Woodhouse Michael: Road User Charges Bill — Third Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Woodhouse Michael: Road User Charges Bill — Third Reading 
[Sitting date: 14 February 2012. Volume:677;Page:375. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National) 
: 
 It is my pleasure to rise and take what will probably be the final call on the Road User Charges Bill. On the basis that the words “59 votes in favour” do not constitute a speech this is my first offering in the House for the 50th Parliament so welcome back and congratulations on your respective appointments. I also welcome our new MPs. There were four more maiden speeches today—four fairly solid offerings I thought from the Labour members. I want to particularly acknowledge my parliamentary colleague from Dunedin North Dr David Clark who I know despite our political differences will work extremely hard for the city of Dunedin and I look forward to working with him. 
I have a new role of senior whip and I am looking forward to the challenge that it is. I must just make a little point about my colleague Melissa Lee. She was not on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee last year she is not on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee this year and she is not rostered to speak in the House. Given that they are three reasons for her not to speak on this bill I thought she did extremely well at very short notice. 
Hon Clayton Cosgrove 
: You’re not meant to actually say that in public. You’re not meant to sort of admit it in public. 
MICHAEL WOODHOUSE 
: It is a bit of mea culpa. It was going to come back to me at some stage. 
I want to just touch on a comment that Mr Horan made because I think it goes to the essence of the submissions we heard on the Road User Charges Bill in the select committee last year of which of course I was a member. He said consultation is one thing; listening and taking heed is another matter. I accept the member’s point. He is a very intelligent fellow I am sure and will quickly come to understand however that consultation and consensus are two very different things particularly politically. One can listen very very carefully to often wildly divergent points of view and then seek common ground as much as possible. But certainly with the road transport industry on this bill that was absolutely the case. 
If there was any example of that it was on that cold July morning in 2008 when I was standing in the Octagon watching the amazing sight of a number of trucks rolling round and round it and stopping traffic because of the drivers’ concerns about the lack of consultation that was then perceived to be the case. I do appreciate Mrs King coming to the House and talking about those experiences but I want to respectfully disagree with her about what the trucking industry was most upset about. Nobody likes a price increase but they were prepared to accept it. What they did not appreciate was the fact that they had been told they were going to be given notice and they were not. They were not given notice because the Minister of Transport at the time Mrs King the previous year had given the industry 3 days’ notice and horror of horrors the trucking industry and the people who needed to purchase road-user charges or RUCs did the rational thing: they went out and they purchased $30 million of charges. 
Well I see no harm in that. I am from that age where we as children listened around the radio to the Budget being presented in the 1970s by the Rt Hon Sir Robert Muldoon who was also Minister of Finance. It was about the smokes and the petrol was it not? It was done on a Thursday night I think in those days. I can tell you that by the time he got to the amount of excise that was going to be applied to fags people were going straight down to the supermarket. We did not have many supermarkets in those days; it was the dairies and the service stations that filled up. 
But here is what happens when road-user charges are paid in that way. The Crown has $30 million more in the bank earning interest—money that it would not have got. So yes there is an offsetting implication to the fact that because the prices are going to go up people buy early. That is the normal rational thing that people do. But the thing that got people most upset was the fact that they had been told that one thing would happen and another thing happened. 
I want to elaborate on that point because of the criticisms that Mrs King made completely irrationally about the lack of a notice period in this bill. Well she clearly has not read it. She was not on the select committee. Her colleagues Ms Fenton and the others on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee last year could have enlightened her but did not. So I will point out clause 79 which provides that regulations made to specify rates of road-user charges come into force 42 days after they are gazetted. So the inference—well it was not inferred; it was absolutely unchallenged; it was stated—that this Government is not giving road users plenty of notice of changes to the road-user charges is simply not true. 
Nor I have to say is the continued wailing and gnashing of teeth from members on the other side at the concerns of the Motor Caravan Association. Indeed the association did come to the committee and express very serious concerns about the implications of the changes in the road-user charges calculation for its members. Its concerns were completely wrongly placed. The officials of the Ministry of Transport worked with the Motor Caravan Association to alleviate those concerns and largely they have gone away except that the people listening to the debate in the Committee and in the third reading tonight will be completely confused. Well I want to give them the assurance that the 270-something percent increases that the association says are going to come are not accurate because the baseline is going to be recalibrated once the move from nominated weight to gross weight is brought in. That in itself is going to be much more administratively efficient. The amount of paperwork done in order for truck companies to record their actual nominated weight and then to have it checked and policed on the side of the road is incredibly administratively inefficient and a gross weight system will be satisfactory to all but people who carry feathers or Pink Batts regularly in their trucks because they go out full and they come back empty. If they are never close to their gross weights maybe there will be an issue but it is around the margins. The Ministry of Transport has worked very carefully with the industry to ensure that those changes affect as few people as possible. 
So with those words it is my pleasure to commend this bill to the House. It is a good bill. It will improve road-user charges collection in this country.