Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I rise in support of this bill, the Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill. It’s been some weeks now since the first part of the debate, so I’ll just very briefly, for people watching at home, outline what this bill is doing. It’s really just tidying up certain processes so that things can move a bit quicker in the transport space. One is providing for the creation of transport instruments. There’s a whole lot of regulations and rules that affect the transport sector, anything from the maximum penalty that you might be charged for when you park your car illegally and it gets towed, that type of stuff—there’s all sorts of things like that. At the moment, there isn’t the type of instrument that means that the officials can, kind of, just get on with it and make the sorts of updates that need to happen regularly over time, and everything has to go through a Government process. This allows for a more streamlined process which means that the Minister of Transport can delegate accountability for certain rules and regulations to lower-level authorities through the creation of transport instruments. I think what that will mean is just that our rules and regulations in transport can stay up to date and fit for purpose. Otherwise, it just gets, kind of, caught up in a massive process, which isn’t always necessary for small changes.

It also makes some changes to the powers of exemption from regulations and rules made under the land and maritime Acts. It increases the board size of the transport agency, Waka Kotahi. Also, some of the other organisations like the Civil Aviation Authority and Maritime New Zealand can have the ability of having more people appointed to their board. I think that’s a particularly good thing in the case of Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency, which has nearly 2,000 staff and an incredible mandate, huge amount of responsibility, right across the country. In order to have effective governance for an organisation that is that large, you really do need more than the current number of board members. This is only making a slight change from at least six to more than eight to at least seven and no more than nine. Then there’s some changes to maximum fines allowed in regulations made under the Maritime Transport Act, increasing the time period a vehicle can be impounded to collect evidence after a serious crash or incident, and making the Chatham Islands Council a regional council under Part 3A of the Maritime Transport Act.

All of this sounds like—I guess it’s a little bit difficult to relate this bill, necessarily, to people’s everyday lives, but I did during this debate just want to take the opportunity to respond to some of the arguments that were put forward earlier in the debate by Michael Woodhouse, the spokesperson for transport for the National Party. I think that there’s a whole lot of misconceptions, particularly from the National Party, on what effective transport investment is in the 21st century, and I can really understand their confusion about it. They’ve long been advocates for significant investment in very short, very expensive bits of highway. You know, it is understandable that people would think, “Oh, if we have these really expensive highway connections, it’s going to make it easier to drive from point A to point B.” Unfortunately, the overwhelming evidence from the second half of the 20th century, where we did a lot of highway building, is that it doesn’t reduce congestion and make it easier for people to get around. It does have a lot of negative unintended side effects, which have to do with the way that land use is influenced. When you build a highway, you very briefly reduce congestion, maybe up to the first five years—but, of course, the design life of the road itself should be more like 20 to 40 years—but after about five years, there’s overwhelming evidence from North American cities and also from here in New Zealand that within about five years there’s no reduction in congestion because the highway—

💬 Simon Court: Waterview Tunnel’s fantastic.

Well, it’s not quite been open five years, has it, Mr Court? The thing is that when you make it easier for more people to drive at peak time, what happens is more businesses and households make decisions to live further away and then they rely more on their cars, and then after about five years, the congestion comes back because you get an increase in VKT—vehicle kilometres travelled.

💬 Simon Court: Tell that to the tradies of West Auckland.

I mean, one would think that the ACT Party would understand markets, and what I’m hearing right now from their resident engineer is that engineers actually don’t understand markets. They’ve been planning around more cars coming no matter what the price—

💬 Simon Court: My turn next, and we’ll let the voters be the judge.

—no matter what the cost is. This is just empirical; it’s not a matter of opinion, Mr Court. If you look at the papers, The Fundamental Law of Road Congestion done by the Toronto University Department of Economics, that looks at data from 50 cities, it really overwhelmingly concludes that every time we spend billions and billions of dollars investing in a small number of cars to be able to get on the network, it results in more congestion, a more car-dependent land use pattern, which actually reduces people’s choice, it reduces their ability to get around. Not everybody can afford a car; not everyone can drive. We have unintentionally created towns and cities where our youngest residents—you know, children aged 12—are no longer able to independently get around. They’re forced to be driven by their parents from place to place.

💬 Simon Court: Nothing to do with motorways.

