Rodney District Council (PENLINK Toll Road)Empowering Bill

I move, That the Rodney District Council (PENLINK Toll Road) Empowering Bill be now read a second time. In considering this bill and reporting it back to the House, the majority of the members on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee have recommended that the bill not be passed. I think that is most unfortunate, and I want to explain why to this Parliament.

I will briefly remind colleagues of what this bill was all about. It was simply a piece of legislation to enable the Rodney District Council to facilitate the design, financing, construction, operation, and maintenance of a road to be known as the Weiti Toll Road, to be constructed across the Weiti Estuary from Whangaparaoa, to meet up with State Highway 1 at a place called Redvale. The whole idea of the legislation was to deal with major congestion on the Whangaparaoa Peninsula. Traffic coming out of that long peninsula has to travel away from Auckland for a number of kilometres, go round the end of the peninsula, then travel back to Auckland through highly congested conditions. It takes, at peak traffic times, a long period of time to travel that distance, and that is costing the people of the region huge amounts of money. It has been estimated that if this legislation had gone through and the toll road had been built, then between $7.5 million and $10 million could have been saved each year.

It is fascinating to reflect back on what happened when I introduced this legislation into Parliament. I would like to quote from the Hon Judith Tizard, an Associate Minister of Transport and the Minister advising the Prime Minister on Auckland issues. Do members know what she said when I introduced this bill into Parliament? She said: “I rise to support the passage of this bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee. This bill has been the subject of a great deal of consultation. I thank the Rodney District Council for the great lengths it went to in informing Auckland members of Parliament across all parties.” She supported the comments I had made on introducing the legislation, and she went on to say that she supported it. She said: “This is a project that has a great deal of local support. I have seen surveys of the Whangaparaoa community that indicate that the vast majority of residents support it.” There we have an Associate Minister of Transport, the Minister advising the Prime Minister on Auckland issues, saying this is good legislation, yet the Government is actually stopping its passage.

What happened? The answer is dead simple. The Greens got at it. The Greens got at the Labour Government and the Labour Government buckled. After one of the Government’s own Ministers said that this was good legislation, that this toll road should be built, the Greens got at it and this oh so strong Labour Government led by this oh so competent Prime Minister, Helen Clark, just buckled. This legislation was introduced in August 2001, and here we are at the end of 2003 and nothing has happened. The traffic out of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula still sits there in a gridlock. People cannot get in and out. Millions of dollars are lost every year, and the Labour Government has done nothing.

Labour members will say that their land transport amendment bill, their generic legislation, will solve all the problems, and that the Penlink toll road will be able to go ahead. I invite Government members to reflect on this. This legislation was introduced in 2001 to enable the road to be built, but nothing has happened and the people have suffered the ongoing congestion and gridlock for a further 2 years. But in that time the people of the region have also been advised that, whereas they had expected another piece of roading in Rodney to be a free, public piece of motorway—and I am referring to the sector of motorway called the Albany to Puhoi realignment B2 (ALPURT B2), from Orewa to Puhoi—that piece of motorway extending State Highway 1 north from Auckland is not going to be a free public motorway; it is also going to be a toll road. One of the most rapidly growing areas of New Zealand is being treated by this Government totally unfairly. The Government is now saying that not only will the Penlink road have to be a toll road but also ALPURT B2 will have to be a toll road, if it is to be constructed in the next decade.

I ask Government members this: if the ALPURT B2 motorway, the motorway from Orewa to Puhoi, which affects the same people in the same region, has to be a toll road, is it not reasonable for the Government to pick up the Penlink toll road, deal with it, and build it? It is unfair to lumber the people of Rodney with two toll roads to try to solve those traffic woes. The Rodney District Council area, which is only a small area of New Zealand, has massive traffic flow from the Auckland region, yet the people of Rodney are being hit with two toll roads. At the moment, Transit has not picked up that project. It is not in its 10-year plan. That means that if the Penlink legislation, which the Labour Government is blocking today, does not go ahead, the Penlink toll road will not be commenced until 2013. It is not in the 10-year plan, it is now 2003, so it will not be commenced until 2013. That is ridiculous.

