Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Transport: I present a legislative statement on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: I move, That the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill is part of the Government’s commitment to improve public transport in Aotearoa New Zealand and, in turn, strengthen employee welfare and improve environmental and health outcomes. This bill aims to align the framework governing public transport planning and provision with Government objectives through the establishment of the Sustainable Public Transport Framework, or SPTF, addressing issues identified by the PTOM review, which is the Public Transport Operating Model review. The bill does this is several ways, including establishing new governing principles; creating greater flexibility around asset ownership and service provision models; enabling innovation in the types of services that can be provided, including supporting the provision of on-demand public transport services; creating new transparency and planning requirements; and altering and clarifying the regulation of exempt services.

We have already taken important steps to reduce our public transport emissions through requiring that only zero-emission buses are purchased from 2025, and we have provided funding to decarbonise the bus fleet through Budget 2022. Through Budget 2022 and 2023, we have also funded improved bus driver wages and conditions. The SPTF is the next step towards embedding improved workforce and environmental outcomes in the public transport system.

This bill amends the Land Transport Management Act 2003, replacing PTOM with the Sustainable Public Transport Framework. This framework will place workers and public transport users at the heart of public transport procurement, planning, and provision, while retaining successful components of PTOM. It will support workforce recruitment and retention and will prioritise fair and equitable treatment of employees, mode shift, and environmental and health outcomes. It will enable on-demand public transport services and enable public transport authorities to own assets and operate services, allowing tailored solutions for communities and greater service flexibility. New notice requirements for the withdrawal of integral exempt services will provide surety to regional councils and users. It also introduces new transparency and planning requirements, strengthening collaboration between regional councils and operators. Overall, this bill brings us a step closer to delivering positive environmental, social, and public transport specific outcomes.

Thank you to the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, which has done a lot of work on this—so thank you to that select committee—and also thank you to the 54 organisations and individuals who submitted on this bill. The diverse range of expertise shared by these submitters has been integral to getting the bill to this stage today.

The recommendations made by the committee are supported, and I will touch briefly on several changes to the bill. The first change removes the automatic exemption for inter-regional services. This change was among the most advocated for changes by submitters. It amends the treatment of inter-regional services, making it so they are treated the same as services within a region. With this change, inter-regional services will only be exempt if they are not identified as integral and they operate without subsidy. This change reflects the inter-regional services that are already a critical part of the public transport system, and it makes it clear that there should be collaboration across regional boundaries to plan and deliver these services.

I also note that a transitional provision has been included to ensure this change does not affect funding arrangements for existing subsidised but exempt inter-regional services. This will prevent current services from being negatively impacted and will provide more flexibility for regional councils.

The second change clarifies which exempt services do not need to be registered, limited to certain unscheduled services and shuttle services. This is necessary to ensure scheduled public transport services continue to be registered, enabling continued regional council oversight of the public transport system.

A third change will ensure sufficient regional council funding is available before the Minister recommends the removal of a service exemption. We agree with the committee that consideration needs to be given to regional councils’ ability to fund services if an exemption is removed.

Changes have been made to the guiding principles. Specific mention of supporting equitable access and coordination of public transport services with land use have been included. It makes sense that these two vital components of an effective public transport system are directly mentioned.

Following feedback from submitters, the committee has recommended a sensible clarification to the transparency requirements. The change clarifies that if information is requested, it does not need to be disclosed by a regional council or Waka Kotahi if there are grounds to withhold it under other relevant legislation. This ensures improved transparency between operators, regional councils, and Waka Kotahi, while protecting commercially sensitive information.

Finally, the committee recommended changes to regional public transport plan—or RPTP—requirements. Changes to RPTP requirements will ensure consistency with the guiding principles. Removing commercially and competition-based requirements reflects the shift towards a more holistic approach to public transport provision. Meanwhile, requiring regional council consideration of public transport worker and representative union views when preparing RPTPs supports a fair and equitable workforce treatment.

Again, thank you to the select committee and to all those who submitted on the bill. We would always like to acknowledge your participation in the democratic process.

This bill is another milestone in the Government’s emissions reduction plan. The establishment of the Sustainable Public Transport Framework, which will replace PTOM, is necessary to lay the foundations to achieve emissions reductions through mode shift and decarbonising public transport. The reforms also address systematic issues in the sector and improve the regulation of public transport services. I commend the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill to this House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill which the National Party continues to oppose. We oppose this legislation because this is an example of more central planning and control of public transport services in New Zealand by a Government, without actually having a plan on how it is going to achieve better public transport. And, in fact, this piece of legislation, in my opinion, is going to put things backward because what it does is it, effectively, takes away the key requirements for operating a public transport service—that it must be done in a commercial way where it goes through competitive tenders and where we know that there is good value for taxpayers money coming through that process.

What this legislation does is it, effectively, puts in place a whole new regime which dramatically changes that approach which has been in place. The Government stands up and says, “Well, we need to change the system because, effectively, what we’ve had is we’ve had low use of public transport in recent years and we need to therefore throw everything out.” Well, I wanted to put it straight on the record: this Government is responsible for the reasons why we have such poor patronage on our public transport network at this stage. And it is the former Minister of Transport who put this bill to the House, who was also the Minister of Immigration, who took 12 months too long to make sure that there would be enough bus drivers available to actually operate our public transport networks in New Zealand. And so this Government says, “Well, it’s all about wages and it’s all about emissions and it’s all about frequency.” Well, actually, what they failed to think about was: how do we make sure we’ve got enough bus drivers in the country to be able to actually operate the public transport network? It’s even worse for our ferry services, where they have to wait even longer because of how long it’s taken for the Government to actually change the immigration settings to be able to get ferry workers to be able to operate ferry services in New Zealand.

