Infrastructure Bill

I expect this consideration of Part 2 will be much shorter. At the select committee there was a great degree of agreement, from what I can read in the commentary on the bill. The only issue I wanted to raise with the Minister in the chair, the Hon Bill English, for all the good it appears to be doing, is what his policy objectives were in respect of amenity value, and the restrictions on local government in setting that amenity value—the debate between improvement and keeping the amenity value consistent. That may be an area where local government may well feel that the bill is written in a way that could be taken as being against them and against the work that they are doing in their communities. So it would be of some use to get the Minister’s comment on that. Whether that is a big thing, I am quite genuinely not sure. He could shed some light on that.

Just in case he chooses not to, maybe I should do part of his job for him and say what Part 2 does. For the people who are viewing Parliament TV this evening and need to know exactly what we are debating, this is Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill. It is a bill that was a centrepiece of the National - ACT - Māori Party Government. Sometimes it is the Māori Party - National - ACT Government, but on this occasion it is the National - ACT - Māori Party Government. This is a bill that was central to reforms to the economy that would “unlock growth”—and the other phrases, clichés, and slogans that seem to fall by the wayside as things get so tough for the Government in politics. This bill remains stuck here, in the Committee of the whole House, 2 years into Government. Part 2 amends the Telecommunications Act, the Electricity Act, the Gas Act, and the Local Government Act 1974 to provide consistency around reasonable access to corridors, allocation of costs when utility operators are required to move assets, and time periods for notification and response. It also amends the Railways Act 2005 and the Government Roading Powers Act 1989 to provide timeframes for responding to requests for access to rail corridors and motorways, and requires controlling authorities to publish criteria on which they will base their decisions to grant access.

Those are all matters in the bill that the Labour Opposition is in agreement with. As Darien Fenton commented earlier, a lot of this work had been commenced under the previous Labour Government. That work was taking place. We believe that those changes will be of use. As I said at the beginning of my contribution, there is the issue in clause 21 of setting reasonable conditions, which we have made some comment on, but there is also this issue of the amenity value. We would like to hear from the Minister in the chair on that. We respect the fact that he is obviously a very busy man; it is obviously a very taxing and challenging portfolio for him.

💬 Hon Bill English: Very busy.

We have an interjection out of him. That is a great thing! The good news is he is alive and at least he will now appear in the Hansard record as making a contribution on his own legislation, which at one point, a couple of Speeches from the Throne and Prime Minister’s statements ago, was one of the turbocharging pieces of legislation. Goodness knows what the next 6 months of the year will be about, given that so many of the initiatives in the first half of the year appear to have gone west.

💬 Moana Mackey: They’re turbocharging moving forward.

Are they turbocharging the move forward? If there is one thing—

💬 Hon Bill English: That’s Julia Gillard; that’s Australian Labor.

Mr English knows all about that. He knows all about being the loyal deputy who stabs the leader in the back. He did that when he was deputy himself, then the full political circle came around and it happened to him. He would be able to tell us quite a few stories about that.

💬 Hon Bill English: That’s all going to happen in your party.

The politics of personality always get him going. One of the only ways to get him to contribute at all is to get into that nasty little side, where it is all about the machinations of politics and who has sold out whom, and for what reason.

The phrase that Bill English would secretly like this Government to be known by is the “crunching of the gears” Government, as it goes from fifth gear to reverse in very, very quick order as policies and priorities change. Thankfully, the Infrastructure Bill will not be one of those, because it has the support of the Labour Party—the Minister’s best efforts notwithstanding.

I am very happy to take a quick call on Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill, particularly on the issues that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee discussed in Part 2. I want to touch a bit on the rewrite of history that Moana Mackey went through in terms of getting the cart before the horse—the drafting of the code before the bill was drafted—and the fact that some of the corridor providers have dropped out. In fact, that is why the bill has come into existence.

