Transport Legislation Bill

I move, That the Transport Legislation Bill be now read a first time. It is my intention to move, at the appropriate time, that the Transport Legislation Bill be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for consideration, that the committee report by 29 October 2004, and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during oral questions, and during any evening on a day in which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area on a day the House is sitting, despite Standing Orders 191 , 193(a) , and 194(1)(b) and (c).

This bill is the culmination of the Government’s work to structure the transport sector so that it can deliver the affordable, integrated, safe, responsive, and sustainable transport system New Zealand deserves by 2010. It builds upon the New Zealand Transport Strategy and is the enabling legislation for changes made through the recent Government transport sector review. The strategy is important in that it moves beyond the narrow focus of the past to a broader vision, to provide a truly integrated approach to transport planning and provision in support of wider social, economic, and environmental goals. The strategy sets out the Government’s five objectives for transport as assisting economic development, assisting safety and personal security, improving access and mobility, protecting and promoting public health, and ensuring environmental sustainability.

This bill also builds on the Land Transport Management Act, which restructured the transport funding arrangements and is the type of legislation passed to ensure more roads and public transport infrastructure is built. More recently, this was followed by the Local Government (Auckland) Amendment Act, which enabled the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and Auckland Regional Holdings. These changes helped to realise the Investing for Growth package announced by the Government in December 2003 to address the transport problems of Auckland and of the rest of the country. This Government will get New Zealand moving again.

Through the Government transport sector review we looked at the structure of the sector and how well this was suited to meeting the expanded brief laid out in the transport strategy. We found it was good at delivering against the old brief, but it could produce better outcomes for the economy, business, communities, and the travelling public if restructured to focus on the delivery of the objectives of the strategy. This bill will enable that restructuring to take place. Key to this is addressing a number of structural and resourcing issues that were an impediment to providing leadership across the sector, rather than on a type by type basis.

The review identified opportunities to improve the level of collaboration across agencies in terms of policy development, planning, funding, and the delivery of solutions to New Zealand’s transport needs, in line with the objectives of the strategy. The review also identified that the Land Transport Safety Authority, the Maritime Safety Authority, and the Civil Aviation Authority were constrained by too narrow a brief. In the light of these findings from the review, the bill enables the formation of a new agency, Land Transport New Zealand, comprising the operational responsibilities of the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund New Zealand, following the transferral of policy functions from those two bodies to the Ministry of Transport. The Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund will be disestablished.

The bill enables an increase in the scope of the Maritime Safety Authority and of the Civil Aviation Authority, to take into account the objectives of the New Zealand Transport Strategy in their work. There is no change to the primary safety responsibilities of those authorities. The bill enables the integration of the current Safety Administration Programme—which contains $275 million, including GST, in funding for the 2003-04 year—into the National Land Transport Programme. This safety funding covers a diverse set of outputs, ranging from safety information and promotion to road policing.

The establishment of Land Transport New Zealand will enable a strong multi-objective focus to be taken, closer and more effective linkages to local government, enhanced regional presence and resourcing, and a better integrated approach to land transport planning and delivery. As a result, local government and local communities alike can expect better understanding of their transport needs, and improved responsiveness to them.

The changes in this bill mainly affect the Ministry of Transport, the Land Transport Safety Authority, and Transfund. There are no major changes to the current structure, activities, or staff of Transit New Zealand, the Maritime Safety Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Transport Accident Investigation Commission, or the Aviation Security Service. Most employees in the agencies affected by these changes will continue in their current roles, with some movement between agencies as functions are transferred. No material change is expected in the overall numbers of staff employed within the sector, however the Ministry of Transport will grow by about 50 employees as policy roles are transferred over from the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund.

The balance of Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund roles will be brought together in Land Transport New Zealand. The funding for the National Land Transport Programme will not be affected by the changes. Although there are some functional changes and a general expansion of the sector’s brief to cover the objectives of the New Zealand Transport Strategy, there will be no reduction in the emphasis placed on safety. The bill includes specific measures designed to improve search and rescue arrangements. The responsible Minister will have the primary responsibility for coordination of search and rescue functions among agencies.

The bill also covers the various related technical amendments to other Acts that are affected by this legislation. The Government intends that New Zealanders should be well served by an integrated, affordable, safe, and sustainable transport system, as set out through the New Zealand Transport Strategy. There is a need for Government transport agencies as a whole to jointly own and contribute to the achievement of the strategy. This bill provides the institutional arrangements for the Government’s transport sector agencies that will underpin that strategy. This bill will overcome past fragmentation and enable the sector to take a broader and more collaborative approach to transport planning and management. I urge members to support the bill.

I say at the outset to the Minister and to the House that the National Party will support this legislation—certainly in going to the select committee, and probably right through the House—because it is a step in the right direction in terms of making what I think are some sensible modifications that are required. My history in the transport portfolio goes right back to the early 1990s when, as a Minister in Cabinet, I oversaw what I thought was some quite sensible restructuring of what was a monolith in those days: one huge Ministry of Transport, which had everything in it. It was a little bit like the old Department of Scientific and Industrial Research. Nobody knew what it was, what it did, or how the staff did what they did, but it had thousands of people in it. We went about breaking that ministry up into its various component parts. I think we got most of that right, although this bill today takes one extra step, which I support.

