Estimates Debate — Vote Transport

I am delighted to take a call on transport. I apologise to the House if I sound as though I am beating the same old drum, but, tonight, in the very short period of time I have, I will deal with just one very brief part of transport—probably the most important part—which is roading and roading infrastructure.

I will start by saying something positive about the Budget, because I think it is important to say that the National Party has been beating the drum for some time with the message that in these times of economic surplus, when the Government has a lot of money in excess of what it is spending, our view has been that at least what was being collected from motorists by way of petrol tax, road-user charges, and motor vehicle registrations should be spent on the roads. We have run that campaign for some years, now. The very first of the red and blue billboards at the last election basically stated that. And finally, in Budget 2006—and this is where I give some credit to the Minister of Transport, Annette King, before I get on to some other issues where I do not think there is much credit due—the Minister of Finance came out and announced that over the next 5 years the Government would be spending $13.4 billion on our roading network or on land transport, although most of that is for roading, and collecting only $13.1 billion. That means that over the next 5 years, the Government will be spending around $60 million a year more on land transport than it collects from those three forms of revenue.

I congratulate the Minister on that. I doubt whether any political party in this House would actually expect the State to spend more than that on the roads. We have finally got the Government there. When Labour runs the line that it has been spending lots on infrastructure for years, I can only show members of the Committee graphs like the one I am holding. It shows that in the Labour Government’s first full year in office, it actually spent less on land transport than National had spent, and that in the next 2 to 3 years, when the figures are corrected for inflation, spending was actually under the previous level, in real terms. So the crocodile tears from the Government about it spending more than National on roading have not been true for some time. But, finally, I think the Government has done something right.

I would like to ask the Minister a really important question. If by this acknowledgment that in the next decade or so the roading infrastructure of this country will be so desperately in need of public funding that the Government will need to spend all the revenue from petrol tax, road-user charges, and motor vehicle registrations on it—in fact, as I said before, the Government is spending fractionally more than that—why will the Minister not just move away from her ideological position and say that the Government is dedicating the money? The public would love the Government to do that. The Government is actually doing so anyway; that is what the funding level is. The Government has said there is to be a 5-year, rolling, ongoing funding package. I doubt whether any Government—and I can tell members that when the National Government comes to power in 2008, it will not reduce the sum of money—

💬 Hon Rick Barker: Dreamer!

No, I am sorry, but if there is any dreamer in the House, it may be Mr Barker. When the National Party comes to power in 2008, it will not drop the funding for roading. The public will then have some sense of security, because they will know that what they pay at the pumps will not go off to pay for other things but will pay for land transport.

I say to the Minister that the Government has got one leg of the tripod sorted—and I have congratulated it on that—which is the public money allocated to roading. But the tripod will not stand without the other two important legs being fixed. One of them is the Resource Management Act and the Land Transport Management Act, with regard to the absolute bureaucratic nightmare that it is to try to gain consent for a new road. I say to the Minister she should go and look at something like the M7 in Sydney, which is a 40-kilometre motorway with three lanes going either way. It had a public consultation and consenting process that took 9 months. She should go and look at the Mitcham-Frankston ConnectEast road in Melbourne, which is 39 kilometres long, with three lanes either way and big tunnels going through metropolitan Melbourne. I am not talking about rural and remote areas—something like the Albany-Pūhoi road or Transmission Gully—I am talking about metropolitan Melbourne. The public consultation process took 9 months from go to whoa, and building the road took 3 years. It was the same with the M7 in Sydney.

Yet the chief executive of Transit has told the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee that in New Zealand it now takes considerably longer to gain consent for a new road than it does to build it. And when we asked whether that was true of everywhere else around the world, he said he knew of nowhere else where it was anywhere near that level. The rule of thumb was that the consent period was normally about one-third of the construction time, so that if building a road took 3 years, the consultation time would be about 1 year. Or if the building time was 6 years, consultation might take 2 years. I say to the Minister that if she is to get the tripod to stand up—she has one of the legs sorted, and I have congratulated her on that one—then somebody in this House will have to be brave enough to say to Parliament that we must have a national strategic importance process for some of the network highways and arterial roads that are both State highways and network arterials. We must amend the Resource Management Act so that there is a special process, an exemption, in order to see some of those roads built within a realistic time frame.

