Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Instruction to Committee In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Williamson Maurice: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — Instruction to Committee In Committee Instruction to Committee In Committee 
[Sitting date: 01 July 2008. Volume:648;Page:17049. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) 
: 
 I want to take the first of what I hope will be many calls that you will allow the Opposition Mr Chairperson. One of the things that this Government is getting very cute at is bringing legislation to this Parliament. If we look at the size of the Land Transport Management Bill we see it is a 247-page bill but it is being brought in in only two parts. There is a Part 1 then a fractional Part 2 that contains a little bit of miscellaneous provision. Because of the way in which the debates now occur at the Committee stage we deal with bills part by part. 
This is a massive Part 1 that is as I said in my second reading speech like the curate’s egg—it is good in parts. I will not even begin to say that this bill is bad across the board but if things are done reasonably and this Parliament works as it should members of the Opposition should be allowed to pick a 5-minute speech on each of about five or six of the main subjects the Minister has just covered. The Minister talked about Toll then she talked about hypothecation then she went on to talk about the Government policy statement the planning cycle and so on. I want to cover off a few of those things right now. I think the Minister is dead right about getting a more concentrated planning cycle that everyone can work around. I think it has been overdue for a long time and I congratulate her on legislation that sets up those structures. 
But there is a range of questions that we want answered. For example in relation to the regional petrol tax which I hope to be able to cover as well how come we now see an Supplementary Order Paper that instead of saying “You can introduce a regional petrol tax if you want.” now states that there will be a schedule associated with it? Supplementary Order Paper 209 proposes to substitute a new subsection (4) of section 65G in clause 31. Subsection 4(b) states: “the total rate of any regional fuel tax scheme may not exceed—(i) 2 cents per litre … in 2009; and (ii) 5 cents per litre … in 2010.” That is really interesting because later on I will refer to a quote by the Prime Minister who said that she had no intention of allowing the regional petrol tax to be put on to long-suffering motorists “next year”. She made that comment in June 2008 so I presume “next year” means 2009. However the Minister in the chair the Hon Annette King in almost flouting the wishes of her Prime Minister has shoved a schedule into the Supplementary Order Paper to allow a rate of 2c in 2009. 
There is more that National members would like to debate if you will give us those calls Mr Chair. The first is to do with the structure of the new agency because I think it is always worth while trying to look for gains in efficiency of Government departments not that that has happened under Labour when we look at the hugely bloated growth in bureaucracy and floor space in the 9 years since Labour came to power. If the Minister wants to debate that issue I am happy to give her the total number of bureaucrats and the total amount of floor space that has been rented since Labour came in. I am happy to look at some efficiency gains but we must always call into question those issues of conflict of interest. 
I tell the Minister and she probably remembers it well that in the mid-1990s the clarion call from local government was that Transit by being both the funder of roading and the provider of the State highway network had a complete conflict of interest. I have the documentation and the letters from councils up and down the country. I dug them out of the box at the time the select committee process was going on. They told me over and over again—indeed they kept beating me up—that I could not let Transit be the one who decides who gets what money and also be the operator of the State highway network because Transit would continue to favour itself. In the end I gave into that because I thought there was some real merit to the case that Local Government New Zealand and others were running—that there was that conflict. What is really interesting now is that we are putting them back together again. We are going to take the funding agency—that is Land Transport New Zealand—which decides which projects get which money in each year and then we are going to incorporate it back into that body and call it the New Zealand Transport Agency. That is the very body that is looking for State highway funding all the time in the form of Transit New Zealand. 
So again on one of the calls that I will take on Part 1 if we get them I will explore whether there is enough protection. We were told at the select committee that there was. Interestingly enough of those who should have been concerned about that conflict did not express it and in fact when asked about it said that no they thought there were enough protections. I would like the Minister if she can during one of her calls to give a detailed explanation to the Committee about how those protections will work to stop the agency being both the funder of roading and the owner and operator of the State highway network. If we talk about conflict of interest I would have thought that today we have seen one of the most classic conflicts of interest ever to occur in this country. We have seen the Government buy back the rail network today and today we have also seen the Government put an increase in road-user—