We tried to break the operational elements of transport into their particular components, by setting up a Civil Aviation Authority, whose job was to go out and manage safety practices within the civil aviation world, and a Maritime Safety Authority, whose job was to deal with the transport sector in maritime terms. There was another body—the name of which I still have trouble in using, because of the counselling I had to receive over what it did to me along the way—called the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think one of the reasons that authority was such a difficult organisation to deal with was that it had some control over policy as well as the operational side of land transport. The pleasure I feel today in seeing this bill can be expressed by saying that responsibility for transport policy has to come back into the Ministry of Transport, where the Minister has some say over things, can express some guidance about what Government policies are, and can see policies develop. Policy should not be developed at an arm’s length from the Minister, or we will have the situation of a Crown entity going ahead and doing its own thing, and then leaving time bombs for the Minister to wake up to in the morning and find they have just exploded on him or her.

I will give an example of that. I was woken early one morning, when I was the Minister, by a journalist from National Radio’s Morning Report, who asked whether I wanted to comment on the latest discussion document the Land Transport Safety Authority had released, which was about safety helmets for motorcar drivers. I really thought that someone was pulling my leg.

💬 Darren Hughes: But it wasn’t?

No. That was the problem. My first instinct, because I was bleary-eyed after a very late night, was that it must be the first of April. But it was not; it was something like October. So it was not that. I thought the incident could not be happening to me. First of all, I thought that it was not a Morning Report journalist who was asking me to comment, but one of my colleagues who was playing a trick on me. But it was not; the call concerned a genuine discussion document. Somebody in the Land Transport Safety Authority had had a light bulb go off in his or her head, and had thought that because helmets had worked on motorbikes and were stopping head injuries, the authority should put out a paper, without telling the Minister—the authority was supposed to have a no-surprises regime, whereby the Minister knew things were coming, but I was not told of this—with a proposal that the authority would require safety helmets for motorcar drivers.

Now, I want members to think about the implications of that. They can take the example of a Remuera housewife, who pops down to the town centre and has a lovely $300 hairdo done. It is just beautiful—coiffed to magnificence. She is off to a ball that night. She would get out to her BMW, a 7 series, be about to head off home, and she would have to put on the old safety helmet. So I told the person on Morning Report—and sadly, the reporter used the line over the air, so it got me into a bit of trouble—that the person from the Land Transport Safety Authority who had put out such a hopeless piece of nothingness would find it difficult to sit down for the rest of the week. But that sort of stuff went on.

The other thing I am still getting counselling for was the window-tinting regulations, an issue that went on and on. The Land Transport Safety Authority was setting policy about how much tint one could put on windows and—members will love this—it even said that in vans with rows of seats running back behind the driver, it would make a concession. It said it would let people tint the windows that were further back than the driver, but that they had to put an opaque partition behind the driver, so the driver could not turn around and look out of those windows. That is what the authority said. We went through a nightmare with that outfit. The regulations went to the Regulations Review Committee. I hoped that the committee would kill them, but it did not, and we went around and around. So I have to say that today is one of those days when the empire strikes back, and I feel good about this bill. I congratulate the Minister on this bit of the bill at least, because policy—the real determination about the things we want to be done—is to be brought back into the ministry.

I would still want to keep some form of blowtorch on the performance of the Land Transport Safety Authority. I think that it has improved dramatically; let me give it a bit of a shot in the arm, as well. I think the new director, David Wright, has improved the operation of the authority and made it better, but there is still more room for improvement. This bill is a good step in that direction. I think there should be the same situation with regard to every one of the operational agencies: the Land Transport Safety Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority, and the Maritime Safety Authority. They should deal with operational matters only, and not start to get into the madness and lunacy of policy setting. They are not equipped to set policy, and it used to always come back on the Minister’s plate, as if it was the Minister’s fault and the Minister was to blame, even when he or she had not been told the agency was thinking of doing something.

When this reform was first announced, I was a bit fearful that it would go much further than it has, and I am pleased it has not done that. There was a whole lot of talk about setting up one huge roading operation that did the provision of both roading and the funding for roading again, and I am pleased the Minister did not go in that way. As a former Minister, I separated the purchasing and the provision of roading, and I still think there is some sense to that. I still think that it was wrong that Transit, which had all the money, was also the arbiter of how much went towards State highways—which it ran—and how much went into local roading subsidies, alternatives to roads, subsidies for buses and ferries, and the public passenger transport subsidy. It seemed ridiculous that Transit was both the judge and jury, in terms of the process it was involved in. It was receiving all the money in its coffers, and then deciding whether to fund a project it proposed itself or to fund a project proposed by other people. That was the reason for splitting the Transit operation, which we did in 1996, I think. We did that to make sure that we had both a purchaser of services—be they State highways or local roads—and a provider of State highways. That was being done within Transit, but in fact Transfund had a lot of flexibility about how it went about its purchasing.

I do not have a problem with Transfund being merged into the operational side of the Land Transport Safety Authority. It is really a merger in name only, and I am sure there will still be a department or a division within the authority that is responsible for the purchasing of roading outcomes and alternatives to roading. So maybe that really is just an efficiency gain in terms of some overheads—not needing to have two directors and two boards. I will watch with interest to see that Transfund does not get subsumed into that operation and lose some of the efficiency gains that it could generate, if the purchasing is done properly. But overall in the first half of this bill, with regard to the reforms, I think that the Government has moved in the right direction. I am happy to say that is so, and that this bill is not the cataclysmic, massive restructuring that some of the industry were fearful of. I have found that most people within the industry sector think that, in principle at least, this is the right way to go. We will watch the situation, obviously, as the bill goes through the select committee. We will listen to the submissions, and there may be some tidying-up of detail around the fringes that needs to be done.

