Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Transport: I move, That the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill be now read a second time. I want to thank members of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for their work on the bill. The changes proposed in the bill allow for the fair and practical application of road-user charges in a range of unusual circumstances. The bill will amend the Road User Charges Act 2012 and the Land Transport Act 1998. The Road User Charges Act 2012 provides for the regulation and administration of the collection of road-user charges, or RUC, for the use of roads and road wear. The Land Transport Act 1998 provides for a range of functions relating to land transport, including the registration and licensing of vehicles.

The main purpose of this bill is to address an anomaly for some vehicle owners who are required to purchase road-user charges for their vehicles but are unable to do so because their vehicles are not registered and not legally required to be. Its secondary purpose is to enable annual charges, in lieu of road-user charges, to be collected through registration and licensing processes for vehicles that are exempt from road-user charges. The bill also makes other minor changes to the Road User Charges Act 2012.

Vehicles that are exempt from registration, not required to be registered, or operated under a trade plate in an unregistered state are subject to road-user charges, unless they belong to a class of vehicle that makes them specifically exempt. However, it is not possible to issue road-user charged licences to these vehicles, because road-user charged licences are linked to a vehicle’s registration number. These kinds of unregistered vehicles make only limited use of roads, and it is not cost-effective to try to collect road-user charges for them. The Road User Charges Act 2012 will be amended to allow regulations that exempt unregistered vehicles from road-user charges.

Other classes of vehicles are exempt from road-user charges primarily because it is uneconomic to collect road-user charges for these vehicles. Also, most of these vehicles do very little travel on roads. However, some exempt vehicles, such as fast tractors, do a sufficient amount of travel on roads to cause road wear, so it is fair that their owners should make a contribution towards the cost that they impose. This bill allows for the collection of an annual charge in lieu of road-user charges for these kinds of vehicles. By doing so, it allows for the fair and practical recovery of costs where collecting them through the normal process would be impractical or uneconomic. The bill also amends the Road User Charges Act 2012 to add offence provisions where light vehicles conditionally exempted from road-user charges are operated in breach of those conditions.

Finally, the bill contains amendments of a technical nature that support the policy aims behind road-user charges and rationalise enforcement activity. These clarify that a person who has entered into an arrangement to pay overdue fees by instalment will not be subject to additional penalties, allow the road-user charges collector to set a licence fee for one-off vehicles that are not covered by prescribed road-user charges types, and make minor amendments that allow for the effective functioning of the road-user charges system. The bill will need to be divided into two separate bills at the Committee stage.

The bill was referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee in August 2013. The committee considered five submissions and heard from three submitters. The committee has recommended three minor changes to the bill. These changes are necessary to improve the application of the bill. Under the Road User Charges Act 2012, if a vehicle subject to road-user charges is used on a road without a valid distance licence or being registered under an alternative payment scheme, the only defence available to the operator is that they had a “reasonable excuse” to do so. One submission noted that this creates the undesirable situation where an operator must go to court to demonstrate that they had that reasonable excuse. Although it is always open to an enforcement officer to accept an excuse as reasonable, there can be uncertainty where a vehicle subject to road-user charges does not display the correct road-user charges licence, but the licence displayed is one for which sufficient payment has been made to cover the charges that apply to the vehicle. Subsequently, the committee recommended a change to clause 6A to give clearer guidance to operators and enforcement authorities as to what circumstances could constitute a reasonable excuse. The amendment provides guidance to operators and enforcement authorities as to a particular circumstance that might constitute a reasonable excuse, without otherwise altering the effect of the provision.

The second amendment that the committee recommended relates to clause 8, with a new section 12A(2)(e) to remove the previous reference to the operator providing information to the regulator after the “completion of the operation of the vehicles concerned.” This amendment reflects the intention of the clause, which is to provide correct information, and the intention of the bill, which requires information to be provided as soon as practicable once it becomes available. The amendment enables simpler compliance for a small number of operators.

Lastly, the committee recommends inserting the word “user” into section 57(1)(a) of the Road User Charges Act 2012. This would change the phrase “unpaid road charges” to “unpaid road user charges”, making the Road User Charges Act clearer and more consistent. The proposed changes allow for the fair and practical application of road-user charges in a range of unusual circumstances, and I commend the bill to the House.

Labour is supporting the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. It is worth recalling that the first reading of this bill was held under urgency way back in August 2013. Indeed, I remember speaking on this bill at a quarter to midnight in a little bit of a rant about fast tractors, which seemed very amusing after we had had a very long, long day in the House. So it is interesting that here we are several months later—it was so urgent, but here we are on the second reading in March 2014.

It is an unnecessary bill in the sense that it did not need to happen in the first place—that is, we have this bill in front of us, basically, because the Government made a stuff-up when it brought in the original legislation, the Road User Charges Act, which was passed in 2011 and came into force on 1 August 2012, and left out a bit. So what the Government tried to do then—what Gerry Brownlee and whoever the Minister of Transport was at the time tried to do—was to get the Regulations Review Committee to cover up the gap by bringing in a regulation that would continue the exemption for farmers who operate light road-user charge vehicles for agricultural operations. These were vehicles such as tractors with limited on-road use. The Ministry of Transport decided to introduce this, pending outstanding policy decisions. So, in other words, it put forward the regulation to the Regulations Review Committee even before the policy decisions had been made. In other words, the Government had not done it in the legislation and it had not even thought about the policy. But the problem was that the regulation was brought to the Regulations Review Committee afterwards—afterwards. So the regulation was made in anticipation of the policy position the Government was going to take.

💬 Meka Whaitiri: Weird.