The goal of having a voluntary code between corridor managers and utility providers has been the target for a long time now. After many years of trying, utility operators and corridor managers have failed to agree on a voluntary code. That puts us in a bit of an interesting situation because we are being asked to legislate for that which the industry could not come up with by itself. I think the select committee members would agree that when we heard submissions, there was a kind of Mexican stand-off going on between the corridor managers and the utilities providers. I think the Local Government New Zealand submission was the most revealing about how difficult that had been.

Local Government New Zealand did a couple of things. It described some of the authorities around the country that have come up with their own voluntary codes and have achieved agreement with utilities providers. But that becomes very difficult for utilities providers that are nationwide—telecommunications providers and so on. They are forced to try to comply with a plethora of voluntary codes, and that has become very difficult. I think the gold standard, the goal, within a regulatory framework, is to come up with a code that everybody can sign up to. Once this bill is passed, the Minister will have the legislative power to bang heads together to make the code work. But, as we know, that will be very difficult unless those organisations come willingly. I hope that that is the case.

It was also evident in Local Government New Zealand’s submission that it wanted us to keep everything it agreed with in the code, but put things that became quite tense into law. That would have become very messy and it was not the select committee’s recommendation. As-built drawings were one of the examples it came up with. It has had constant problems trying to get as-built drawings out of utilities operators, but the code, as it is drafted, makes it very clear that coming up with accurate as-built drawings is a requirement that cannot be contracted out of. It is not just utilities providers; anybody who has been in the construction industry or has been a client of a building project knows that as-built drawings take forever to come and are often the last thing that gets ticked off in any construction project.

There was quite a bit of discussion about the issue of amenity values and the causer-pays principle. For the benefit of the Labour spokesperson on transport, the real issue was a belief by utilities providers that as a condition of access to the corridors, local councils often burden them with the cost of maintaining or improving the amenity, and that that is disproportionate to the disruption being caused. The bill clarifies that it is causer pays as long as there is no expectation by the local council to improve the amenity or to somehow make a better visual amenity—for example, taking away cabinets or putting lines that were previously overhead underground. Having considered hither and to the issues around amenities values, the select committee was quite comfortable that the bill as it was drafted, with a couple of amendments, covered the issue of access and amenity values pretty well.

We also considered the issue of lining up the notice periods, which were different in the respective Acts—the Telecommunications Act and the Gas Act. We now have a bill that will be quite consistent in terms of the expectations to provide notice of access. I think that was a really good improvement to Part 2, as well.

This bill is about reducing red tape, but it is actually about orange tape. It is the orange tape and the orange cones that the public see every day with transport infrastructure changes that seem to be constant. Local Government New Zealand said that there were 8,000 separate applications for access to corridors in the Auckland area alone and not all of them were well coordinated, so I hope that that improves.

I will speak to Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill. It is good to see that members opposite have had some further unclogging of their arteries and that the Minister in the chair, the Minister for Infrastructure, has stirred himself, as has a member of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It is good to have a contribution from them.

I will go through Part 2. My colleague Darren Hughes has talked about the purpose of Part 2, which is stated in clause 19(1) to be: “to amend a variety of Acts relating to utility operators’ access to transport corridors in order to achieve greater certainty and consistency in the rights and obligations of utility operators and corridor managers.”

Starting with the amendments to the Telecommunications Act 2001, I cannot help but note the irony in having this bill go through its Committee stage today, when other things are happening that apply to every single worker in the country. Before I get on to that, though, I recall that in the first reading of this bill, Clare Curran, Labour’s spokesperson on communications, was talking about the situation in the telecommunications industry with regard to the Visionstream workers who were contracted out by Telecom and who went from being “employed” to being “self-employed”, and the consequences of that on the telecommunications industry. I think Clare Curran is very, very good in constantly calling the Government to account on its broadband strategy and on how that is rolling out, although it seems to be stalling somewhat appallingly at the moment.

I turn to clause 21, “Criteria for setting reasonable conditions”. I would ask the Minister in the chair, the Hon Bill English, whether he could define the word “reasonable”. The reason I want him to do so is that I know that the Minister of Labour currently has a proposal to remove the access of workers to their union unless their employer agrees to that access, and that agreement cannot be “unreasonably” withheld. There is a whole lot of real difficulties around what is meant by “reasonable” and “unreasonable”. I would like some answers, because that might help us when it comes to considering what the Minister of Labour is proposing.