I want a Labour member to get to his or her feet and tell this Parliament when construction of the Penlink toll road will commence. If it is not in the current 10-year plan, when will it commence? How long do the people of Rodney have to suffer before the construction of that toll road, which the Government has blocked for the last 2 years, can commence? The Rodney District Council has gone through all the costs. It has purchased the land; the land is sitting there. The road is ready to be built. It has called for tenders. None of it can go ahead because Labour is blocking this legislation. This Government having done that, it is incumbent on it to sort out the mess.

At present, in the Auckland region, only three major projects are ready for construction. Of all the roading in the Auckland region, all the motorway requirements, only three projects are ready for construction. They are the motorway from Orewa to Puhoi, which is ALPURT B2—and at the moment the Government is saying it has to be a toll road—the Penlink road, and the Greenhithe Bridge. They are the only three projects ready to be constructed right now. I want a Labour member to get to his or her feet and tell the people of Rodney and the people of Whangaparaoa what the Government is going to do about the Penlink toll road. Labour members have blocked the legislation for 2 years. The Rodney District Council has had the huge expense of getting ready for the construction of that road, but it is being blocked. What is Labour going to do about it now? Are Labour members going to tell the people of Rodney that they do not give a damn and they are going to do nothing, or is someone going to get to his or her feet and tell the people of Rodney that that road will be constructed, starting immediately?

That is what the people of Rodney deserve, as Labour has blocked this legislation for more than 2 years. The people of Rodney deserve to hear from a Labour member tonight what the Government proposes to do about this major roading project. I think Labour owes it to the people of Rodney to put this right. Labour has stuffed it up because it has kowtowed to the Greens. It has buckled to the Greens. Labour has screwed up this roading project, and it should now make clear to the people of Rodney its plan to fix it. The people of Whangaparaoa cannot get out of that peninsula because of a major traffic gridlock.

Labour, having blocked this legislation, having buckled and kowtowed to the Greens, owes it to the people of that region to explain clearly why the Penlink road is not in Transit’s 10-year plan, and when construction of the road will commence. It is incumbent on the Government to accept that responsibility and explain to the people of the region what will happen.

As one who lives in the North Shore area and has lived at the end of the Whangaparaoa Peninsula for a number of years, I would rise in support of Lockwood Smith on his bill, but he has been telling the people of Rodney to listen to what Labour has to say about this bill. But United Future has come along, and thanks to the hardworking efforts of our MP, Larry Baldock, in the transport area, the Land Transport Management Bill has now been passed. That legislation makes way for that bridge—which is much needed in the Rodney area—from the Whangaparaoa Peninsula across to Redvale. So we will not be supporting this bill, because we have already supported legislation that has done the job this bill intends to do. The people of Rodney can rest assured. I do not know how long Lockwood Smith has been in this House, but United Future has been here for 18 months, and the job is done. The bridge can be built; it is all under way.

This local bill proposed the building of the first public-private partnership road in New Zealand and the first private toll road in New Zealand. It was setting a major precedent, and for that reason the Local Government and Environment Committee gave the bill very careful scrutiny when it came before us. The first public-private partnership in New Zealand was proposed to be a partnership between a relatively small local council and a large multinational corporation. As one might expect in that situation, when we analysed it, it turned out that a rather unequal partnership was being proposed.

Public-private partnerships do have something to offer in building New Zealand infrastructure, but only if the relationship is a fair one where the public interest is preserved and the risks are shared fairly. That was not going to be the case with this bill. The road itself was quite hotly contested locally by those who felt that it undermined the development of the Whangaparaoa area as a self-contained community, where people were beginning to develop local jobs for local residents, and that it would encourage Whangaparaoa’s future as simply a dormitory for Auckland. So in terms of planning it was a bad move. The road would drive through an ecologically sensitive area towards the Weiti estuary, and through a quiet local community that got no benefit from the road and fiercely opposed it.

Part-way through our consideration of the bill, the Government announced a new policy package to overhaul transport legislation generally and provide in a general sense for public-private partnerships and toll roads. The criteria announced in the Government’s statement in February 2002 were simply not met by the provisions of this bill. The committee considered that it was not appropriate to pass one-off legislation for one road that was clearly at variance with Government policy and generic legislation that was about to be produced. So Parliament eventually put this bill on hold until it could be considered alongside the new Land Transport Management Bill and benefit from the policy development work that went into that.

