Land Transport Management Amendment Bill

I would like to explore, as I said earlier on, a whole range of issues in this legislation but, sadly, with it all being nearly in one part, I will have to focus on just one aspect. I will focus on the issue of road-user charges, and say to the Minister in the chair, the Hon Annette King, that one of the problems we heard from a number of people was that it is difficult enough having to deal with refunds and offsets in a particular way when the road-user charge system is in place, but having a regional fuel tax implemented as well will mean that commercial operators will now have to work with both forms of charging.

I guess it is really important to explain to people out there that when we are running motorcars with petrol, we pay just the petrol tax by way of tax on that petrol. But commercial users of trucks have to buy road-user licences by estimating how many kilometres they want to buy, and their hubodometers on their trucks tell them whether they have done those kilometres. They purchase the kilometres for a certain number of tonnes, and then they travel that distance. That is the road-user charge. But, of course, if a truck goes off-road and into a forest, as forestry trucks do, it still has its hubodometer running, so the driver then has to record how much off-road travel the truck is doing and get refunds and rebates.

I know that a number of commercial trucking companies out there say that it is a real nightmare to do that, but they have to, to try to make the system work, and one of the reasons why we are very strongly opposed to a regional fuel tax is that it adds a separate charge for those people. It is not increasing their road-user charges at a regional level—it is not saying “for your road-user charge you will pay the extra”—it is saying that on diesel there will now be a tax that people will pay per litre when they buy their fuel. As those operators quite clearly pointed out, they will now have two sets of compliance on which they have to do their returns and refunds, to show that diesel was being used either on proper roads or in forests and off-road, in order to make the reclamation of those sums of money. So I say to the Minister that it is very, very worrying for us that there are two separate regimes. Had the Minister wanted to move to just a total fuel tax, that would be all right; we could have lived with that. Had the Minister wanted to go to just a straight road-user charge regime, that would be all right—

💬 Hon Harry Duynhoven: Is that what you are suggesting?

No, I am just saying “Had the Minister wanted to …”. But I tell Mr Duynhoven that the problem is the two regimes; I would be pleased if he would listen and get it through his head. It is the two regimes that cause the problem for the people out there, and it is unfair to impose two total regimes on them.

I also talked earlier on about the conflict of interest between the funder of State highways also being the funder of other roads, and therefore looking after itself. But I point out to the Committee tonight that what is so delicious an irony is how much of a conflict there is with what the Government has done today with road-user charges. Today the Government has bought back the rail operator. It now owns the railways; it is the owner, yet today it has put up road-user charges for the trucking fleet. If people ever wanted an example of a conflict of interest, I say that this is one: I own this business; I bought it today and it is mine—and by the way I have now got the powers, and I will use them, to put up the costs of those who compete with me. The Government does not own a trucking operator—well, not yet, but I am fearful that if I give this speech too often that is exactly the next thing it will be looking to buy—but today, 1 July 2008, will go down in history as the day when the Government took control and ownership of the rail operation. Tonight we will be passing as part of this bill the provisions of a Supplementary Order Paper to cope with some of the superannuation requirements for the people concerned, which is a bizarre part of this bill, and which was not even there until this Supplementary Order Paper appeared. But on the same day, the very same day, that the Government has bought back the rail operation, the Minister has come out and fired in a road-user charge increase—oh, and by the way, she permits with this legislation a regional fuel tax, which will start charging a fuel tax on those companies out there that are operating trucks.

I have been contacted today, and I am sure other members have as well, by a number of trucking operators who are furious about it. In fact, Tony Friedlander has put out what I think is quite a hard-hitting press release, saying that he feels he has been betrayed. He was given a commitment last year by officials and the Minister that if there was going to be another road-user charge increase, trucking companies would be given a month’s notice of it and be given that warning.

💬 Nathan Guy: Consultation!

Consultation—they would be given it. But it came like a bolt out of the blue today to them and, as he said in his press release—and the Minister can shake her head all she likes—he feels that he has been betrayed by people who gave him commitments, and so on. And there are more issues to this bill that I would like to explore.

I take just a brief call to reply to two points made by Maurice Williamson. With reference to the regional fuel tax, I tell him a truck that fills up with diesel would not be running a second system. The tax is paid by the distributors before the diesel gets to the pump, so in fact truck owners will not have to run a second system. If, for example, they are paying a regional fuel tax on diesel in the Auckland district, when they fill up at the pump it will already be paid for by the distributors. There are two systems: if they are on the road, they pay a regional fuel tax; if they go off the road, they already collect information to be off the road, so the situation is no different.

The second point Maurice Williamson mentioned was the increase in road-user charges. I say to the member that we have today had just the second increase in road-user charges since 1989—the second increase. I tell the member to compare that situation with that facing every petrol user in New Zealand, who have had the petrol price adjusted in terms of the CPI nearly every year. It is impossible to give notice of an increase in road-user charges at this stage, for a simple reason. Last year, when we had the first increase in road-user charges since 1989, 3 days’ notice was given, and truck owners forward-purchased $17.5 million of road-user charge certificates at the old price. That represented money that did not go into the National Land Transport Fund, which was not fair on other road users.

