Sabin Mike: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeSabin Mike: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — Second Reading[Sitting date: 18 March 2014. Volume:697;Page:16765. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]MIKE SABIN (National—Northland):I think the member Gareth Hughes just dashed his opportunity to raise his party’s vote with that particular speech. If people at home wake up now that he is finished what they will find is that roads are actually quite important to the economy in this country. The point that Andrew Williams made was a very very good one—that all roads are important. No one on this side of the House would disagree that all roads are important. But the Greens have their fanciful wish list and would just tax people significantly greater amounts to pay for more access for schoolchildren to walk to school and for more cycleways and so forth. I do not believe that it is actually a case of either/or; it is one of and/and. As Gerry Brownlee the Minister of Transport said today this Government has spent more than anyone on the sorts of things that the Greens talk about but hopefully will never get a chance to do.But if we think about the road network as we think of the human body and if we think about the difference between veins and arteries that is simply what the road network comes down to. There are some areas of the network or the body where it is far more important that we have flow and that there are no encumbrances to that flow and that is what the roads of national significance programme is all about. Admittedly that is a policy decision on behalf of the Government and although the Greens can stand in the House and talk about low cost-benefit ratios I can assure the Green members 100 percent that there is a far greater cost-benefit return to this nation in having efficient freight movement—in particular around the more congested areas of this country—than there is in having more cycleways and opportunities for children to walk to school.I do not know—I am an old-fashioned sort of a guy. I sort of think that if children want to walk to school actually they probably can. They have been doing that for a long time and it is not the case that this Government just ignores that; it is a case of prioritising. It is almost like the Greens have forgotten about the fact that they have gone away from this idea of printing money and like they have got some magic wish list of opportunities in the transport sector that they would pay for but like they have somehow forgotten about the fact that you have got to have an economy that is performing to actually do that.Simon O’Connor: How’re they gonna move the money?MIKE SABIN: Well exactly—ironically how will they move the money? How are they going to move the logs? How are they going to move the milk powder? How are they going to move all the other produce that this primary producing country ultimately produces? What are they going to do? Are they going to have a team of people with unicycles wandering down cycleways to get it to market? How about the buses that they talk about all the time? Oh that is right. They use roads as well. I have not seen them hovering above the earth any time recently.This Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill has some minor technical amendments. But in all seriousness what we are actually dealing with here is a very complex system for the road-user charges. The anomalies that sprang up have been dealt with in this legislation. Although it affects only a small amount of people a lot of those people are in my electorate. A lot of them are farmers and a lot of them are people who work in the rural economy. That is right. They are the lifeblood of this economy. So although the Greens can trivialise that fact and ask why we are dealing with this bill now the bottom line is that if we were not they would be criticising us for not dealing with it.This Government just gets on and does what the community and what the voters expect of us. This is another good example of it and another really good example from the Greens of why they should never occupy the Government benches.