The other area of the bill concerns the coordination of search and rescue, which I think is desperately needed. One of the problems in the old civil aviation legislation was that the Civil Aviation Authority was given the mandate to run the whole search and rescue operation. Clearly it has a proper role to play in terms of a lot of the accidents we have; any aircraft accidents would obviously have to have some guidance and control from that authority. But there have been some examples—for instance, a situation where there was quite significant loss of life off Oamaru in a boating tragedy—where it was clear, if one was thinking about it, that the Maritime Safety Authority might have been a better agency to have an overall brief to watch over how that search and rescue operation was conducted and who was in charge of it. Again, I think it is probably right that responsibility for search and rescue operations is being brought back to the Minister to make some determinations. This legislation will pull out the mandate that the Civil Aviation Authority has had, and put it back with the Minister—or at least that it is what I understand the legislation will look like. It will give the Minister the right to determine the agencies responsible for search and rescue, what they should do, and where the various boundaries lie in terms of what the various agencies do. Again, it is quite a sensible move.

However, I will just recap, in the last minute that I have, by saying once again that the most important thing, whenever Government agencies are functioning, is to have—[Interruption] Goodness me, what was that? My watch says—OK, never mind. I have 2 more minutes, so that means I have 12 minutes for this speech.

💬 Darren Hughes: Start again.

No, no—I have more important stories to tell, if members would like to hear them.

💬 Opposition Member: Go ahead.

“Go ahead.”, says the whip. Yes, I have even more stories to tell, if members want me to. They will really stop members from sleeping at night.

The other thing that I would want is some more accountability in the Land Transport Safety Authority with regard to specific outcomes. Today in the House I think I heard the Minister of Police wax lyrical about the road toll coming down. Well, I say to the Minister that the road toll is not coming down. I ask him to go and look at the graph. The road toll came down progressively during the 1990s and into the beginning of the 2000s, but it has since turned and is now heading back up. I think some very serious questions need to be asked of the police with regard to their enforcement of the road code, because I think there is some really ludicrous stuff going on, including situations where speed cameras are pinging people for driving at 1 kilometre an hour over the tolerance level. Those people are law-abiding citizens—for example, a vicar on his or her way to church—and that makes the public angry. It makes the public very angry because those drivers were not endangering people, but were travelling along at the normal speeds that others were travelling at, but the speed cameras were just clicking away. I also put some onus back on to the Land Transport Safety Authority for some of that. Its focus has often been on the bizarre and the extreme, and it has lost sight of what the major gains are in terms of road safety, what best practice is, and which international practices are to be followed. I think that as we are a small country that really does not have a great deal of, say, crash testing and stress testing ability and so on, we should be very sensible and look to learn from the experience of alternative jurisdictions.

So overall, I think this bill is halfway towards being reasonable legislation. The National Party certainly will support its referral to a select committee, and we will take great interest in what members of the public have to say in their submissions.

The debate is in danger of becoming congested by Ministers and former Ministers of Transport, so I will take a very brief call. I will not get into the sharing of my inner feelings in such a manner as Mr Williamson, even though I could tell some stories myself, because the health of our whips might not be enhanced by that process.

As the chair of the select committee, I look forward to this bill coming before it, and to perusing it to make sure we get good legislation. I am pleased that we will have a structure that will put into place Government agencies that are able to keep pace with the rapid progress this Government is making in transport—in improving infrastructure and public transport throughout the country. It is a good bill and I commend it to the House.

New Zealand First will support the bill going to the select committee. We are quite relaxed about the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund joining forces and becoming Land Transport New Zealand. We hope that the new agency will be structured in such a way that it will not only be able to fulfil its functions, as stipulated in the bill, but it will also be able from time to time to give the Minister practical, hands-on advice on what needs to be done in terms of land transport, to advance the economic well-being of the country.

I thought the Minister said in his opening speech that one of the responsibilities of the new authority would be to give economic advice, but I cannot readily find that responsibility in the bill. I hope it is in there somewhere; if not, I hope the select committee will be bold enough to consider inserting some sort of provision or recommendation that Land Transport New Zealand is able to give sound and practical economic advice to the Minister, so that we can develop this country and its infrastructure.

I feel, frankly, that over a period of years land transport, and roading in particular, has not kept pace with vehicle traffic and numbers. Something needs to be done, with some degree of urgency. I know that the Labour Government is well in league with the Green Party, which basically wants to tear up roads, but I am hoping that the organisation resulting from the amalgamation of the Land Transport Safety Authority and Transfund will be able to give the Minister some sound, hands-on, practical advice.

One of my areas of concern is section 69, “Functions of Authority”, inserted by clause 33. Paragraph (h) states that one of those functions is “to investigate and review land transport accidents and incidents in its capacity as the responsible safety authority, subject to any limitations set out in the Transport Accident Investigation Commission Act 1990:”. I have some real concerns about how we investigate accidents in this country—concerns not so much about land transport accidents but more about maritime accidents. I thought a Transport Legislation Bill—the title of this bill—would be an appropriate bill for addressing those sorts of concerns.

I am specifically talking about the investigations of accidents by the Civil Aviation Authority and the Maritime Safety Authority of New Zealand. The accident that comes to mind is one involving ships called the Sydney Express and the Maria Luisa. On one cool, calm, dark night in Wellington Harbour, I think in December 1996, the Sydney Express, which was a container ship, literally rammed into the Maria Luisa, overturned her, and five men died.

