O'Rourke Denis: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeO'Rourke Denis: Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DENIS O’ROURKE (NZ First):New Zealand First has expressed concern about a number of amendments to road-user charges made during this term of Parliament. The Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill seeks to correct some of the stuff-ups made so far. We will support the bill on that basis as far as it goes. But there are many more stuff-ups that are not being addressed at all in this bill. One is some of the provisions of the 2012 amendment Act which made many changes to the road-user charges system. New Zealand First then had and still has concerns for the 22000 motorhome owners registered with the Motor Caravan Association although the total number affected is of course many more than that. We have similar concerns about the horse trucks that have been caught by those changes and which should have been exempt from the 2012 regime.Vehicle operators in those categories justifiably oppose having their road-user charges increased—mostly doubled and in some cases trebled—because of new bandwidths and maximum permissible on-road weight charges when their weight is constant and in most cases considerably less than their maximum chassis weight. There are a great number of motorhomes that are built on a chassis that have a greater gross vehicle mass rating than the actual on-road weight of the motorhome. The changes made in 2012 which we think should have been corrected as part of this particular stuff-up’s correction bill result in the owners of these vehicles being required to purchase road-user licences for a greater laden mass than the actual laden mass.The purpose of road-user charges legislation is to continue the road-user charges system by imposing charges on heavy vehicles and certain other vehicles for their use of the roads that are in proportion to the costs that the vehicles generate. We believe that there should be a provision to enable motorhome-type vehicles which are never likely to operate at near the maximum permitted laden weight to be assigned a road-user charge weight that would be sufficient to cover their actual laden mass. An example is a motorhome with a gross vehicle mass of 12000 kilograms but an actual on-road mass of 8500 kilograms. Under the 2010 road-user charge their charge was $120.24. Under the 2012 changes the owner is now required to purchase a road-user charge licence for 12 tonnes at a cost of $246.26. That of course is an increase of $126.02 or over 104 percent which we think is outrageous.The requirement to have all heavy vehicles operating with a road-user charge licence to cover the maximum permissible laden mass as the lesser of the rated gross vehicle mass or the vehicle’s dimension and mass—rule 2002—has resulted in some excessive increases in costs to the owners such as that I have already mentioned. The greater percentage of private motorhome owners in New Zealand are retirees. These people have limited income and in many cases will not easily be able to absorb such large increases in their costs. This bill should have included a provision to allow motorhomes to have a road-user charge licence weight allocated that covers the actual on-road mass of the vehicle. The current regime which captures motorhomes and horse trucks and hugely increases their road-user charge liability is grossly unfair and should have been addressed as one of the Government’s many stuff-ups where road-user charges legislation has been concerned.Although this bill is supportable as far as it goes New Zealand First places on record our strong objection to the way motorhome and horse truck operators have been treated—not even considered as part of these amendments which we think they should have been.