Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a call on a very important piece of legislation, the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill, which sets out a new sustainable public transport framework. This framework gives regional councils more flexibility. It gives them more planning, funding, and procurement of public transport, and it does so by allowing public transport authorities, like the regional councils, to operate public transport services in-house.

The current framework, of course, which of course is the PTOM model—Public Transport Operating Model—does not help deliver the best bus or ferry services, or public transport services, for that matter, which we desperately need in places like Tāmakimakau-rau / Auckland and across New Zealand. This bill heralds a new approach, and, namely, it supports on-demand public transport services. It allows councils to own and operate services in-house. It improves the pay and working conditions of people like our bus drivers. It delivers routes and services that reflect local community needs, and it incentivises, most importantly, the decarbonisation of our fleets.

Prioritising fair and equitable treatment of employees and mode shift are important things to do for our Government. Some transport operators have had perverse incentives to squeeze worker conditions, limit pay and opportunities, all of which has limited the potential of our public transport system in this country. Improving the conditions of employees will make it easier to recruit, to retain our workforce, allowing frequent and reliable services, and we have recently seen the first fair pay agreement come into force, something that members on this side of the House felt was very important.

Public transport is a lifeline that connects people to work, to their local schools, to recreation, and to their friends and whānau, and, it won’t surprise members—it’s something I’m very, very proud of, of course—that my home electorate of Northcote has the third-highest use of public transport and buses to get to work, at 14.7 percent against the New Zealand average of 4.2 percent. So something I’m very proud of in this piece of legislation is getting on with what we need to do as a fairer public transport system for Aucklanders, for New Zealand, and ensuring that we are meeting our climate change obligations.

So, without further ado, and as the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I’m looking forward to this piece of legislation coming through to our select committee. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Well, isn’t this interesting? Here we were told, only a few weeks ago, that this Government was going to be back to basics—the “back to basics” Government. Yet they couldn’t help themselves, could they? This failed socialist experiment—it’s in their DNA; they just want to get in and they want to centralise everything. And, look, there’s a clue in the bill, in the start of it, the main provisions. What is this bill about? More central planning and control; they’ve even written it in the first page. That’s exactly what this is about: Labour knows best! Wellington knows best! More central planning.

Of the failures this Government has had—KiwiBuild, three waters, the Government’s $1.9 billion for mental health, everything they’ve touched around centralised planning, the health reforms, the tertiary sector reforms—you think they would have learnt. Every centralisation reform they’ve tried to introduce has gone to custard. Then they said, “Don’t worry. We’ve had a new Prime Minister. There’s a bit of a change; we’re back to basics.” But they can’t help themselves, because for this Government, it is always ideological—it is always ideology that’s driving them.

What’s interesting, when you unpack the regulatory impact statement that goes along with this bill, even the Minister’s own ministry was warning against the options that he had chosen. It was going to drive up cost. It was going to remove transparency. It actually wasn’t going to give public transport customers the best service, but, of course, Michael Wood knows best! He overrode his officials. He overrode his ministry, because for him, it’s ideological—ideological transport Minister.

I must say, I know that many New Zealanders, on 14 October, can’t wait for Simeon Brown to be the transport Minister for New Zealand. Let’s take a stocktake under what’s happened under this Government. Potholes everywhere. No roads have been maintained. Buses—well, I don’t even know if they run any more. And then, ghost trains—that’s their transport plan. Their biggest issue now is they want to centrally plan the bus system—purely ideological.

I’ll tell you what it means for people I represent in Waimakariri in North Canterbury—good, salt of the earth North Cantabrians in provincial and rural New Zealand. The issues for them, as I saw on Monday night when we had a tailback from the town of Woodend right back to the Waimakariri bridge—what they’re missing is that State highway this Government cancelled five years ago.

So it’s all very good centralising the bus system, but just to give you a clue, that bus is going to have to go on a road, and if you can’t get your roads right, how are your buses going to go? At the moment, they’re redirecting hard-earned road-user charges being paid out of the back pockets of hard-working Cantabrians and redirecting that funding from the land transport fund to pet public transport projects in Auckland.