When one looks at the way that that accident was investigated and reported upon, one has to speak one’s concern. Allegedly, the police did look at it, but they told me they listened to the Maritime Safety Authority and relied heavily on the authority. The Maritime Safety Authority and the Transport Accident Investigation Commission supposedly conducted independent investigations, but I have now found out that evidence that was given confidentially to the Transport Accident Investigation Commission got into the hands of the Maritime Safety Authority. Evidence from the master and third officer of the Sydney Express got into the hands of the Maritime Safety Authority very early on in the piece—months before the authority made its final determination—and the authority will not now release that evidence to the families of the crew of the Maria Luisa.

I am working through the Ombudsman right now and, hopefully, we will get access to that evidence. There was no formal inquiry. There was nothing but a few experts gathered in a few rooms who made a determination. The deputy coroner who took charge of the case ruled that there was no need to have an inquest because there had been so many inquiries into the issue. It now turns out that there were no truly independent inquiries. There was a degree of cooperation—to put it mildly—by which a conclusion was reached.

I say that that is not good enough, and that this bill is the ideal legislation in which to look at how we examine accidents in this country. I feel particularly sad about the Maria Luisa incident, because 5 men died and there is no conclusion, at all, for their families. They are still grieving.

To some degree, the crew were blamed for the accident, but there was no cross-examination of witnesses. There was nothing. There was simply a decision arrived at by so-called experts. I have met many experts who disagree with those findings and, as a master mariner myself, I have to say that I was concerned when I read the transcripts of the evidence that the Maritime Safety Authority had compiled.

This bill gives an ideal opportunity to examine, in some detail, how the organisations of the Maritime Safety Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority, and the new authority should investigate accidents and report on them. I believe that the process should be a good deal more transparent than it currently is.

This is a small bill in the scheme of things, and I suggest that it will go through largely unnoticed. I doubt whether there will be terribly many submitters. But the bill could have a profound effect on transport and its operations in this country, so we have to get it right.

The Transport and Industrial Relations Committee has to address this issue in a meaningful way. I respect Mr Gosche. By and large he does a very, very good job in chairing that committee, but the committee has been known to make some blues.

💬 Darren Hughes: What?

Oh, yes.

💬 Darren Hughes: No!

Oh, yes—the holidays legislation caused me some anguish; I was there. There are aspects about the Holidays Act that New Zealand First firmly supports, but we did warn the committee and we did warn the House that the legislation might be going a bit too far and will need to be rectified. I do not think we will have the same sort of opportunity with this legislation—we have to get it right.

New Zealand First will support the bill going to the select committee. I hope we will play a positive and strong role in endeavouring to get the whole thing addressed correctly. So I will close on that point, by simply saying that New Zealand First will support this bill going to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and we will see how it goes from there.

Peace has broken out in the House and I find myself, most unusually, agreeing with what the two previous Ministers to speak have said, which suggests to me that I should say rather little. There is, of course, quite a bit of detail to be sorted out at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and the Greens look forward to taking part in that proceeding, but, generally, we see this bill as pretty non-controversial.

The big things in transport have happened. With the new strategy and the new Land Transport Management Act we have set a new direction for transport. We have set new objectives, goals, and priorities. The main issue now is to make sure that that is carried through into implementation on the ground. I have to say there is always an element of “business as usual” after we change legislation in this way, and there is a need to manage that. Therefore, it is now important that we strengthen the capacity of the Ministry of Transport , which, frankly, does not have the resources it needs to do the job that is currently required of it; so we support that.

Rationalising the way safety is delivered across modes, and search and rescue, is sensible. I alerted the Minister, during the Review of the Centre, to the fact that we did not support merging Transfund and Transit. We put a lot of effort, in the last legislation, into getting their respective roles right, and we felt that should not be changed. I am glad that the Minister did not go in that direction, either. I do not have strong feelings about the merger of Transfund and the Land Transport Safety Authority. It may work well, it may turn out to have some problems, but we do not have a strong view either way. We will just have to wait and see on that.

Having said those few words, I can say that we look forward to the debate at the select committee.

The ACT party supports this bill being referred to the select committee, but before I move on to why we do so, I would like to say that we are becoming increasingly incensed at this Government’s referral motions, which are an abuse of the process and an abuse of power. I am referring to Ministers’ requests to dispense with Standing Orders 191 to 194, so that select committees are allowed to meet on Fridays and in an evening when the House is sitting. Another thing that this Minister has requested is to ram this bill through with a report-back date of 26 October. The other parties have already signalled that they support this bill’s referral to a select committee, and that makes that abuse of power even more insidious, because there is absolutely no need for the Minister to request that referral date.

The Government does this increasingly. It is not only an abuse that affects smaller parties; it is also an abuse of the submitters, who have the right to come to select committees and be heard by those select committees, and an abuse of the right of the members of those select committees—especially the Opposition members—to put questions to those submitters. We are increasingly seeing that this Government wants to ram legislation through. It has early report-back dates, with sittings at any time of the day, the night, and the week, and in some cases the time for questions is reduced to 30 seconds. A submitter puts a submission before a select committee and members have 30 seconds to ask questions.

💬 Hon Mark Gosche: Not on my committee.