I also note the irony of clause 22, “Notice requirement”. The previous speaker, Michael Woodhouse, talked about lining up the notice requirements for the various utility operators, which other speakers have also spoken about. We support that. We think it is reasonable that utility operators should be given notice, just as we think it is reasonable that workers who are to lose their jobs should be given notice. But, indeed, under the Government’s proposals for the 90-day Act, workers will not be given notice. It is not required. In terms of clauses 22 to 25, I would like the Minister to tell us what he thinks the words “notice” and “reasonable notice” mean.

New section 147A, “Local authority, etc, may require lines, etc, to be moved”, which is to be inserted in the Telecommunications Act by clause 28, did not come up in the debate on Part 1, but there was a long debate in the select committee about the definitions of “local authority”, “wastewater”, and “water requirements”. A great deal of concern was expressed, and I think that concern is still there, given that the Minister of Local Government has a bill coming forward that would enable the contracting out of water for 35 years. That issue has been discussed up and down the country, and it was certainly discussed in Auckland, where I come from. Although I think we reached an agreement in the select committee on new section 147A, I would like to have an assurance from the Minister in the chair that the proposal from Rodney Hide will not affect that new section. We worked hard in the select committee to try to clarify that issue, and, in fact, the Greens were very, very keen on that. We reached an agreement on it, and I know that Jeanette Fitzsimons, who was on the committee at the time, was very, very keen that we certainly had that sorted out.

I also note that we have amendments to the Electricity Act. We had a very interesting debate in the House earlier tonight during the second reading of the Electricity Industry Bill about electricity generation. There are a lot of questions around that issue.

Clause 30 inserts new section 24A, “Criteria for setting reasonable conditions”, in the Electricity Act, where again we go back to the word “reasonable”. Again, I ask the Minister in the chair to tell us what he considers “reasonable” to mean. There is some detail in the bill about that, but we are considering a very, very important question, given that we seem to have one rule for utility operators on the one hand and another rule for workers in other legislation on the other hand.

If I may—and without getting on to the Gas Act—I would like to talk about the amendments being made to the Railways Act. Again, it was a very interesting discussion during the select committee process, because there was quite a lot of conflict between railway corridor operators and utility operators. The utility operators seemed to believe that KiwiRail and ONTRACK were deliberately blocking access to their land.

I thought that a very, very important point came through to do with safety issues in rail and to do with workers’ safety, and particularly to do with the safety of the public. I had a lot of conversations, although I cannot remember whether the railway union came and talked to us. The previous speaker may remember. Certainly, people from KiwiRail came and talked about the importance of workers’ safety.

I have to put on record my concern about railways workers’ safety under the 90-day fire-at-will bill. I ask which workers on the railways would raise a safety issue under the provisions that they have, because their jobs would be on the line. There is absolutely no doubt about that. The amendments to the Railways Act 2005 are important, and I am absolutely pleased about those.

💬 Paul Quinn: Darien, what bill are we on?

I am talking about clause 38 in Part 2, if the member would like to get out his copy of the bill and read it. It talks about the amendments being made to the Railways Act. In fact, if that member had been on the select committee, then he would know that safety was one of the very, very important considerations that we talked about, but he probably still would not have listened or taken any notice. I am raising an issue of deep concern to members on this side of the Chamber about the safety not only of the public but also of workers under these provisions and under other proposed provisions of this Government. Thank you.

Likewise, I rise to speak on Part 2. The thing that is very interesting about this part—and I am sure that people have been riveted so far on this discussion on the Infrastructure Bill—is that Part 2 amends a number of different Acts. During the course of the considerations of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee it was very interesting to analyse the differences between the Acts concerned, which are, of course, the Telecommunications Act 2001, the Electricity Act 1992, the Gas Act 1992, and the Local Government Act 1974.