So whether it’s motorways, the reality is that there’s an opportunity for a much more efficient transport system, and this means investing in the modes that have been under-invested in. When we start to reduce the unintentional subsidies that exist for single-occupant vehicle trips—that’s one person driving alone in a car at peak time, which is, of course, the average vehicle occupancy at peak time in all of our major cities is 1.1. By unintentionally planning everything around one person, one car, we have made it difficult, if not impossible, for people to do anything but use a car, so we have unintentionally taken away those choices from people. The whole system will work more efficiently when we invest in those missing alternatives, like safe cycling for short trips; like frequent, reliable, affordable public transport. The more we invest in it, the more we put it out there, the more people take it, and the less congestion there is on our roads. Then, of course, the people who need to use the road network in their cars and trucks are better off if parents don’t have to take their kids to school, if they can get on their bikes and walk and scoot safely. The tradies are better off, because they are a minority of cars on the network. They’re better off when you invest in the alternatives.

I guess what really reigns here for the right—it’s really clear from the interjections from the ACT Party here—is they’re not interested in empirical evidence, they’re not interested in efficient solutions; they’re interested in a culture war that says we should build stuff for cars no matter how ineffective it is at helping people get around our towns and cities.

💬 Simon Court: We’re interested in relieving congestion.

The way that you can reduce congestion—yes, you can do it through congestion pricing, Mr Court, and there are five to seven cities in the world that have implemented congestion charging. There are some commonalities amongst those cities—so Singapore, the City of London, Stockholm, Gothenburg, Milan; all of them had much higher investment in public transport before they went to congestion charging, so when they went to congestion charging, that infrastructure was already there and people could switch to it.

💬 Simon Court: Let’s have both.

They also had much higher prices—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! Mr Court.

—and smaller supply of parking. So, you know, we’ve still got room to go here in New Zealand, but the reality is that the number one priority, if we want to make it easier for people and goods to move around this country, the best way to do that is to invest in rapid transit in our cities, in frequent rail between our cities, and improving the options for coastal shipping and rail to move goods. That actually costs less than putting the next car or truck on the road.

The beauty of investing in green alternatives to the roading network is that they free up the roading network itself. Those investments help the people who use the roads. The roading network is there; of course it should be made safer, and that’s something I worked on quite a lot in the last term of Government. It’s not made safer through mega-projects that cost billions of dollars for 3 to 5 kilometres; it’s made safer through things like median barriers, through slight widening, through safer passing lanes on thousands of kilometres of roading network that we have across the country, and through safer speeds, where that’s appropriate.

So the Green Party will still be here talking about a sensible transport investment. We invite our colleagues to the right, in the ACT Party and the National Party, to come on board, because this should not be a political football. New Zealand has so much to gain from a rational, sensible investment in transport from this day forward.

Thank you. The ACT Party does support this bill, because it provides the opportunity to introduce better instruments at the behest of the Minister, which will specify how to comply with rules or regulations. But the underlying issue is that some of the rules and regulations are still unfit for purpose. Now, we’ve heard from other members of the House about why they think this is such a good idea to give the Minister of Transport more powers. But ACT does have significant reservations, and these reservations have also been raised by submitters.

Some of the submitters were concerned that the ability for the Minister to grant the power to organisations like the New Zealand Transport Agency (NZTA) to create their own regulatory instruments would lead to excessive prescription of how organisations that make things and build things such as buses and coaches, the thousands of trucks and trailers that are constructed and modified every year—that the specifications for these would end up being written by a Government department in Wellington, rather than trusting those businesses which know exactly what type of logging truck or freight truck they want and are prepared to pay an engineer and a fabricator to build them exactly what they want and then to have it certified as safe. And some of those concerns were that giving these additional powers to the Minister, and thereby to allow him through his agencies, to make these rules was overly prescriptive.

We know that some of the things in this bill are important. For example, in a maritime sense, it might be entirely worthy to require certain types of vessels to carry lifejackets and for people to wear them, and that’s entirely worthy. But what we see here is a risk, and that risk is that agencies like Te Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency have, in the past, demonstrated an inability to keep the roads safe and actually to fulfil the regulatory responsibilities that they already have.

We know that NZTA has failed in its duties to check on trucks and other things that they were required to check on and certify, and that over many years these issues went unidentified and unresolved. And when they finally were brought to the attention of the NZTA, following serious injuries and fatalities when some poorly constructed trailers and other components failed, NZTA, rather than looking at its own obligations as a regulator and whether they had fulfilled those obligations, appear to have gone on a witch hunt after certain people in the industry for failing to fulfil their obligations. It is very, very important—and ACT would want to make the point—that people who are making things, manufacturing things, must do so safely, but those Government organisations responsible for auditing and checking, they have to do their job as well. That’s why we vote them budgets and that’s what the people of New Zealand expect them to do.

