Russell DeborahDr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour—New Lynn): I'm very pleased to take a call on this bill during the committee stage. It came through my select committee where Andrew Bayly was of course very helpful in sorting out some aspects of the bill as he usually is. I want to endorse the remarks made by Mr Bayly about the need for long-term planning and long-term thinking around infrastructure and of course the remarks made by the Minister in the chair about our need to get away from short-term stuff—doing things in three-year cycles—and have a look at that long-term plan and that is exactly what this Infrastructure Commission is supposed to do.I think in particular looking at the first part of the bill one of the terms that is specified is community expectations". It's a defined term in the bill and will become a defined term in the Act of course. It says that community expectations "means the expectations of the communities that use or will use the infrastructure or the services …" That's obvious I suppose in the title itself. But what's interesting there is thinking about infrastructure not just in terms of a road a bridge—10 bridges in Northland or whatever. It's thinking about it in terms of what the community needs what the community expects what the community understands about what the purpose of infrastructure is. It's not roads for the sake of roads or bridges for the sake of bridges or—Kieran McAnulty: It is bridges for the sake of bridges.Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL: Well it is bridges for the sake of bridges. But it's thinking about infrastructure in terms of the benefits or the other outcomes that result from infrastructure and services in terms of how the services are actually delivered and the quality of them. But to me the interesting part of it is the way that the community expectations are built into the understanding in this infrastructure bill—that the Infrastructure Commission will need to understand that and think about it in terms of the way it's got that long-term planning going on. So that's a very interesting term to have sitting in what you might think is one of the standard Meccano-set bills we get around infrastructure. Going on from there although in clause 3 "infrastructure" means "physical infrastructure that is in New Zealand …" the Infrastructure Commission needs to focus not just on the creation of new infrastructure—and again this is sitting in the definition of "infrastructure project"—but also "the maintenance upgrading replacement decommissioning or removal of existing infrastructure". So clearly we already have masses of schools and hospitals and roads and the like in our country already and as it turns out those schools and hospitals actually need maintaining. This is something that might have escaped some members of the House while they were sitting over on this side in previous years—that maintenance actually matters. But often those maintenance projects are not just short-term issues. They are actually a long-term commitment to ensuring that the infrastructure stays fit for purpose and can continue to be used. Part of the job of the Infrastructure Commission is to have that long-term focus—not just around what bits of road need to be built in which places not just around which new buildings or ports or railways or whatever might need to be built in the first place but about maintenance of our existing infrastructure maintaining our existing hospital buildings maintaining our existing schools maintaining our existing bridges and roads and so on. That is actually a really important part of this. I feel as though maintenance of our infrastructure is perhaps something that has been somewhat neglected in various places but it does need to be considered on an ongoing basis. So I'm impressed really that the Minister felt that we needed to think not just in terms of the building of new stuff but also the maintenance of our existing infrastructure because of course if you don't maintain it then it loses value and it just results in costly repair jobs or in some cases in having to be replaced entirely down the track. So it's an interesting aspect of this bill."