You can tell by the language they’re using that they’re initiating a war—what was the term that’s used through the bill?—on single-occupant vehicles. What nasty people they are, in single-occupant vehicles! I’ve seen a few of them in my patch. In fact, Waimakariri has the highest rate of three-car families in the country. Why? Because when you live in rural, provincial New Zealand, no public transport system is ever going to get you where you need to go. If you live in Swannanoa and your kids in high school need to drive to Kaiapoi, and one of the parents works in Christchurch and the other in Rangiora, they might be in those nasty single-occupant vehicles. Watch out, because the Government’s going to wage a war on you.

Because, of course, as we heard from that last speaker, Shanan Halbert, the soon-tobe former MP for Northcote, it’s all about the lens of big metropolitan cities. This Government—it’s all they care about. Get out to rural and provincial New Zealand, and then you start to understand the challenges that New Zealanders have, because what this bill is doing is removing choice. They call it “modal shift”. On this side of the House, we call it “modal choice”.

We want to give people choice. And I’ll tell you what this bill removes: the ability for the council to go out into the market and contract someone. They can do it in-house, with no openness and transparency. That’s exactly what we see from this Labour Government. So much for being open and transparent.

When you look at clause 9, which amends section 115: “providing public transport services assists in furthering the principles set out in paragraphs (a) to (d).” Why that is important: in the bill that this is replacing, paragraph (e), which is now overlooked, was (f). This means the efficiency and value for money at paragraph (e) are not a requirement for public transport provisions, which is incredibly different from the previous legislation.

So no longer do services need to be—under this bill that we’re debating today—efficient and good value for money. I’m looking forward to the Labour callers, and, of course, the Green caller as well, who take their call on this bill. How are we going to get a better public transport system if we’re removing efficiency and we’re removing value for money? Of course, this Government doesn’t worry about it. It all grows on trees, doesn’t it? But only a few weeks ago, they were telling us that the cost of living crisis was their number one issue—“back to basics”. But here they are again. They had a great opportunity to look at the opportunities within public transport—on-demand going gangbusters down in Canterbury, especially South Canterbury. This bill had an opportunity to really unleash that.

As I mentioned at the start of my call in this debate, this bill will allow for the in-house provision of public transport delivery—

Chlöe Swarbrick: Choice.

—with no tendering processes required. Chlöe Swarbrick just shouted out, “Choice.” How do you get choice when there’s going to be no tendering processes required? Even in the regulatory impact statement, the Minister and his officials—because he’s got a lot of officials that he can talk to. That’s right—officials arriving by the day at the moment; 14,000 extra bureaucrats in Wellington since this Government came into office. But what the ministry said is that enabling in-house provision of public transport services without contracts will lead to performing worse than the status quo when compared to the criteria. So that would be very interesting for the Labour speakers today in this debate. How are you overriding the advice from the ministry that this bill will perform worse than the status quo? The ministry added, “Any move away from a contractual approach … may also reduce transparency over cost and performance.”—reduce transparency over cost and performance.

So here we are: we’re debating a bill today that is all about central planning and control. It actually says it; the front page of the bill—it’s quite open about it. Central planning and control. It’s going to end up in a worse performance of the system than is the current status quo. And as the advice said, it’s going to reduce transparency over cost and performance.

Once again, this Labour Government—this failed socialist experiment—can’t help themselves. They promised us “back to the basics”, and here they are a few weeks later. The only solution they had—they had a real opportunity—was central planning and control again.

Well, that was pretty difficult to listen to if you live in Auckland, where our transport system is really broken. We don’t have buses and we don’t have ferries because the old model was ideologically driven and it threw away common sense, Mr Doocey, because what we had was a system that said that people like the council couldn’t own the buses or the ferries. And because they couldn’t own them and they had to contract them out—i.e., give taxpayers’ money away to private enterprises—we had a system that was absolutely run down.

We have that system today, Mr Doocey. And I’d like to take you to meet the drivers of those buses, because I represented those drivers when they were on conditions that involved split shifts. It means they come in from South Auckland, and they come in and they sit in the depot. In the middle of the day, they are on no pay and they sit there in the middle of the day with no pay. And then they start again.

That system doesn’t work, and it doesn’t attract New Zealand workers in a time of high unemployment. What I hear from the Opposition is “Well, you’re actually ruining it by not allowing us to bring in workers who are willing to work in the worst possible conditions.” That’s not the solution either, Mr Doocey.

The solution in this situation is that we forget about ideology, and we get a bit of common sense, and we make sure our conditions for our bus drivers are good enough; and we relieve our councils from the obligations they’re under to actually contract out that work, and we allow them to own the fleets of buses and ferries so they can actually build up an infrastructure and they can make the call. And that’s not centralisation: that’s actually local power and that’s actually an important part of the solution here. I commend this bill to the House.

