Menéndez March RicardoHon DAVID BENNETT (National): Thank you Minister for those answers and that clarifies some of that. Just one of the other issues is that it seems like the Labour Party has assumed all businesses especially in the road-user charges (RUC) case run at the same time but some are seasonal businesses—for example in the primary sector—and my colleague from the ACT Party will no doubt want to take a question on this as well. An agricultural contractor for example has just finished their autumn work which is large part of their business. Over the winter they will be doing very little and so the next few months they will have little contracting use and little use of RUC whereas over the last six to eight weeks they've done maize silage and other things like that and will have had a massive transport bill. How will that relate? They're going to get a discount for the period of time they're not working essentially and having to pay huge RUC at the time that they're most busy.I think the Minister assumes every truck is on the road every day for 12 months in the year and there is no continuity of business or up and down of a business. He thinks it's all continuous and there's no peaks and troughs in how a business operates. I think it's completely unfair for our rural agricultural contractors that they now will actually have been paying huge amounts in RUC and through their winter period will actually now be effectively subsidising the transport network. It's the same with Fonterra and other players like that. The winter milk is very small compared with the spring need for transport and even the autumn need for transport.So what about businesses that are actually going to be negatively impacted because RUC is not something that they may be having as a continuous amount because their business fluctuates? Has the Government given the ability for businesses to have fluctuation and to be able to look at it as a three-month period over a 12-month process as often happens in other tax cases like income tax and suchlike or is this going to be a hard and fast You've got no RUC over the winter. Suck it up." approach by the Minister? So would he please answer that question—has he even thought of it?CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): I was going to call the ACT member but he's sat down so I call Ricardo Menéndez March. If you want the call just keep calling.RICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. It pays to stand up nice and early. Just in the spirit of not filibustering I'll keep my contributions brief. I was keen to unpack the assertion by the Minister around the expectations he had around this bill having a positive distributional impact. I wanted to understand what is that being based on who's going to benefit from this—is it lower-income people or which groups is he expecting to sort of benefit the most proportionately—and have there been any other alternative interventions considered that perhaps could have a more equitable distributional impact that unfortunately may have not been brought forward by the Government? Hon MICHAEL WOOD (Minister of Transport): Just addressing a couple of the questions that have been raised by members starting with Mr Menéndez March. My expectation is that there would be a positive distributional impact and that is because transport costs will tend to be a higher proportion of the total household costs that are faced by a person or a household on a low income than they are for a person or a household on a high income. Therefore any reduction in those costs will have a bigger proportionate impact on that low-income person or household.In respect of Mr David Bennett's question about seasonal businesses: the bill is as it is written. The reduction applies for the three-month period between 21 April and 21 July and I would note to the extent that a business is not purchasing diesel through that period or is purchasing a lesser amount of diesel through that period they are not going to be facing the cost spike that we are observing at the moment that this policy is designed to mitigate."