Very weird—very weird. This bill has got quite a saga to it, actually. The Government left that bit out. So it meant that those farmers with their mainly off-road vehicles carried on paying money—quite a lot of money, actually—in road-user charges contributions, yet the regulation was completely out of order. So the Regulations Review Committee moved that it be disallowed.

What happened then? Well, a decision had not been made. The officials had stepped into the gap and tried to cover up for the Minister of Transport, and they put in this regulation. Charles Chauvel, who was the then Regulations Review Committee chair, got up in the House with the agreement of the Regulations Review Committee—remember, this was right back in 2012—three of whom were National members who had actually agreed that this regulation to plug the gap in the legislation that the Minister had stuffed up in the first place way back in 2011 should be disallowed. But then the Minister decided that he would not allocate House time to debate the disallowance motion, so the regulation was disallowed. In other words, it just disappeared and ceased to exist. The regulation was overturned, which is what should have happened anyway.

But then what happened next is that the Minister was not satisfied with that. He reinstated the regulation. He had another go with the Regulations Review Committee to try to plug this gap—to try to plug this gap. The Regulations Review Committee, which did an excellent job on this, said that it was not any better the second time—it was not any better. It is a story of incompetence—

💬 Andrew Little: A comedy of errors.

A comedy of errors and a story of incompetence. The Minister tried to introduce it the second time with no improvement. He should have amended the legislation, but he did not. He tried to get it through the Regulations Review Committee again, so another disallowance motion was moved because there was no improvement and it was no better than the first time. Finally, as I said at the beginning, on 27 August last year we had legislation introduced to fix this mess under urgency—under urgency. It should have been in place for 1 August last year, but we had it introduced on 27 August. It has taken several months. Despite the fact that the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is an excellent committee and did its best, there was no way that it could work in the haste that was needed and, in fact, retrospectively pass this legislation so that we could cover up the Minister’s mistakes.

It is a comedy of errors. It is a sad story about wasting Parliament’s time. It is a sad indictment on the Government, because road-user charges are a very important part of our infrastructure. It is very important that we have road-user charges so that we can pay for the roads, make sure our exports can get around the roads, and make sure the infrastructure is safe and efficient. Also, I think that there are some things missing in our road-user charges and our whole transport system that I just wanted to mention briefly, if I can. Local roads are an example. Local roads have been completely underfunded by this Government. If you go to Gisborne and if you go to the electorate of Meka Whaitiri and talk to the forestry workers who drive logging trucks up and down those roads, you will see that that is so dangerous. It is so dangerous now because funding for local roads has been underfunded. It is the same in Northland, actually—

💬 Andrew Little: And State Highway 3 in Taranaki.

And State Highway 3 in Taranaki, as well. The Government has got the balance wrong. Even though we support road-user charges, we believe that the Government has got the balance wrong when it comes to transport funding.

Just talking about the bill for a minute, the Minister has spelt out what it does. I will go over that. It amends the Road User Charges Act to enable regulations to be made, exempting from road-user charges vehicles that are not required to be registered. We had five good submissions. It was very interesting. There was a long debate about farm vehicles and trailers on farm vehicles. There was also a bit of concern, as I recall, from the Road Transport Forum, I think, which was worried about tractors that were carting trailers along but not being charged road-user charges. It is fair to say that this is a reasonable thing to do, because most of the vehicles covered by this bill make very little use of the roads, and they make a sufficient contribution to the cost they impose on the road network through the vehicle licence fee.

The imposition of an additional annual charge for a trade plate or vehicle licence is a cost-effective alternative to road-user charges. That is what this bill does. It amends the Land Transport Act to enable an annual charge in lieu of road-user charges to be collected through the registration and vehicle licensing system, where it is deemed appropriate. Owners of light road-user charge vehicles that are operated almost exclusively off-road can apply to the road-user charges collector for an exemption under section 40 of the Road User Charges Act. However, there are no offence provisions relating to the breach of conditions associated with section 40, and the bill proposes to amend that Act to add offence provisions to support the enforcement of those conditions.

There were seven minor technical amendments. Going back to what I said at the beginning, I say that Labour is supporting this bill. It is a necessary gap that needed to be plugged. It is just unfortunate that we had to go through such a long process and such an embarrassing process for the Government. Thank goodness we have such an excellent Regulations Review Committee, whose job it is to scrutinise regulations and legislation, led by that very able member the Hon Maryan Street, who did an excellent job after she followed on from Charles Chauvel, who also did a wonderful job. Thank goodness we have it there to keep an eye on the Minister of Transport when he tries to do things and tries to fix up problems without going about it the proper way. So thank you—Labour is supporting this bill.

It is good to hear that the Labour Party is supporting this bill, the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. I just want to acknowledge the Labour members on the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, who do such a fine job there—Darien and the others who have worked so hard on this bill. Thank you for your support for the Government on this bill.

This bill has a somewhat chequered history, as the previous speaker, Darien Fenton, has said. At the same time, these areas of road-user charges are not the easiest to deliver rules and regulations around in the first hit. Even when this bill was being considered by the select committee, the Road Transport Forum brought up the risk of tractors potentially using the road in a way that had not been anticipated or is not easy to accommodate through our road-user charges process. So it is still not 100 percent, you could say, in the sense that there may be opportunities for people to try to use their forms of transport to avoid the charges, but that is the nature of these things. We have just got to do what we can under the rules in the way that we can. I appreciate the work the Minister of Transport has done in getting this bill through the House and the select committee.