As the committee went through the bill and took advice from a number of departments, it was clear that the bill itself was seriously flawed in favour of the private partner and against the public interest. So the committee recommended that if this bill were going to proceed, some major alterations needed to occur. The committee believed that the concession period of 50 years proposed in the bill was far too long. If the road could not pay for itself faster than that, then there was not a very good case for building it, and it recommended shortening the concession period to 40 years maximum. One might note that the Land Transport Management Act has an even shorter period in it, and that was regarded by the private partners interested in building such a road as acceptable.

Part-way through, with the help of the Department of Inland Revenue, we discovered that the profitability of this road was based on a tax rort—a form of double-dipping, whereby the tax department would end up paying a considerable part of the profits that the private partners in this road were going to get. So on the advice of the Department of Inland Revenue, we recommended that that should be fixed, and that clause 14(7) should be deleted, in order to prevent a depreciation tax issue, which was simply not fair play. It remains unknown whether the road would proceed without that clause, which was to be a significant contribution to its profitability.

We also thought it was appropriate to put a limit on the time that tolls could be charged on this road. It was OK to charge tolls until the road had been paid for, and a reasonable profit obtained by the private partners, but there was nothing in this legislation to prevent those tolls going on ad infinitum raising money for people who had already been well paid for the work they had done. So we recommended that there should be a clause to say that after the capital costs of the road, certain preliminary costs, and a fair return had been recovered, then the road should revert to being a free road.

There were serious privacy implications in the bill as introduced in terms of the rights it gave private enforcement officers employed by the private partner in the road to collect personal information from road users. We suggested that those provisions should be deleted. In fact, the enforcement powers given to the private agents of the private partner were, we thought, quite inappropriate. The New Zealand police force enforces our traffic laws on public roads. It should also enforce them on private roads, and only the bare minimum of enforcement powers in terms of the payment of the toll itself should be handed over to private agents of the private partner.

With those amendments, we reported the bill back, and Parliament eventually decided that it was appropriate to put it on hold until it could be considered along with the generic legislation, and that is what has happened. However, our work was not wasted, because those provisions from the careful consideration the select committee gave the bill became the basis for much of the work that went into the Land Transport Management Act, which we have just passed. So the question of concession periods, the question of the balance of risk between the public and private partner, the question of tax and depreciation arrangements, the question of protection of privacy and enforcement have all informed the work that has gone into the Land Transport Management Act.

The Penlink bill is now simply unnecessary. If the Penlink road can meet the criteria of the New Zealand Transport Strategy and the criteria of the Land Transport Management Act, then it can proceed under that generic legislation. However, if it does not have the support of the communities through which it passes, if it does not take adequate steps to minimise the impacts on the environment of building the road, if it does not contribute to better integration of transport management, and if it does not exhibit the various social and responsibility clauses in the Act, then it may struggle under that legislation, and that is as it should be. The bill should now be discharged because it is no longer necessary, but I think its process through Parliament has been useful in that it has been a kind of a dry run for the larger bill that followed and eventually overtook it.

A few days ago, I think on 21 November, to be precise, the Minister of Transport went before a local government forum and asked it to please come up with a road he could toll, so as to prove his critics wrong. He is in dire straits. He needs some roads to toll because he wants the Land Transport Management Act to work. I notice that there was no speaker from the Government in the Chamber initially in this debate. I sat back and refrained from taking an earlier call, waiting for a Government member to explain the Government’s view on this bill.

This bill has been effectively sabotaged by the Greens, and we are not prepared to support it. I heard Paul Adams talk about his colleague, the expert on transport—the man who is so dedicated to transport he did not even want to get on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and is not on that committee as a permanent member. He just appeals to go on the committee, time and time again. He is known—[Interruption] The member is throwing a little back to me. I remind the Hon Harry Duynhoven that when I had to go on the committee as a voluntary member we had only 5 members of Parliament, and I just could not afford the time to go there all the time. United Future is a party that has come in and bragged about transport. Larry Baldock is a reasonable guy, but he is known in Tauranga—

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: This is Paul Adams.