E te Māngai, tēnā koe, tēnā koutou e te Whare. I guess, just to wind back the pretence a little bit, this is something which I regularly bang on in this House about: we are all ideological. That’s the point. We all have ideologies and values that underpin the policies that we put forward because everything that we do in this place is about trade-offs and about whose side we stand on and about the kinds of outcomes that we want for society. They’re the same things that we’ll take to the hustings through to October. So, again, all political parties, all politicians, are ideological.

The ideological line in this House, and as we’re hearing peppered throughout this debate, is largely whether people, or whether New Zealand—whether cities and towns around this country—would like to see our public transport operated primarily by private interests, as has been the case under the Public Transport Operating Model—or the PTOM—which is being changed by this new model, which allows choice, Mr Doocey, in the form of, for the first time, the ability for our local authorities to own the public transport network and those buses, those depots, or otherwise.

So, now that we’ve said that, I’d also like to address some of the points made by the National Party about how, somehow, this is all fire and wrath and rule and a terrible situation if this thing goes through because it’s demonstrative of the fact that the buses are being cancelled at the moment. Mate, the buses are being cancelled at the moment under the Public Transport Operating Model which privatises public transport in Auckland and, actually, as a result of this slash-and-burn budget, as proposed by Mayor Wayne Brown at Auckland Council to permanently cut over a thousand buses a day. So I’d just like to, once again, make a call-out to Auckland-based colleagues to join me later tonight on a meeting about how we can try and actually prevent that with greater investment in public transport.

So to the core of this legislation: the Greens have actually advocated for some of the things contained in this, particularly that point around the ability for our local authorities to actually publicly own their public transport in the first place for a really long time. We actually put out a petition, as led by my colleague the Hon Julie Anne Genter, a few years ago on the basis of bus driver pay and conditions and the fact that there was not alltoomuch public control over those because of the fact that under the PTOM there was a requirement to contract out. That is, as colleagues on this side of the House have been demonstrating, precisely why we’ve seen that downward pressure on those wages and on those conditions.

I guess that takes us to one of those, God forbid, ideological questions of what it is that we’re talking about when we’re talking about public goods or public services and what it is that we want when we’re talking about this public infrastructure.

And, I guess, just to weave through a few of the other examples in the public sphere, where we have sought to privatise to really perverse outcomes. It’s not only in public transport; we’ve also seen it in the likes of housing, for example, where in the 1980s and 1990s, we saw the sell-off of our State houses and the introduction of the accommodation supplement because, hey, the private market was going to sort it out—they were all charity and otherwise! And guess what! What we’ve seen is that the accommodation supplement, which the Government continues to pay up to the tune of approximately $2 billion a year, is a subsidy for private landlords.

Then, I don’t know, look at the early childhood sector, where we’ve seen the continued privatisation in that space to the effect that now we’ve got a 62 percent privatisation. We continue to pay amongst the highest amounts, as a Government, into the early childhood sector, yet, somehow, for some reason, New Zealanders continue to pay amongst the most expensive costs for childcare in the developed world. Why is that? Because of this private intermediary, and that is exactly the thing that the National Party continues to advocate for the retention of, and it is why people across Tāmaki-makau-rau and in my patch in Auckland Central and across the country continue to pay far too much, but also for nowhere near enough serviceability on their public transport.

I think that’s, perhaps, the greatest lie of the trickle-down economics mythology that continues to be peddled by this side of the House, and that’s that somehow we’ll get an affordable or efficient outcome by continuing to contract out—ironically, to contractors, who they’ve also declared war on—and somehow get greater affordability and greater efficiency when somebody else has to make money on top of what you are contracting out. The maths simply does not add up, and that’s, frankly, why we’re getting these really perverse outcomes in reality.

I’d also just, in my closing remarks, like to allude to some of the comments made by Mr Doocey, in particular about how this was “purely ideology” and what we were seeing was the “rebuking of officials’ advice.” I’d like to refer Mr Doocey and the National Party to a 300-odd page Official Information Act (OIA) request, which I’m more than happy to table in this House, which is all of the advice that the former Minister of Transport Steven Joyce, under the former National Government, received on not exempting the Fullers ferry route to Waiheke from the Public Transport Operating Model.

