Brownlee Gerry: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Brownlee Gerry: Land Transport Management Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 11 September 2012. Volume:683;Page:5101. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon GERRY BROWNLEE (Minister of Transport) 
: 
 I move  
That the Land Transport Management Amendment Bill be now read a first time. 
 It is my intention to nominate the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee to consider the bill. 
This bill will amend the Land Transport Management Act 2003. The Act provides the planning and funding framework that channels around $3 billion of central government funding each year into road construction and maintenance and public transport. The bill is part of the Government’s ongoing efforts to cut unnecessary red tape and create a better more effective legislative framework for transport. The bill will lead to streamlined decision-making and fewer prescriptive planning processes for those in the transport sector. It will allow councils greater flexibility to plan for the needs of their region and it will ensure that both central government and local government get better value for money from their investments in public transport. 
The bill has three main components. First it will remedy some problems with the planning and funding framework for the Land Transport Management Act 2003. That framework imposes processes that are duplicative repetitive and prescriptive which leads to uncertainty excessive paperwork and unnecessary compliance costs. The bill will make the Act easier to use and understand by focusing its purpose and decision-making criteria on achieving an effective and safe land transport system and replacing the regional land transport strategy and the regional land transport programme with a single regional land transport plan. It merges the national land transport strategy and the Government policy statement on land transport funding into a single Government policy statement on land transport. It also removes the obligation on regional transport committees to include representatives of sector interests instead leaving it to elected representatives to decide whom they need to hear from. 
The bill will also amend the Act’s funding and planning provisions by enabling future projects to be funded by borrowing where there is a good case to do so and the Minister of Transport and Minister of Finance agree. It is worth noting that in the last year more than 5.5 million journeys have been taken on the Northern Gateway—a toll road funded by debt through the previous Government. By repealing the regional fuel tax provisions we acknowledge that this form of taxation needs to go because its costs would end up being spread across all regions. 
The second significant area of change is the Act’s tolling provisions. The bill will replace duplicative statutory tests applying to the approval of toll road schemes with a single high-level test requiring them to be efficient and effective. It will also rely on the Privacy Act rather than on an anonymous method of payment to safeguard privacy. It will reduce potential barriers to public-private partnerships in toll road building and management by removing the requirement for special concession agreements. The final change in this area is to enable the existing toll road in Tauranga—Route K—to be brought under the toll road regime that applies to other toll roads in the country. 
Finally this bill establishes in legislation a new policy framework for planning and contracting public transport known as the Public Transport Operating Model. This follows a review of the Public Transport Management Act 2008 that found there was little incentive for operators to invest in public transport services or for them to come up with innovative ways for improving services. The legislation will require all public transport services in a region to be segmented into units and provided under exclusive contract to the regional council. Regional councils will be required to identify in their regional public transport plans the units the policies on units and the other public transport services the region intends to financially assist. Services that are not part of a region’s core public transport network will be exempt from operating under contract and will be identified on an exempt-services register held by the relevant regional council. 
This bill will repeal the Public Transport Management Act 2008 and carry over relevant provisions into the Land Transport Management Act. 
In closing may I say that Parliament in passing this bill will ensure that New Zealand has a durable piece of legislation that promotes an effective efficient and safe land transport system. It also recognises that New Zealanders want such a system. Thank you. I commend this bill to the House.