So we listened to officials throughout the process when this was before the Transport and Infrastructure Committee, and the question that was for me most interesting was the question around whether those issues that the Government said needed to be fixed could have been negotiated through the Public Transport Operating Model. The question around whether you could negotiate that the services that were operated by public transport operators had to be using, for example, electric buses—well, yes; the answer was yes, you could include that as a requirement in the tendering process. Could you describe, in the tendering process, particular pay and conditions? The answer was yes. Could you put in place particular minimums of frequency? The answer was yes. And so all of the issues that the Government says needed to be fixed could all be managed through the tendering process under the Public Transport Operating Model legislation as it exists today, and does not require the Government to be passing new legislation.

But in the meantime, what this legislation is doing is then taking things a step further. They are throwing out some of the key principles around how public transport operations should be undertaken in New Zealand and changing those principles dramatically. For example, one of the principles which is being removed is: “The incentives should exist to reduce reliance on public subsidies to cover the cost of providing public transport services.” Making sure that public transport services are operating efficiently—no longer a requirement. We went through this at select committee. In terms of the new principles they have a new principle which says the investment needs to be efficient, but then the following clause says, “providing public transport services assists in furthering the principles … (a) to (d)”, and of course efficiency comes under (e). So it’s no longer required to actually be considered as part of making sure that taxpayers’ money, when it’s being put towards public transport, is actually operating in an efficient manner.

There are, of course, further changes which this bill does which came up through select committee, and there are a number of submitters who raised concerns around this, but the bill allows for in-house provision of public transport servicing with no tendering process required. The regulatory impact statement revealed that the Ministry of Transport had a differing preferred option to the Minister regarding this particular point—basically said it’s not going to work in terms of achieving better outcomes for public transport users. But no, the Government ignored that advice and instead has decided that public transport operators should be able to operate public transport services in-house, without a tendering process, which effectively means we’re going to go back to the bad old days where public transport effectively operates within an opaque—no one really knows how it’s being funded and there will be no real clear measures and outcomes put in place. And that is going to be something which I don’t think is going to deliver better public transport services for New Zealanders.

As I discussed, the issue around bus driver wages, that issue can already be resolved through the negotiation process and the tendering process. It didn’t require a legislative change to actually address that. But I think the biggest issue really comes down to the fact that this Government is now saying to regional councils that instead of going out there and tendering, instead of having to go through a competitive process to operate a public transport service, making sure that the ratepayer and the taxpayer are getting good value for money, that the outcomes that are being required through that tendering process are being robustly tested against what the market can provide, instead of that approach being taken to public transport operation in New Zealand, what this legislation says, effectively, is that the regional transport operators—regional councils—will, effectively, be able to just decide to run that in-house. They’ll own it, they’ll run it, they’ll operate it and I can tell you what, it will not work in New Zealand and things will go backwards, mark my words on that.

And so the National Party continues to oppose this piece of legislation. We share the concerns around what a number of players in the industry raised, that competition creates efficiency and removing that competition removes that efficiency and ultimately means that taxpayers and ratepayers don’t get the value for money and don’t get the service delivery. If we’re going to achieve the increased patronage which we all aspire for our public transport operations, if we’re going to get more people using buses and trains and ferries, it’s not going to work if you operate an inefficient service run in-house by a council. It needs to go through a competitive process and that is exactly what this legislation ultimately overturns.

So the National Party thanks those who submitted on this piece of legislation and the process that this went through via the select committee. We have not been convinced of the need for change through this legislation and we continue to oppose this bill.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. There it goes again: when it comes to getting on top of our transport challenges in this country, in particular in our largest city, the National Party is going backwards. They offer no help, no forward-thinking; no solutions about actually how we’re going to tackle congestion and reduce emissions. They think by doing the same old thing it’s going to get a better result—it’s simply not. When we look at the workforce shortages, absolutely, the pandemic has contributed to the challenges that are in front of us—but naively, the National Party thinks that if we just let everyone in, that would solve our problems. It fails to actually acknowledge that not only was it the pandemic that impacted on our workforce shortages, but actually the drive to the bottom of how we pay bus drivers and ferry drivers is the number one reason why people leave the profession.

And so it’s this Government, actually—and can I acknowledge the Hon Michael Wood, who did the particular work on changing and putting up actual solutions that are going to change our public transport system. This bill amends the Land Transport Management Act 2003. It will replace the Public Transport Operating Model (PTOM) with the Sustainable Public Transport Framework. This framework will place workers and public transport users at the heart of our public transport system—and procurement in planning and provision while retaining successful components of PTOM. It will support workforce recruitment and workforce retention, and prioritise fair and equitable treatment of employees that work in the sector, mode shift that we desperately need in a growing Tāmakimakaurau, and environmental and health outcomes.

It’s my privilege, always, to be the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. It’s the role in this House that I value the most, next to being the MP for Northcote, because people in our city in Northcote, and as we know—yes, an announcement this week: 100 percent of our bus shortage issues are back in order, we’ve got our buses working and our drivers in place and being paid fairly because of this Government. We’ve got some more work to do around ferries: I want to put it on the record that I’m very, very disappointed that our ferry services at Birkenhead Wharf and Northcote Point have been cancelled recently; I’ve raised my concerns about that. But this particular bill, of course, is one part of the issues that are in front of us.

This Government is about change. It’s about being bold and brave and actually putting good solutions in place to reduce congestion and to increase our public transport uptake in our largest city. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, if that last speaker, Shanan Halbert, meant his final words about Birkenhead and Northcote, he would have seen that Fullers actually opposed the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. I didn’t see him advocating—

Shanan Halbert: They did because they’ve got a monopoly.

Hon DAVID BENNETT: He says they’ve got a monopoly—he says they’ve got a monopoly. Ha, ha! That’s his view. He comes into this House and has the gall to say that there shouldn’t be closures of certain ferry routes, when he actually opposes the organisation that provides those ferries and does an excellent job in Auckland, as a matter of fact.