Also today we have had comments in this House from the Green Party about the roads of national significance. It is very disappointing to see those members attacking those roads, which are so important for the structure of the New Zealand infrastructure and freight transport forwarding in New Zealand going forward. When we look at the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill, we have got to remember that these things travel on roads, and the roads of national significance are vital for the growth of this country. It would be good to see the Green Party actually supporting those roads, rather than trying to decry them and reduce funding for them, which, no doubt, the Green Party intends to do.

This is a bill that is important in the sense that it clears up some of the anomalies in the road-user charge system. They are very simple changes, but they are necessary to make that system more effective. We look forward to it passing through the House. Thank you.

The Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill, now in its current form as reported back from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, is the sort of bill you have when you have made so many mistakes in the previous legislation, whether because of urgency or because of an inattentive Minister of Transport.

💬 Mike Sabin: Well, the Labour Party is qualified to talk about making lots of mistakes, of course.

The truth of this, as Mr Sabin well knows, is that we were landed with a piece of legislation for which we were told urgency was required. It was raced through its first reading in the dead of night, only for us to discover that it was full of holes. It is interesting that this piece of legislation, taken out of the context of errors and the haste with which the original legislation was passed, looks somewhat reasonable. It adds a bit of flexibility.

As the honourable member David Bennett has said, road-user charges are very important. Where I think the Labour Party differs from the National Party is that the National Party thinks that there are six roads in this country that are significant, whereas we think that there are a lot more roads that are significant. One of the roads in this country that is very dear to my heart—and I have been travelling a lot lately; you might or might not have heard of it—is State Highway 3 in north Taranaki. I can pinpoint it to the nearest kilometre. It is that stretch of State Highway 3 that goes from the borders of Waitara, the lovely settlement of Waitara, right up to the larger village of Te Kūiti, the handsome little village of Te Kūiti, which is so important to that area, so important to the history of this nation, and, I might add, so important to the history of the National Party. It is the heart of the King Country. The heart of the King Country is where a lot of sheep farming has been going on, and it is also an area of New Zealand that not only has delivered up one of the longest-serving National Party Prime Ministers in the form of Jim Bolger but has been fraught with difficulty in other respects for a long time, and it gave birth to a very important Māori movement, the Kīngitanga movement.

So we have the King Country, and State Highway 3 is the road that links the important province of Taranaki to the important province of Waikato. I make no distinction in terms of the importance of either of them, except that I do want to acknowledge in the context of this debate that as a result of decisions made in the wonderful province of Taranaki only last year, the significance of Waikato to Taranaki is even greater because of the decisions of the Taranaki Rugby Football Union. It has now affiliated the good people of Taranaki with a Super 15 rugby team that is domiciled in the heart of the Waikato, in Hamilton.

It is for that reason that the stretch of road that I talked so longingly and lovingly about—that stretch of State Highway 3 between the delightful settlement of Waitara and the very important settlement of Te Kūiti—is so important. A lot more Taranakians will now be travelling that road in the months to come, during the Super 15 season, and it is for that reason that I want to see road-user charges being used for all significant roads in New Zealand, including State Highway 3, which is why this bill affords—[Interruption] Well, I look at the levies being extracted out of the region of Taranaki by this Government, and indeed others, and added to the coffers of central government—and I quibble not about that exercise; it is an important exercise—but I, on behalf of the good people of Taranaki, and particularly the people of New Plymouth, simply say that we want our fair share. We want our fair share, and we want the money that gets extracted from the province of Taranaki to go into the general coffers spent on the infrastructure of New Plymouth, including State Highway 3.

It is for that reason that we support this bill. Road-user charges are levied in a very flexible way under this bill. It allows specialist machinery requiring specialist operators—machinery that is not often found on the roads, whether it is State Highway 3 or any other road in New Zealand—to now have road-user charges levied on it in a sensible, meaningful sort of way, and those levies can now be used for all the good roads of New Zealand, not just the six roads that the National Government thinks are significant.

So this bill creates that very important function for the Government of ensuring that there is now flexibility in the regime of road-user charges. It will benefit farmers, it will benefit farm contractors, and it will benefit the operators of specialist and sophisticated machinery that sometimes might travel on roads but spends most of its time on farmland or on forestry land or in other similar areas because that is what those vehicles are particularly intended for.

The other thing that this bill does is correct an oversight in the Road User Charges Act 2012—in particular, section 9. It now allows a reasonable excuse defence to be mounted for not displaying the correct road-user charge licence for the machinery. In fact, it adds an interesting level of flexibility now. Clause 6A sets up a reasonable excuse defence, but, interestingly, it adds new subsection (4B) to section 9, which means that any other excuse might be a reasonable excuse, not just the fact that there is a levy being charged already on the vehicle even though it does not have the correct road-user charge licence displayed upon it.

So this is the ultimate in flexibility and, like all good legislation, it has been scrutinised very carefully in the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It has won a consensus of support, at least from the Labour Party, and it also reflects and recognises that we need to make sure that those who are the users of our roads pay towards them. But where it fails, of course, is that it does not go the extra step of ensuring that the use of the money collected and levied in this way goes towards all the roads that are important to New Zealand—every important regional arterial route, not just the handful that some consider are important.

💬 Darien Fenton: Or railways.

Or rail—at least for those lines that can be used, because not only in Gisborne but also now in Taranaki, would you believe, there is a rail line that is unusable because of a single washout. It is currently being used by a set of golf carts, I might add, to supplement the Forgotten World Highway. But, notwithstanding that, we support the legislation because—

💬 Hon Member: Very good.

