Genter Julie Anne: Debate on Prime Minister’s StatementText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeGenter Julie Anne: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement[Sitting date: 17 February 2015. Volume:703;Page:1610. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. The Prime Minister in his statement claimed that there were four priorities of his Government and that policy and legislation would reflect these priorities. The first two priorities—responsibly managing the Government’s finances and building a more competitive and productive economy—are unfortunately being directly undermined by the actual policies that this Government is pursuing.In his speech John Key mentioned his Government’s inexplicable commitment to spending billions and billions of dollars on a few expensive motorways that do not get much value for every dollar spent and will have no positive impact on our economy and certainly will not lead to it being more productive. How is this good financial management? It is not. Take the Ministry of Transport and its own advice to the Minister. This was written in 2013 in preparation for the Government Policy Statement on Land Transport Funding. It was not released to us under the Official Information Act until very late last year after the election just before Christmas. What it shows very clearly is that everything the Green Party has been saying for the past few years is true. It backs up exactly what we have been saying. It shows that over the past decade demand for roads has declined considerably. It shows that people getting to work especially in our largest cities are increasingly choosing to take public transport or walk and cycle even though our walking and cycling conditions are very unsafe and even though our buses and train services are of a much poorer standard and much more expensive than overseas.Imagine if the Government actually invested in proper public transport and made it affordable—how many people would take it? We would not have any congestion. The evidence shows that rail freight grew considerably over the past few years while road freight declined considerably. The evidence shows that local roads carry many more vehicles than State highways. Despite all of these very clear trends National shifted money away from local roads away from capital investment in public transport away from rail and sea freight even though all these areas and modes have much greater value for money and they have increasing demand from all sectors private and public.They are not only better for productivity and the economy; they are better for the climate they reduce costs for the Government and they reduce costs for households and businesses. But National supposedly a good fiscal manager instead shifted hundreds of millions of dollars a year into a few expensive gold-plated motorways. It is actually increasing borrowing for some of these projects so we will be paying it back for decades to come.Another policy the Prime Minister signalled in his speech was the wholesale attack on the Resource Management Act. This is our world-leading environmental protection law. I know New Zealanders like myself love our wild places love our wild beaches forests and green spaces in and around our towns and cities. All of these places will be under threat if the Government’s radical proposals to change our law succeed. The alleged purpose of the changes is to create affordable housing. This is absolute rubbish. The purpose and principles of the Resource Management Act have nothing to do with the supply of places to live. Let us just make that very very clear. The purpose and principles have nothing to do with the supply of housing.There are unhelpful rules in district plans that existed prior to the Resource Management Act—in fact I spent most of my career before I came into Parliament trying to raise awareness with this particular Government about some of those unhelpful rules which it was completely uninterested in dealing with. What those unhelpful rules do—rules in district plans which have nothing to do with the purpose and principles of the Resource Management Act—is to largely prevent the supply of apartments in inner-city suburbs which is where the market is demanding that new dwellings be built and they are not being built. Instead of this Government showing leadership with the actual tools that already exist under the Resource Management Act like national policy statements and national environmental standards it is looking at gutting the law itself. The truth is it does not care about affordable housing. If National cared about affordable housing it would introduce better protection for tenants. It would limit the sale of property to residents and citizens and stem the flood of foreign money coming in and inflating our local housing market. It would introduce a capital gains tax to rectify the perverse incentive to invest in property instead of the productive sector of the economy. And most of all it would build more places to live. In particular it would build high-quality apartments and town houses in the inner suburbs of Auckland and it would invest in high-quality public transport like the City Rail Link which it is holding up and which is desperately needed and the rest of the congestion-free network which the Green Party supports and would build and we know that we have the money to do it. The Government is taking none of the fiscally and economically responsible options that are available to it that would not only help the economy but would address climate change and reduce inequality which are the priorities of the Green Party. We will continue to offer positive practical proven solutions even though this Government will continue to ignore them I suspect.