We have heard concerns from different stakeholders, not just through the select committee process but also through the media organisations, who were so afraid of the repercussions of speaking out against NZTA and some of the behaviours that they’d witnessed and been subjected to that they resorted to using a burner phone to communicate with Radio New Zealand journalists to raise their concerns about the performance of NZTA and the likely implications of some of these reforms. That must be almost unheard of, in terms of New Zealand Government agencies creating such a culture of fear amongst those who they are intending and have a responsibility to regulate.

Some of the submitters who were prepared to put their views on record pointed out something that seems very obvious to many of us, that where you have designers designing components and manufacturers making them—say, for trucks and trailers, and coaches and buses which might be used as school buses or in public transport—it is very, very important that the designers are competent and that they follow best practice. And in order to demonstrate that they are competent, those designers must have sufficient professional development and training and certification of their own. Some of the submitters pointed out that in NZTA’s current approach and in their practice, they have completely ignored the requirements for a professional practice aspect around certification of trucks and trailers and buses and other mechanical equipment, and instead chosen to, essentially, give a certain group of certifiers powers over others, and these certifiers are often people who are getting towards the end of their career. They may have learnt on the job. They may know what good welding and good technique looks like in the factory, but they haven’t had the benefit of professional engineering oversight of their careers, and they haven’t had the benefit of professional development.

So what the submitters proposed and what we haven’t heard yet from the Minister is whether a professional practice, essentially like a mechanical engineering or a civil engineering discipline, could be created around the certification process. Because if there are going to be thousands of trucks and buses and trailers and log trucks and bulk trucks on our roads, and those being manufactured new and being adapted and modified every year, then we would want to know that the people certifying them aren’t just people who’ve come from the factory floor or from the shop but they are actually people who understand engineering design processes, safety in design—all of those things that we’ve learnt how important they are through the Christchurch earthquakes, Pike River, and other disasters which have shone a very bright light on the role of professional engineers’ training and continuing professional development, as well as the regulatory auditing function.

So what ACT would propose is that while we do support this bill, the Minister and the agencies that Minister is responsible for focus their efforts not just on compliance, not just on auditing, not just on enforcement, but on identifying those skills gaps and those opportunities to increase the level of knowledge in the industry and actually to set out a pathway for those people who are working on the shop floor, who are working in the factories, making these trucks and buses and trailers and so forth—that they can actually have a pathway to a vocation. Because currently there is no vocational qualification for somebody who’s an expert welder to go on to become an expert certifier. It’s simply something that they achieve when NZTA, for example, issues them a letter.

So what ACT would advocate for is better education and, for the agencies involved in certification, to identify where those gaps are in education and training, and to propose better vocational education qualifications if that’s necessary, and also a process to review the practice of these designers and fabricators so that they can receive the benefit of continuing professional development as they go about their vitally important work. And it is vitally important work, because not only do we need this equipment to be safe, but we also need more trucks on the road to cart more quarry products and aggregates from those quarries to cement plants, and then the concrete to the house building sites and to the roads and even to the railways that our colleagues in the Green Party and previous and current Labour Ministers are so fond of—those railways, which will consume hundreds of thousands, if not millions of tonnes of concrete and other products; this year, expected to run to 4 million cubic metres or 10 million tonnes of concrete coming from batching plants in trucks on the roads. And you can’t make concrete without getting the rock from the quarry to the batching plant and the cement from the cement kiln to the batching plant.

So it’s vitally important not just for safety, but for our economy to get this right. So the ACT party does support this bill, but with reservations and with a laser focus on improving it for safety, but also for the purposes of delivering the economic benefits that trucks and buses on the road and, dare I say, even trains on the tracks can offer to New Zealand. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I rise in support of this bill, and I’ll take a very short call. I thought I’d contribute some additional material rather than repeat it. I think the first thing to comment on is, really, the significance of something like transport instruments in freeing up the Minister to be able to do what is very necessarily done at this point. I think that the select committee has done some very good amending in terms of making that a much more careful process, so there are checks and balances in that system. There will be specified people that the authority is delegated to, and the matter will be one that can be subject to the scrutiny of the Regulations Review Committee. That is true too of exemptions. Those are important changes, but one of the ones I’m most proud of that’s changed is that there is now going to be long-term funding for the seafarers board. That lets our sailors, who have been out there in COVID, absolutely disconnected, allowed to have access to the internet in a long-term way, and that’s a very good thing, and I’m very proud of it. It was an election promise. Thank you.