I will tell the Minister—she will not remember this; she was not in the portfolio then, and probably was not aware of this—that stage one of the Albany-Pūhoi project, which went through rural farmland in New Zealand, took 7 years for the consents process. I have done a calculation on that, and I will show it to her if she wants to see it. I have used a spreadsheet and I have prorated the length of the Albany-Pūhoi route—it is only two lanes through quite flat rural land—and compared it with the Mitcham-Frankston road in Melbourne, which is 39 kilometres long, has three lanes, and is divided with tunnels through metropolitan Melbourne. If the project is prorated, based on length and carriageway and so on, then if the Mitcham-Frankston road had been built at the same rate as the Albany-Pūhoi project, it would have taken 58 years to construct. Australia is doing it in 3 years. So I ask the Minister when we will see anything from her, from the Minister for the Environment, or from any other Minister about changing the Resource Management Act specifically to see that roading infrastructure is built at a realistic pace. That is the second leg of the tripod.

We are now the only nation I know of in the developed world—and of many countries in the non-developed world, as well—that does not have the private sector as well as the Government funding roading. That is the third leg of the tripod. All three eastern seaboard states in Australia—New South Wales, Victoria, and Queensland—have massive investment in their roading infrastructure by the private sector. New Zealand does not. All three of those states have Labor Governments, interestingly enough. Involving the private sector cannot be a “mad monk of the new right” Tory idea, because the Labor parties in New South Wales, Queensland, and Victoria are doing that. I went to Birmingham in March of this year and saw the M6 toll road, which is a magnificent new 27-mile, three-lane road built in Tony Blair’s Labour-governed England. The Labour Minister Alistair Darling said the British Government simply cannot come up with the money any more to build the networks the nation needs, so it needs the private sector to fund them. Communist China is hardly a right-wing extremist country, but it is the biggest builder of private sector roads in the world.

I would welcome the Minister telling us of another country she knows of that we would see ourselves as being comparable with, be it France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Austria, or the Netherlands, that does not have private sector road-building. Yet New Zealand has none, and, more important, we have legislation that actually, by its nature, stops that from happening. I know a number of private sector investors who would like to invest, and who have said there are projects big enough or interesting enough or with a return on investment for them, should the Land Transport Management Act not have some of the absolutely ridiculous features that were put in it—not by this Minister; I am not attacking her personally—by the Labour Government to appease the Greens, because they were in the driving seat when that legislation was put through Parliament. If anything, the Land Transport Management Act needs to be gutted, so that we can see not just the public spend at the level it is at—because it is at the right level—but also the Resource Management Act taken to a point where we can have special exemptions in order to get the networks built, because built they must be.

The third thing is that we need to see enough funding coming from the private sector to make us look as though we are in tune and in step with every other nation I can think of. The Minister should look at the Millau bridge in France, which is taller than the Eiffel Tower, crosses a fantastic valley on the Massif Central, and takes over an hour off the north-south journey. The French Government said it just simply could not build it and that the private sector should fund it, which it did. The bridge has three lanes going either way and has now become a tourist attraction. People go to the Millau bridge because it is a tourist attraction to see that magnificent piece of engineering.

Why should we not see that here? We have Macquarie Bank, for example—I guess members of the House will not know this. Macquarie Bank is the biggest investor in private roads in the world. Macquarie Bank, through Jim McLay and others, has said that while the legislation stays as it is in New Zealand, the bank will not invest here.

The Minister must tell the Committee two things. The first is what she will do to reform the Resource Management Act so that realistic consenting periods—periods in line with those in any other jurisdiction we would like to compare ourselves with—will see us build the big networks. I accept that it is fine to leave little local roads to the normal processes. The second thing the Minister must tell us is what she will do in order to see the private sector become a major funder of roading in this country.