This is Paul Adams? But he was talking about Larry Baldock. I want to tell Paul Adams that Larry Baldock is known as “Toll Road Baldock.” Actually, he is not known as “Toll Road Baldock”, but I will not tell the member what “Baldock” is changed to when it gets into Tauranga.

New Zealand First is opposed in principle to toll roading; we are opposed to the concept of toll roading. We basically believe that every dollar spent by the motorist should be spent as effectively as possible. There is no advantage to the motorist to be had from building huge toll plazas. It is not the best use of the motorist’s dollar to pay for people to man toll road plazas 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It is not the best use of the motorist’s dollar to pay for administration costs, and it is not the best use of the motorist’s dollar to pay the profit on toll roading. Toll roading is no good to the community unless the tolls from a particular road can be spread on to other roads. It absolutely fails to address the core problem with regard to roading.

Auckland roads are in a mess, and Auckland transport is a mess. I was talking to transport operators the other day. They told me about some of the problems, and they are significant.

💬 Hon Taito Phillip Field: What did the member do about it when he was in Government?

That is a good question and I will tell the Minister, because he wants to understand exactly how a political party is committed to transport issues. We transferred some of the money from petrol that goes into the consolidated account into the roading account, and that was to have been done on an ongoing basis. Had that been continued, right now a lot more money would be going into roading than there is currently, and we would not be putting on the 4.7c per litre, or whatever it was, that Labour put on petrol the other day.

💬 Hon Taito Phillip Field: Father Christmas, too!

The Minister asked me a question, and I gave him an answer—and a Merry Christmas to him. If the Government is serious about addressing the Auckland congestion problem in particular, then it should take time out to talk to New Zealand First. We are a political party that regards transport and roading as a high priority in terms of the development of our economy. But the Government is talking to United Future and the Greens. With due respect to those parties, we can get what United Future knows about transport and roading on the back of a postage stamp in block capital letters, and still leave space for the Greens to get their contribution on it, too.

New Zealand First opposes this bill, but we will not support the Government, or even give the impression we will support its Land Transport Management Act. We think that Act is totally wrong. The Government knows that it is totally wrong, and it will come up with something new on 12 December, or some time like that. Harry Duynhoven knows that Act is wrong; he knows that it does not work. He is one member of the Government who at least knows something about transport, and he knows the Government has to do a lot more in that area. We are in the invidious position of not supporting this bill and not supporting the alternative.

Before I conclude I will just say that the people of Rodney want the Penlink roading project to be put on Transit’s 10-year plan, and I believe that they are entitled to that. That is a reasonable entitlement. New Zealand First opposes this bill. We know that throws the matter into the lap of the alternative, which we also oppose, so we have no alternative but to abstain from voting on this bill.

It is a great pleasure to follow my colleague Peter Brown from the New Zealand First Party. He is a man of principle, and that principle is that New Zealand First cannot make up its mind on this bill and will abstain from voting on it.

💬 Simon Power: No, they can’t find Winston Peters.

When the leader of New Zealand First is back that party may well decide which way it will jump on this bill. Mr Brown and I have served together on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee over many years. However, I have to say that it was a little rich of him to have a go at United Future for not having a permanent member on the select committee. I remember that when I was formerly the chair of the select committee I used to make special provision for Mr Brown to be a temporary member on a regular basis.

I want to turn to the purpose of the Rodney District Council (PENLINK Toll Road) Empowering Bill. This bill was put up with a view to expediting a toll road in that particular area, and events have really overtaken it. The Land Transport Management Act, which is now in place, will really take over what the bill was intended to do. It allows for public-private partnerships in the building, ownership, and management of roads, which will allow for the provision of roading where otherwise the normal funding mechanisms would not apply or would not see that road built for the foreseeable future. I am sorry that the Minister of Transport is not available to be here tonight to talk on this bill, because that is one of the issues he has spent a huge amount of time and work on. As members know, I have not been on the select committee for some time, and as a result of that I have not been directly in touch with this particular bill for a little while. But I know from discussions with my colleagues, and from the work that was done on the Rodney District Council (PENLINK Toll Road) Empowering Bill and the Land Transport Management Bill while I was a member of that committee, that this bill was considered seriously. The Government certainly feels that the bill has really been overtaken by time and the events that have followed, particularly with the enactment of the Land Transport Management Act.