Under the Public Transport Operating Model, there is the ability for the Minister to provide exemptions in statute. That is, from that Public Transport Operating Model, which is largely one that requires contracting out and the privatisation of public services, there is also the ability to exempt certain public transport routes from complying even to those standards of transparency, serviceability, supposed affordability, and otherwise.

Here we have this 300-odd page OIA where officials, time and time and time again, were telling the former National Government and Minister of Transport, then Steven Joyce, that it made no sense to exempt the Waiheke route from compliance within the Public Transport Operating Model. None the less, for no apparent reason other than one that we can perhaps connect the dots on in this House, the Minister then forged ahead, and that is a mess which, to this day, we are continuing to try and unpack. It is, therefore, the only public transport route currently in this country which is considered necessary by the local authority—that is, by Auckland Council and Auckland Transport—as integral to the public transport route but excluded from the Public Transport Operating Model. So that’s just one very niche and very local but specific issue which I’d really like to drive home when we’re talking about ideology and influence on legislation.

At the end of the day, this really just boils down to whether we are willing to enable public services to be owned publicly. The Greens say, “It’s about damned time.”

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. And it’s not just because they’ve got the word “transport” twice in the same phrase; it’s because it is bad policy. If you boil this bill down to a very simple summary, this bill tries to ensure that councils have the opportunity of operating bus services and ferry services and any other public transport operation they can think of. And when I say “operating”, I don’t mean going out to the market place and saying, “We would like the following bus routes to run at the following times. Who can provide that service for what price?”; I mean, the council actually buys the buses and the electronic equipment to guide it and collect the payment, and it employs the bus workers.

I think people might want to think a little bit about their local council and think they’re nice folks, but do we really want them to also be in the transport business—not just commissioning at a high level but actually fixing the buses, working out how to maintain the buses? Is that the sort of thing that councils should be doing or should they, as is the status quo right now under the Public Transport Operating Model, have a job of saying, “On behalf of our ratepayers, this is where we’d like the buses or the ferries to go and we would like to go out to the market place and ask people who are actually in business doing transport to provide the services.”? Those are the two basic choices.

The ACT Party would just make the point that private enterprise, that businesses where people are risking their own money—a lot of people in business get started by borrowing money against their house. With those kinds of people, where they’re putting their own skin on the line, where they’re the ones that are kept up all night, they tend to offer more efficient services than public services. And you just have to ask yourself: what’s the record of councils as landlords owning homes? Hopeless, mostly trying to get out of it, and very sensibly so. What’s the record of councils managing three waters infrastructure—drinking water and stormwater and waste water and sewage?

Well, funnily enough, this Government says that councils shouldn’t be able to operate their own three waters infrastructure. This Government has gone to an enormous effort with at least three pieces of legislation in Parliament so far—a massive multi-million dollar advertising, or some would say propaganda, campaign. They’ve taken enormous amounts of political heat. But this Government has done all that because they don’t think councils should operate three waters. They’ve said councils don’t have the scale or the expertise or the balance sheet in order to be able to borrow the money to invest in the three waters assets, so three waters assets have to be taken out of the purview of councils.

What about planning, resource management? What about the Natural and Built Environment Bill? Well, David Parker, the environment Minister, has a huge piece of legislation that actually establishes 15 new entities to do resource consents and planning and create plans. Why is he doing that? Because he doesn’t think the councils are up to it. So it’s very strange that Labour doesn’t think councils can run three waters, doesn’t think that they should be as involved in planning their communities. It’s very strange—you know, we know they’ve been pretty hopeless at managing most things, actually. However, Labour is determined that they’re going to run bus companies, and we heard possibly the reason why, just a second ago. She talked a bit about transport—Helen White did, the member for Auckland Central. She talked a little bit—oh no, sorry; that was Chlöe Swarbrick. She talked a little bit about different issues, but the thing that she really fixated on—you know, a former unionist or perhaps a current unionist—was “This will change conditions of employment.” And that’s the issue.

This is not being done to provide better public transport for Aucklanders or people in North Canterbury, like the former speaker Matt Doocey. This is being done, actually, as a payoff to Labour’s union mates—they want the councils to be the employer. They want to start using public transport as a form of job creation. And this is another great irony of Labour and another great failing of Labour. The Labour Party believe that somehow they’re above ideology, that somehow what they’re doing is just practical and right. But in reality what they are finding, as they bring this legislation to the House, is that they are not going to deliver practically better services for New Zealanders. What they’re going to do is try and deliver for the unions and the labour movement in this particular public service, when the practical answer is to actually go and talk to some people that operate public transport.