Now, I didn’t sit on the Transport and Infrastructure Committee. I have been a member of the committee before but, unfortunately, I was not sitting on the committee this year and didn’t see this bill. But, when you look at it, it is the true lefty approach that Government knows everything. You just have to take one sniff of this bill and you’ll understand the failure of that Government over there and how they’ve ruined this country in six years, and just the destruction they’ve caused because of their ideology. It’s the complete ideology that Government knows best; Government can control everything. If you leave it to Government, all public services will be delivered in the appropriate manner! That’s what this bill does; it takes it away from competition. It takes away the competitive aspect and says councils can do a better job. Well, I don’t know any council that can do a better job. I don’t know any Government that can do a better job. If Government could do a better job, it would be doing it already, and it doesn’t.

When we were in Government—in the last Government—we brought in this concept that there would actually be some sharing of costs and some fair recovery. Now, that was one of the first things the Labour Party got rid of—the idea of fair recovery, of making people actually pay something. The Minister may shake his head, but he knows damn well that they did take away that requirement for fair recovery. We had a 50 percent recovery that we were intending councils to get, and they got rid of that as soon as they got into Government. That was the first step of taking away any competition in the public transport sector, and this is just a final blast, you could say, to really consolidate the power in central government and local government and destroy any competitive pressure or tension that you may have in the market. And it will fail, just like any of the other left-wing ideological things that this Government has done.

Every time they do things like this, it just costs more money. We just have to look at their ideas around public transport in Auckland and how they were going to have this great cycling and walking bridge across the harbour and the millions of dollars that went in consultants—for nothing. Then you look at Let’s Get Wellington Moving. There was an article in the paper this morning about the highest-paid officials in Wellington doing nothing. There’s no actual results. And then the greatest irony of all is that today they’re going to actually announce Cambridge to Piarere and some other roading projects that they cancelled when they got into Government. They were actually funded. They were actually there, funded, and these guys cancelled them—

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Right-o, Mr Bennett, now, you’ve had a good 3½ minutes. Let’s have a look at the bill, shall we?

Hon DAVID BENNETT: Yeah, it’s all part of this, because, like I’ve been talking about, public transport and how they have taken an approach that the Government knows best and can do a bit of delivery has been shown to be a failure.

If you look at what they did around that walking and cycling bridge, they said that Government could deliver this better. They couldn’t even get it off the ground. They said that they could deliver light rail in Auckland. They haven’t even got it off the ground. It will be the same in this context. And there’s no ability to have environmentally friendly engagement with transport operators that may be looking at options to undertake better transport methods, to achieve the environmental goals they talk about, because they’re taking away their competition. They’re saying that the regional council will do it and the regional council will be better than the competitive aspect that you see. If anybody looks around New Zealand at the moment, at buses that are using more environmentally conscious sources of energy, they’re coming from the private sector. That’s where they’re coming from. They’re developing them themselves. That’s what’s happening, and to hide behind the environment as the reason for this bill is just another one of the ways that this Government has tried to pull the wool over New Zealanders’ eyes for six years.

New Zealanders are very aware that this has an impact on their daily lives. We can’t just give away free things all the time and say Government will deliver a better result. That has an impact on everyday New Zealanders, has an impact on their interest rates at the moment, is going to have an impact on their job security, and every time this Government steps into this House and says, “We can do it better.”, they’ve failed. The last six years have shown they’ve failed, and we didn’t need to have the last six years. That approach has always failed. You can go back a hundred years and find out that the approach of big government always fails. It’s not a new thing, but they had to go and prove again that it fails, and they have hurt a lot of New Zealanders in the process. This is just another example of big government—government knows best; we can do it better than the private sector; we don’t need competition; we don’t need to have a competitive process; we don’t want the private sector to engage in technologies and solutions that are better for New Zealand! “Let big government do that; we’re much better at it.”

Well, New Zealand has learned another lesson: you don’t trust big government, you don’t trust the Labour Party, you don’t trust an ideology that’s failed for a century, and it will fail in the future again. This piece of legislation is just an example of, and epitomises, the failure of this Government and how they have taken a great experiment with New Zealanders over the last six years. Their experiment was that they knew best and they could solve all the problems, and this experiment has failed. The leader that started the experiment—she left. The Government, which is in tatters now, can’t control anything in the economy. They can’t control their own team. It’s a complete and utter failure, and New Zealanders are paying for it. They’re paying for it at the pump, they’re paying for it in interest rates, and they’re going to pay for it with their jobs. And it’s a shame that New Zealanders had to be taken down that road again, because people used arguments around the environment and such like to try to position themselves for their real ambition, which is what this bill does: that Government will deliver, Government will solve your issues, and Government is the answer. It doesn’t work all the time—and, in public transport, it certainly doesn’t work all the time—and this is a great example.

If it did work, where’s that beautiful bridge for people to walk and cycle across the Auckland harbour? Where’s that beautiful rail network that was going to go in, which hasn’t even got off the ground? Where’s the effectiveness of the transport, Ministers? And why, on their last days, do they have to go out and promise a whole lot of roading projects that they cancelled six years ago because of their agenda and their failed view and experiment for New Zealand? Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Thank you. I’m going to try and address some of the rant and ramble that I just heard, because it’s a little crazy-making.

Hon Michael Wood: You’ve only got 10 minutes.

HELEN WHITE: What we—that’s true, I have only got 10 minutes. We have an interesting confusion here, because what the Public Transport Operating Model did was it actually prescribed—central government prescribed—that people had to contract out the services, which meant you had to give the money, if you were a local council, to run public transport to the private sector, i.e., Mr Bennett’s mates. You weren’t actually in a position where you could run the service yourself, if it made sense.

Hon David Bennett: Point of order—point of order.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Not “you”.