—it does achieve a very important objective. It creates a sense of flexibility. It will be good, and the next Government, when it is elected on 20 September this year—the Labour-led Government—will make sure that the levies collected will be used for all the important roads in this country, not just the small half-dozen that the members opposite in the Government think are important.

💬 David Bennett: Come to Hamilton and say that.

There will be levies that will be used beyond the Waikato Expressway. Even though there will be some Chiefs supporters from Taranaki using that expressway occasionally, most of the Chiefs supporters from Taranaki would rather that most of the money went to only the delightful, beautiful, scenic, and very important but currently unsafe State Highway 3.

The next call will be a split call. Julie Anne Genter—5 minutes.

I rise to speak on the second reading of the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill, as reported from the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. The Green Party has no reason to oppose this bill. It makes a number of technical amendments that fix up some of the mistakes that naturally happen when there is a good deal of reform, as there was recently to the road-user charges system.

For the benefit of those at home today, I will just outline exactly what the objectives of the road-user charges system are. Road-user charges are the fees that are paid by those using heavy vehicles, in lieu of paying a petrol tax. Road-user charges contribute about 30 percent to our transport budget as a whole. Since the National Government came into power, in fact, the share being paid by heavy vehicle users has declined quite significantly, and the amount being paid by users of petrol cars through petrol tax has increased quite a bit. So there is a greater portion of the transport budget being paid for by users of light vehicles—petrol vehicles—than there is by users of diesel.

According to the documents that were provided by the Ministry of Transport, the objectives of the road-user charges system are to support economic efficiency, to recover the costs that road users impose on the road network, and to be equitable between road users. I have to say that what is really missing from this bill are changes to the road-user charges system that would actually give effect to these objectives. The reality is that at the moment the road-user charges system is not direct—it does not directly charge cost to users in a way that would most directly support economic efficiency—and certainly the way that the transport budget is being spent is not equitable to all road users. It does not take the cost from those who are actually going to be using the road. It does not take the money from those road users and put it into the projects that are being funded.

As an example, Mr Bennett said earlier in this debate that the roads of national significance were good for the economy and that they were a fair use of road users’ money because it was being used on roads. What he did not say is that the Government’s main priority—these five or six motorways that are yet to be built—carry only a tiny percentage of all daily vehicle trips. So 75 percent of the transport budget is being used on less than 5 percent of vehicle trips. That does not seem like a fair allocation of resources, because it is not.

In fact, road-user charges and petrol tax are not the right way of assessing user charges. Basically, the way it works is that the Government sets its priorities based on what its election promises were, because it wants to build some shiny infrastructure so that some people in a few smaller towns or rural areas will vote for the National Party. The Government then prioritises and puts all the money into those projects, saying that they will be good for the economy, even though it has not done any economic analysis. Once the economic analysis shows that the projects are incredibly poor value, the Government goes ahead and builds them anyway. The users of the roads are not the ones paying for it. It will be people driving cars and trucks all over New Zealand who will be paying for these motorways that are used by only a tiny percentage of road users.

What is really sad about this is the lost opportunity. If the transport budget was allocated in a way that got the most bang for its buck, it could reduce transport costs across the board in New Zealand and it could improve choices for people so they had alternatives rather than having to rely on a car for all trips. Also, road freight users are actually massively disadvantaged by this system because most of the problems with peak congestion on a State highway network are caused by commuters who have no better option than taking the car. So it is the road freight users who are paying. They are less than 5 percent—less than 5 percent—of the vehicles on those roads at peak time. We have got plenty of roads to move the freight that needs to move on our roads; the problem is that the roads are congested with commuters because they do not have cost-effective alternatives for getting to work. And the road freight users have no choice but to pay, because the Government is going to put up the fuel taxes and road-user charges to pay for the projects that it is building now. In the future, we will be paying more for these projects and we will not have any choice but to use cars.

Kia ora. Ngā mihi nui ki a koutou. Kia ora. It is an absolute privilege to follow Green member Julie Anne Genter, our transport spokesperson. I am proud to rise to support this bill, the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. This is a small technical change to the way we earn income from the road-user charges for the National Land Transport Fund. We would like to thank the committee that heard the submissions, the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We would like to thank the submitters and the chair.

We are facing a time of rising greenhouse gas emissions from transport, a billion-dollar blowout when it comes to transport funding, and National having to put up the fuel taxes. We see an $8 billion annual fuel import bill. Kids feel unsafe cycling to school, yet National is not giving them solutions. Despite all these massive transport challenges facing the country, National, a few months before the election, wants to focus on a few technical amendments to the road-user charges. It wants to exempt fast tractors from road-user charges and it wants to exempt all unregistered vehicles—vehicles exempt from registration because of the nameplate system. This is National’s priority in transport. National has made a mess of it so it would rather hide it and focus on these technical amendments.

This is not the only road-user charges legislation that we have had in front of us this Parliament. We also saw another bill that changed the way the calculations were met. At a time when we have fantastic IT solutions—computer technology is fast, cheap, and efficient—they are not being used to calculate road-user charges on a fair cost basis. You would think that the National Party would be supporting a fair user-pays system. No, instead we are turning back closer to the past with a paper-based, overly complex, very expensive to administer, old-fashioned way of dealing with it. It is no surprise that New Zealand is the only country in the world that uses such a cumbersome, old, complex system to calculate its diesel-based levies in the way we fund our roads and public transport.

So this election is all about transport choice, because over on one side you see a very clear vision—a vision rooted in the 1950s and 1960s, a vision that does not give people choice.

💬 Mike Sabin: There have been roads around for longer than that.

