming from other transport projects that are currently funded but that will not be funded in the future. Of that extra billion dollars for new motorways $420 million is coming from public transport from walking and cycling infrastructure from safety programmes and from maintenance. So we are going to have a whole lot more roads but we will be maintaining them in a much worse way. They will be fun to drive on will they not? 
Wednesday last week was Walk2Work Day. Living Streets Aotearoa which runs its programme to encourage people to walk to work ran an event down on the waterfront. It was opened by the Minister of Transport who had the gall to go down there and tell them in his speech what a great idea it was to walk to work. What he did not tell those people was that 2 days earlier he had taken $15 million away from them away from people who walk and cycle to work and given it as a handout to people who drive to work. Well that is a great way of encouraging people to get out of their cars and walk to work is it not? I called it “Hobble to Work Day” because that is how it will be trying to walk to work under this new Government. The Minister’s excuse was: “We needed a better balance in funding.” Well that balance has just been made worse. It is no longer 5:1; it is now between 7:1 and 9:1 according to the Government’s figures. 
The other excuse given was that most people drive to work; therefore we should spend most of the funding on cars. But why do most people drive to work? It is not very hard to work out. For decades we have funded motorways and we have not funded public transport. Most people do not have an option about how to get to work so “Let us continue to fund what they do now because they have no choice.” and they will continue to do it because they have no choice. 
Darren Hughes was worried that the Penlink road to Whangaparaoa will not be built under this project. Under the Official Information Act I recently got the advice of Treasury and the Ministry of Transport to previous Ministers. It showed that much better projects with much better benefit-cost ratios than Penlink could have been done in the Auckland region with the regional petrol tax. Those agencies advocated to Ministers a package of road safety pedestrian and cycle projects spread across the region which more fairly spread the benefits across the whole region and which had a very much higher benefit-cost ratio than Penlink but that information was never drawn to the attention of Cabinet in the Cabinet paper. 
The Minister says that we cannot change people’s behaviour and get them out of their cars. The information he needs from his officials is that at peak hour public transport around the country is full. The trains are full and the buses are full. We cannot get any more people out of their cars at peak hour until we have more trains and more buses unless we are going to mechanically shove people into carriages and slam the doors behind them as they do in Japan. People cannot use transport if it is not there. Aucklanders have demonstrated very very clearly with the rise in petrol prices that they will leave their cars at home if they have an alternative and that they want better public transport. Every survey has shown that they want better public transport; it is up to the Government to make sure they have that opportunity. 
The papers I received last week also show that the electrification of Auckland’s rail system has a benefit-cost ratio of only 1 unless we do the surrounding projects of integrated ticketing real time information for passengers and upgrading of stations so that people do not have to wait in horrible places. Those projects have a benefit-cost ratio of 3:4 but they are being left unfunded to apply to the National Land Transport Fund on the chance of getting funding with a financial assistance rate that means they will still have to pay around half of it in Auckland.