HELEN WHITE: Sorry.

Hon David Bennett: Point of order. I take offence at that comment.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: I think, David, you’re a robust character. I don’t think there was anything in there to take offence. Carry on.

HELEN WHITE: Sorry, Mr Speaker. So the issue with this bill is it is actually allowing true competition, because the public entity gets to choose, the local body gets to choose, who it is contracting with. It doesn’t have to just look at efficiency; it can look at a whole lot of other factors when it does that.

Now, the problem with running something like a big team of buses or ferries is that it’s really expensive, and so you often end up in a position where you’ve got very little choice if you leave it entirely to the private sector. So we can see that with Fullers ferries: it’s the only show in town, and you’re really stuck with it because you haven’t invested in ferries and competition to it. That is really important, that we break that down, because in Auckland at the moment we have not had great public services. Actually, as a result of focusing on wages of our bus drivers, we have managed to solve that one.

So this is the framework which allows good solid public transport and choice when you are Auckland Transport or you are the Auckland Council—choice about how you do it and actually bringing competition in, not strangling the situation and actually telling people how to do it from central government. So this is the irony, this is the great difference from the speech that we’ve just heard—this is the opposite. This is a Government bill which puts choice back in the hands of local body and allows the build-up of public services.

Now, I have once before spoken about my experience as a lawyer for the bus union. I remember how terrible things were in those times, when bus drivers were just getting so little pay and they had split shifts and they were on minimum wages. The answer to our bus driver shortages is just simply not lower conditions and bringing in migrants to do low-paid work, because guess who pays for that? Those workers pay, but also we all pay, because we have to house those bus drivers in Auckland. Let’s start employing people on decent terms and conditions, and let’s see what can happen as a result. And, lo and behold, what happened this morning? We had an announcement that bus driver shortages are over in Auckland because people are being paid decently.

Let’s move on. Let’s have a framework that works for this country and brings our public transport system up to date. I commend this bill to the House

That was the most remarkable series of assertions from the Labour member, Helen White, about what this bill intends to do, what the benefits are, and what the risks are of not following through. But ACT has a differing view, which was presented in the report back on the Land Transport (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill, which some people might say is a version of “bus communism” but let’s give the Government the benefit of the doubt.

Hon David Bennett: Socialism.

SIMON COURT: Well, all socialism ends in communism. You know that. So the policy intention is that this bill will achieve the objectives to regulate public transport and to prioritise mode shift—that’s bullying people out of cars and on to public transport, walking, and cycling. Then there’s fair and equitable treatment of employees. Well, imagine that. New Zealand already has laws that require employers to treat their employees fairly, but for some reason the Minister responsible for the bill at the time, the Hon Michael Wood, insisted that fair and equitable treatment of employees be included in a bill about public transport, for goodness’ sake, as well as improved environmental health outcomes.

Public transport serves a vital good. It enables people to get from their place of work to home, from home to school, wherever they are going, in large numbers. It’s meant to be efficient. It’s meant to be delivered in an effective way so it can move the most people in the shortest possible time. Environment and health outcomes should not be in this bill. Environment legislation is covered by the Resource Management Act. Climate legislation is covered by the emissions trading scheme, which puts a price on emissions. Health outcomes are up to the public health agencies. This bill is another example of the incoherent approach to delivering better value for money, more affordable living for New Zealanders. It’s confused, and, frankly, it’s unnecessary. It’s a waste of the committee’s time, and ACT does acknowledge that the officials who contributed to this bill and came to the select committee were doing their best to help committee members understand it, although it’s quite clear that some of those on the Government side of the House still don’t understand it.

This bill enables regional councils to own assets directly by removing the requirement for local authority interests in public transport services to be held in a council controlled organisation. I’m going to read that again—it enables councils to own assets directly. Now, has anyone heard of three waters? The three waters reform, which is a bill that passed yesterday, forces councils to hand over their assets in three waters, and this bill says they should own public transport assets. The incoherence, the confusion, the lack of policy principles is not remarkable; it’s what’s got us to this place in six years.

But Kiwis shouldn’t worry because there’s going to be a general election. ACT has some practical policy solutions to get to you on the bus, get your bus there on time, and get you to work on time or school on time if that’s where you need to go.

What else does the bill do? It requires public transport services to be procured and planned and operated in an open and transparent manner. I would hope to goodness that in New Zealand services procured with taxpayers’ and ratepayers’ funds are procured in an open and transparent manner. Because if they’re not we’d want the Auditor-General to go and have a look at it, wouldn’t we? Wouldn’t we? Oh, no, does this now need to be included in a public transport bill? What else has failed in the last six years?

Simon O’Connor: You don’t have enough time.

SIMON COURT: Oh, I don’t have much time—I’m going to stick to the bill. The bill proposes to encourage greater collaboration between regional councils and territorial authorities. For people listening at home who think that all councils are kind of the same, regional councils typically control regional land transport plans. They have a regional overview—a really important role. Territorial authorities are your city council and your district council, which often provide the infrastructure—for example, the bus stop or the local road the bus travels on. Of course they should collaborate. How on earth is that since the Local Government Act was amended by a former Labour Government to give councils the power of general competency, which means they can do anything, anywhere at any time they like, including competing with the private sector, Helen White, and it isn’t a very good idea, if you want the private sector to be delivering efficient services and to have a fair go, to have local government soaking up its overheads with ratepayers’ funds and going out there and competing unfairly with the private sector.

But imagine greater collaboration between regional and district and city councils. Well, of course that is necessary, but the power of general competence has led to councils becoming less competent at everything. It’s expanding the definition of public transport—and this is the kicker; this is what really tears ACT’s nighty—to clarify the treatment of on-demand public transport services as public transport services. These guys want to patch over Uber. These guys want to use taxpayer and ratepayer funds to subsidise services on demand. I’ve got an app on my phone. If I want on-demand services, I can get them now. It’s absolutely unnecessary, incoherent overreach from a Government that is out of ideas and has failed at everything it’s tried to deliver, including getting the buses to run on time.