We hear all the jokes from the National members, but it is not about choice. What they say is: “You’re going to use our mega-motorways and you’re going to pay for them. And even if we don’t get enough funds, we’re going to put it on the credit card.” Despite 75 percent of the money going there, these roads are for only 5 percent of the people. What the Green Party is about is choice. We want you to be able to safely cycle to school if you want. We want you to be able to take a good, efficient, affordable bus. We want to give you public transport choices like a central business district rail link to unlock Auckland’s potential. It is about choice, because what we are seeing is the lion’s share of the transport budget being blown on these so-called roads of national significance. What New Zealanders are not getting is choice.

Secondly, we are going to give Kiwis a choice around economic outcomes. What we heard from the Minister of Transport in question time today in relation to Julie Anne Genter was the Minister say that economic analyses and reports were overly bureaucratic and they are not what he makes his decisions on. At a time of considerable fiscal challenges facing our country, it is outrageous that we have a Minister overseeing a $20 billion National Land Transport Fund who is making decisions based on the politics, on what he thinks the strategic fit is, not on the New Zealand Transport Agency advice. What we know is that a huge chunk of that very expensive taxpayer spend is going on motorways with very low benefit-cost ratios. What we know is that the freight industry is crying out for alternatives—things like effective coastal shipping. We see our regional railways close, as we heard from the member Andrew Little, and we see our climate change emissions going through the roof, despite all the talk about them.

So, in summary, this is a good bill. We support it. It is very modest in its intent and technical. But what we need are greater solutions to the road-user charges problem. What we support is a smarter, fairer system where if you damage the roads—and when it comes to heavy vehicles, it is the weight of the vehicle that has a disproportionate impact on road wear and tear—we think it is fair that you should pay your fair contribution to upgrading our roads. Road-user charges are around 30 percent of our National Land Transport Fund income, so they are an important part of that and it is worthwhile looking in the future to IT solutions. In summary, what we are going to focus on in Parliament if we get the privilege of being in Government is not minor technical amendments such as these. What we are going to focus on is providing Kiwis with choices, better public transport, safer walking and cycling, and real economic outcomes for taxpayers.

I think the member Gareth Hughes just dashed his opportunity to raise his party’s vote with that particular speech. If people at home wake up, now that he is finished, what they will find is that roads are actually quite important to the economy in this country. The point that Andrew Williams made was a very, very good one—that all roads are important. No one on this side of the House would disagree that all roads are important. But the Greens have their fanciful wish list and would just tax people significantly greater amounts to pay for more access for schoolchildren to walk to school, and for more cycleways and so forth. I do not believe that it is actually a case of either/or; it is one of and/and. As Gerry Brownlee, the Minister of Transport, said today, this Government has spent more than anyone on the sorts of things that the Greens talk about but, hopefully, will never get a chance to do.

But if we think about the road network as we think of the human body, and if we think about the difference between veins and arteries, that is simply what the road network comes down to. There are some areas of the network, or the body, where it is far more important that we have flow and that there are no encumbrances to that flow, and that is what the roads of national significance programme is all about. Admittedly, that is a policy decision on behalf of the Government, and although the Greens can stand in the House and talk about low cost-benefit ratios, I can assure the Green members 100 percent that there is a far greater cost-benefit return to this nation in having efficient freight movement—in particular, around the more congested areas of this country—than there is in having more cycleways and opportunities for children to walk to school.

I do not know—I am an old-fashioned sort of a guy. I sort of think that if children want to walk to school, actually they probably can. They have been doing that for a long time, and it is not the case that this Government just ignores that; it is a case of prioritising. It is almost like the Greens have forgotten about the fact that they have gone away from this idea of printing money and like they have got some magic wish list of opportunities in the transport sector that they would pay for, but like they have somehow forgotten about the fact that you have got to have an economy that is performing to actually do that.

💬 Simon O’Connor: How’re they gonna move the money?

Well, exactly—ironically, how will they move the money? How are they going to move the logs? How are they going to move the milk powder? How are they going to move all the other produce that this primary producing country ultimately produces? What are they going to do? Are they going to have a team of people with unicycles wandering down cycleways to get it to market? How about the buses that they talk about all the time? Oh, that is right. They use roads as well. I have not seen them hovering above the earth any time recently.

This Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill has some minor technical amendments. But in all seriousness what we are actually dealing with here is a very complex system for the road-user charges. The anomalies that sprang up have been dealt with in this legislation. Although it affects only a small amount of people, a lot of those people are in my electorate. A lot of them are farmers and a lot of them are people who work in the rural economy. That is right. They are the lifeblood of this economy. So although the Greens can trivialise that fact and ask why we are dealing with this bill now, the bottom line is that if we were not, they would be criticising us for not dealing with it.

This Government just gets on and does what the community and what the voters expect of us. This is another good example of it, and another really good example from the Greens of why they should never occupy the Government benches.

I am pleased to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to take a call in the second reading of the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. New Zealand First supported this bill going to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. My colleague Denis O’Rourke indicated at the time, back in August of last year, that the changes brought about by the bill were largely technical in nature and largely acted to correct anomalies in the existing legislation. A bill to correct stuff-ups—that was how my colleague described it. Mr O’Rourke is an eloquent man, a man of letters, a learned barrister and solicitor, well schooled and well skilled in the ways of the law. He is capable of a quite melodic turn of phrase when the fancy takes him, but on that occasion I believe he was being very deliberately blunt.

He was followed by Mr Auchinvole from the Government side of the House, the retiring list member from the West Coast—not retiring as in shy and retiring. I did not mean to intimate that Mr Auchinvole is the shy and retiring type—quite the opposite, in fact. Mr Auchinvole is nothing if not flamboyant. But I digress perhaps just a little. Mr Auchinvole proceeded to castigate my colleague in what I can only assume was a grudging attempt to indicate his appreciation for our support of the bill whilst still desiring to have a dig at Mr O’Rourke in the process.

