Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2)

on behalf of the Minister of Transport: I move that the Road User Charges (Temporary Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

Can I ask the member to just read that paragraph out. You had missed out “RUC”, sorry.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Sorry, Madam Speaker. Where is it?

“Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme”.

Hon WILLIE JACKSON: Ah, sorry. Sorry, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2) be now read a second time.

As mentioned in the Minister’s first reading speech, the Government’s top priority is supporting households with cost of living pressures, and, of course, that’s what our Prime Minister has been saying for the last few weeks. Bread and butter issues are the focus now for this Government, and it’s a message that is resonating so strongly for our Government—so strongly that it’s leaving the National Party in the lurch.

Fuel is an unavoidable cost for many New Zealanders. They need to get to work or to make sure their kids get to school. For some small-business owners, fuel costs have a real impact on their ability to run their business. We know that many families are facing tough choices right now. For this reason, we have decided to maintain the support measures we first put in place in March and April of 2022, and it’s Cabinet and Government who have considered this and realised the needs of New Zealanders around the country. We know that Kiwis are suffering under a lot of the pressures in terms of the cost of living, so this is absolutely being clear that we support them.

The extension will run to 30 June 2023, with full rates of fuel excise duty and road-user charges resuming on 1 July 2023, keeping those measures in place in a way to provide timely and meaningful support to households and businesses across the country. The Government has already amended regulations to keep the 25c per litre reduction to fuel excise duty in place until 30 June 2023. Half-price public transport will also remain in place until 30 June 2023. We’re not backing off our efforts to encourage New Zealanders to get on public transport.

We know that this announcement has been well received by people right across the different political spectrum, so we’re pleased to see the support that has come across for this policy. The reduction to road-user charges expired on 1 February 2023. For the last three weeks, those who need to purchase a road-user charges licence have been doing so at full rates. We need to amend the Road User Charges Act to bring back the reduced rates as quickly as possible.

The bill is necessary to put in place a second temporary reduction period for road-user charge rates. The period will run from 1 March 2023 until 30 June 2023. During this time, all legislated rates of road-user charges will be reduced by 36 percent. Setting the reduction at this level helps to ensure that we are providing equivalent support to diesel vehicle owners as we are giving to petrol vehicle owners. At this level of reduction, the price of a road-user charges licence for a light diesel vehicle falls from $76 to $49. This means that the owner of a light diesel vehicle will save $27 each time they purchase a licence.

The bill does include a power to extend the reduction period by Order in Council. The international economic outlook remains uncertain and unpredictable. The bill provides the Government with the ability to continue this support, should the economic conditions warrant it, without seeking another amendment to the Road User Charges Act.

The road-user charges system is more complex than fuel excise duty. As the Minister noted in the first reading speech, there are over 200 road-user charge rates and more than 80 different vehicle types. Meanwhile, there’s one fuel excise duty rate paid as part of the retail price of fuel. Road-user charges are based on distance travelled. They must be purchased in advance of travel, and those people subject to road-user charges must affix a label to the vehicle that proves they have a valid road-user charges licence.

For this reason, we provide several different ways for people to purchase road-user charges. You can purchase in person from agents across the country or you can directly purchase online from Waka Kotahi. All the standard payment methods will be available to people during the second temporary reduction period, and the Minister is assured that Waka Kotahi has the resources in place to support those people who need help to purchase.

We’re keeping safeguards in place to discourage excessive purchases. The pre-purchase nature of road-user charges does create a risk of drivers or owners purchasing excessive amounts. When we first introduced the reductions in April 2022, we put some safeguard measures into the Road User Charges Act. We did this to discourage people from making excessive purchases or abusing the intent of the reduction. Waka Kotahi has been empowered to flag and investigate potential excessive or unreasonable purchases. If it concludes that the purchase was unreasonable, it can invoice purchasers at the full or standard rate for the excess. Waka Kotahi’s website provides guidance to help guide decisions on what is likely to be an acceptable or reasonable purchase. Individual travel patterns are often unique, and the guidance recognises this.

Passing this bill is a priority. We need to pass this bill because it is a way to provide timely support to many households and businesses across the country. It will deliver real savings for people who own and drive diesel vehicles, and we can implement it quickly. We look forward to the debate on this bill. Kia ora tātou.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take a call on the second reading of this piece of legislation. This debate, which is now being pushed through in urgency, is a reminder of this Government’s ad hoc way in which it is dealing with this issue. This piece of legislation has been dropped into Parliament and is being passed under urgency because of an announcement made on 1 February to, of course, extend the reduction in excise and road-user charges (RUCs), which, of course, is meant to expire on 31 January.

