Hodgson Pete: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Hodgson Pete: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
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Hon PETE HODGSON (Labour—Dunedin North) 
: 
 I went over to the United States in 1992 on one of those “CIA” trips. I was there for a month and we were entitled to have a bit to do with putting our own agenda together. I found myself in Pasadena talking to a guy called Paul MacCready. Paul MacCready has since passed away but before he did he managed a few things. He got a pterodactyl to fly. He took part in the Alice Springs to Darwin solar races each year and continued to clean those up. 
Paul MacCready was the guy who invented the Gossamer aircraft the first aircraft that was human-powered and heavier than air and he invented a thing called the Impact which was an electric vehicle. I sat down with him for the day just to get a sense of where his head was at and he taught me a really important lesson. It was that politicians should not pick technologies; politicians should back technologies. 
In 1992 the Government of California had said—and as my colleague Darren Hughes said earlier—that there was a case for the Government to set a percentage target so it did. It said that all vehicles to be sold from the year 2000 or thereabouts in Los Angeles would be zero-emission vehicles. But Mr MacCready said that the politicians had made a mistake because they had picked a technology instead of backing it. They should have watched what technology was coming forward. It was not zero-emission vehicles back in 1992; it was hybrids. He could see them coming out of Japan and he could see that that would be the next wave to be followed maybe by plug-in hybrids and then maybe by electric vehicles. 
Now 17 years later Mr MacCready has been proved right and the time for a Government to back this new technology—zero-emission vehicles; electric cars—has come. So Labour members support this legislation but in the same breath we say that it is insufficient. We are not suggesting great subsidies or anything of the sort but we wonder whether taking road-user charges off zero-emission vehicles will make much of a difference when one considers not only the capital cost but the entire lack of infrastructure. 
No planning is going on around the advent of electric vehicles into this country. There is no planning law about what type or types of recharging we might have—induction plug-in or whatever. There is no standard set for safety around those forms of recharging. We do not have any infrastructure in place for the advent of these vehicles so the early movers will have to make it up as they go along. If we are to have 350 or something electric vehicles in this country by a certain period— 
Sue Moroney 
: 300 in the next 5 years. 
Hon PETE HODGSON 
: Well by the law of averages that will mean 10 in my home town of Dunedin and those 10 electric vehicle users will not have a place to plug in in the central city unless there is planning for that. They will not be able to be assured of safe ongoing recharging at home or anywhere else unless there is planning for it. And they certainly will not be able to go on a trip—not into Central Otago—because there will not be anything there for them to charge into or easily charge into. So it is an infrastructure issue. The Government needs to do more in the electric vehicle space than it has done. I commend what the Government has done. It is a good step forward but it is not a sufficient step forward by any means. 
I wonder whether the Government would ever consider getting together a group of people who have an interest in this matter—potential users potential services—and asking them when we should start training mechanics to look after these vehicles when they need servicing. We do not have that now so will we be doing DIY maintenance on electric vehicles? Will people be phoning up some trained electrician who is very interested in electric cars? 
The point is we will have to have that trained electrician or have that knowledge before people buy the vehicles. That is why I think the Government has not done enough. We need a skills infrastructure we need a physical infrastructure and we need a plan. But we do not have any of those; we simply have the removal of road-user charges. 
I refer now to the other matter in this legislation. I well remember a bunch of truck drivers rolling into the streets of Dunedin and elsewhere around the country late last year. They were outraged by the fact that the then Minister of Transport had taken steps so they could not rort an increase in charges as if such Government action was unusual. Has no one ever been in this House when under urgency tax changes have gone through in the dead of night? That is the precise action of a Government when it is looking to put up charges. It does so suddenly so that people have certainty about what they are going to pay—more or in some cases less—the following day. That is normal but when the Minister of Transport did so it was an outrage. So a bunch of truck drivers came into town blocked up the roads and basically said: “We know that we don’t pay enough but we don’t want to pay any more.” 
I acknowledge that road-user charges always bring debate around the margins that road-user charges are never set perfectly and that there is always room for debate about this or that aspect of them. I know that; I have been a Minister of Transport myself for a time. It is an ongoing thing but when the Government decided that road-user charges needed to go up—and that decision was backed by quite careful analysis—and when the truck drivers of the nation started running into town one did wonder whether a former National Party member for New Plymouth who currently runs the Road Transport Forum the trucking forum was behind some political motivation. Hearing some of the chatter across the House today confirms for me that that was a political act designed to do damage to a Government rather than to protest an issue. 
I think that this Government’s solution of a limited ability to pre-buy is a really good one and I congratulate the Government on it. But let us not suggest that there is anything new or unreasonable about making a sudden decision to increase a charge or a tax. That is normal in democracies and it is normal in this democracy. So I do not want to hear any of that from the National Government. With those remarks I welcome this legislation and I hope it makes its untrammelled progress through the House.