💬 David Bennett: Well, Denis isn’t going to be here.

He then went on to talk quite a lot about tractors, Mr Bennett, about which I am certain he knows a great deal. I know a thing or two about them myself. I have driven many a tractor in my time in my life prior to coming to Parliament. In one previous incarnation, in fact, I sold tractors for a living—Massey Ferguson and Samay. Tractors are relevant to this bill because they are one of the types of vehicle with which it is concerned. As vehicles that are almost—

💬 Hon Annette King: Ask Shane Ardern about them. He knows a bit about a tractor.

That was a very fine example of a Massey Ferguson tractor—an oldie but a goodie. As vehicles that are almost never used on the roads and therefore not required to be registered, tractors may be exempted from the requirement for road-user charges to be paid under the changes that this bill brings about. That is a good thing, in our estimation. They will incur a small annual charge instead as contribution for the very minor wear and tear that tractors inflict on our roads—all very fair and above board.

The bill was returned from the select committee, the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee—that fine and august body of men and women from across the House of the people. It has been returned with a small number of minor amendments suggested. They are minor technical changes to what is a minor technical bill. It is nothing earth shattering. This bill will not cause mountains to move or civilisations to fall. It is very necessary. It is a necessary part of the machinery of government, grinding away largely unseen beneath the foundations of society. But it is not likely to be a central player in the upcoming election campaign, which we all face—all bar Mr Auchinvole, of course, who is retiring, and one or two others from the benches opposite. There are 14 in total, I believe. And who knows? There may yet be more. Mr Auchinvole is exempted from the rigours of the campaign. He will not be joining us on the hustings. Instead, he will be retiring to the West Coast—and a fine place it is to retire to—doubtless to write the first of many books about tractors.

In closing, I will say that New Zealand First will continue to support this bill. There will be great relief about that on the Government side of the House, I am sure. Those members can rest assured that this bill will continue its passage through the parliamentary process and into law. We will enable it so. Thank you.

What an extraordinarily perceptive contribution from Mr Prosser, expounding at length on the mellifluous oratory of his colleague Denis O’Rourke and the merits of Massey Ferguson tractors. It followed on a beautiful segue from the peroration of the bucolic charms of “Taradise” from the member Mr Andrew Little, and the charms of State Highway 3. What an extraordinary contribution. I was thinking that it might be 5 to 6 on a Thursday, but it is not. I look at the clock and it is 25 past 5 on a Tuesday. I wonder what we are in for later on this week.

I must say, this bill, the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill, is small and perfectly formed. It amends primary legislation to enable exemptions from road-user charges for vehicles not required to be registered for use on roads, such as the many by-ways and highways of Taranaki. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much—

💬 Hon Maurice Williamson: See if you can top those last two speeches.

Oh, I do not even want to begin to try to do that. I am rising, as my colleagues have, to speak in favour of what is a very sensible piece of legislation, the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. Its history is not so sensible, but what is in here makes sense. This bill makes amendments to both the Land Transport Act and the Road User Charges Act, and in doing so its primary purpose really is to enable regulations to be made exempting road-user charge vehicles that are not required to be registered from road-user charges. That is, vehicles that are exempt from road-user charges make very little use of roads but make a sufficient contribution to the costs they impose on the road network through the vehicle licence fee. However, some vehicles are likely to impose higher costs on the road network than are covered by the standard licence fee. That is the situation that this bill seeks to rectify. There has been quite a lot of conversation about tractors and fast tractors, and that appears to be the main vehicle concerned in this situation.

The bill also looks at offence provisions to breaches of conditions associated with section 40 of the Road User Charges Act. It proposes to add offence provisions to support the enforcement of conditions associated with exemptions under section 40. That is all very interesting. Then there are seven minor technical amendments to the Road User Charges Act to improve the operation of it. That may sound quite boring, but as probably everybody in this House would agree, road-user charges are important, and it is important that we get this right, which leads me to the very interesting history of this bill.

Others have mentioned it, but I took the step of reading the first reading speeches—or at least some of them—on this bill, because I thought, gee, it is interesting what people were saying there, and what a fascinating history it is, indeed. It does show me as a member of this House the real value, I guess, of the Regulations Review Committee, because what happened, in a nutshell, was that the original road-user charges legislation actually did not get it right. The Government did not get it right.

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Again.

Well, it did not get it right a few times, really. I looked at Maryan Street’s speech because she made a very interesting contribution in the first reading, talking about how delighted she was to see this piece of legislation come before the House, even under urgency—even under urgency, which, as other colleagues have mentioned, did seem a somewhat strange thing—because she was the chair of the Regulations Review Committee and had seen all the to-ing and fro-ing that took place leading up to this bill.

Basically, what happened was that officials decided to try to fix up problems with earlier legislation by regulation. The Ministry of Transport decided to introduce regulation “pending outstanding policy decisions on how best to manage” these exemptions. As she said: “In other words, the Government had not done it in the legislation.” What happened, as was quite correctly pointed out, was that the officials did not have the power to do that. That was pointed out by the Regulations Review Committee. It is very interesting that instead of trying to deal with it properly, it was disallowed—I believe that that is the term. I am just trying to find it again—yes, disallowed. Charles Chauvel moved that. Instead of trying to get it right properly, the Minister of Transport just had another go at trying to do it by some sort of back-door means. That is quite interesting. The Minister concerned was Gerry Brownlee. So it is actually, again, interesting.