And why did they decide to extend it? Because, of course, this Government has still got no plan on how it’s going to deal with the cost of living crisis that New Zealand taxpayers and working families are facing. This is a Government which simply has one tool in the tool box, and they just keep re-announcing it every three months. So, this is meant to now expire on 30 June 2023, and, mark my words, there will be an announcement somewhere around 29 June—it might even be an announcement on 1 July—to say that they will be extending this only one more time.

But, of course, the National Party will be supporting this piece of legislation, because what it does is quite simple and is important, and it does rely on the fact that it ensures that people who pay road-user charges—which are people who own diesel vehicles: our tradies, our farmers, our truckies—are able to also get the reduction in road-user taxes, which those who drive petrol vehicles and who pay tax at the pump through petrol excise are already receiving. But, of course, there are a number of questions that we will be asking at the committee of the whole House, because, of course, once again, this bill has been rushed, there is no select committee process, and there’s no ability to actually interrogate the bill substantially with officials and actually understand the implications it has on the funding system, etc.

It’s been rushed through, but there are a number of number of questions that need to be asked about the assessment process, which need to be asked around what’s going to happen to those road users who have been purchasing road-user charges in the last couple of weeks and had to because their previous amount ran out and they’ve had to purchase some more. Will they be able to get some of their money reimbursed? Of course, when you have an ad hoc approach to policy, you end up with some people having to go down and buy at the full rate. If you go down to buy your RUC today, you have to pay the full rate. So will these people be able to get reimbursed for this fact? Some people might say, “Well, they should have they should have just bought more in advance.” Well, some people may have, and some people may not have. And the reality is, though, if you do have to go and buy a RUC today, if you go and register a vehicle today and you have to put some kilometres on the clock because you have to pay in advance, and if you went and bought a new diesel vehicle on 2 February, you’d have to put a couple of thousand kilometres on straight away, and so you’ll be paying at the higher rate. How are those people going to be reimbursed?

So there’s a number of questions, but, at its core, that is the fundamental point: it does create that fairness, and that is why we’re supporting it. However, we have a number of questions certainly around why this bill creates a five-year blank slate for this to be, effectively, permanently extended. It’s now no longer a temporary reduction, but a permanent reduction. And those are more questions that we’ll be asking the Minister at the next stage.

But, look, I just want to echo a couple of points which have been raised during this debate, and that is the fact that we do need to make sure we sustainably fund our transport funding in New Zealand, and this Government has mismanaged the National Land Transport Fund, it has failed to invest in our roading network, it has failed to build the roads that we need, and what we need is a National Land Transport Fund which is well-funded and which is able to meet the challenges that we as a country are facing.

This Government’s focused on one thing alone: light rail, which ain’t gone anywhere and is now not going to be started until 2025. They said it would be built by 2021; it won’t be started until 2025. They are stripping billions out from the National Land Transport Fund for their pet projects, when, actually, what New Zealanders want that fund to be used for is building and maintaining our roading network. And if you travel down the East Coast of New Zealand, if you go across the Brynderwyns—well, you can’t go across the Brynderwyns; if you want to go across the Brynderwyns—if you want to go to the Coromandel, if you want to use these roads, well, you can’t, because this Government has failed to invest in our highways. It has stripped the National Land Transport Fund of its primary purpose to build and maintain our roading network and to invest in the quality of our roads, and it’s focused on its pet transport projects, which it has failed to deliver. So we’ll support this bill, but this Government has failed on transport in New Zealand.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I guess it’s important just to acknowledge that, while we are in urgency, we follow the same procedures that we would in any other piece of legislation that goes before this House. Every member of this House has the opportunity to make a 10-minute contribution should they wish to; yet, what I hear this afternoon is a lot of filling of that time in political speech, where, actually, this piece of legislation is an important part to assisting New Zealanders with the cost of living challenges that are in front of them. Yes, it is correct that we are feeling inflation pressures, and that impacts on both businesses and communities; on parents taking their children to schools. But, in fact, when we look at this piece of legislation—and, yes, its extension—times continue to move on, events continue to impact: just recently, we had floods and cyclones. But we know, most of all, that people are feeling the pressures of the costs in front of them. This piece of legislation assists them with that, and I commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s encouraging, actually, to hear the other side finally acknowledging that there is a cost of living crisis. Unfortunately, they have contributed to it through the Government’s policies, and this is a band-aid solution for something that, quite frankly, shouldn’t have been happening anyway. The reality is we are here, and we are, on this side of the House, supporting this piece of legislation, as Mr Brown previously outlined, because ultimately it brings back a level of fairness. Those who are operating petrol vehicles at the moment already enjoy this rebate—“enjoy” is perhaps a loose term for it. But, irrespective, aligning diesel vehicles at that same level is an appropriate change to make. Ultimately, though, the question is: well, what are our long-term solutions to these challenges? And we’re simply not seeing that from the Government.