The member opposite is shaking his head. I suggest he sits in on the select committee that is dealing with the foreshore and seabed legislation at the moment, because that is exactly what is happening. It is an abuse of democracy. When I came into Parliament I was told that we in this Parliament have a privilege that I do not think any other Westminster system has whereby submitters can appear before a select committee, give their submissions, and be questioned, so that the public can have their input into legislation. If this Government keeps abusing that privilege, then it is about time that all Opposition parties started fighting back. The ACT party will be moving an amendment today to the referral motion to take out all the words after the word “consideration”. I think all parties in this House that believe in democracy should vote in favour of that amendment and stop this abuse of process. It is outrageous and it is increasingly happening. It is increasingly what this Government is doing with bills that it is introducing to the House.

Small parties do not have enough members to be everywhere at once. We have to make decisions. Some of us are on two or three select committees. The Government would argue that list MPs have the time to do so. That is not the case. A list MP’s constituency stretches from North Cape to Bluff. Sometimes the workload can be triple that of a constituency MP. List MPs cannot be here on Fridays in a week when the House is sitting; they have to be elsewhere. They lose their representation of the people whom they are speaking up for at the select committee. It is about time the Opposition started to fight back, and we are starting it.

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: It’s an affront to democracy.

It is an affront to democracy. As I said, this is good legislation because we have seen, in the whole area of transport, all these big fiefdoms being able to develop their own policies and fighting with each other. We have the Maritime Safety Authority, the Civil Aviation Authority, the Land Transport Safety Authority, Transfund, Transit, and the Ministry of Transport. Do members know why this has happened? Do members know why we have got to this situation with transport in this country? It is because for so long we have had weak Ministers of Transport. Under the 1984 Labour Government the Ministry of Transport was reduced to 20 personnel and out of that has grown these enormous—

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: Who was the Minister?

Yes, who was the Minister?

💬 Hon Ken Shirley: It was Richard Prebble.

It was the Hon Richard Prebble—the last strong Minister of Transport.

💬 Darren Hughes: She’s embarrassed!

It was a rhetorical question, but the baby over there would not know what that meant. We need a strong Minister of Transport. This Government has had so many changes of Ministers of Transport, and we still do not see a strong Minister of Transport.

We have a recommendation from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that this Government hold an inquiry into the sale process of Paraparaumu Airport. What is this Government doing with that recommendation? It is just shelving it. It has decided that it might do something by 1 October. Questions need to be asked about whether there is a conflict of interest with that inquiry, in terms of personnel from the Ministry of Transport who were involved with the sale process having gone to work in the Minister’s office, and having too much influence on the Minister in terms of whether an inquiry will be held. There are people out there who have fought a long and hard battle to have an inquiry into that sale process. They deserve answers.

As I said, we are supporting this bill being referred to the select committee, but we are furious at this Government’s increasing abuse of power when it tries to ram legislation through the House. When I last looked New Zealand was not a dictatorship; we still had democracy and the right of the Opposition parties to be heard and to have some input. But that is increasingly being taken away by this Government. It is an appalling affront, and any Opposition party that does not support our amendment is standing on the top of a slippery slope of abuse of power.

All I can do for the National Party over here is endorse ACT’s proposal that all parties in this House—apart from the undemocratic Labour Party, which is riding roughshod over process—support the motion that we dispense with the Labour Party Government’s proposal that we ride roughshod over Standing Orders 191, 192, and 193.

That may not have been so bad had the Labour Party Government not been continually doing it over this parliamentary term. Members will recall that the new seabed and foreshore select committee—which I think is called the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee—has dispensed with Standing Order 191, which is about meetings not happening on Fridays except by leave of the committee. It states: “Except by leave of the committee, a select committee may not meet on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House.”, but, no, the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee has ridden roughshod over that Standing Order. Standing Order 192, “Place of meeting”, states: “A select committee may meet at any place within New Zealand. It must be authorised by the House before it can meet outside New Zealand.” It has also been dispensed with by the Fisheries and Other Sea-related Legislation Committee. Standing Order 193, “Meetings outside Wellington area”, states: “A committee may meet outside the Wellington area,—(a) during a sitting of the House, only with the agreement of the Business Committee”—Labour is riding roughshod over that—“and (b) otherwise, only if the committee has itself agreed to the place for its meeting.”

That is happening far too often, and we will join ACT in opposing the proposal that this bill be considered on Fridays, and in places outside Wellington without that first having gone to the Business Committee, and all the other issues in the Standing Orders that are being overruled. They are not put there as a joke, as the House well knows. The Standing Orders are the Speaker’s second bible. I know that the Standing Orders are important to Mr Speaker. He has watched them being ridden roughshod over. They were not put there in vain.

In saying that, I would like to point out that the National Party supports this bill being referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We understand that it is to report back on 29 October. We have members on that committee who are enthusiastic to see this bill tweaked where it needs to be, but, on the whole, we support it.

I would like to take up some of the Hon Maurice Williamson’s comments about the decision for this legislation actually to split off the policy functions of the Land Transport Safety Authority and bring them back into the Ministry of Transport. In his view, and certainly in the view of much of Parliament, the policy and operational functions being in the Land Transport Safety Authority has gone on for far too long. There have been too many surprises. Legislation and regulation in the transport sector have tended to run away from Ministers in this Labour Government more than most. I acknowledge that part of that is incompetence, but it is also to do with the fact that the Land Transport Safety Authority has had a policy function as well as an operational function. Having the majority of the policy brought back into the ministry is certainly a good thing.