I want to quote Maryan Street’s first reading speech. She said: “What happened after the disallowance of the regulation? The Minister reinstated it. It was not any better the second time—it was not any better. So we have a complete litany of ineptitude—a complete litany of ineptitude.” That was the Minister Gerry Brownlee. I do not want to be unkind, but I am aware that if Christchurch colleagues were with me in this House right now, they would say that that sort of description of that Minister is probably not too far off the mark. [Interruption] Oh, there is a Christchurch colleague here, right behind me. Poto Williams is, indeed, confirming that in terms of the behaviour of that Minister and the way that he has managed the situation in Christchurch, perhaps that same description—“a complete litany of ineptitude”—may well apply.

Getting back to what happened with this bill and the regulations and so on leading up to where we are today, I want to say that the legislation was wrong in the first place. Regulation was put in place that was not allowable. It was disallowed. Then, because there was no debate on that, there was further regulation that was disallowed. Then, finally, there was legislation introduced, and we have the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill. I think members throughout the House and anybody listening to this will find that quite interesting. I do not know how common that sort of farce is, but I found it very interesting.

Just going on to the detail, really, and why this is important, I think it is important that we have a modernised and simplified road-user charge system that has appropriate provisions for compliance as well as appropriate monitoring mechanisms. This bill seeks to do that. Also, the Government needs to ensure that the road-user charges are fair and reflect the amount of time the vehicle is actually on the road. This is where we talk about these high-speed tractors. I notice, in looking at first reading speeches, that there appears to have been quite a lot of conversation between some members on different tractor brands. I do not intend to get into that, having no strong view on the matter.

On a more serious note, Kiwis are being hit in the pocket by increasing petrol tax and increasing road-user charges so that the Government can pay for its gold-plated roads of national significance. I think it is important as politicians that we think about transport infrastructure in a much more comprehensive and strategic way than this Government appears to have been doing. What sort of transport system do we need in 20 years’, 30 years’, and 50 years’ time? We do not believe that the roads of national significance will deliver on that. We need a much more strategic approach to transport direction, and, in fact, it needs to be part of a strategic approach to economic development. That is something we are not seeing from this Government.

I do want to note that I thought the contribution from the MP Mike Sabin was interesting. He talked about roads and why we needed roads. He talked about logs and milk. Well, yes, logs and milk are very important in our economy—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: Ask Judith.

That is true. Judith Collins will certainly vouch for the milk part. But we do need to get past thinking about our economy as solely logs and milk. We need to be looking at the value-adding. We need to create a smart economy. We need a manufacturing base in this country. This Government fails to deal with those sorts of questions. It fails to look at the role of Government working in partnership with business and in partnership with unions to develop a comprehensive economic development strategy for our country where we can create really good-quality jobs that deliver decent incomes to our people, instead of what is happening at the moment, where wage rates are an absolute disgrace. People cannot live on wages in many, many cases. The wages are simply insufficient to meet their costs—the family’s costs. That is just wrong, and that has not always been the case in this country. Some people maybe think that it has been. We have not always been a low-wage economy. We have at times, in fact, had very similar wage levels to our Australian compatriots. Coming back to the bill, I want to say that we do need a strategic approach in transport and a strategic approach in the economy to ensure that we get those better wages.

A couple of people have talked about local roads, and I also would just like to comment that local roads are a critical part of our infrastructure as well and are essential for regional development. But the other thing—and something that the Government seems to have a lot of problems with when it is focused solely on its roads of national significance—is the importance of our rail network. The rail network should be the backbone of our transport system, because we know that the problem with roads is that they get full very quickly. All these roads—we build them, they are OK for a while, and then they get full. What do we do? We build more roads. We need to ensure that we have a rail network that actually can support our economy, including our manufacturing industry.

I think this has been a great example, listening to the Opposition members, of the green tail wagging the red dog—the belief that if you use words like “strategic” and “planning” and all of this, somehow it will just come to pass. They are talking about that, then, with the roading network—that somehow, you know, we are just going to value-add to things like logs and the fisheries and so on, without actually taking in the fact of whether anyone is going to buy them and, ultimately, how you are going to transport them.

If you live up in Whangarei, like I used to, where there are huge logging issues, you want these roads of national significance opened up. That is why colleagues like Mike Sabin and Mark Mitchell are supporting the Pūhoi to Wellsford highway and why we are trying to open up areas like the Waikato Expressway. It is to make this economy work more efficiently and faster.

So this legislation, the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill, here in its second reading, is an attempt—a small attempt, but an attempt in the wider scheme of things—to make the transport system in New Zealand far more efficient. We are committed to an economy that is fast and flexible, and that is why we move towards a fast and flexible land transport scheme. I commend the bill to the House.

I understand that the next call is a split call—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: No, I don’t think it is.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): It is not? OK—

💬 Hon Trevor Mallard: No, no. I think the Greens have been kind enough to say that they would like to listen to me for 10 minutes.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): Well, we look forward to 10 minutes from the Hon Trevor Mallard.

Thank you, Mr Assistant Speaker, and I would like to say that I am starting this call in some anxiety. Looking around at my colleagues in the House, I have a feeling that I am missing the men’s caucus of the Labour Party, which could well be meeting at the moment. I am slightly worried about why I might be excluded from that group.