The next call is a split call. I call Chris Penk.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. These are a few of my favourite things, as someone once remarked. We’ve heard of seafarers’ welfare and, even more importantly, the Regulations Review Committee so far in this debate, so it’s a good day for New Zealand. The Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill is good, as far as it goes. There have been some debates that I might venture—much broader in nature, obviously, than the bill. And that’s been very interesting to hear—our colleagues of the ACT and Green Party exchanging views on the validity of, among other things, highways.

The bill itself, though, is pretty mode-neutral. If I were feeling lazy at this time of the sitting week, I would spend my whole time contributing merely by reading out all the different number of Acts that are amended. It is an omnibus bill. I will spare everyone that pleasure, but I will note that transport, civil aviation, port, and even submarine modes of transport are covered. But I’m being a bit cheeky and getting overexcited, probably by the mention of the Regulations Review Committee, because—submarine cables, in fact, and pipelines, so a form of transport, but only very technically, in the underwater environment.

So we’ve got in this legislation an attempt to add efficiency and effectiveness to the transport regulatory system, arguing, really, that we’ve got a way of ensuring that the regime is able to achieve what it does and in a more timely, perhaps less costly, manner. Certainly that’s the aim, and, of course, it’s a worthy aim. I’ll just, in my remaining time, touch on a couple of aspects that I thought were interesting about the way that it goes about doing that. I wasn’t a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee that considered the bill, so I have due circumspection in saying that I didn’t hear all the submissions or indeed advice regarding the particular provision that I’m about to speak to.

But it’s about the right of appeal that’s not to apply to class exemptions. So what we’ve got in the bill is a situation where if an exemption is applied to a class, we are saying in this legislation that there won’t be a right of appeal to the District Court for anyone who’s dissatisfied with that decision to exempt a whole class. The bill rightly notes that doing so would need to be understanding that there’s a high cost—is the phrase that it used—to appealing to the District Court, and then it notes that there are a couple of other avenues that someone could pursue if they were dissatisfied with a class exemption having been granted. One is judicial review. Well, of course, that’s an application to the High Court, and that, of course, in itself is very expensive.

They do, however, note that the Regulations Review Committee would be available to scrutinise class instruments.

💬 Rachel Brooking: Excellent.

Exactly. I have a couple of colleagues from that worthy committee with us in the House. I note that we’re going to have more work coming our way, so I’m ambivalent about that, but nevertheless, it is at least an avenue that is available and will remain available, of course, for anyone who believes that the class exemption that’s going to be allowed for under this, albeit that they can’t make an appeal to the District Court, they do at least have that opportunity. The commencement date, I note with interest, actually, was originally going to be 1 July 2020. It’s been kicked down the road a little bit, and that’s obviously appropriate.

So I’ll just finish, I think—

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: Go on. You can do it.

Well, actually, I’ve been encouraged by the other side to continue going. I’m seeing if the whips want me to continue to do so, so I’ll keep an eye on that. I will just note, by way of punishment, that the exemptions to powers made under the regulations and rules—the director of the relevant transport agency may but is not required to include expiry dates. That was a bit surprising to me. Speaking of expiry dates, I’ve got 24 more seconds. So maximum fines can be increased—well, that’s probably reasonably obvious at face value. I thought the other interesting aspect was that the Chatham Islands Council can be a regional council under Part 3A of the Maritime Transport Act. So for lovers of that fine piece of real estate in New Zealand, that’s very interesting indeed.