You know, I was out at the opening of Pavlovich late last year, out of West Auckland, a brand new terminal, all private investment to make transport better. I met with the chief executive officer and chair of Fullers just a couple of weeks ago. It’s not difficult. They’ll say the problem is there aren’t enough people. The argument you hear from Labour is “Oh, it’s because they’re horrible to the workers. They make them do split shifts and, you know, they’re not treating their workers well.” The truth is that there are just not enough workers in New Zealand. There are not enough drivers. Talk to anyone in a trucking company. Talk to anyone in logistics. Talk to anyone in the airport precinct. There aren’t enough people to drive the ferries and drive the buses. That is the problem.

So the Labour Party, failing to understand the practical issues, instead turn to ideology and attempting to serve their constituency and the union movement that built them, just as they did when they got rid of charter schools. It wasn’t about public policy. Always goes back to paying off the unions, with the Labour Party. They are trying to distort the entire public transport system purely to pay off with jobs for the boys and girls.

That is not going to make the boat go faster. It is not going to make New Zealand a more prosperous country. It is not going to make New Zealand a more livable country, and it’s not going to help us reduce the amount of carbon or greenhouse gas emissions that New Zealanders emit when going about their daily life with a given living standard. All it’s going to do is further complicate the way that services are delivered, the way New Zealanders solve their practical problems from day to day, as the Labour Party attempts to pursue ideological, administrative changes to the way that public services are run. There is no problem there to be solved. They haven’t got up and explained, “There’s a big problem. This is why we’re doing it.” The only problem in public transport right now is there aren’t enough people available.

Mr Speaker, here’s another thought for you. They haven’t explained why a publicly owned bus or ferry service would be better. We had an attempt. We had an attempt from Chlöe Swarbrick, who said that, “Well, because these private companies make profit, then it’s going to be more expensive because they have to make a profit on top of their cost structure.” But what she fails to understand is, well, business, really, and profit and the role of it. You see, in order to make a profit, you have to actually ensure that the costs of what your company consumes are less than the value of what it sells. It’s not complicated, but it’s very hard to actually do. It takes a lot of hard work, a lot of risk, a lot of nous. And it’s the profit motive, the opportunity to make a profit that actually gets people focused on: how can we do more with less; how can we be more efficient in this firm?

In actual fact, if it’s true that profit drives efficiency, because it makes people constantly compare the costs of what they consume with the value of what they sell, then what will removing the profit motive mean? What will it do when councils that the Government doesn’t trust to do three waters or planning or anything else are suddenly in charge of operating businesses that run buses and ferries? Well, it’s not rocket science. You can work it out. What it does is it takes away the incentive to think extra hard every day about the cost of what’s consumed and the value of what’s provided. You have a monopolistic service run by people with no profit motive. The service levels get worse, the cost gets higher, the only winners are the unions, and the losers are those people—particularly those people in large metropolitan areas like Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch—who actually need a decent public transport system for their lives to work.

So we oppose this bill. We oppose the ideology behind it, we oppose the bankrupt economics behind it, and we hope this Government will one day see sense or else they’ll all have to go.

I stand to take a short call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. The electorate where I live and where I’m based goes from Porirua through to Tokoroa, covering the rohe of Te Tai Hauāuru and Rangitīkei. We’ve had our fair share of public transport woes over many years. Many people rely on public transport. Many people have no choice but to use public transport, whether it be bus, ferry, or whatever.

So it pleases me to see the replacement of the Public Transport Operating Model with the Sustainable Public Transport Framework. In particular, what stands out is the thoughtfulness towards the workers and users of public transport—improving conditions of employees, retention of the work force, and job security. What also stands out is the responsiveness to changing demographics, travel behaviour, and support of innovation.

The bill provides flexibility for the sector to determine the best way to give effect to the new priorities. It addresses the systematic issues in the sector and improves regulation of public transport systems. I want to acknowledge the challenges of our communities over the years and the hard work of former Feilding councillor Councillor Humphrey, other councillors, and community groups who have advocated for change for their communities for years. This bill allows councils to operate public transport services inhouse. They know the needs of their communities. What we’ve got now does not serve the public.