It was interesting to hear about the issue of safety helmets. When Maurice Williamson was Minister of Transport he was woken up one morning and asked to comment on the Land Transport Safety Authority’s bright idea of having safety helmets for those in automobiles, trucks, and little minis all around the country. How absurd that idea was! How could it ever have got into a policy document? It was absolutely absurd. I think of the mother of six from Pakuranga whom Maurice Williamson often talks about. What if she had to have seven little helmets stored in her car to be used every time she wanted to drive down to the local dairy to pick up some milk? What if she had to have seven little car seats and seven little helmets? I mean, how far does it go? One might need to have gloves next, and knee-pads, and on it goes. That is the problem with having the Land Transport Safety Authority too focused on those sorts of policy decisions, and not being accountable, I guess politically, to the electorate, which is, generally, common sense. Sometimes regulations tend to run away with people.

Talking about the transparency of car windows and not being able to see through them, I remember that argument. I have a woman in the Whangarei electorate who is still battling Land Transport Safety Authority proposals about how much of her side windows she should be allowed to cover with transparencies. Having spent 500 bucks putting stickers on the side windows of her car, she was told she had to tear them off. That was understandable, except that she had received three warrants of fitness while those stickers were on the car; all of a sudden, apparently the warrant of fitness people had got it wrong, and she, at her expense, had to take them off.

💬 Simon Power: That can’t be right.

No. The authority then suggested that she put transparent stickers on the windows—ones with colours that people can see through. She spent a couple of grand on that, and, again, the car went through warrant of fitness checks and was fine. She then got pulled up on that, and had to tear those off, as well. That is the difficulty when something like the Land Transport Safety Authority is involved in operational functions as well as policy functions; we get these absurd, impractical regulations, bureaucracy runs away with it, and every New Zealander is the poorer for it.

Of course, we know of the authority’s focus on the road toll issue. We heard the Minister of Police say in the House today that road tolls are dropping. We know that is not true. They levelled out, and they have just started increasing again. He has police out there collecting revenue for his Minister of Finance, Michael Cullen, to spend on all sorts of pet projects. He has his police collecting revenue under a quota system, and it is not having an impact on speeding drivers, dangerous events, or the number of deaths of New Zealanders on the roads. We need to ensure that the Land Transport Safety Authority does not give permission, in effect, for the police to be collecting revenue instead of focusing on police work, which is what the police should be doing.

In fact, I am actually doing a survey at the moment of people in Northland. I have received just over 3,000 survey forms back from the public on whether they feel the police are spending too much of their time and resources on road work—that is, collecting revenue on the roads—or whether they are getting enough resources for police work, which is catching criminals who are stealing, catching violent offenders, and catching all those others who are causing mayhem in our society. I will be very interested to go through that survey and find out whether people in Northland are concerned that there is too much focus on revenue collecting, and not enough on policing. I will certainly be sending those results to the Minister of Police. He might get a short, sharp shock from those results. He might decide that a quota system for ticketing is not helpful to New Zealanders and not helpful with regard to their relationship with the police.

Maurice Williamson also touched on the issue of search and rescue operations—those undertaken or overseen by the Civil Aviation Authority in the past—and the change in the bill to give the Minister discretion as to who does oversee search and rescue operations. Clearly, it could be the role of the Maritime Safety Authority, and that would be better in many, many situations. This change was brought about by the sinking of a recreation vehicle near Oamaru some time ago, where several lives were lost. A review of what happened there questioned whether the search and rescue had been carried out in the best way it could have been. The authority’s involvement in the overseeing of it actually came up wanting, and that led to the changes in this bill.

So we support this bill being referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, but we will also support ACT’s proposed amendment to the motion.

I rise on behalf of United Future to support this legislation being introduced into the House. It is with a great deal of satisfaction, really, that we see another piece of legislation that is focusing upon transport issues. When I first entered this Parliament I had a burden for the issue of families. Second to that was the issue with regard to our transport network in this country, and the number of New Zealanders who were being injured or killed on our roads as a result of poor roading infrastructure, as well as other things.

When I first stood for Parliament in 1999 I spoke a lot in my speeches about some very practical things that could be done to improve things in New Zealand. I had recently read a little publication called The Dog and Lemon Guide, which I still hold to be full of some very practical things. One of the things the book recommended was the introduction of crash testing results for automobiles. It has been pleasing to see that introduced in the last few days so that New Zealand motorists can choose safer cars when they purchase them, and I think, ultimately, that will have an effect upon the safety statistics that we all long for in this country. So there has been much happening with regard to transport, in terms of the legislative programme of this House. United Future is pleased again to rise and speak in support of the Transport Legislation Bill.

A long time has passed since the Government transport sector was restructured in such a way that a single agency has the authority and resources to take the lead in developing and implementing transport policy, and that administrative overlap and wastage is minimised. I think we all agree that there will be significant improvements arising from the restructuring that this bill promotes. Ultimately it will give our taxpayers a much better efficiency in the use of their taxpayer funds.

United Future has worked closely with this Government on transport issues. It has been my pleasure to work with the Hon Paul Swain, and now with the new Minister of Transport, the Hon Pete Hodgson. In fact, United Future is very pleased that the Government has adopted so much of United Future’s transport policy. We will continue to work cooperatively with the Government throughout the rest of this term. We are determined to see addressed the chronic underfunding of New Zealand’s transport infrastructure. We are determined to see reforms that will enable much-needed new roading projects all over the country to be expedited.

