Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Gosche Mark: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:648;Page:17203] 
Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) 
: 
 That was a speech of a member of the National Party Maurice Williamson really struggling with the instructions from Crosby/Textor not to get into anything difficult. He spoke a lot about the good things in the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill and waited until the last minute to tell us why National is voting against it. I want to quote from the  
New Zealand Herald 
 editorial about the previous speaker. He is the National Party’s transport spokesman which the  
New Zealand Herald 
 found out. 
Hon Judith Tizard 
: Is he? 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: Yes. “The legislation foreshadowed in the 2007 Budget but still awaiting its second reading”—so this was a little while ago—”in Parliament has run into opposition from National. The party’s transport spokesman Maurice Williamson has questioned the desirability of such a tax at a time of spiralling living costs especially for food and petrol. He says a National government would look at other ways to pay for the project such as infrastructure bonds or a public-private partnership. The party was committed to electrification and did not rule out regional fuel taxes as a long-term possibility said Mr Williamson but “right now is the worst of all timings” to quote Mr Williamson. “This sort of thinking has reduced”—listen this is the good part—”Auckland public transport to its present lamentable state. Quite simply the large sums involved mean no time is the right time.” 
That is the editorial critical of Mr Williamson and the National Party and it is absolutely right. How are public-private partnerships paid for in the rest of the world? Mr Williamson has been around the world looking at them. He is on that plane so often that he has more airpoints than anybody I know. I ask Mr Williamson how they are paid for. Oh they are paid for by the motorist through a toll! National members say: “Oh no no no let’s not have something simple like a regional fuel tax to pay for electrification let’s have a toll instead. Let’s have a toll to pay for the infrastructure bonds the borrowing and the debt funding he has talked about.” What a load of nonsense! 
National members desperately want to vote for this bill but Crosby/Textor has said “No don’t do anything that might upset the public. Don’t show any bravery. Don’t go into Parliament and do the right thing for Auckland or for Wellington or for Bay of Plenty.” Submitters from those regions came to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee and said: “We need this money and we are prepared as the local authority to impose it.” It does not even need the Minister of Transport to have the courage to do it. The bill allows the councils to make the decision. The Minister of Transport will not impose a regional fuel tax; the councillors elected by the ratepayers in their region will make the decision. So if the Hon Maurice Williamson were the Minister he could not get hurt—although it would be too hard for him to have to approve anything. He had 9 years in Government approving nothing. That is why nothing was built. That is why the public transport system had its funding frozen for 6 years. That is why National spent $40 million on public transport whereas the Labour Government has spent $300 million—because he would never sign anything that would approve something. Oh no that would require some work! 
It is interesting that the National Party will vote against a mechanism that the Hon Dr Lockwood Smith said he would cross the floor to vote for—Penlink. Penlink is a road in his electorate that he said is absolutely vital. I saw the Mayor of Rodney District Council the other day and she is absolutely hanging out for this vote today so that her people in Rodney can get Penlink. National is going to vote against it and we are looking forward to Dr Lockwood Smith coming to vote on this side of the House as he said he would. Maurice Williamson would like to be voting for this as well. He claimed in his last election manifesto to be all for hypothecation—absolutely rock-solid. The only policy one could find on National’s website about transport was a policy to spend all the petrol tax and all the road-user charges on transport infrastructure. That was National Party policy. Is it still National Party policy? 
Hon Maurice Williamson 
: Yes absolutely. 
Hon MARK GOSCHE 
: It is still National’s policy but in a few minutes’ time he will vote against it. What courage what leadership what vision and what optimism for the future! Are they not the lines that were told to John Key—the vision the optimism taking us forward? Yet in a few minutes’ time National members will vote against their only policy—hypothecation. They will not vote for it. 
The other day I was out with members of the coastguard from Maurice Williamson’s own electorate—the Howick people. They are in Mr Williamson’s electorate are they not? They are looking forward to the passing of this bill because they will get some well-deserved money. They take their boats on the water they pay petrol tax. That petrol tax did not pay for the water it cannot pay for it to be improved because the petrol tax builds roads—it pays for buses. The National Party knows that. The members of the coastguard from his electorate who are volunteers who give up their own time also have to pay petrol tax to run their boats along the water. The National Party knows that is not right but will it vote for this bill? No Maurice Williamson will vote against that as well. He can go back to those people and explain as can all of the other National members. 
Bob Clarkson did not know about the provision that benefits coastguards. He has just found out about it from my speech. Bob Clarkson will go back and tell the coastguards from the Bay of Plenty that he did not support it. He thinks they should pay petrol tax as if they were running on the road even though their boats are on the water. I ask Mr Clarkson and Mr Bennett whether that is sensible common-sense stuff. Mr Bennett will not care because Hamilton does not have a coastguard. So he will be able to get away with it. He will be able to go back to the search and rescue people and say that he did not care and he did not vote because there is no coastguard in Hamilton. There is no coastguard on the Waikato River probably so he can say that he did that in all good conscience. 
Everybody in Auckland knows that we need electrification of the rail. The Auckland Regional Council and the Auckland Regional Transport Authority are hanging out and all the people are hanging out for the ability to get electrification of the rail. The National Party says it supports that but they will vote against the method to pay for it which is in this bill. Oh! Pansy Wong has just figured that one out too. I think the excuse is that no trains go to the eastern suburbs of Auckland where Maurice Williamson lives. That is what I heard him say the other day. There are no trains. Well no ferries go to Otahuhu so I should be voting against the bill—we should not subsidise ferries because no ferries come to Otahuhu or for that matter to Onehunga or to Mount Albert or to west Auckland. Where is the logic in that? You see Pakuranga does have a very good public transport system. It is called buses. Those big maroon-coloured things that drive past Mr Williamson’s office are buses and they will benefit from public transport infrastructure being improved. 
This is a good bill. Remember that the National Party said it will solve all the problems and give everybody a tax cut if it becomes the Government because it will take out the bureaucracy. At the moment we have three separate sets of bureaucracy created by National; they are called Transfund Transit and the Land Transport Safety Authority. Not so long ago this Government put the Land Transport Safety Authority back into a single organisation with Transfund and with this bill we get rid of another set of bureaucrats—another chief executive another board another set of people doing duplicate work in two organisations. One would think the National Party would be voting for that. National members say they are against all those bureaucrats doing that work. They say they are for efficiency. No. They want to keep three separate boards and they want to keep three separate chief executives because Maurice Williamson came up with that idea back in the early 1990s. It was so sad watching him question all these people who he said had demanded that he do this. They demanded that so why were they not demanding that we keep it? Well it is because the world has moved on. That was then and this is now. 
As the Auckland City Council transport chairman said—I think he might be closer politically to Mr Williamson than he is to me—that was then and this is now. Even he could see new in the job as he was when he came before the select committee that having a single organisation made sense. Then we asked a whole lot of people—not politicians but experts in looking at whether separate organisations were the way to go—and they said no bring them back together under the Next Steps programme. 
The National Party will be voting against a reduction in bureaucracy. It will be voting against its policy on fuel tax—hypothecation—it will be voting against getting less bureaucracy it will be voting against the search and rescue people it will be voting against the Penlink project and it will be voting against Auckland getting electrification. What vision! What vision we are getting from the National Party. That is a good description of its lack of vision.