So we can assume there are worthwhile benefits from public transport which are shared by the fare-paying passenger and the road operators due to reduced congestion and emissions at peak times, because, of course, if you’re operating a diesel bus, if you’re operating a private motor vehicle that runs on petrol and diesel, you will pay for your emissions under the emissions trading scheme.

So let’s assume there’s an economic model that demonstrates there are worthwhile benefits from public transport, and that’s why it should be delivered as efficiently as possible, so that costs are minimised and benefits are maximised, and the people who pay for it should be the people who benefit from it to a large degree. It’s not clear that this piece of legislation will do that. In fact, it’s much more likely that regional and city councils who want to take on the role of owning the buses and owning all the infrastructure—and remember they’re already cash strapped. Remember that one of the reasons for the three waters reforms is because apparently councils can’t borrow any more money. They’re already cash strapped. So where on earth they’re going to get the money to buy all these buses and build all this infrastructure is unknown.

So let’s assume that it needs to be delivered as efficiently as possible. Well, the people who benefit are the people who get to use the bus. But under this Government’s model, fewer and fewer people are paying the full cost or even a fair share of the cost of public transport. And then you think about all the people on the road who might say, “Well, I would use the bus if it arrived on time and if it was a good service.” And yet what did the former Minister Michael Wood do for the people of West Auckland? He said, “Instead of a northern northwest busway like the one that we built out in the North Shore, you can have bus stops on the side of the motorway at Te Atatū and Lincoln Rd.”

And that former Minister said in a select committee that that’s what good public transport looks like. Now, ACT disagrees. So do the people of West Auckland. That is the most outrageous claim from the former Minister Michael Wood—that bus stops on the side of the motorway represent good public transport. But that’s the vision—bus communism, patching over Uber, and bus stops on the side of the motorway—from a Government that said climate change is a nuclear-free moment and that you should all get out of cars and get on the bus.

Anyway, it’s only a few short weeks to the election. There will be a referendum on the former Minister’s bus stops on the side of the motorway in a few short weeks, and I think the people of West Auckland will vote against them. So what would that do? Well, let’s assume there’s an opportunity to reset expectations. We would say there’s a need for investment in public transport and the transport infrastructure and networks and services in general. Best way to do that? Get the cities and districts to tell central government what they need to deliver for a growing population. Establish 30-year infrastructure plans that lock that in so future politicians can’t come along and say, “You get light rail, you get a bridge.”—that won’t happen under an ACT 30-year infrastructure plan—and lock in the funding and financing, including bringing in billions from the private sector to support the delivery of good public transport and transport infrastructure.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. This is a really good bill. It’s a move in the right direction. I have to start by congratulating the Hon Michael Wood for all the effort that led to this bill finally coming to the House and to the chair of the Transport and Infrastructure Committee and all the members—Shanan Halbert and all the Labour members. I think that we did really good work at the select committee and made further improvements to the bill.

Ultimately, New Zealanders want better public transport. They do. We’ve just seen a poll of New Zealanders which said 72 percent wanted to see the priority as more investment in public transport, rail, and coastal shipping; not new roads. People in New Zealand are crying out for options that don’t force them into using a car for every single trip; spending $8,000 a year, on average, owning and operating a car. They want more people-friendly cities where their kids can have more independence to get around, as we once had. We can do all of that.

Now, the most outrageous thing to me is that the members speaking on the right say they care about economic efficiency and outcomes, and yet they keep proposing failed models that won’t get those outcomes they say they want.

Let’s just have a little bit of history about this bill, how we ended up having to come to this bill. In the 1990s, we had a National Government that forced local councils to sell off bus operations and to privatise the operation of bus services, and that led to the lowest level of public transport use in the history of New Zealand, really, in the mid-1990s. Of course, that’s only just started getting built back up, particularly after the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority—

Hon Judith Collins: The 1990s! Oh, dear oh dear, 1990s! How could she know?

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: I’ve seen the graph with the data. I mean, I know this is a huge mystery to the National Party, that you could actually look at evidence and data; they just rely on their reckons based on their experience. But I actually look at data, the Hon Judith Collins, and the data shows that public transport was at an absolute low in the 1990s, after being at incredibly high levels in the 1950s when we had electric trams across many of our cities. But, anyway, I digress.

After the establishment of the Auckland Regional Transport Authority, we started to see some improvements to public transport in Auckland. I mean, Wellington, because it had its rail network electrified a long time ago, actually maintained relatively high levels of public transport and had clean electric trolley buses running until 2018—it’s a shame that those got ripped out, and I did my best to stop that.

Before Steven Joyce came in, there was the Public Transport Management Act, which was passed by the Labour-led Government. What’s interesting about that is they brought three options to the House, and there was option one, option two, and option three. Option three gave the regional councils or the public transport authorities the most power to use the data to plan a good public transport network that would serve the people of their communities. Interestingly, Simon Court probably doesn’t know this but Jeanette Fitzsimons called up Rodney Hide and the ACT Party and convinced them that even though they were kind of generally opposed to public transport that if public money was going into public transport, it made sense to get most value for the community out of that public money. That’s why the ACT Party supported option three, which, actually, the Labour Government wasn’t supporting, but option three ended up passing, which was great, and then National got in.

Here’s the thing about National: they can’t seem to differentiate between what is good for private business and what is good for the community and people. That makes it very hard for them because ultimately they think that rich people getting richer, profits being privatised and maximised—that’s what they’re really here for; that’s what they’re here for. They like to say that it will benefit the community, but we know, we have decades of evidence, that that’s not true, and I think the average person on the street knows that, that when the supermarkets are banking $1 million a day in excess profit, that’s not good for people shopping at the supermarket. And when bus operators are making profits—we don’t even know their level of profit—that means people aren’t getting the best value for money out of that investment in public transport services.