Following on from Maurice Williamson’s very good points about the three factors in the tripod, the first thing I say is that that was a blatant theft of National’s policy going into the last election, whereby we said we would spend all the money raised from road taxes on the roads. Due to a one-off payout from the energy sector, which is another major part of infrastructural development, the Government in essence said all the road taxes are going into road funding. But as the lights go on and off in Auckland over the next decade or so, will all that funding for roading come through in the future? There is no guarantee of that; the Government has not entrenched that position in legislation. National has asked the Government on numerous occasions to do that, but it has not done so.

Maurice Williamson talked about private sector involvement, and we saw an example today where the Minister of Corrections failed to give any indication that he would allow any private sector involvement in building jails. Ideologically, the Labour Government will not allow the private sector to be involved, and the same goes for roading. Private sector involvement will not happen, because ideologically Labour does not want that sector to be involved.

And we have seen big issues with regard to Auckland passenger transport, a matter that was raised by the Greens after the Budget. Indeed, they were quite right to do so. There was nothing in the Budget for Auckland passenger transport. There has been a lot of talk about negotiation at some point in the future, but we have not seen anything happen.

If we look at the Waikato, we see a perfect example of what has happened under the Government. We have had about five major 10-year State highway project plans in the last 15 months. Let us look at what actually happened in the Waikato, leading up to the election. We had a State highway plan in about February or March of last year that put the Waikato projects way down in priority. The Minister at that time was asked to come and explain that, and he did. He said we should wait until June, when a new plan was to be put out, and we would be all right then. So the Government put out a new plan in June. There was no change in priority; we were still at the bottom. Then he came back and said we should wait for a joint officials group to report—after the election, of course! Sure, it did that, but it was about 12 months later, after the Budget.

After the election, we had to wade through five 10-year project plans, and then we did not get much.

💬 Darren Hughes: Did they get it or not?

All the Waikato received was $215 million—that is all. If we compare that amount with the Bay of Plenty at $400 million or Wellington at $885 million, we see that is simply not good enough. The Government has let the Waikato down. It produced five reports that told us nothing. It is a case of putting it off and putting it off. Those are the sorts of flip-flops made by the Government, as it tries to weasel its way out of any kind of roading programme for the future.

With regard to the roading programme, one of the key issues mentioned by the Minister was that all the roading taxes would go on roading, as Maurice Williamson said. Winston Peters and the Minister of Finance both came out and supported those comments. But where has that position been enshrined in legislation? We have not seen that. Will we see that from the Minister of Transport, Annette King? I hope she will stand up and tell us that that will be enshrined in legislation, so that we all know that position will be part of the future of New Zealand and we will not have to campaign on that issue in future. We ask the Minister to take a call and say it will be enshrined that in future all roading taxes will go on roading.

Can I thank the—

💬 Dr Richard Worth: A useful contribution may occur.

Thank you very much to the member who has just made that excellent interjection. I do appreciate his solid support for the speech I am about to make. Firstly, I thank Maurice Williamson and David Bennett for their contributions to the debate tonight and say that I have found Maurice Williamson to be a very constructive member of Parliament. He is very happy to give me the benefit of his vast knowledge as a former transport Minister, and, seriously, I have appreciated the discussions we have had. I thank him for his comments regarding the Government’s appropriation for transport in the last Budget. I know that he was particularly pleased, but was also very disappointed because in Government he was never able to achieve that level of funding for the transport sector of New Zealand.

It was an abysmal effort over the 1990s by the National Government, as it took money out of the infrastructure—whether in roads, health, police, or whatever. It was unable to put the investment into New Zealand that was needed. I am pleased the National Party acknowledges that in this Budget we are setting out to invest in the roading infrastructure in New Zealand, and not only in roading but also in public transport and transport in general, over the next 5 years. We have done something that has not been done before in that sector—that is, given a 5-year appropriation of funding and certainty of funding over the 5-year period so that roading in particular can be completed. The money has been set out; the programme has been set out by Land Transport New Zealand and Transit New Zealand. The people of New Zealand know that the money is going in.

