Hughes Gareth: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Hughes Gareth: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5118. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
GARETH HUGHES (Green) 
: 
 Kia ora Mr Speaker. Nga mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. I rise to take a call on the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill or as it more accurately should be called the “Land Transport (Put it on the Credit Card and Pray for a Brighter Future) Bill”. This bill—this bad bill—simply does a few bad things for New Zealand. It does not go about transport the key way which is that we should be discussing how to get around. Let us not make up stuff and exaggerate as we heard from the National backbench about horse and carts. Let us have a discussion around how we design our transport systems that work for us in 2012. How do we design a transport system that is going to work for the future? How can we have a multimodal system where we have a role for road safety improvements rail coastal shipping walking and cycling to boost our economy and to get us around our cities cheaper and faster and how can we provide it? 
The Government has not gone from that approach. It has gone from the Steven Joyce “Colossus of Roads” transport approach which is to put it on the credit card. He has gone around the country spending $14 billion on just seven new uneconomic motorways and now he has found that he has dug himself a fiscal hole. He has left the mess for Gerry Brownlee the current Minister of Transport and now the Government has to put it on the credit card. The bill also streamlines toll roads in New Zealand—and I want to quickly touch on the privacy implications there—and then reduces local input in decision making when it comes to it. It is simply incredible that in a time of austerity when we are facing nearly $70 billion in gross national debt and when we are seeing the Government cut various Budget lines this Government is quite prepared to put more uneconomic motorways on the credit card. It is simply mad when we know that some of them have negative benefit-cost ratios. 
Take Puhoi to Wellsford. Independent consultants found that it had a benefit-cost ratio of 70c. This means that any member of the Government would get laughed out of a board meeting if they were going to borrow a dollar and get only 70c in economic return. It does not make sense. What we are seeing is a time of record high oil prices declining road traffic and public transport patronage breaking records and going through the roof. This Government is looking towards the 1950s to borrow more for motorways. It is like Julius Vogel in the 1870s borrowing billions to build bullock tracks not the high technology of the time. It does not make sense. 
But what this bill also does is reduce the privacy of New Zealanders. This bill quite deliberately in its streamlining of toll roads removes previous legislative requirements for personal information to not be collected. It has raised the Privacy Commissioner’s red flag. She is concerned and we look forward to her submission to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. The question is why the Government is doing this. I have not heard a single member on that side of the House talk about this issue. It is likewise with the Public Transport Operating Model changes. I have not heard anyone on the Government side say why they are doing it because the truth is that they want their mates—their mates who donate to them—to cherry-pick the most profitable routes and leave the least profitable routes up to the councils. 
At the same time this Government wants to take away the local community representation—the non-voting members on regional transport committees. It wants Steven Joyce and Gerry Brownlee to tell all of our cities including Coromandel which has had its local road budget slashed to pay for Auckland to pay for Wellington and to pay for Waikato that there is no money for Coromandel. This is what we are seeing going forward with road safety. 
We could be spending that money on road safety improvements. We could be spending that money saving the Gisborne rail line. We could be saving that money getting a rail link between our first-biggest and third-biggest city but we cannot because Gerry Brownlee and Steven Joyce have raided transport money and raided the transport pantry. They have run out of money and now they have to put it on the credit card. Now they are saying that your privacy will not be respected and your local decisions will not be respected—in fact they are going to take those people off the regional transport committees. 
At the same time they are also saying to Auckland: “We are not going to let you decide what you do with your transport money.” They are explicitly stating in this legislation that we cannot have regional fuel levies. If Auckland wants to do it if Auckland wants to go forward it should be able to do it. This Government is the block to Auckland going forward and it is going to get punished down the line. 
At the last election the Green Party went to the New Zealand electorate with a modern plan for smart transport that would have saved the taxpayer money that would have paid down debt and that would have invested a considerable share in the central business district rail link in light rail for Auckland in rail and in coastal shipping. What we lack from this Government are road safety improvements which would actually save Kiwi lives now. There is a better way of doing it and this bill is the absolute worst way you would go about it. Kia ora Mr Speaker.