So the way we can do public transport better is by enabling more public ownership, particularly of strategic assets, like bus depots. I don’t think there’s a single person on this side of the House that’s been involved in public transport operations, but I can tell you that the strategic location of a bus depot makes it, effectively, a monopoly for one operator, the owner of that bus depot, when bidding for certain contracts, because it would take too long to try to run more buses to that area. Therefore, you don’t actually get competition.

The whole idea of trying to get proper competition of what is a natural monopoly—a public transport network—flies in the face of any economic rationality. But, of course, we do know that the Hon Steven Joyce failed all his economic papers at university and got a degree in zoology, so I guess that’s why he didn’t grasp that concept, and also the concept that it’s difficult to commercialise the benefits of investment in public transport.

The people who benefit the most are not the people riding on those public transport services, it’s not the people operating the public transport services; it is the people who are using the road, who have less congestion because every person on a bus takes up way less room than another car. The major thing that is making it difficult for people to drive around on our roads in cars and trucks is other people in cars. If those people in cars who want to take public transport—and we know a whole bunch of them do—if we provide a frequent, reliable, effective, and affordable service, they will take it, and they always have; they always have. Everywhere we’ve invested in good public transport, like the Northern Busway, which the Green Party advocated for and the National Party opposed; like electrification of Auckland’s rail network, which is how I joined the Green Party and campaigned for that massive success; like the City Rail Link, which I tried to convince the Hon Gerry Brownlee to invest in sooner, and he dragged his heels and eventually the National Government realised they had to do it, but it was five years too late—all of that is successful investment in public transport that benefits everyone, including our climate.

But we are not going to get better public transport through allowing private operators, like Infratil, who owned NZ Bus and flogged off the incredibly strategically important Kilbirnie bus depot, which was originally a public asset; they sold that off, they sold their bus operations to some overseas equities fund—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Who sold it to them? Labour, that’s who.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: No; it was—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: 1989; they did.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: Well, OK. Therefore, the 1980s Labour Government—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Get the history right.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Would that member please desist with the barrage of interjections, the Hon Gerry—

Hon Gerry Brownlee: I was just helping.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): No. The member will stand, withdraw, and apologise.

Hon Gerry Brownlee: Withdraw and apologise.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: We can all agree that the 1980s and 1990s in New Zealand were a failed experiment in neoliberalism and the idea that the private sector is always better and that allowing private—

Simon Court: No, ACT doesn’t agree. No.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: OK, the ACT Party doesn’t agree with that. They’re in denial about many things, including the reality and threat of climate change and of the failure of neoliberalism to deliver benefits to everyone. That’s why Roger Douglas is denouncing the current ACT Party.

New Zealanders want positive solutions. The reality is: investment in public transport for public good benefits everyone. It benefits the people who use that public transport, it connects our communities, it benefits business, it reduces the fiscal burden on households who have to own as many cars, and it enables more people to move at peak times. So enabling public ownership of strategic assets is long overdue, whether that’s the vehicles themselves or bus depots. It will help us get more efficient services and provide better value to the community for our investment in public transport.

That’s why this bill is a very good bill. I’m very sorry to hear that the National and ACT Parties won’t be supporting it, but I do think it is a lesson for the people at home that if you vote for either of these two parties, you are not going to get practical transport solutions; you’re going to get a failed ideology that cannot understand the concept of public investment for public good, of protecting our environment, our climate, and our health; to understand all of these things are interrelated and we can make better choices that will benefit us now and in the long term.

I love public transport. I think people who know me well know that it’s pretty much all I talk about at the moment. Growing up, before I moved to Auckland, I used to ride my bike to school. Then I moved to Auckland and managed to live there for a few years without owning a car and the same in Wellington. It wasn’t until I moved to wonderful, sunny Nelson that I actually started driving.

At that point, 15 years ago, I identified that we needed better public transport in Nelson, and so I’m delighted that recently we’ve just introduced 17 lovely electric buses, and I just want to acknowledge my predecessor, Nick Smith, who’s seen the light. Nick actually has his bus licence, and I risked my life getting in the bus while he drove it. Apart from a quick little brake—where he possibly stepped on the brake a bit too heavily—we made it home in one piece, I’m pleased to share.

This is an excellent bill because it corrects a wrong with the Public Transport Operating Model that really led to the driving down of wages and conditions for bus drivers and the driving down of investment in public transport. The biggest thing that this bill does is it gives that flexibility around ownership and delivery and allows councils to actually be far more embedded in the delivery of public transport services.

I’m really pleased that we have put this bill in place, because in Nelson, we do have two councils that have oversight of public transport, and they’re delivered by a fantastic local company called SBL; I acknowledge Tim Cumming and his team.

What this bill does is it doesn’t take away the opportunity to run our public transport system that way, but it allows for a lot more flexibility and really focuses on ensuring we’re investing, rather than driving down costs and wages. It’s a fantastic bill, and I commend it to the House.

This bill, I think, could be best described as an empty box wrapped up with Christmas paper: looks really good, and you can make wonderful speeches about how marvellous it is, but it fails to recognise the fact that it is totally back to the future. The speech before by the Green member, Julie Anne Genter, should have gone one year back from the history that she was attempting to quote and recognised that it was a Labour Government in 1989 that brought in the reorganisation of local government, and saw the end for numerous transport boards run by local authorities throughout New Zealand. Why did they do that? Because they were a hopelessly inefficient way of providing public transport. And now we have—just these 30 years later where, you know, some changes might be useful—a complete return to what was the norm in the 1980s. Quite unbelievable.