On 12 December an Auckland transport package is to be announced by the Minister of Transport. It will outline the future direction not just for roading in Auckland but also for all transport needs in Auckland. The purpose of this bill is one of the cases that has merit—of course it does. That is why it will be considered with all the other cases alongside it, to determine the priority for addressing roading and other transport needs, particularly, of course, in the Auckland area where there are such big problems resulting from many decades of non-investment, or insufficient investment, in transport links. The issue is not just one of roading but also of rail, ferry services, public transport, buses, bus lanes, and integrated transport systems that simply have not been developed to keep pace with the population. The issue in Auckland is a simple one: the city is outgrowing its infrastructure, and that really does need a considerable amount of effort, work, and money to be spent. The Land Transport Management Act provides a mechanism whereby all projects can be considered on an equal basis and have their merits fairly considered, and then as a result those that are of the highest priority will go ahead.

The Government intends to vote against this bill simply because time has overtaken it, and its purpose has been overtaken by the Land Transport Management Act.

National totally opposes the Government’s move to discharge this bill tonight. I listened carefully to the Associate Minister’s comments on the bill when he said Labour does not think this bill needs to go through because in 9 days’ time Labour will make an announcement in Auckland that all the projects—roading and public transport projects—will be assessed again and ranked, and then the Government will do the top ones. How totally pathetic is that? Aucklanders know that those projects have been assessed time and time again. At the beginning of the year the Penlink project was high on the order of projects to be done in Auckland. In fact, Auckland had the majority of the top 30 projects on the nationwide roading strategy that was released in January of this year. But by the time the final version of the strategy came out, Auckland had very few projects in the top 30.

Now we see a new plan that the Associate Minister has announced tonight, whereby on 12 December the Government will rank the roading projects again, rank the public transport projects with those, and then come up with a list that has a road, a bus lane, and a train station on it—and everyone in Auckland is meant to thank the Government and say that is novel. Mr Duynhoven knows that has been done in Auckland time and time again, and that it will solve absolutely nothing.

My other point is that this bill was introduced on 12 December 2001. At the time of the bill’s introduction the Government told the councils in Auckland that it supported this legislation, but instead it has changed its mind, backed down, introduced some other legislation, and said that that legislation will solve the problems of Auckland. The Government already knows that it will not do so. If the legislation that Mr Duynhoven told the House has overtaken this bill and will solve all the problems is so good, why is there to be another announcement on 12 December? I thought that the problems had been solved a few months ago, so what is the point of another announcement? Is it just more spin for Auckland, or is it that the Auckland mayors are saying to the Government the same thing that they are saying to us: that this Government has failed in terms of Auckland’s roading? We know that it has.

We know that the Rodney District Council wants this legislation. We know that the Labour members of Parliament in Auckland do not want it.

💬 Simon Power: Why?

The reason is political. The reason is that Labour holds no seat north of the harbour bridge, so it does not want this bill to go forward. The reason Labour does not want this bill to go forward is that everything in roading now is done on the basis of political patronage, through Mike Williams’ Transfund-Transit committee. Everything is done on the pork barrel. The man from Otago is gone; he is history. His local newspaper, when asked about him, says that it cannot understand why no one ever sees him. He is the invisible man from Otago; the man whom nobody knows. I do not even know his name.

This legislation would have had the Penlink road being constructed right now. If the Prime Minister had confidence in Mr Duynhoven, he would have been up there cutting the ribbon on the Penlink road next year. I read Matt McCarten’s book over the weekend. Matt McCarten identifies Mr Duynhoven as being the person the Prime Minister wanted to give a ministerial post to, but knew that he was not up to it. She tried to think of another option for him. We know what that was. Mr Duynhoven had to sit out for 3 years, come back in to the House, chair the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, play around with his beloved transport committee—but without any responsibilities—and get the House to legislate in order to keep him here. For that, Mr Duynhoven is eternally grateful to the woman who kept him out of Cabinet, because she has kept him in Parliament. Mr Duynhoven could have cut the ribbon on the Penlink road, but he will never do so. At the end of the day the political ideology that says we must not have a toll road has won the day. The Government has capitulated to the Greens, and has put extra rounds of consultation and environmental concerns into the transport legislation. For goodness’ sake, a road has to be socially responsible! That all means that not one dollar will be spent on Penlink.