I would like to start by saying that I have some experience of vehicles of this type and know a little more than I used to 40-odd years ago about which vehicles should be driven across roads and which should not be. I had a very bad experience on the county roads of Taumarunui with a D7 bulldozer, where I discovered that even when you have the blade up when you go across the tarseal road, it does tend to make quite a difference to the surface as the D7 grips and rips it up. So I do know that even if they are vehicles that are not generally driven on roads, they can cause damage, quite a lot of expense, and, in this particular case, annoyance to the county clerk of the Taumarunui County Council at the time.

I listened with great interest to the speech of Simon O’Connor, and he was saying that The Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill was a small but important step towards having a more efficient roading system. This bill is no such thing. It is no such thing at all. This bill—and I have been here looking at it very carefully for at least 20 minutes now—appears to be something that is only fixing up a mess that is the responsibility of a National Government Minister of Transport. I cannot tell from reading it whether it goes back to Maurice Williamson, whether it is all Gerry Brownlee’s work, or whether “Mr Fix-it”, or “Mr Not-quite-fix-it”, Steven Joyce, was the person who—from Maurice Williamson’s smile I can tell that it was Steven Joyce, not Maurice Williamson, who was the person responsible for making this mess originally, and then Gerry Brownlee tried to fix it up twice. So what this bill does is try to correct some errors in transport legislation.

I know this is an unusual thing to say, but I am actually feeling slightly sorry for the National Government Ministers in this particular area, because I think it is fair to say that there are two areas of legislation, especially for minor legislation and regulation, where you are not that surprised when it is wrong. They are agriculture and transport. That does say—[Interruption] Sorry?

💬 Hon Member: Agriculture?

Yes, agriculture and transport. They are the ones that most often have to come back with amendments to amendments to amendments in order to try to get the legislation right. That probably does go, over a period of years—although I do not want to criticise the Public Service—to the quality of the recruitment and the payment of the people, and, as a result of that, some of the legislation that we have had out of those agencies, frankly, has not been that flash. This Parliament has wasted a lot of time on going over it and over it and over it in trying to get it right.

I will be interested to hear from the next National speaker a better explanation around combination vehicles. Is a combination vehicle something like a truck and trailer that are only sometimes put together? Is it a truck that has the basic trailer attachment, but it is not on it at the current time? Or is it something that very, very rarely gets put together in that combination? The requirement to apply for a certificate at a point soon after using it is something that is important. If there is a requirement to do something rapidly, one would assume that it is an unusual combination. I presume it does not apply when it is a combination road-user charges thing. It is not the diesel land cruiser giving the other diesel land cruiser a tow over the Wainuiōmata Hill because one of them has run out of diesel. Clearly, they run out of road-user charges fairly often, but they still go when they run out of road-user charges, but not when they run out of diesel. Is a combination road-user charges vehicle one land cruiser diesel towing another land cruiser diesel, or not? Is that what we are referring to as a combination vehicle? And if a vehicle is not actually using its motor when it has a motor at the time it is being towed, is it subject to road-user charges or not?

I know that members opposite are looking carefully across the legislation, and even if they cannot tell us now, I am sure that as we work our way through the long and extensive Committee stage, especially on Part 2 of this bill—it is a bit sneaky, really. It pretends to be other minor amendments, but actually there is quite a lot in here. If we look at new section 12A, “Agreement to pay road user charges in relation to combination of vehicles”, in clause 8, I think there is room for more explanation there.

The next thing is “or carried” in display of a road-user charges licence. The deal around road-user charges licences is that you normally need to be able to see them. So what does “or carried” mean? If there is a combination of vehicles and there is a road-user charges licence, can someone keep the road-user charges licence in their pocket, rather than displaying it, as is normally required? It appears to be what we are permitting now. I am quite surprised, frankly, because I would have thought that for a Government that is working hard to get the road-user charges revenue, it is pretty hard to get that revenue if the road-user charges miles, or kilometres I suppose they are called now, are kept—[Interruption] Well, it used to be miles back when I was in Taumarunui county. [Interruption] Metrics—it is a new thing. To be fair, that was in the days of 60-mile-an-hour limits. That has changed.

There is new section 38A, “Exemption of RUC vehicles not required to be registered”, in clause 11. This appears to give to a Minister quite a broad power as to what is to be licensed, or not. If you look at new section 38A(1), it can be “(a) all RUC vehicles that are exempt from registration under the Land Transport Act 1998; or (b) 1 or more classes of RUC vehicles …”. The Minister can specify that all road-user charges vehicles or a particular class of road-user charges vehicles are exempt. [Bell rung] Is that 8 minutes already, Mr Assistant Speaker? No, that could not possibly be. I had 10 minutes, not 5.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Lindsay Tisch): I gave you 10 minutes

I had not even got on to the bit about the spooks. If one goes to page—[Interruption] No, absolutely. The member in front of me—the Minister to be—says that it is not in this bill. Actually, this bill does relate to the Search and Surveillance Act 2012. Who would have thought that there would be a sneaky amendment in relation to the ability to search and surveil hidden away in something called the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill?

I bet that the Prime Minister, who is in charge of the Government Communications Security Bureau, knows nothing about this. It is another attempt to use the Maxwell Smart approach on the part of Gerry Brownlee, and to not let the boss know what is going on. It does involve getting warrants. It involves getting warrants under the Search and Surveillance Act. Well, do we really want such serious legislation—such serious legislation—to be used to find out whether someone has got a road-user charges ticket in their pocket? I mean, the idea that some of the most serious legislation in the country, which is very, very controversial and something that is up for amendment, could be brought into force in order to search for a bit of paper on road-user charges is just disgraceful. I look forward to a lot of discussion on this particular point in the Committee stage.

I commend the Land Transport and Road User Charges Legislation Amendment Bill to the House.

Bill read a second time.