I have been asked tonight why we do not enshrine in legislation that we will use all the motor vehicle registration charges, the road-user charges, and petrol levies for roading. But we do not need to enshrine it, because not only are we going to do it but we are also going to put in $300 million more than we receive in those particular levies. We will put in $300 million more. It is not confined to just the amount that comes in from road-user charges, petrol levies, and so on; it is $300 million more.

I would be very interested to hear the National Party tell us tonight whether it will be its policy at the next election to enshrine in legislation that all revenue that comes in through those mechanisms will be used on the roads. I would like to hear that commitment from members opposite. They have made two speeches about that tonight and made a big play of it. So I would like to know whether that will be their policy. Well, I know what their policy was at the last election. They said they would consider putting all the road user charges, the motor vehicle fees, and the petrol levy into roads over a 6-year period. They did not say that they would do it or were committed to it; their policy was that they would consider it over a 6-year period. I am very pleased that this Government has been able to put in not only that money but additional money, as well.

The member Maurice Williamson raised the issue of the Resource Management Act and the need for us to build roads faster. I agree with him that we need to get on and build the roads we need in New Zealand. But I am told that the Resource Management Act is not the problem. The problem in the past has been having no money and having no commitment to getting the money—the fact is the previous National Government did not put in the money for it to happen. When National finally decided to put in a road, it took one hell of a long time. So I say to the member that there are people in New Zealand who want to be consulted when a road is going to go through their community. There is no way we will be able to fast track their right to have some say over whether a road goes through their community.

I am actually quite confused about where the National Party stands on these issues of public consultation. We are trying to get extra electricity to Auckland—[Interruption]—especially for Mr Worth; he needs to be lit up. We are trying to get some extra electricity to Auckland. Well, what is happening with the National Party? National Party members of Parliament are petitioning against the ability to put more power into Auckland. Under the Resource Management Act they are petitioning against electricity for Auckland. Where do they stand? They are at sixes and sevens on this issue. I have to say that Maurice Williamson does not agree with them, but he is stuck with those Luddites who are lions in their own patch but when they come down here we never hear from them.

💬 Dr Richard Worth: Time to sit down, Minister, you have gone on long enough—we’re happy.

Oh, the member is very happy tonight. He is a very happy member and is really enjoying himself tonight.

Another issue raised by Maurice Williamson is the ability to have private sector funding for transport. Let us clarify that matter—and I think this is also in answer to David Bennett, as well. He said that this Government is ideologically opposed to having private sector funding in the roads of New Zealand. Well, I think National was in Government for 9 long years and, in that time, did those members pass legislation to allow private funding of roads? Did they allow one single private funder to build roads in New Zealand? No, they did not. But now that they are in Opposition, we are being told that we are opposed to it.

It was this Labour-led Government that passed the legislation in 2003 that does allow for private funding of roads. I welcome a proposal that comes to me to sign off, as Minister of Transport, that has some private funding of roads—I say: “Bring it on!”. But it is only because of this Labour-led Government that legislation that allows that to happen is on the books. Those members talk big in Opposition and do nothing in Government. Why did they not pass the legislation when they were in Government, and why did they not build a single road with private money? There is silence from the Opposition benches.

Let us move to David Bennett, the new, eager member for Hamilton East. Do people know that people in the Waikato, after getting peanuts or nothing from the last National Government for their roads for year after year after miserable year—in fact, the National Party did not even know how to spell “Waikato”—finally, in Budget 2006, have been given what that member called a miserly sum of money: $214 million. I would have thought that was a pretty good sum of money, particularly as it came out of a joint officials group’s work, where they set out their priorities. The Government has come in behind it and put up the money. What an ungrateful member that person is, because I can tell him that there is no way he would have got that money under a National Government. The member would have been dog tucker because, as a marginal seat member, he would not have got anything out of a National Government because it would have spent it all, if people remember, on tax cuts—and tax cuts do not pay for roads.

So I say to that member that I believe people in the Waikato are very lucky, and long may they have a Labour-led Government that will look after them. But it is not only them; many, many communities around New Zealand have benefited from the money this Government is putting into roading and transport in general in this Budget and over the next 5 years.