The consistency we were looking at was around reasonable access to transport corridors. I have to say I did not know a great deal about this issue at the start, but it became very clear just how important those corridors are in terms of ensuring we can install the suitable services—gas, electricity, broadband—we will need to grow the economy and serve the people of this country. So consistency around reasonable access to transport corridors is important.

Consistency and clarification around allocations of costs are important when utility operators are required to move assets, which, of course, they can be required to do in these circumstances. Also, consistency around issues like time periods for notification and response is important. In addition, as the previous speaker, my colleague Darien Fenton, has just said, Part 2 amends the Railways Act 2005. The Government Roading Powers Act 1989 is also mentioned, again in terms of providing time frames for responding to requests for access to rail corridors and motorways, and requiring controlling authorities to publish criteria on which they will base their decisions to grant access.

So Part 2 contains a series of provisions around each of those Acts, looking at issues like the criteria for setting reasonable conditions. Mr Hughes referred to the issue about whether the operator will be required to increase the amenity values rather than merely maintain them. One thing that was quite interesting in the select committee was a debate around the term “fittings” and whether we would use that term. Members will be interested to know that the committee decided not to go with the term “fittings” and replaced it with “lines, cabinets, other appliances, and associated equipment”.

The question that Ms Fenton raised about health and safety is important, and in relation to the rail corridor the select committee had a very interesting conversation. One cannot move trains around a bit of work that is going on to ensure that they are out of the way while work is being undertaken, whereas with a road one can use detours and those sorts of things. We had a good, robust conversation about the health and safety component.

In that respect, I would be lax if I did not also refer to a number of the changes that are going on, led by the Prime Minister, in the workplace area. We are under real threat through the sort of negative, cost-cutting approach that this Government is taking, where workers’ rights are being undermined. There is a real risk that health and safety will be compromised for workers in this country. Let me give members an example of how that might be the case. With the extension of the 90-day “no rights at work” trial to all workplaces, people will be unwilling to even raise questions of health and safety for fear that they may be sacked.

I go back to the criteria for setting reasonable conditions. The sorts of factors that are included in those reasonable conditions in Part 2 are around the safe and efficient flow of traffic, the health and safety of the people likely to be affected directly by the work, the need to lessen damage, and compensation that may be payable. An important measure in new section 24A(1)(e), in clause 30, is the criteria around the need to lessen disruption to local communities, including businesses. It is really important when we are looking at this kind of work and upgrading our infrastructure that we do it in a way that minimises disruption to the community.

The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): I ask that the level of discussion on my right be kept at a lower level. It is quite distracting.

I will take a quick call on Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill, which we are discussing tonight. Part 2, as others have said, amends a number of different Acts and makes those Acts able to coordinate in a much more consistent way so that our infrastructure can move forward and develop much more effectively. The bill amends the Telecommunications Act 2001, the Electricity Act 1992, the Gas Act 1992, and the Local Government Act 1974. The idea is to try to provide some consistency around reasonable access to the corridors and the allocation of costs when utility operators are required to move assets. It will also address the time notification and response that those operators will need to provide to make their operations much smoother and more coordinated.

I think we have all been in the situation—and I know many definitely have been in the Auckland area—where we have seen roads dug up and inadequately put back together again by, for example, various utility operators This bill will enable us to ensure that we are well notified about disruptions, that work goes ahead in full coordination with many of the other operators, as well, and that we have the minimum amount of disruption, particularly in the Auckland environment where there is so much pressure on roads and so much pressure on the ability of services as Auckland expands. Auckland is expanding at the rate of one Wellington city every 8 years. It is an extraordinarily quick and fast expansion. I think this bill will address many of the arising from Auckland’s expansion to be more effective and more efficient. There is another example that this part speaks to. Contractors who were laying pipes in Auckland City found that they had different dimensions when they went out to connect up with pipes from Waitakere City. This legislation will be helped by the fact that Waitakere City and Auckland City will be one super-city, and, certainly, I hope that some of those things will be remedied. This bill will go a long way to try to restore some of those efficiencies we need.