I’m delighted that a key element of this important bill is to lay the foundation to achieve emissions reductions. I commend the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill to the House. Kia ora.

This is a split call.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s good to rise and talk on this bill. Just to run a bit about it, I mean, we’ve already discussed some of the elements of it, but one of the main tenets is that we’re moving towards more of a central planning model of control. A couple of key focuses in this bill are around mode shift—contentious—and also reducing emissions—not so contentious there. I think that’s something that we all want to achieve.

But it also has another goal in there of reducing the instances of single occupancy vehicles, which would mean I would be in trouble because quite often I am the sole and single occupant. And as much as I talk to myself, there’s only me, and me only, and occasionally my podcast or a child in the back giving me a bit of stick. It will also allow councils to run in-house provisions of public transport services. And one of the key things to note there is that it doesn’t necessitate contracts be used, which I find reasonably alarming. I know my colleague the very insightful Matthew Doocey down there in the front row alluded to that during his good 10 minutes earlier today.

It also allows for different asset ownership arrangements to allow regional councils to directly own public transport assets. We did hear a bit of criticism from the Green Party earlier today about private companies owning some of these assets because they would want to be putting a profit on top of it, and I’m not sure I’d necessarily agree that that would be more expensive than a heavy bureaucratic public system which doesn’t have contracts and doesn’t have competition, and, without contracts, doesn’t necessarily have that oversight or operational requirements or performance measures that must be met. So all things to take into account when considering the virtues of public v private or a mixture of the both.

Key messages my party wants to get across, and I want to get across as the speaker, is that we oppose this bill. That’s already been made clear by the earlier speakers on our side of the House. We believe New Zealanders are fundamentally better off when public transport services are provided under free, fair, open, transparent tenders, and I think most people, reasonable people, would agree that that is how most manners of contracts should be conducted. You want them to be competitive, you want people to lay out on the table what they intend to deliver, and then it also enables the person putting forward those contracts or paying for them to be able to hold the provider to account.

We also want flexibility. You know, we understand that providing greater flexibility is what we want to see, and enabling the shift to an in-house delivery model is completely different. It stands to limit competition.

We have a lot of talk around, you know, single occupancy vehicles, and, I mean, yeah, cool, if you live in Wellington or Auckland, there’s a bit more of an ability to ride share or Uber or look at other alternatives there. I mean, the reality is for a few of us who have stood up and—I mean, on my side of the House we’ve got Hamilton West. We’ve got someone from Pukekohe. You know, regional areas, Pukekohe—I mean, I live rurally myself.

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: What about our ferry, then, eh?

What about our ferry? Yeah, indeed, Angie, wouldn’t that be good? It’s not that realistic to say that people should be able to go outside in single occupancy vehicles when they don’t live in inner city Auckland or Wellington.

I lived in big cities before returning to New Zealand and I didn’t need to own a car. I was on the mass rapid transit, or the train, or whatever you want to call it, in the different places every day, and I thoroughly enjoyed it, and it was incredibly wonderful to be able to get around that way. The reality is that most places in New Zealand aren’t like that and they won’t be like that.

But there is good news. There is good news for those members on the other side of the House, because we want to lower emissions and we have a plan to lower emissions, and cars are moving towards being electric or plug-in hybrid electric vehicle or hybrid. I know my friend Tama has a plug-in hybrid. We drove in the mighty Haval H6 down the island and we really didn’t use much gasoline. The good thing is that more and more cars, by the day, are moving to being electric, and they will, under a National Government, be run off of renewable energy, more so than over that side of the House.

I think one of the other important things to remember is that—I mean, it’s already been alluded to by Matthew Doocey—the buses that people need to get around, and they will be electric buses, do run on roads. We need to make sure we’re funding them. Fundamentally, I oppose this bill—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. As a member of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, I’m looking forward to hearing submissions and considering this bill.

Previous speakers have tried to say tonight that there isn’t a problem. But we can see across the country there’s definitely a problem with how our public transport system runs, and a lot of that comes back to the heart of the Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM).

One of the issues with the PTOM is that it focuses on contracting out and encouraging companies to bid at the lowest possible price. What that does is it drives down wages within the sector and—lo and behold—we have an issue with bus companies finding enough drivers. And gee, I wonder why. Could it perhaps be that the wages are low due to the contracting out model? That is one of the things that this bill addresses, and it is overdue and about time that we are doing it.

