Joyce Steven: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Joyce Steven: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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Hon STEVEN JOYCE (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 I am very pleased to take a call in relation to the Road User Charges Amendment Bill. Personal mobility in motor vehicles has been one of the great liberators of the mechanised age—it really has—and it has created huge productivity benefits. It has given people the ability to get around and of course most people find a motor vehicle a hugely wonderful tool. The challenge is that if the potential—and I stress “potential”—upcoming limitations on fossil fuels and climate change issues come into play then we will have to look for other forms of motive power and the electric car is one of those motive powers and also biofuel and bio-diesels. We must encourage all of those forms of motive power and we are doing so in the case of electric vehicles with this Road User Charges Amendment Bill. 
I had my first ride in an electric car the other day. Unlike Mr Hughes opposite it was very quiet and it was a very smooth run. But there were a couple of limitations. There was no car radio because there were not quite enough watts to drive the car radio as well as the car; and it was so quiet that I was able to hear my companion speak at great length quite easily all the way through the journey. The car drove very well. The biggest risk with electric cars is that they are very hard to hear because they are so quiet. 
The point is that the technology is still very new and this legislation is really about encouraging the technology to develop. It is not a massive cost; I think if it was a massive cost the Government would be concerned about the potential drain on the road-user charges in the National Land Transport Fund. At this stage it is not a massive cost; it is about encouraging electric vehicle manufacturers who are already looking favourably on New Zealand because of our high levels of renewable electricity and renewable energy use. They like the thought of their vehicles being introduced into this market as one of the earliest markets. They like the thought of New Zealanders being early adopters of electric vehicles and then showing the rest of the world how to do it. So they are encouraged by these sorts of signals from Government that this is something that we should do. 
I would like to make brief mention of the Supplementary Order Paper which is of great length and involves moving the word “issued”. We had the word “issued” at one point in a sentence and we have issued it across to another point in the sentence. I thank my colleague Amy Adams who very cleverly and sensibly made that change to make sure the meaning was clearer. Writing good law is always a good idea and I congratulate my colleague on making that amendment which strengthens immeasurably this particular legislation. 
As well as sending a strong message to the motor vehicle manufacturers we must acknowledge that there is still a lot of work to do in the electric motor vehicle area. The reality is that New Zealand will not be doing that level of manufacturing and work but there are some encouraging things. One of the challenges for the uptake of electric vehicles is the sheer cost of the vehicle compared to the operating cost—the sheer upfront costs. That is a difficulty; an electric vehicle is approximately double the cost of another light vehicle of a similar motive power level. That is a real challenge and it is one the manufacturers are working on at the moment. I have heard some very interesting ways in which they are looking to approach it. A big part of the cost of an electric vehicle is the batteries and those batteries could potentially be leased or sold to owners on a lease-back arrangement to get the operating cost of a car up and the purchase cost of a car down making it look a little bit more like an internal combustion vehicle in terms of the economics that people are used to. That is one of the things the industry is looking at and I think it is certainly looking at partnerships within New Zealand including with some of the State-owned enterprises to see whether it can have these cars introduced as early as it possibly can. 
Finally I would like to mention the importance of road-user charges. We have a system in New Zealand where road-user charge revenue is hypothecated. It is used in the National Land Transport Fund and this Government has made a special effort to ensure that as much of it as possible is returned to the road users who pay it. It is therefore the way that primarily we pay for our roading system and we must not have significant precedents. I have made it clear in the explanatory note of the bill that this is not to be seen as a precedent; this is purely a one-off to encourage electric motor vehicles.