Julie Anne Genter talked about the “failed ideology” of ensuring that there is competition and efficiency in the delivery of services. Well, what is so failed about that concept? The reason why people don’t use public transport in New Zealand in great numbers is because of the lack of reliability of those services. And now, we have a Government that is going to take away some of the requirements about that efficiency and replace it with this set of new requirements: new “principles”, they call them. The first one is: “[a] well-used public transport service reduce[s] … environmental health and health impacts of land transport, including by reducing reliance on single-occupant vehicles and using zero-emission technology”. Everyone knows that; so why does that have to be a principle for the establishment of your public transport? It’s a simple point, and no one is going to argue that point.

But when it comes down to looking at councils, again, owning bus services—then I think there is a problem. And you’d have to ask, why would we encourage local government to take their ratepayers’ money to buy bus services that they already can control through the arrangements that exist right now? And that might have been a place to make some changes because, well, for all the vain hope in the world that it might be possible to get local government, both regional councils and district councils, to discuss these things, to sort out some good routes, etc., etc.,—they don’t do it now. There’s nothing stopping them getting in a room to have a discussion about where those bus routes should go, but they don’t do it. And I know in Christchurch it’s a constant ache for people who want to use bus services, and the idea that we’re going to now have perhaps the Environment Canterbury bus service, and all that investment by those companies who have provided bus services in the city for 30 years is suddenly just going to be set aside.

There is absolutely no gain to any consumer in this particular proposal; not one. There is a whole lot of feel-good stuff in here that ends up just making you wonder why on earth there was so much time invested in all of this. One of the principles here is: “regional councils, territorial authorities, and public transport operators should work together to provide co-ordinated public transport services and associated infrastructure necessary”. Where is the provision in the law that says they must do it, and what is different about what they can do right now? So we’re going from a “can” to a “could”, to a “maybe” and a “would”; and none of this is going to make a blind bit of difference to another person going to a bus stop tomorrow morning, next month, next year—wherever—if there isn’t reliability in that service.

So all this does is creates a whole lot more uncertainty. Why would any one of the current bus operators out there at the moment want to reinvest in their capital stock? Why would they want to buy better buses, why would they want to buy electric buses? What would be the reason for them investing all that extra cash when they know that at the drop of a hat, the local authority can turn around and say “You’re out, we’re taking it all over, it’s all ours”. The member from the Green Party used the term “ideological approach”. This is what this is, and it is a failed ideological approach.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I just can’t believe that in 2023 we have to explain to the other side why promoting our public transport in our country helps with our environmental and health outcomes. The absolute siloed thinking that we’ve heard from the other side in terms of not recognising that some of the most successful economies in this world have great public transport. And the fact that we are having to look climate change straight in the face, and having to face all of the challenges that we will—and we already have started to at the beginning of this year.

We need a good public transport system that will sustain us into the future, that will help us with emission reduction, and that will make sure the wellbeing of all our people in Aotearoa New Zealand gets looked after. This bill enables it, that’s why I commend this bill to the House.

Fa‘afetai lava, Madam Speaker. It is a great honour to take an opportunity to take a brief call on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill’s second reading.

I just want to, first of all, thank the Ministers, former and present, for their work on this bill, bringing it to the House, and also the awesome Transport and Infrastructure Committee that I got to be a part of this morning as well, led by Shanan Halbert and the team. Also, to the 54 organisations and individuals that presented their submissions during this process, I thank them for their contributions as well.

As part of the Government’s commitment to improve public transport in Aotearoa, like we have heard from my colleagues, this is all strengthening employee welfare and improving environmental and health outcomes.

When it comes to public transport in Takānini, we currently have two consultations happening at the moment. That is the Takānini level crossings, in terms of improving the railway links and the buses that go through the network there and helping improve the efficiency for our passengers. The other one is the southern Frequent Transport Network Routes plan in order to provide the bus networks to get to those vital points in Takānini to improve the service as well.

This bill does several things and I just want to comment on one of them: enabling innovation in the types of services that can be provided, and that’s part of supporting the provision of on-demand public transport services. So in 2021 and 2022 we had Auckland Transport piloting a programme for on-demand services to our people. That was a success, with a couple of our local board chairs commenting on the efficiency that provided to our community members, and that has now been put in place permanently for our community. On-demand services—in innovative ways, and providing those services for our community is the way to go. So I can commend this bill to the House.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. Here we are, still in urgency, debating the second reading of the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. Although out in the real world it’s Thursday afternoon, here in Parliament it’s still Tuesday, and we’ve been debating legislation under urgency. We went through until midnight last night and we started at 9 o’clock this morning because the Government’s shambolic legislative programme is in chaos. They’re trying, in their dying days—in the last, dying, desperate days of this Government—to ram through a range of ideologically driven, “Wellington knows best” legislative changes that surely, as my friend and colleague the Hon Gerry Brownlee noted a speech or two ago, is really nothing more than just back to the future.

And the reason things were changed, back 30 years ago, was because it wasn’t working then and it won’t work now. We have a crazy situation where this Government takes the approach, on so much of what they want to do—in terms of their approach to legislation it’s “Wellington knows best.” Wellington knows best how to operate just about everything, in Labour’s view of the world. And so here we are, this is a piece of legislation that kind of sounds warm and fuzzy, and if you don’t look past the pleasant words and platitudes, it sounds kind of OK. But it’s not until people dig into the detail of it that they will realise that what this piece of legislation does is, effectively, entirely screw private sector public service providers from doing what they do well—what they do best.

I come from the Coromandel and we don’t have a lot of public transport in the Coromandel. In fact, we’ve got a little ferry that goes across the Whitianga Harbour, we’ve got a minibus or two that do a little circuit around Thames, and that’s about it. There are no trains. We don’t have any bus services to speak of. In fact, any that we have that come from the InterCity services, and what have you, have been diminished or reduced. Our roads are continually under threat and are fragile, and the main highway is still closed. So our local government operators in the Coromandel find that this will mean nothing to them. It will mean absolutely nothing to them, but across the country, the potential for screwing the marketplace is very high indeed. So what we’ve got here is more central planning and control of public services by a Government that wants to just foist its ideological approach on the marketplace.

