Fitzsimons Jeanette: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Fitzsimons Jeanette: Road User Charges Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:655;Page:4895] 
JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) 
: 
 Light electric vehicles are capable of making some small contribution towards a more sustainable transport system in New Zealand. I say “small contribution” because they will be extremely expensive—roughly double the price of ordinary cars. Because most New Zealanders cannot afford to buy new cars they buy second-hand cars. But there will be no second-hand electric cars in New Zealand for a long time. Interesting data given to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee just today in its review of the estimates showed that the Ministry of Transport expects the penetration rate of electric vehicles into the New Zealand fleet to reach 1 percent by 2020. That is way fewer than even the prediction that the Ministry of Economic Development made in 2007. 
Electric vehicles are being made at a very slow rate overseas. The reason is that their price is so high; a lot of that price is the battery technology. To be able to store enough energy to run a motor vehicle 100 or 200 kilometres on a charge takes an enormous amount of battery power—far more battery power than it takes to run our house. Running our house takes eight deep-cycle batteries the size of a truck battery. One cannot carry those around in an electric car so we have to devise a battery that is very low weight for high energy storage. That is very expensive. Electric cars will be a luxury for the very well-off for quite some time. 
The Government is asking that ordinary motorists—ordinary people on the minimum wage living on the edge of a city because they cannot afford the property prices closer to town—completely pay for the use of roads by people driving electric vehicles. Let us be quite clear that that is what we are doing: we are asking all road users—rich poor and unemployed—to pay the road-user charges for those who can afford to buy electric vehicles. We have to have a very good reason to do that. What might that reason be? Well we have an urgent need to move away from fossil fuels and the internal-combustion engine and in the view of the Green Party we should be making major efforts to improve public transport and rail freight in order to reduce the need for those fossil-fuelled energy sources and for individual vehicles where shared vehicles are perfectly adequate. 
There is no doubt that electric vehicles can make some contribution to that goal because there will still continue to be uses where one person in one vehicle is the only way of getting there. What bothers me is that the Government seems to see the one person in one vehicle approach where one cannot move anywhere as a human being without carting a ton of metal as the main solution. It sees things like travel demand management walking cycling and public transport as fringe activities that a few dopey people decide to engage in. We see it the other way round. 
So what is our position as Greens on the Road User Charges Amendment Bill? We want to encourage the new technology even though we know that like many new technologies it will be used by only those who are very well off like the Minister opposite. We therefore see it as appropriate for a short period to encourage those vehicles into the market by giving this incentive recognising that the vehicles are very expensive. We would be very concerned if the subsidy were to go longer than the 4 years that is proposed. We will be very firm about that at the select committee. We think that once those vehicles start to come into the country they will develop their own momentum. But to encourage the first movers—those who are prepared to bite the bullet and get into a new technology earlier—some subsidy is worthwhile. It will not be hugely expensive initially. The Ministry of Transport believes there may be 30 of those vehicles in New Zealand by 2010 and that it will take until 2020 before we have 30000. Well the subsidy will run out a long long time before that. 
We will support this legislation. The thing that concerns me most about it is the extremely short select committee period. I do not see how we can possibly give the legislation due consideration and hear from the public in such a short period. I urge the Government to consider taking this process a little slower. After all how many electric vehicle owners will be inconvenienced if we take an extra month at the select committee to consider this subsidy how long it should last and how it should be paid? We will not vote for that very early select committee report-back date but we will vote for the bill.