We can imagine the great announcement that Mr Duynhoven has told us about tonight. He will be in trouble with the Prime Minister for that, because that was a secret for the 12th. That is why Mr Duynhoven could not be in Cabinet. He has blurted out here in the House that roads and public transport stuff will be ranked together, according to whether a project is environmentally sustainable and socially responsible. We know that roads in that area will not be ranked, but buses and trains will be. That is Labour’s cunning plan. There will be more buses and trains, more subsidies from the Auckland Regional Council paid back through the Auckland ratepayers, and no more roads for Auckland.

It all could have been so simple. This bill went to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, which Mr Duynhoven formerly chaired. If he had worked a bit harder and concentrated a little on the job in hand, then he could have got this legislation through. National members tried time and time again to push through this legislation, but we could not get there because the numbers were against us. At the end of the day the majority jumped to the Prime Minister’s tune, and Mr Duynhoven jumped higher than most to her tune. This legislation could have been passed, and that would have ensured that a road was being constructed as people drove north this Christmas. The road would not have been opened by then. The Prime Minister probably would have opened it; she probably would not have let Mr Duynhoven do that. Instead, she would have opened it, probably in the middle of next year.

That piece of roading could have been being built right now. Instead, we see nothing. We see no road at all. We have only Mr Duynhoven’s plan, as announced to the House tonight, that on 12 December the Minister of Transport will hold a press conference in Auckland and announce that all the roading projects and public transport projects—and no doubt some walking ones—will be considered and re-ranked against each other, and then the top ones may be funded. What a load of absolute nonsense that is! If that is the best that Mr Duynhoven has been able to do as Associate Minister, then it is no wonder the Prime Minister had to talk to Matt McCarten, say she had a chap who needed to be given something but who needed to be kept out of Cabinet because he could not be trusted there, and ask Matt McCarten what could be done with that chap.

💬 Darren Hughes: No. 13.

That member lusts after being No. 13; he lusts after getting ranked as high as that. We will wait to see whether he ever rises to those giddy heights. Mr Hughes is the only 20-year-old who has to ask a 45-year-old for a date, to get publicity from that. Probably she was a 55-year-old, actually. That aside, this legislation should have been passed, and the road should have been being built right now.

I rise on behalf of the ACT party to speak on this bill. I have to say that the response of the Government to this proposal is simply indicative of Labour’s failure in the whole area of transport. When Labour came to power it inherited a state of gridlock in the Auckland region. It tried to pretend that it was pro-Auckland, pro-business, and all the rest of it, and that it was going to sort out that region’s transport problems. However, it has totally failed. Its response to this toll road proposal is simply indicative of the extent of its failure. It will not let this bill go through, even though it would actually allow the people of the Rodney area to take the situation into their own hands and to create their own solution, which they are prepared to pay for. The Government will not allow even that to happen.

Instead of approximately half the money collected from the petrol tax every year going into roading, this Government—because of its cosy arrangement with the Green Party—is putting that money into walkways, cycle tracks, railways, and shipping. It is putting it into all sorts of things apart from roading. So, right now, less money than ever before is being invested in our roads. Given the problems that the Auckland region and other cities around New Zealand have, that is an absolute disgrace.

There is another issue here. I heard Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith, the instigator of this bill, talking about how the Government seems to have turned its back on the Rodney area, but he forgot one simple fact—that the Rodney district and the Northland region in general are held by National members of Parliament. The real reason why this Government has walked away from the Northland and Rodney areas is that National Party members hold those areas, not Government members and their cronies.

This bill was intended to alleviate the gridlock traffic problems in the Whangaparaoa area. I was not on the Local Government and Environment Committee that considered this member’s bill, but I understand that Labour supported it going to a select committee. From what we have heard today in the debate, the bill was then blocked by the Green Party. We know that the Green Party is anti-roads at the best of times, so it would certainly be anti large roads, which this one would be.

