Wong Pansy: Public Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Wong Pansy: Public Transport Management Bill — Second Reading 
[Sitting date: 02 September 2008. Volume:649;Page:18238. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
PANSY WONG (National) 
: 
 We National on this side of the House and the public are looking forward to hearing the amount of the tolls this Minister will announce in a month’s time. Apparently Labour is very proud of its toll roads as well. I also want to tell the good news to the Clutha-Southland people down there because the Minister has challenged the Hon Bill English to use more bus services. So I am sure the Minister is going to put extensive bus services down there in Clutha-Southland so that the Hon Bill English and other good people can travel on them.  
No matter how many times the Minister has muttered the words “public transport” this Public Transport Management Bill has a very clearly stated objective. It is actually to clarify and extend the functions and powers of regional councils in respect of public transport planning and regulation. It is all about control it is typical of Labour’s intrusive micro-management and it shows neither respect for private property rights nor the proper process for passing legislation.  
Let me share with people listening in to this debate: currently we have two types of public transport service. One is commercially viable; the operators register with the regional council their intention to provide a service and they receive no subsidy for it. In the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee we listened to some of the operators during the committee process and some have built up the commercial viability of their bus routes through the involvement of a family business over a long time. Others have been innovative to ensure that their bus routes have become commercially viable. But another type which we know as contracted services actually requires subsidies: public subsidies are required to make sure there is a service on that particular bus route.  
Currently the type of operators who provide public services range from city council - owned bus companies as in Christchurch and other cities family businesses or large-scale commercial operators. Some operators as I have indicated have registered their intention for a bus route and have developed it to a more popular base where public subsidy is no longer required.  
Before this bill was introduced there was indeed a quite extensive consultation process. It was carried out to look at three options. Option A apparently was the status quo where bus and ferry services would continue to operate as a mix of contracted or commercial services and regional councils would have limited control over commercial services that required no subsidy. During the select committee submission process it was interesting that no matter what backgrounds these operators or submitters came from they all hailed the Christchurch bus services as an outstanding success and we remind everybody that the Christchurch bus services have flourished under the current legislative environment.  
Option B was an option to empower regional councils to be able to impose control on commercial services. Let us revisit that: commercial services are services where operators register to operate without public subsidy. One can therefore imagine that commercial operators were very apprehensive. They received no public subsidy but this legislation would introduce more power for regional councils to tell them what to do or what not to do. Members should think about this—we are down to micro-management such as the colour of buses that a regional council might want to impose on the bus company. There might be pink buses to stand apart from red ones; I would probably welcome blue buses on the road.  
So those operators were shocked to find out that the option B they had been consulted on was eventually different from the option B that had been introduced in the bill. Apparently the Labour Cabinet after considering the results of the consultation have introduced more controls and more powers for regional councils than there were in the option that had gone out for consultation. But Labour has not had the decency actually in the foreword to the legislation to highlight the fact that option B in the legislation has been presented with variation. It is not the original option B.  
It took quite a lot of effort for some of us to debate that and to say that to be fair to the submitters who had been originally involved in the consultation they should also be able to see the analysis done by officials in order to offer them the comfort of the original option B and the revised option B which according to officials consists only of technical differences. I can assure members that they are more than technical. But it took quite a bit to convince the committee that the analysis should be released to the operators because the Labour-led Government always believes that it should keep people in the dark and introduce changes at the last minute to shut down debate or consultation.  
The other option which is known as option C was to empower regional councils to prohibit commercial services and to bundle commercial and subsidised services together. Can members imagine? If an operator of a family business a bus operator had developed a service over a long time and had developed a route into a commercially viable one so that the operator did not need to receive a public subsidy that service could disappear. The regional council could decide that it would bundle it together with something else and take it away from that operator. Well in the bill that was introduced the officials advised us why they had decided to go against option A the status quo. They said they also rejected option C because that option would prohibit commercial services in a region which might lead to the reduction of opportunities for public transport operators to be innovative and would reduce the control operators had over their own businesses. That would potentially undermine business confidence.  
So even the officials had advised Cabinet—I presume—to ditch option C and go for option B. There was a shock then to select committee members—not to mention submitters—when the chairman of the committee the Hon Mark Gosche suddenly introduced the notion to the committee that most people liked option C. Well it was actually not most people; it was the Auckland Regional Council the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and councils largely from Auckland that were saying “Isn’t it a great idea to give local government the total say on how people should run their businesses?”. 
The chairman said that maybe the select committee should forget about consultation and the official advice and go for option C. Then of course we said that option C was outside the scope of the legislation but we were told by the chairman that he had had a quiet word with the Minister and that it was all right because the Minister would welcome option C. That is terrible I thought. Cabinet had rejected option C and the chairman was trying to get the select committee members into the position of saying that the select committee rather than Cabinet wanted to impose option C.  
Well even New Zealand First the doormat for this Labour-led Government can see the writing on the wall in imposing option C and going against the wishes of the great majority of submitters who had rejected option C. I just point out that I find this Labour-led Government’s total disrespect for consultation and the select committee process incredible.  
The last thing I will say continues to be on this process. We found out that the good Regulations Review Committee chaired by my able colleague Dr Richard Worth had sent us advice on some major concerns it had about the regulatory-making powers in the bill. Unfortunately the letter went astray but then the chairman of our select committee would not agree to having a proper process for us to bring this bill back to the select committee for a proper debate before it was brought back to the House. National would not agree to a bill that had taken away private property rights and had ignored the consultation results.