So the issue is about being fair. The only way to change it would be to change the Road User Charges Act. Changes to that Act will be made in the future to allow a finite period for the road-user charge license to run. That policy work has not been completed. So to have allowed a month’s notice would have allowed every big truck owner to forward-purchase road-user charge certificates for as long as they wanted, because those certificates have no end period. Would that have been fair to the road users of New Zealand? Would it have been fair to the motorists that Maurice Williamson says he cares about? We have to have a fair approach, and that is exactly what those who pay road-user charges and those who drive petrol vehicles got today.

Tēnā koe, Mr Chair. I just want to make a brief comment on what I understand is Pita Paraone and New Zealand First’s signal that they want to move an amendment to new section 4 to delete the phrase “principles of the” in relation to the Treaty clause, clause 5, in the bill. We have given some serious thought to that, having only just heard about it. New Zealand First has certainly raised that issue considerably often in the past in a number of its members’ bills to delete references to the principles of the Treaty. Just as we oppose those bills, we will oppose this amendment. I want to set out why we oppose it, so it is clear that the issue is not about politics but is actually about the law.

My grave concern about deleting the phrase “principles of the” is that it leaves a lacuna in the law about what implementing the Treaty in a court under the provisions of the legislation would then mean. The Green Party is of the view that the principles are not the best way to interpret how the Treaty should be applied. We would prefer that the Treaty itself and its provisions were taken more seriously, and that they were dealt with rather than principles developed by others over time. None the less, we have nearly 30 years of jurisprudence around the definition of the principles of the Treaty, and a significant body of law, both legislation that describes or refers to the principles and also judge-made law—case law—that interprets what the principles are and how they should be applied.

New Zealand First has never offered an alternative concept for how the Treaty itself might be interpreted differently from the principles of the Treaty. If we were to take that phrasing out of the legislation, it would leave it to legal argument to make that determination. We would be opening a great legal debate about the Treaty again, with no guidance whatsoever from Parliament, from New Zealand First, or from anyone about what to do with it. As a default position, a court may look at that and use the principles, or return to an interpretation based on the principles, because that is the law we have at hand to understand how to deal with the Treaty in legislation. But if Parliament expressly takes the reference to the principles out of the legislation, there is an argument that that leaves open the question of whether the courts should apply the principles as they understand them, when Parliament has clearly said that the principles should not apply. Again it leaves a huge hole in the interpretation of Treaty law.

I have no problem with the concept of looking more closely at the Treaty, and particularly with the concept that Māori should be the ones who determine how the Treaty should be interpreted in relation to legislation. But that is not what New Zealand First is offering. It does not provide any structure or system for doing that; it provides no wording that allows for that. New Zealand First simply wants to take out the reference to the principles. I know that its leader, Winston Peters, has a long history of objecting to Treaty lawyers, in the various phrasing he has used about them. I have always wondered whether that is just because he became an MP rather early in his legal career and never got to jump on that particular gravy train himself, which he might well have done had he not been a member of Parliament when the Treaty law hit the law books in the 1980s and 1990s.

The Green Party is also opposed to this provision because it sets a precedent for the New Zealand First campaign to delete references to the principles. We have seen in their past members’ bills very poor drafting—drafting that actually takes out the Treaty of Waitangi from legislation rather than just the principles. That is careless and unnecessary, particularly when it comes to members’ bills, because getting them pulled out of the ballot is a very precious opportunity and one would want them to be in the best possible form. I have always been disappointed that New Zealand First did not provide a proper analysis of what it wanted to do by taking out references to the principles, in terms of what it expected them to be replaced with and, particularly, the processes it envisaged around Māori making the decisions about what could replace those references.

So we will not support New Zealand First’s provision. We do not trust its motives on this issue, and we certainly are derisory of its inability to provide any kind of structural alternative that recognises that Māori are the ones who should determine this issue in the first place.

I am highly surprised that members of some other parties are not taking a call. However, I would like to follow through on a couple of other issues. One thing we heard in terms of the justification of the regional fuel tax was that people in Invercargill will not want to pay for things in Auckland. I think there is some merit to that argument. In New Zealand we should always recognise that some things are in the national interest and that we will all in some way contribute to them. I am sure that all New Zealanders’ taxes paid for Te Papa; I am sure all New Zealanders’ taxes have paid for a number of national things along the way. Let me just take up that argument and use my constituency, Pakuranga, as a good example.

A number of people have raised with me their anger at the proposed regional fuel tax. At the time of its announcement, with the suggestion that we should be moving to it and allowing it, the argument was that it would help Aucklanders to get out of their cars and on to public transport. I want to make it clear to the Minister that the people who live in the eastern suburbs—in my electorate, out in Botany, further out in Flat Bush, and so on—have a number of questions about that. If people in my electorate end up paying 10c a litre extra for their fuel tax and the alternative is to move to rail, our question is: where is that rail in the eastern suburbs? Out in the west, not only is the rail being double-tracked but also a lot of money is to be spent on electrification. So the people out on the west of Auckland will say it is OK to pay the regional fuel tax, because they can either pay it or use the double-tracked, electrified rail system. The people on the North Shore can say they have a dedicated busway that cost $130 million, so if they do not like paying the regional petrol tax they can move on over to the dedicated bus lane on the North Shore.

I ask the Minister again what the people of—not just my electorate, because it goes quite a long way down and around other electorates: the new electorate of Botany, certainly; the new electorate of Papakura; the new electorate of—

Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

Debate interrupted.