But this situation is just part of a very sad picture for the Rodney region. Not only does it have gridlock in the Whangaparaoa Peninsula area; it also has the most outstanding disaster zone, in terms of roading in New Zealand, sitting right in its midst. The northern motorway, our premier motorway, stops dead in the middle of a paddock in Orewa, then winds down through a residential area before eventually hitching up with a very dangerous stretch of State Highway 1. This project, called the Albany to Puhoi realignment B2 (ALPURT B2), a 7-kilometre stretch of roading, should have been finished as soon as the resource consents came through from the Environment Court. We know that those consents were held up for about 6 years, but earlier this year all of them came through.

Before Labour became the Government, Transit New Zealand promised that completion of that motorway would be its No. 1 priority. In fact, it was hanging out, waiting for the consents to come through. But after the change of Government the membership on the boards of Transfund and Transit changed, and, instead of the project being the No. 1 priority, all of a sudden it was shoved right down to the bottom, and, according to the original plan, it probably would not have been completed for about another 15 years. This Labour Government has shepherded that absolute disgrace of a major motorway stopping in a paddock. It is a dangerous part of the State highway, and costs, according to Transit, $1 million a week in lost opportunities for the people in the Northland region. This Government’s response is simply to say “Tough!”. Well, I say it is not good enough for a Government to turn its back on State Highway 1, which is part of its jurisdiction and part of its funding regime.

Instead, we now have the Land Transport Management Act, which, I understand from talking to the sorts of companies that should be lining up to invest in these public-private partnerships, is virtually unworkable. They ask why anybody would invest their money in one of these toll road proposals, given the terrible conditions that this Labour Government puts on them. The Government is heralding the Land Transport Management Act as the answer to New Zealand’s traffic gridlock problems—“We’ll fix it all with toll roading.”—but meanwhile it is delivering to the country legislation that will not even work. Again, that is simply indicative of this Government’s failure to come to terms with one of its most important priorities, which is to provide infrastructure so that New Zealanders can get on with doing their jobs, running their businesses, and building wealth and productivity for this country.

I understand that right now in the Auckland region only three roading projects are ready and able to go. They are the ALPURT B2 road—now that the consents have all gone through—which would cost about $140 million; the Penlink road, which would cost about $50 million; and, I understand, the Greenhithe Bridge proposal, which is also ready to go.

💬 Dail Jones: It’s under way.

It is under way, I understand. But the Government has $225 million in Transfund’s bank account that is earmarked for projects in Auckland that will come on stream one day, and it should be saying that as that “one day” is months, if not years, away, it will put some of that $225 million into completing ALPURT B2 and into getting the Penlink road on the go. That would be the sensible thing for this Government to do. Will it do it? Absolutely not!

I have one concern about ALPURT B2. I have talked to the Minister of Transport, so he knows about the shambles at the end of State Highway 1’s northern motorway. He admits that it has to be fixed, but I have one huge difference of opinion with him. He says that the road that completes the northern motorway from Orewa to Puhoi should be a toll road. Well, I say that is irresponsible. It is State Highway 1! State Highway 1 is funded by people paying petrol tax money, by that money going into Transfund’s bank account, and by the Government using that money to build State highways. Any deviation from ALPURT B2 being a State-funded highway is a total abrogation of responsibility by this Government.

It is quite distressing for a Northland MP to see the way in which this Government has been dragging its feet on roading issues. It costs that region so much every single day in lost opportunities and in the extra cost of transport to anything going on in Northland. Many Aucklanders do not go north when they could, or when they want to, because they know they will get stuck in traffic. Why would people have a beach house in the Kaipara district when they would be stuck on the motorway for ages? That is one of the reasons why Labour has been dragging its heels on these issues. It wants to keep people in Auckland, where its voters are—we know that—instead of allowing them to go and live in the north, which is an area with a bunch of National members of Parliament who are actually doing a very good job in this House.

The fact that this bill is about to be voted down by the Government is, again, indicative of its failure even to be concerned about completing infrastructure. If it voted for the bill, that would be a very, very good indication that it does care. I say that it does not care. It will vote the bill down, and that is a disgrace.