A year or so ago I visited the very nice city of Timaru, and I was pleasantly surprised and amazed to see that they have developed a trial system of something that they call “MyWay on-demand”. Now, in Timaru it used to be that the council contract had arranged for buses to travel on a circuit on a schedule that just literally drove round and round Timaru every day, all day. The vast majority of those buses that travelled on that predetermined schedule of the old type meant that more often than not the buses were either empty or had very few passengers in them. It wasn’t a particularly efficient system. So the Timaru MyWay model actually is quite exciting; it’s an on-demand system that allows people to literally use an app, use technology, use modern innovations, to call up a public transport provider and essentially not use a scheduled programme, repeat cycle, old-fashioned bus schedule, and it seems to be from all accounts working very well. Now, this is currently a model that, as I understand it, is run under the auspices of the council. But if we follow it to its logical conclusion, it effectively could become sort of like an Uber bus service. And there’s no reason why private commercial operators shouldn’t and couldn’t operate something like that that’s innovative, that’s smart, that’s modern, that’s intelligent and, more importantly, efficient and effective in terms of ratepayer investment but is also a really good service for the people who want to use it.

And so here we have a political party that’s determined to take us back to the future, and the future’s not good. The future is looking pretty jolly bleak. There were very good reasons that changes were made to allow the Public Service provision of transport to be contracted out on a transparent, fair, competitive basis to private sector providers. This legislation would change all that, and I want to make it clear that under a re-elected National-led Government that isn’t far away, we’ll ensure that public transport operators continue to be funded in a transparent way with the market-based approach to delivery of public transport operations that has been working so successfully until now—until this Government actually wants to meddle with it.

We in the National Party support public transport. We are very big supporters of public transport, but we don’t want to have a position that is going to be able to, effectively, as the Hon Gerry Brownlee pointed out, put at risk the capital and the investment potential of private sector operators. Because as Gerry Brownlee so correctly and aptly pointed out, why would a private bus investor, a private bus supplier, a transport supplier, invest the hundreds of thousands of dollars required to buy just one modern, electric, low-carbon, climate-friendly bus when they know that there is a potential for the council, maybe just by dint of a changed political philosophy in that council, suddenly saying, “Oh no, no, no, we’re not going to use your services anymore, we’re gonna take it on.” It’s kind of like going back to the old days of the Ministry of Works or something, just literally operating everything from the centre. And so the risk to those investors or those businesses is that they simply won’t invest, they simply won’t allocate capital and that will mean that we end up having a transport fleet, a bus fleet, that is old, that is not particularly carbon friendly, that is not particularly climate efficient and is not modern. And that actually will be a long-term net negative, not only to the people who travel on those buses and those services, but it will be a net negative to the long-suffering ratepayers who ultimately have to fund those inefficient services.

And I just don’t know how it could possibly be that in today’s age a bill like this could actually get past a Labour Party caucus to get into the Parliament. Now, I notice that the bill is in the name of the Hon David Parker, and people listening on their wirelesses and on their televisions, maybe, to this debate today, will know that David Parker is a very new Minister of Transport, and I’m not sure that David Parker probably really has his heart in this legislation because, you know, he’s a clever one. He’s one of the performers in the current Government. He’s the one that actually gets to do all the heavy lifting and all the hard jobs, and, in fairness to him, he’s had a very high work rate. Much of the work has been questionable but you can’t deny that he’s had a high work rate. So he’s picked up this transport portfolio from his predecessor the Hon Michael Wood. Now, what we know about the difference between Michael Wood and David Parker is that Michael Wood was hell-bent on an ideological approach to transport—an ideological approach to transport throughout the nation that saw little done but lots announced. And this is a bill that very much fits into that mode. This is a bill that is more about grand gestures and words that will have a negative effect. But it plays deliberately to an ideological approach—a certain sector of the political marketplace that I don’t think understands the reality of how commercial operators work. And that’s one of the problems that the Labour Party have; that they really don’t understand it.

One of the things that we know is that Labour have only three approaches to policy: make it compulsory, ban it, or tax it, and if they are in doubt they just tax it more. Well, this is a bill that fits classically into those three criteria: big on grand gesture, light on detail, and with a perverse outcome that will impact negatively not only on ratepayers but also on public transport users. We oppose this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak on the Land Transport Management (Regulation of Public Transport) Amendment Bill. I am a proud Wellingtonian who takes pride in taking public transport every day, as much as I can, from home to work, and vice versa, and so do thousands of Wellingtonians who take public transport every day. A bill that’s discussing good environmental outcomes and also the health and wellbeing of New Zealanders is, all of a sudden, taking us back to the past, and the cynicism and the negativity from members of the Opposition is just mind blowing.

Climate change is getting worse. It’s serious; it needs to be dealt with. Some of the ways to do that is by decarbonising our public transport. Having efficient, reliable public transport is a good way to do that, as well, because we have to make sure that we’re giving people an option to actually get out of their cars and get on to public transport. This bill is part of the Government’s commitment to improve public transport in Aotearoa New Zealand, to strengthen employee welfare, and to improve environmental and health outcomes. This is the core aim of this bill. It does this by establishing new governing principles, creating greater flexibility around asset ownership and service provision models.

To me, this bill is another milestone in the Government’s emissions reduction plan: the establishment of the new sustainable public transport framework that is going to replace the Public Transport Operating Model. This is a good bill. I commend it to the House.

The question is, That the amendments recommended by the Transport and Infrastructure Committee by majority be agreed to.