It is worth mentioning, as others have, that work on this bill started in 2007. It has been quite a long time coming—more than 3 years. It was started under the previous Labour Government, which recognised the need for this legislation and began working on it. Given the fact that this Government has made so much of the need for improved, more efficient, and more effective infrastructure, it is surprising that here we are, 2 years into this Government’s term, and only now are we in the Committee of the whole House stage of this legislation. As I said, the work began under the previous Labour Government. Utility operators such as electricity, telecommunications, sewerage, drains, and gas say that there has been an inconsistent application of reasonable conditions when seeking to exercise their right to access roads in particular, because that is where most of our services tend to run. On the local authorities’ side, they are concerned and, I am sure, are under pressure from residents and ratepayers about the poor quality of reinstatement of roads by utility operators. There is also concern about the inconsistencies between statutes. Therefore, some operators are able to afford some advantages over others. This legislation, particularly Part 2, will go a long way in terms of ensuring that all of those utility operators are operating under a standard format. Thank you.

I am happy to stand and speak to Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill. I think it is important to reiterate that this work started under the Labour Government. We are 2 years into the National Government’s term and still passing Labour legislation. That is all right, we prefer to pass more Labour legislation and a little bit less National legislation, if possible, so we will not complain about that.

Part 2 is incredibly important because access to the transport corridor varies so greatly. It varies greatly across different local government jurisdictions. It varies greatly across all the different statutes, and, of course, as time has gone on we have ended up in a situation whereby communities that were previously not connected to reticulated water and waste water are now connected, so that infrastructure has stretched out further and further. It is affecting more and more communities. Once upon a time, electricity infrastructure was the only infrastructure that went out to a lot of these communities; now there is so much more. We have broadband infrastructure apparently, according to the Government. We do not know whether we will see it. When we do see it, it will probably go only to people’s streets, not to their houses. That seems to be a waste of infrastructure. I certainly hope that that will not be the case. But if we are going to extend and add more and more infrastructure, it makes sense to start to regulate and try to bring together in a coherent way access to that infrastructure.

One of the big issues has been the difference in treatment for different utility operators. That has created a large amount of tension. It is not tension that is necessarily going to be legislated away by this bill, although I do think that this legislation will be a good start in trying to bring some consistency to that. But the fact is that when we have so many different local authorities all doing different things, for a single organisation, for example, that has to work with every single local authority across every single statute that relates to infrastructure, we can imagine how difficult that becomes.

I will mention, because no one has mentioned this yet, the impact on the public of this legislation. One of the things that really annoys the public is when they drive down a road that is being dug up because something like a water main is being replaced, and 6 weeks later they drive down exactly the same piece of road and it is being dug up for something completely different.

💬 David Bennett: That doesn’t happen now. It only happened under you.

Oh, David Bennett and his usual excellent contribution to the House! I will not bother to even repeat it; it is not worth it. If he was listening to what I was saying, he would know that I was pointing out that one of the things that I hope this legislation will result in is a far more coherent approach to when this work is being done. If all infrastructure operators know that a certain piece of road or rail corridor is going to be open for work, that traffic will be diverted, and that the road will be dug up, then they know that if they have maintenance work that needs to be done on electricity or broadband infrastructure it makes sense and it is cheaper to do it at exactly the same time. That reduces the amount of time when the public is being inconvenienced by major works being carried out.

This seems relatively simple, but of course none of this has been brought together before because none of these organisations were able to work with each other effectively in this way; because of a lack of coherence, that has not been happening. I think that sometimes when we deal with legislation that is very technical, like this bill, we forget the public in that process. When it comes to the development and the maintenance of infrastructure, the public are an incredibly important part of that. Part of the reason we have ended up in a situation where local authorities are resistant to allowing access to a corridor is because they come under enormous public pressure from their voters, who say to them that they are sick and tired of their roads constantly being dug up for no reason. So they start to put more stringent requirements on those utility operators.