The previous speaker, Sam Uffindell, made some comments around flexibility and around enabling choice. If you actually read the bill, you’ll see that the bill enables regional councils to operate public transport services in-house or to continue to outsource the operation of services. It’s got a choice.

The other really good part of this bill—just coming from Nelson, where we have unitary authorities so we don’t have separate regional and territorial authorities—is that it will establish a requirement for greater collaboration. One of the really good things that has happened in my electorate in the last couple of years—thanks to the Government putting a lot more investment into public transport—is that we now have a joint public transport plan between Nelson and Tasman. We’re going to get buses into those smaller places, which there is demand for. I’ve been talking to people who live in small towns who are telling me they want public transport. We’re going to have an entire fleet of electric buses. The buses will be far more frequent, at a reasonable price, and the public are really looking forward to that service coming on board in the middle of this year.

It has been enabled because our two councils, which are unitary authorities, have been able to work together with investment from Government. We’re going to have a fantastic service with decent wages for those drivers. So this bill will actually help other councils do exactly what we’ve done in Nelson. I commend it to the House.

Meitaki maata, Mr Speaker. Like my colleague Rachel Brooking—sorry, Rachel Boyack—I am also on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and am also looking forward to this bill coming through the House, because it is—

💬 Rachel Brooking: Rachel Brooking likes the bill, too.

I know. Rachel Brooking just said she likes the bill too. Because not only is this a great piece of legislation, this is great for our bus drivers, for our train drivers, and for our staff that work in the public transport space. This bill ensures good working conditions and, of course, improvement in pay—who doesn’t want that? In the Ōtaki electorate, which is also part of the rural and provincial Aotearoa New Zealand, like Mr Doocey was talking about earlier, we have regular trains that go from Waikanae through to Wellington. We also have buses from Ōtaki through to Wellington as well.

This week, I had the privilege of spending some time with the Ōtaki-famous Barbara, who has been driving school buses for about two decades now in the Ōtaki electorate. Barbara loves her job as a bus driver, and Barbara loves to make sure that she gets our tamariki to and from kura—our kids to and from school—safely. But Barbara also knows that there’s different pays, different conditions out there in certain bus companies. So we want to make sure that we keep amazing bus drivers like Barbara, especially in our rural and regional towns like the Ōtaki electorate. I know it’s getting harder, especially in this competitive market, and so that is what this bill does.

The Sustainable Public Transport Framework—one of its priorities includes the fair and equitable treatment of employees. The Capital Connection also runs through the Ōtaki electorate from Levin through to Wellington, only Monday to Friday, only once, and is always full of commuters going to and from mahi, or work. However, it has struggled due to staff as well. Again, this bill focuses on employment conditions and pay, and if we get that right we will encourage people back into the public transport sector. And that can, again, be considered a great career pathway for people. Hopefully—just a plug—we will someday see regular train services right through to Wellington, and maybe beyond to Palmerston North.

The Sustainable Public Transport Framework also focuses on mode shift and improved environment and health outcomes. And while I absolutely support the benefits to the environment and reducing emissions, I also know that some of our whānau out there don’t have a car, or if they do have a car they find it really difficult to run it. At the moment with public transport, especially with this Government’s half-price public transport, it is an affordable option for those whānau. So it’s critical to make sure we get this right.

Look, I know essentially, at the moment, we have so many things in this bill that I could talk about, and especially the mode options, the reduction in emissions, and looking after our employees, but I don’t have enough time. This is a great piece of legislation, and I commend it to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a pleasure to rise and take a short call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. My own thoughts will be very much originating from local concerns of the mighty Kaipara ki Mahurangi electorate in rural North and Northwest and West Auckland, and I do just want to reflect on some of the comments that have been made on both sides of the House in relation to that.

Some, like my friend and colleague Matt Doocey, have pointed out that for rural parts of New Zealand, the fixation of the current Government on matters of public transport as though they were applicable all across New Zealand is unfortunate, but he is right to identify that not only in relation to areas outside Auckland and Wellington but also, I would add, parts of Auckland in which there are large rural areas—for example, the Rodney District of Auckland, as it then was, constitutes nearly half the landmass of what is now known as Auckland. So, on behalf of the good people of my electorate, I point out that even in Auckland, ostensibly an urban area, actually, large distances between points of interest mean that the kind of public transport solutions—and I use the term loosely—that are being offered by Labour are no such thing. So it’s not just geography; it’s physics, it’s speed times distance, and the reality, simply, for my constituents is that this kind of bill will do nothing for them to get more quickly from A to B, and more safely from A to B as well.