There is no focus on cutting the unnecessary expenditure out of the Government Budget, and that is a key driver of inflation. We’ve seen inflation sitting at 7.2 percent, well outside the target 1 to 3 percent band—more than double and not expected to come back within that for a couple of years. That’s simply not good enough, because it’s letting Kiwis down, putting pressure on them at a time when, quite frankly, it is tough out there. As the previous speaker, Shanan Halbert, noted, things change—and, yes, we’ve seen that over the last few weeks with these terrible weather events that have occurred—and, actually, that’s why it’s so important to have prudent fiscal management when times are good; so that, when they are not, actually you have a bit more flexibility and you aren’t having to take these sorts of knee-jerk reactions and put band-aids in place, where actually good legislation should have prevailed in the first instance and reduced the costs for New Zealanders whilst growing our economy. We’re simply not seeing that sort of a focus from this Government, and it’s quite disappointing, because there has been a lot of opportunity for New Zealand over the last few years, and, quite frankly, it’s been squandered.

So, look, as I said, we are supporting it. As I say as well, though, it takes $700-odd million, in this instance, off the potential revenue in terms of the National Land Transport Fund, at a time when we have a critical shortage of infrastructure. We’re not seeing strong investment in maintaining our road network, and certainly no new projects being built under this Government, in terms of transport, and a key link between the Waikato and the Bay of Plenty region—you can’t get away from talking about that as the MP for Waikato! It’s critical that we see improved infrastructure connecting those regions. We’ve got two major cities there, in terms of Hamilton and Tauranga, and yet they were completely cut off recently. The road through Karangahake Gorge, State Highway 2; State Highway 29 over the Kaimai Range. It’s simply not good enough that we don’t have this sort of infrastructure resilience in our country. And, of course, now State Highway 25A over the Coromandel, as well, was another road. All of those were cut off, and there are real challenges around that. When we’re robbing our National Land Transport Fund of the ability to, I guess, fund these projects over the longer term, we’re really not taking an appropriate view to managing the needs of our country longer term.

So it is disappointing that we are having to do that. But, at the same time, it is appropriate that we do line up both the diesel and petrol mechanisms. If one is getting a rebate, the other should as well. And certainly for those trucking companies, freight providers in particular, when you think about that cost flowing through, as it does, it will potentially help to reduce some of the costs for the end consumer. And, unfortunately, that’s a key contributor to the cost of living impact: these aspects of the system—the supply chain—that flow through to those end consumers. We’ve seen that just the other week as well now, with the Government proposing a $1.50 per hour increase to the minimum wage. Like their fuel charges, that’s going to flow through to the end consumer, and, ultimately, it doesn’t help reduce that cost of living impact. So this is one measure that may help to alleviate some of that for a period of time. But, ultimately, as I’ve said, it is a band-aid. We need better solutions from the Government, more focused on the longer-term economic prosperity of our country and on the daily impact for New Zealanders. And, frankly, we’re not seeing that at this stage, which is disappointing. But, to our earlier points, we are supporting this bill to ensure there is consistency across those fuel types. Thank you.

I just want to push back a little on the previous speaker’s comments, Tim van de Molen, around the National Land Transport Fund and just point out that the Minister in his speech earlier today pointed out that with the reduced income from reducing the cost of transport, the Government will be topping up that fund out of the general fund, and we have just put another $250 million into the emergency transport fund. So what the member has been saying on the other side is actually, quite frankly, wrong.

And I want to point out just how fantastic Waka Kotahi were in my patch last year, following our flooding, when they managed to reconnect the most important transport link in the top of the South—State Highway 6 between Blenheim and Nelson—in just six weeks. So I want to commend Waka Kotahi for their work and I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. I would like to speak to some of the comments that have been made in the debate by both sides. The reality is that the Government has choices and there are other options to help alleviate the cost of living, particularly for those households who are most affected, that would be better overall, better for the climate, better for those people, and better for the economy than this bill.

The proposal to continue extending subsidies for fossil fuels, through this bill which reduces the price of road-user charges and is commensurate with the reduction in fuel excise duty, is, effectively, a subsidy for fossil fuels. It’s that fossil fuel use that’s one of the main drivers for human-caused climate change, and we’re already seeing the impacts of human-caused climate change in the flooding and in the cyclone and we will continue to see more and worse impacts from climate change until we reduce fossil fuel use globally.