Utility operators have to be able to get in. They have to be able to do the maintenance work, because if they do not do that it is far more expensive in the long term. But when they are constantly up against a city council that is having to try to pull together all of these groups, that has to try to deal with utility operators that are working in a huge number of different local government areas and under a huge number of different rules and regulations, that is where the public start to be left out of the equation. It is where we start to see the public being disadvantaged far more than they need to be. That issue is not something that many people have talked about, but resolving it would be a very good outcome from this legislation—a very, very good outcome.

I will make just a very brief contribution to finish off the points that Labour members have made on Part 2 of the Infrastructure Bill. My comments are in relation to clause 38 of the bill in Part 2, the amendments that we are making tonight to the Railways Act 2005. The next part that we are moving on to concerns matters about rail as well, which we are very keen to explore in the Committee of the whole House this evening. It is an example where common sense has prevailed with respect to the definition of those who were captured by the provision of this clause. The bill as it was originally introduced to the House by the Minister for Infrastructure required that all licensed access providers had to publish criteria for access to their corridors on a publicly available website. If we go to clause 38 of the bill, we see that it sets out there how it was originally worded: “Every licensed access provider and every railway premises owner … must…” and on it goes in new subsection (1A). But that has since been altered by the select committee. The recommendation of the select committee was picked up by the Government in quite a helpful way so that the Minister will declare by notice in the Gazette which of those railway premises owners or licensed access providers are required to be the ones who publish their criteria for access on a publicly available website. That is pretty important.

As the select committee report notes, there are 80 such rail providers. They range in size from very small voluntary organisations that we all have in our community, right through to some of those industrial rail operators, and then to KiwiRail itself, or the New Zealand Railways Corporation, as it is known from a legislative point of view. What probably surprises me most about that is that there are only 80 of them. In New Zealand there are a lot of railway enthusiasts, who take their great love of trains and of rail to try to provide in their own communities some form of service or tourist attraction or even fun rides for children, either on a regular weekend basis or for fairs, fetes, galas, and so on and so forth like that.

💬 Moana Mackey: Fete?

The member says “Fete?” but at St Josephs School in Levin our gala was called a fete, and that is a very good thing to know. It is a very cosmopolitan primary school. At St Josephs in Levin we had our own fete—very European. That was before they were popular; this was before the fall of the Berlin Wall. We were really quite avant-garde at St Josephs School in that respect.

💬 Carol Beaumont: Great fashions at country prices.

They certainly do. So we have limited that right down so that it will be only the big players who will be required to do that. I think that is important. I had an opportunity during the parliamentary recess to visit Kawakawa with my colleague Kelvin Davis, the Labour spokesperson for tourism, who took me to see the—

💬 Paul Quinn: Looking for a new electorate?

Paul Quinn should be the last member of Parliament to talk about looking for new electorates. That man would be defeated in any seat he stood in. They could put him up in a blue ribbon seat—he would lose Taranaki - King Country! There would be a socialist flag elected to the Taranaki - King Country seat if Paul Quinn were the National Party candidate there. There is a reason why there is a big whip-round amongst National MPs and Labour MPs to ensure that he stands against Trevor Mallard in Hutt South, and it is that at least there is a bit of a laugh involved in that. There are so many times when that man should resist the temptation to speak out loud, but probably in that sense all I am doing is echoing generations of schoolteachers who wrote that in his school reports. I suspect he was a bit too busy with the candyfloss at the fete in that respect.

Kelvin Davis took me to see the vintage railway people there at Kawakawa who are trying to develop a jigger service to go through the town. They are having some difficulties getting that past KiwiRail and the New Zealand Transport Agency, but it was a reminder to me that there are many local groups who access parts of the rail network that are still able to be used but no longer have either commercial passenger or freight services running on them. It would be preposterous for the Bay of Islands Vintage Railway Trust to have to publish on a publicly available website the criteria for accessing their piece of rail, so I support that provision in the bill. I think that is a good idea, and I am sure Bill English was responsible for it.

The question was put that the amendments set out on Supplementary Order Paper 115 in the name of the Hon Bill English to Part 2 be agreed to.

Amendments agreed to.

Part 2 as amended agreed to.

Part 3 Amendments relating to New Zealand Railways Corporation