We see that the aims of the bill include more central planning and control of public transport services. Well, they lost me at more central planning, because I’ve been paying attention in the last 5½ years and I’ve seen what more central planning of the tertiary sector has done in the polytech space, with Te Pūkenga, and I’ve seen what’s being proposed in relation to three waters—and the most vociferous opponent, I think, of that must not be the National Party but in fact the current Labour Cabinet, or at least some members thereof. It’ll be very interesting to see what eventual policy we see in that space.

And other examples of central planning, of course, inevitably lead us down a road, not in a bus but in a bus without a driver, parked at the end of the road. I congratulate Labour on introducing driverless vehicles to this country. Unfortunately, those are buses that actually were supposed to have been running but they can’t attract the drivers; they don’t want to allow them to come in from overseas, and they’ve in fact, in doing so, introduced passenger-less vehicles as well. Lots of empty vehicles are trundling around North-west and North Auckland and giving a lie to the idea that public transport is the be-all and endall in terms of what should be provided to allow people to meet their transport needs.

In fact, we’ve also got this interesting situation in my particular electorate—and just indulge me for a moment please, sir, as I mention that we have a rail line, a passenger rail line, that’s unused for passenger rail beyond Swanson. So perhaps if the Government had money, time and energy, and imagination to invest in public transport, then, even leaving aside the demonisation of the private motor vehicle, as Messrs Doocey and Uffindell have said, then it would be good, actually, maybe if they could utilise some of the existing infrastructure that already sits there, because they talked a good game about it in Opposition and they’ve done nothing. In fact, they’ve done less than nothing, because by pretending to themselves and the rest of the country that there’d be light rail built in other parts of Auckland and then North-west Auckland, of course, they’ve stymied any reasonable conversations about using the infrastructure that is available in the form of that rail line already there.

I do want to mention, as well, the fact that we often have this strange debate, or at least the left wing of politics do, about the importance of, for example, buses versus investing in roads, as though the two were mutually exclusive. So we have State highways and other main arterial routes that have a single lane in each direction, and the proposal that we put buses on those just so that people can sit in congestion behind private motor vehicles, single-occupant or otherwise, is baffling, because that actually doesn’t improve their situation at all, particularly when you don’t have very many people on the bus. So you don’t even get that economy of scale and environmental benefits that you would have at least if there were a few more people on them, albeit sitting in traffic like the rest of us.

So, for all these reasons, I can’t conclude that this bill will do anything whatsoever of a useful variety for the people in my area; we’ve heard from others on this side of the House that it won’t do much for the people in their areas either. I don’t think it will do anything useful for anyone in any part of New Zealand, because unless the fundamental settings that need to be changed to allow people who want to drive buses, who can drive buses, come to this country and—guess what!—drive buses, then nothing will change. We oppose this bill.

Tēnā koe te Māngai o te Whare. Can I say that it’s great having the last word on this bill. This legislation, of course, is welcome news for the Wellington region because we know that the current legislative framework has straitjacketed councils, particularly regional councils, into that private sector delivery model. And that really fails to provide the agility and responsiveness to ensure that we actually have a public service; the words “public” and “service” being key here. And, look, we’ve heard a lot about bus drivers, and despite issues and problems securing bus drivers all over New Zealand, Wellingtonians are strong adherents to public transport. This is a city that used to have “big reds”; I like the colour red. But we used to run the buses ourselves—in-house, by the city council—until legislation came in saying we couldn’t do that.

This bill enables us to have the best of the old world in the new world. And that means private operators will join with public operators, in time; councils can bring the assets inhouse, a bit like the rail fleet here in Wellington where, actually, those assets are owned by the regional council and then we’ve got some agility in terms of how to respond to service changes across the network.

The bill also allows regional councils to say, “Hey, look, if we want to do things differently in-house”—it gives the councils time to do that. So it will pave the way for that in-house operation. I think the last thing we need is for councils to emulate the failures that we’ve seen in the delivery of services by the private sector, and we need to be upfront about that; the current operation doesn’t work under this legislation. However, this bill addresses that. We get the best of the private and public sectors working together for great bus network and bus transport services in Aotearoa. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill be considered by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee.

Instruction to Transport and Infrastructure Committee