We have already made significant legislative reforms that will enable alternative sources of funding, such as public-private partnerships, to be identified and utilised. We have also ensured that extra funding for all regions, not just Auckland, will be made available from petrol excise tax increases soon to come, and that a more favourable proportion of this tax will be spent on roads, rather than ending up in the Crown account.

However, there is little point in securing extra funding if it is just going to be frittered away by an uncoordinated bureaucracy, or tied up while waiting for projects to get the go-ahead. That is why United Future is so pleased to see this legislation. By strengthening the role of the Ministry of Transport, this single agency will be able to take the lead in developing and implementing transport strategy. Rather than having one agency pulling in one direction, and one pulling in another, by spending road funding money in an inefficient and uncoordinated manner as they go, we will see road money being spent strategically and efficiently, thereby maximising the gains from increased funding.

It has made no sense to us in United Future why we had to have a statutory independent body, such as Transfund, to make so many significant decisions about road funding, simply because there may have been some suspicion about the Minister fixing the roads in his own back yard, when in consideration that was such a small percentage of the amount of funding that was to be carried out throughout the country, and only led to an increased layer of bureaucracy.

This does not occur in the Ministry of Health, and it does not occur in any other agencies, and I believe that it is time we were able to trust the Minister and the Ministry of Transport to see that road funding is used where it is needed throughout the country.

United Future is also pleased that the longstanding issue over which agency should have primary responsibility for undertaking search and rescue coordination has been resolved. By enabling the Minister of Transport to direct the new Maritime Transport Authority to carry out management administration of national search and rescue in future, rather than the Civil Aviation Authority, we will hopefully see better search and rescue coverage and response times, and avoid a repeat of the incident near Oamaru, which resulted in a tragic loss of life.

The other department that is to be restructured under this bill is the Land Transport Safety Authority. It began with United’s policy, and then was United Future’s policy for some time, to have the Land Transport Safety Authority abolished. I have to say that I have personally been impressed with the work of the new director of the Land Transport Safety Authority, in the time he has been in charge of the authority. I believe that the authority has made significant progress in what it does, and I commend him particularly for adopting a threefold strategy, rather than the old twofold strategy that ignored the need to see our roads built more safely, and the engineering design taken into consideration in the strategy to reduce accidents. But ultimately, it is clear that the policy development of the Land Transport Safety Authority should be transferred to the Ministry of Transport, rather then held in a separate agency. As Phil Heatley said, speaking prior to me, there needed to be a separating of the policy and the operational functions of the Land Transport Safety Authority.

We know, though, that despite the best efforts of the authority, we will arrive at a plateau in this country where we cannot bring down the road toll any further without investing heavily in improving the quality of our roads, so that lunatics who continue to travel at great speed or under the influence of alcohol or drugs, are impeded from being able to kill innocent motorists. We must have more divided highways throughout our highway network, and other engineering initiatives that will produce a safer condition to limit the error factor that will always be with us for as long as human beings are behind the wheel of automobiles.

There will be other things addressed by the select committee, I am sure, as it hears submissions on this bill. There has been a lot of debate today about the speed with which this bill has to go through the House, but United Future is supporting that speed. We believe that it is necessary. We believe that this restructuring has been discussed, and has been provided for for some time. The sooner it can be implemented, the better off motorists and the business network through the country will be, as we can implement all the other initiatives that this Government has been introducing, with the support of United Future. I conclude my comments by indicating that United Future will be supporting the first reading of this bill.

It is my pleasure to engage in debate on the Transport Legislation Bill, on behalf of the National Party. National will be supporting the bill. But we will be taking a very, very close look at it when it goes to the select committee, for a couple of reasons. Firstly, we know that legislation introduced to the House by the Labour Party often lacks rigour and definition. It is often very sloppy indeed. I notice that on many of the select committees I sit on, a huge amount of change is made to legislation introduced by this Government. I am forced to draw the conclusion that there is a lack of work by the Government on these bills before they are rushed into the House. Certainly, we will be looking at this bill very closely. I commend the first speaker for the National Party, the Hon Maurice Williamson. He came down here—

💬 Phil Heatley: A former Minister of Transport

He is a former Minister of Transport. The Hon Mark Gosche, also a former Minister of Transport, noted that the House was flush with former Ministers of Transport—in fact, the Minister himself—

💬 Phil Heatley: The graveyard shift.

Yes, it can be a graveyard shift. It was interesting to watch the current Minister of Transport, and a former Minister of Transport Mark Gosche, listening intently while the Hon Maurice Williams was speaking on the bill, so eloquently. In their heart of hearts they knew that although their absolute performance may have been adequate—a “could do better” on a report card—they were looking to learn about relative performance. I could see in their eyes they were thoroughly enjoying his address and that it added to the debate.

I turn to the first and quite important point about the intent in the bill to override Standing Order 191, which would allow the select committee to sit on a Friday and anywhere in New Zealand. The National Party will have much pleasure in supporting the amendment put up by Deborah Coddington of the ACT party to remove that provision. When I saw that, I wondered why the Government is, all of a sudden, asking for this provision so that the committee can sit on a Friday and anywhere in New Zealand. It is a trend of this administration to try to do this a lot. It happened with the Foreshore and Seabed Bill and a number of others.

