Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Well thank you Madam Speaker. Here we are still in urgency debating the second reading of the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. Although out in the real world it's Thursday afternoon here in Parliament it's still Tuesday and we've been debating legislation under urgency. We went through until midnight last night and we started at 9 o'clock this morning because the Government's shambolic legislative programme is in chaos. They're trying in their dying days—in the last dying desperate days of this Government—to ram through a range of ideologically driven Wellington knows best" legislative changes that surely as my friend and colleague the Hon Gerry Brownlee noted a speech or two ago is really nothing more than just back to the future. And the reason things were changed back 30 years ago was because it wasn't working then and it won't work now. We have a crazy situation where this Government takes the approach on so much of what they want to do—in terms of their approach to legislation it's "Wellington knows best." Wellington knows best how to operate just about everything in Labour's view of the world. And so here we are this is a piece of legislation that kind of sounds warm and fuzzy and if you don't look past the pleasant words and platitudes it sounds kind of OK. But it's not until people dig into the detail of it that they will realise that what this piece of legislation does is effectively entirely screw private sector public service providers from doing what they do well—what they do best.I come from the Coromandel and we don't have a lot of public transport in the Coromandel. In fact we've got a little ferry that goes across the Whitianga Harbour we've got a minibus or two that do a little circuit around Thames and that's about it. There are no trains. We don't have any bus services to speak of. In fact any that we have that come from the InterCity services and what have you have been diminished or reduced. Our roads are continually under threat and are fragile and the main highway is still closed. So our local government operators in the Coromandel find that this will mean nothing to them. It will mean absolutely nothing to them but across the country the potential for screwing the marketplace is very high indeed. So what we've got here is more central planning and control of public services by a Government that wants to just foist its ideological approach on the marketplace. A year or so ago I visited the very nice city of Timaru and I was pleasantly surprised and amazed to see that they have developed a trial system of something that they call "MyWay on-demand". Now in Timaru it used to be that the council contract had arranged for buses to travel on a circuit on a schedule that just literally drove round and round Timaru every day all day. The vast majority of those buses that travelled on that predetermined schedule of the old type meant that more often than not the buses were either empty or had very few passengers in them. It wasn't a particularly efficient system. So the Timaru MyWay model actually is quite exciting; it's an on-demand system that allows people to literally use an app use technology use modern innovations to call up a public transport provider and essentially not use a scheduled programme repeat cycle old-fashioned bus schedule and it seems to be from all accounts working very well. Now this is currently a model that as I understand it is run under the auspices of the council. But if we follow it to its logical conclusion it effectively could become sort of like an Uber bus service. And there's no reason why private commercial operators shouldn't and couldn't operate something like that that's innovative that's smart that's modern that's intelligent and more importantly efficient and effective in terms of ratepayer investment but is also a really good service for the people who want to use it.And so here we have a political party that's determined to take us back to the future and the future's not good. The future is looking pretty jolly bleak. There were very good reasons that changes were made to allow the Public Service provision of transport to be contracted out on a transparent fair competitive basis to private sector providers. This legislation would change all that and I want to make it clear that under a re-elected National-led Government that isn't far away we'll ensure that public transport operators continue to be funded in a transparent way with the market-based approach to delivery of public transport operations that has been working so successfully until now—until this Government actually wants to meddle with it.We in the National Party support public transport. We are very big supporters of public transport but we don't want to have a position that is going to be able to effectively as the Hon Gerry Brownlee pointed out put at risk the capital and the investment potential of private sector operators. Because as Gerry Brownlee so correctly and aptly pointed out why would a private bus investor a private bus supplier a transport supplier invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to buy just one modern electric low-carbon climate-friendly bus when they know that there is a potential for the council maybe just by dint of a changed political philosophy in that council suddenly saying "Oh no no no we're not going to use your services anymore we're gonna take it on." It's kind of like going back to the old days of the Ministry of Works or something just literally operating everything from the centre. And so the risk to those investors or those businesses is that they simply won't invest they simply won't allocate capital and that will mean that we end up having a transport fleet a bus fleet that is old that is not particularly carbon friendly that is not particularly climate efficient and is not modern. And that actually will be a long-term net negative not only to the people who travel on those buses and those services but it will be a net negative to the long-suffering ratepayers who ultimately have to fund those inefficient services.And I just don't know how it could possibly be that in today's age a bill like this could actually get past a Labour Party caucus to get into the Parliament. Now I notice that the bill is in the name of the Hon David Parker and people listening on their wirelesses and on their televisions maybe to this debate today will know that David Parker is a very new Minister of Transport and I'm not sure that David Parker probably really has his heart in this legislation because you know he's a clever one. He's one of the performers in the current Government. He's the one that actually gets to do all the heavy lifting and all the hard jobs and in fairness to him he's had a very high work rate. Much of the work has been questionable but you can't deny that he's had a high work rate. So he's picked up this transport portfolio from his predecessor the Hon Michael Wood. Now what we know about the difference between Michael Wood and David Parker is that Michael Wood was hell-bent on an ideological approach to transport—an ideological approach to transport throughout the nation that saw little done but lots announced. And this is a bill that very much fits into that mode. This is a bill that is more about grand gestures and words that will have a negative effect. But it plays deliberately to an ideological approach—a certain sector of the political marketplace that I don't think understands the reality of how commercial operators work. And that's one of the problems that the Labour Party have; that they really don't understand it.One of the things that we know is that Labour have only three approaches to policy: make it compulsory ban it or tax it and if they are in doubt they just tax it more. Well this is a bill that fits classically into those three criteria: big on grand gesture light on detail and with a perverse outcome that will impact negatively not only on ratepayers but also on public transport users. We oppose this bill."