Jones Shane: Road User Charges Bill — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Jones Shane: Road User Charges Bill — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 04 October 2011. Volume:676;Page:21697. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon SHANE JONES (Labour) 
: 
 Tena koe Mr Chairperson Tisch. I acknowledge the Minister in the chair the Associate Minister of Transport and remind New Zealanders that he amongst other things comes from an agricultural background on the Kapiti coast. He has reminded us that those people who have four-wheel drive vehicles that are used both on the farm and on the roads will have to obey the rules. I shall go back and tell my father who is a farmer that there is a new set of rules coming. He will be distressed to learn that red tape is creeping upwards. 
But despite that small lapse Labour will support this bill. We will support this bill because irrespective of whichever party is in Government it is necessary to ensure that we have a way of funding the roads of Aotearoa. It is of immense disappointment to us that the money has been squandered on ideological trophies driven by Steven Joyce called roads of national significance. But that is an election issue and we will put it to the side. We are here on the serious administrative constitutional business of clauses 3 to 6 in Part 1. 
There are other reasons why we will support this bill during the Committee stage. We on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee had our differences. It is a select committee that works well. We have robust presentations from Tau Henare. We have an absent-minded chair occasionally in the form of Mr Bennett with a contribution from the member from Dunedin from time to time when the man is not bemoaning the fact that people in Dunedin are largely unemployed as a consequence of poor transport capital asset decisions and where they are made—not in Aotearoa but overseas. Let me come back to the clauses that comprise Part 1. But I must not forget the member for Botany. Although he is physically present we often feel spiritually he is elsewhere—possibly in the ACT Party or the Libertarianz party—but that aside he is a relatively new member and he has a great future ahead of him. As Mr Boscawen and “Mr ACT Leader” depart he will be able to occupy that space of extreme right lots of noise lots of heat but very very little lucidity. But I will come back to the bill because it deserves serious consideration and talking about those members is not actually in the spirit of seriousness. 
Modernisation is necessary and for those reasons irrespective of whoever occupies the Treasury benches we cannot have a system governing the collection of fees from our vehicle owners dependent on road-user charges because that is a key component of how we fund our roading system. There is an area that we will pick up on later because this is a rather broad part of the bill. We remain concerned if not distressed about what level of participation there will be once the regulatory power - making authorities are exercised. The actual road-user charges are levies and at the end of the day they will not be prescribed in the body of the legislation. They will be the products of subordinate legislation or regulation. Members may or may not know that our former deputy leader—indeed he was our leader—Geoffrey Palmer waxed lyrical about this in decades gone by. That remains a very timely reminder to those of us who are in the business of lawmaking that when we move beyond the parent legislation to passing regulations to please bear in mind—I say to the Minister—that for each regulation that is passed we should be confident about stripping two three four or five regulations off the statute book so that we are avoiding maintaining redundant regulation. Also it is a good discipline. Those of us who have come from a background where we have seen how difficult it is to run firms and seen how difficult it is to maintain compliance and are in parliamentary mode now should remind ourselves that as we put one regulation in place we should try to take two three four or five away. 
It is easier said than done and it may be said that I am being a tad frivolous in this regard but transport along with fisheries is an area that blights the legislative landscape because there are so many regulations. I doubt whether there is a single bureaucrat lawyer parliamentarian or indeed stakeholder who fully understands the breadth of all of those regulations. So I would like to say that it is important that that particular principle is borne in mind. 
The underlying debate in our select committee about this bill related to the fact that a number of carriers were concerned that they would not be actually paying for the load or lack of load on the vehicle at a particular point in time; rather it was going to be the carrying capacity. But let it be said we will support this bill throughout the Committee stage and will continue to highlight those areas that need further refinement or elaboration as time permits.