The obvious conclusion I have come to is simple. This is not taking place because the Ministers care about whether the select committee sits on a Friday, or in Auckland, Wellington, Christchurch, Dunedin, Taupaki, or anywhere else. Ministers, as members of the public will know, do not sit on a select committee, as such. They attend, if it affects their particular ministry. So it does not affect Ministers. They will not be pushing for this. The reason is that the Government now has a very narrow majority, indeed. It has a one-vote majority. It lost one of its former colleagues, the honourable Tariana Turia. She saw the light and left the Labour Party. She will obviously be back in 2005 with a great many more colleagues, and Labour will have far fewer, as it sits on the Opposition benches. Interestingly, it is now in a position where it cannot afford to vote down—

💬 Dave Hereora: He’s dreaming.

Dreams are free but that is not a dream I have; it is a real-life experience. I have seen it in front of me. I have read the book. I know that it has taken place. Nanaia Mahuta is in the House today. She is a good member but is another who will be under pressure when she goes to the ballot box.

💬 Phil Heatley: She will jump ship.

Yes, but I am digressing, in wondering why the Government is so eager to override this provision and why it has been so eager the whole way through in current legislation, and I was at the point where I was discussing the very slim majority this Government has. It could fall at any time. I have great faith in United Future, which understands that this Government is in its dying throes. It is really a very sick puppy, indeed, if I can put it in those terms. I notice this afternoon that the junior Government whip, Mr Darren Hughes, has gone out and had a haircut. That should not be of any note, but often one does that—[Interruption] I know I have parliamentary privilege so I do not want to abuse this, and I would not say this outside the House, but I suspect the haircut is very much on the basis that he is looking for a job interview. I return to Standing Order 191.

💬 Darren Hughes: Bring it on!

We will be bringing it on.

💬 Hon Member: Don Brash will be running against him.

Don Brash will be running against him in Otaki! Dr Don Brash would wipe it clean in Otaki. What a wonderful Prime Minister of New Zealand he is going to make. I return to Standing Order 191. Why is it that the Government is so keen about that? It is nothing to do with Ministers. We know they do not sit on select committees. We know that the Government has a one-seat majority. The reason is very obvious, and I am sure very obvious to those who are eagerly engaged in this debate today. The reason is that members of Parliament, back-bench members, the cannon-fodder of the Labour Party, cannot afford to be out of the House, for fear of the Government losing a vote. Ministers, well, they would have normally come down to the Chamber and filled up their seats and been happily engaged, and happy to take some of the workload off the back-benchers so they could be out there trying to win their seats. But, no, they cannot now, because the Government is under so much pressure. They are out there going up and down the country trying to talk to people about the things they are doing. It is just not happening. That is my conclusion as to why the Government has gone to so much length on Standing Order 191, and I simply wanted to raise that point.

I want to move on to the guts of the bill, which looks to integrate the policy work from the Land Transport Authority and Transfund into the Ministry of Transport. At first blush that looks like an eminently sensible idea, and we commend the Minister for doing that. But I am interested to note that in the explanatory note of the bill there is no mention of the financial implications of merging the policy work that was under the Land Transport Authority and was in Transfund, into the Ministry of Transport. When the select committee looks at this, I will be asking our members on the select committee to find out about any cost savings taking place. Because one thing we know about this Government is that it is a big spender. It loves spending taxpayers’ money. A $13.9 billion spend-up is what Dr Michael Cullen dished out in the last Budget.

Interestingly enough, most people in New Zealand know that that is a crazy amount of money to be spending on such a build-up, and for someone who claims to be a fiscal conservative—a rather bold assumption I would have thought on Dr Cullen’s part—that is interesting. I am surprised we have not seen any mention of cost savings, and the Opposition will be looking to do that.

I do want to make mention of the purpose of the bill, and if I may read from it for a moment, it states: “The purpose of the review was to consider whether the Government transport sector has the capability and is best arranged to implement the NZTS.” If one looks at the strategy we see some very, very interesting terms. One of them is “ensuring environmental sustainability”. I was interested to hear the speech made by the United Future member, who claimed credit and said that so much of Labour’s current policy in transport is coming from United Future.

That, of course, is a complete and utter hoax. We know that the Labour Party’s transport strategy was not written by the Hon Pete Hodgson, who is now the Minister of Transport. It was not actually written by the previous Minister of Transport, Mark Gosche, either. It was written by an unknown woman—Heather Simpson—who does not sit in the Parliament. She does the negotiations with the Green Party. Interestingly enough, when the Land Transport Management Bill was being debated here on a quiet night it was Heather Simpson, with the Prime Minister, who determined what would be in New Zealand’s transport strategy. That is why it is such a Green strategy and unworkable. That strategy will be soundly rejected by the people of New Zealand when they go to the polls in 12 months’ time.

National will be supporting the legislation. We will take a good look at it in the select committee. I urge members to make sure that the cost savings are found and I urge the Government to remove Standing Order 191 so that it can be tossed from office as soon as possible.

I seek leave to table a report from the Dominion dated 29 September 1998, headed “Minister rules out law on helmets”.

Document, by leave, laid on the Table of the House.

Bill read a first time.

I move, That the Transport Legislation Bill be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for consideration, that the committee report the bill by 29 October 2004, and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting, except during questions for oral answer, and during an evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, and outside the Wellington area on a day the House is sitting, despite Standing Orders 191, 193(a) and 194(1)(b) and (c).

I move, That all the words after the word “consideration” be omitted.