Tēnā koe, e te Māngai. I stand to take this opportunity to speak, where the Māori Party had chosen not to take a call on this bill. I share the member opposite’s enthusiasm for regulatory progress in this space. The objective of this bill is to maintain the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulation system created by our legislative system in transport, and I am enthusiastic about that because of the renewed focus on safety that this affords. I think that there has been a focus by the previous Government, the National Government, and it was single-minded, as members have noted already in this debate, about building more roads and that being the focus of transport. But there is a very real and very important need for our transport bodies to have a focus on safety and regulation in this space, and I believe this bill gives the Minister the kind of flexibility that he needs to encourage active regulation, which means that New Zealanders will be better served by their regulatory bodies. Kia ora.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. First, can I just mihi to the member Julie Anne Genter—ka pai tō kōrero—and also Arena Williams. Thank you for the opportunity to take a call on this, the Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill. I’m sure we can all agree, in entirety and across this House, that the safety of all New Zealanders on our roads is important. And that is why the amendments of this bill are so important, because the safety of all New Zealanders is at the heart of this bill. The modernisation and the amendments in this bill ensure we continue to keep safety as a top transport priority, by fixing the gaps, the errors, and the inconsistencies so that it is more efficient and effective, as the member Arena Williams talked about. This bill fixes the regulatory system, it ensures the safety of all New Zealanders on our roads, and therefore I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I want to begin by referring back to Julie Anne Genter, the Green Party’s spokesperson’s speech, who mentioned a lot about getting people out of cars and rethinking the way we do our transport system. I thought it was quite ironic, really, because very shortly we’re all about to head off to the airport—those of us who don’t live in Wellington—and we’ll get a reminder of how well Green Party transport policy works when we’re stuck in traffic on the way out to the airport. I think Let’s Get Wellington Moving is a great thing that should be done; it’s a great National Party policy. Unfortunately, it’s only necessary because the Green Party mucked the whole thing up and have caused this chaos in Wellington. And it’s a shame in a capital city in New Zealand you can’t get around—

💬 Hon Member: Greg O’Connor agrees. He’s nodding.

Even Greg agrees. He knows very well that’s not a good thing, don’t you?

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! The member won’t bring the Speaker into the debate.

Certainly, Madam Speaker. There is quite a lot of talk about safety, and I think absolutely there should be a focus on safety and I note that Waka Kotahi have spent quite a bit of time—particularly, I note, in my electorate, are now proposing to put a “cheese wire” barrier up a two-lane road, a divided highway in an area where there’ll be grape harvesters certainly going up that road at about 30 kilometres an hour. Nothing will be able to get past them. The unsafe design that they are proposing in the name of safety is unbelievable, actually. It would be quite funny if it wasn’t so serious, and I think they’ve really got to go back and think about what they’re doing and actually put the user at the front of their particular design work rather than going off on some random, I think ideological-driven, thought—and no pun intended, by the way—in their designs. Because it’s actually making things much worse and causing frustration that leads to accidents. And I note that lowering the speed limit in the Hundalees on State Highway 1 down to 60 kilometres an hour, the local fire chief was asked to comment on that, and they said, “Wouldn’t that lower accidents?”, and he said, “Well, no, it’ll cause more because all of the accidents are on 45-kilometre-an-hour corners.” So they’ve got to think about the roads that they design in the first place. Off camber corners, non-geometric corners that get tighter as people drive around them, they cause roll overs. That’s what the issues are. We’ve got to spend the money on those things first. And this is on State highways that we get all our freight going down. We’ve got other modes of transport, of course, with rail and so on, but unfortunately that’s not the option for most of our freight.

I think the tow bar debacle and certification that Simon Court from the ACT Party mentioned before, that was a big issue just a while ago when all of the tow bars on trailers that were, in the Ministry of Transport’s view, not adequately certified. And that caused a lot of chaos. Now, we have to really get that right, and that’s going right back to the beginning and making sure the people that are doing the welding, doing the designing, are adequately trained and adequately certified. But a lot of these tow bars had been in service for quite some time. So if they were dangerous, they weren’t just dangerous on the day they decided to go and review all of this and pull all those trucks and trailers off the road, they’d been unsafe for years, in some cases. So we owe it, in the name of safety, to get these things right, right from the beginning instead of leaving it way until after the fact when it could’ve actually caused quite serious issues. Same thing with buses and bus designs, as the member mentioned earlier.

So we do support this bill. It’s good to have the right things in place to deal with these issues, but the agency that actually administers this has to—[Interruption] I’m getting signals—actually get on and do the job with the legislative framework that they have. I think it’s actually relatively simple stuff; unfortunately, it often gets lost in the translation. They need to do their job properly, and so I commend the bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, it’s good to see you in the House—

💬 Hon Members: What a greaser!

—and rise to speak this afternoon, amongst lots of noise, on the Regulatory Systems (Transport) Amendment Bill. We support this bill because safety is our top transport priority and, as a proud Aucklander, we’re very passionate about the investment of this Government and the commitment to transport. This bill will help modernise our regulations to continue to keep people safe. The bill will maintain the effectiveness and efficiency of the regulatory system established by transport legislation, and reduce the chance of regulatory failure. It will also help our police do their job by increasing the time period a vehicle can be impounded to collect evidence after a serious accident or incident. This will help give police inspectors the time to properly examine and process the evidence. I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a second time.