Genter Julie AnneHon JULIE ANNE GENTER (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you very much Minister for your speech and I just want to acknowledge the other members of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I just wanted to raise a couple of things that came up at the annual review. Firstly climate change and how it's absolutely imperative that we make significant reductions in carbon emissions from transport over the next decade. That will mean a very very different approach to infrastructure investment than what we had been planning in the past. Secondly cost overruns on State highway projects. We discussed at the select committee how about 17 State highway projects had resulted in $1.1 billion of additional funding needing to go towards those projects. Those were all projects that were commenced under the last National Government. The consequence of those cost overruns in the State highways programme has been that there's been a reduction in the funding available for sustainable transport options like active transport in our cities public transport investment and rail. And so that brings me Minister to this graph which was produced by the Infrastructure Commission. Maybe you've seen the briefing to the incoming Minister. I'll just hold it above the captions so that people can see it at home. What this shows is Waka Kotahi New Zealand Transport Agency's forward capital commitments going back as far as 2015 going out to 2028. The red line is existing commitments for road. The vast majority of that will be within the new State highways or State highway improvements activity class. Then you see from 2019 there was a big increase from the New Zealand upgrade. So over time there was no actual reduction in the committed funding for State highways. Unlike what the National Party was saying at the time it was still very considerable. And now we've added on a few more billion for State highways. There's a tiny green line here a little sliver and a tiny blue line which indicates capital forward committed funding for rail. Now what concerns me about this graph is that about 90 percent of the funding has been committed and it's huge sums of money already irrespective of any cost overruns that might happen in the future for State highways. And while I know people at home might be thinking Well we have to use cars to get around so we need improvements to our State highways." unfortunately these few projects are extremely expensive. They don't do anything to help most people get from home to work or wherever else they need to go. And the opportunity cost of these projects is we're not significantly investing in public transport and rapid transit in rail to help people get around our towns and cities and around our country without having to rely on a car. So this seems to directly contradict all the evidence and advice that the Government's been receiving. I was at a transportation conference yesterday. Minister you gave a great speech there. All the experts at that conference were saying that to respond to climate change we need to completely reverse investment in infrastructure to actually make it easier for people to get around without having to rely on a car. That means that 90 percent of the new CAPEX investment should be going into alternatives not to really marginal improvements to State highways already in urban areas where we know it will actually just result in more traffic and more car dependence. So I'm interested to know Minister how are we going to change the pipeline to one that's actually going to meet our requirements for a modern efficient transportation system that reduces carbon emissions?"