In New Zealand, there’s a huge opportunity, because our transport system is incredibly inefficient. Government spends somewhere between $5 billion and $10 billion a year on the roads, but households have to spend four or five times as much to use the roads, and I think that that fact is often taken for granted. It’s underappreciated that New Zealand’s households and businesses are spending many billions—tens of billions—of dollars on vehicles, and fuel to run them. We’re importing all of that from overseas. It is a direct productivity drain on our economy that we don’t have a transport system that enables movement of people and goods at lower cost, which most other countries have. They have lower per capita transport costs because they’ve invested in a complete network which includes rail, public transport services, walking and cycling in neighbourhoods and around schools. All of these things reduce the cost of transport, they reduce emissions, there’s huge co-benefits to it, and New Zealand simply hasn’t done that.

So when Mr Bennett, for example, talks about the roads of national significance, let’s just talk about what this really means, because in the nine years that National was in Government and the five years since, the seven “roads of national significance” were highways in our highest population urban areas. They were robbing money from the regional roads. The roads of national significance are in the Auckland region, the Hamilton region, the Tauranga region, the Wellington region, and Christchurch. Now, they, basically, enable more residential development on the fringe of the urban area, which enables more car commuting, which makes traffic worse in the city, and that’s what they’re about.

In that 12 years, I believe it’s about 200 kilometres of State highway that were delivered—200 kilometres. That caters for less than 4 percent of all vehicle trips. If, as Mr Bennett asserts, we were going to take the roads of national significance approach to improving vehicle journeys and safety, it would literally take 300 years of the National Government to address the roading network in our country. Now, 300 years from now, we aren’t going to be using fossil fuels to get around; I mean, within 20 or 30 years, we’re going to have to stop.

Although my colleague Simon Court did say many sensible things about pointing out how this was not an economically productive policy or a good way of addressing cost of living, the one difference, I think—and this is just probably because he hasn’t actually looked at the numbers—is that if we were to have direct charging for the types of roads that the National Party’s talking about, they could not pay for themselves. The whole reason we don’t have toll roads for Transmission Gully and for the highway north of Auckland is because every time they look at charging, they realise that not enough people would be willing to pay the cost. That’s what tells you it’s not the best use of money.

Now, we have a roading network and we need to spend a lot more money maintaining it and making sure it’s fit for purpose; that is absolutely true. But spending billions on urban highways, which the Labour Government has, unfortunately, doubled down on since 2020, is not the right way to do this. And so, Mr Bennett, the National Party are just absolutely wrong when they say that the National Land Transport Fund is being used to pay for light rail. It’s not true. The National Land Transport Fund over the past few years has been spent predominantly on State highways, and those State highways started costing more money to build even before there was a change of Government. So, you know, the $200 million on the Kāpiti Expressway—almost immediately, it needed to be completely ripped up and resurfaced. That was a roads of national significance project delivered under the National Government. The New Zealand Land Transport Agency, Waka Kotahi, was already starting to fail in its ability to deliver highways.

Hon David Bennett: You were the Minister.

Hon JULIE ANNE GENTER: And then there was a change of Government—no, no, no; not when this happened, David Bennett. You’ve got the timing wrong. All that news about the cost of the Kāpiti Expressway and the resurfacing—same with the Waikato Expressway—it’s all down to National Party mismanagement of Waka Kotahi. That is why.

I just want to point out that there’s 25 to 44 percent of household income being spent on transport. That is because the Government has not sufficiently invested in good passenger transport. Now, if we actually invested more public money in revitalising our rail network, which New Zealanders are begging for right across the country in the rural areas, we would have a more resilient transport system that gives people choice so that when the road’s closed, we can quickly fix up the rail line, and it’s actually faster to fix up, but also that our transport system’s using less fossil fuels which are causing climate change. It is a case where the environmental right choice is the economic right choice for New Zealand. That’s why I’ve never understood New Zealand’s transport policy, and the political debate around it is firmly stuck in the 20th century, largely because of the National Party.

So here is an opportunity, an opportunity to help those New Zealanders struggling with the cost of living. Even if their only choice, because of a failure of Government policy, is to use a private vehicle and to power that with fossil fuels, we would benefit those low and medium income households more if we gave them direct cash transfers, which could be used on petrol or diesel, or could be used on food—because food prices are also up and one of the major factors—or it could be used on rent. The Government could be doing more to control rent prices while we try to build supply and increase the public housing supply. So subsidising fossil fuels is not the answer.

The majority of the cost of this to Government is going to benefit—well, not the majority, but the largest share. Many times more of the dollars will be benefiting the wealthiest New Zealanders who are the least affected by cost of living. We need to target it to the people who need it most. We can do that with cash transfers and we need to continue—actually, we need to start truly investing in a multimodal transport network, because, I’m sorry to say, despite the fantasies of the National Party, most of the money is still going on highways. Those highways cost more than ever. I have to agree that the New Zealand Upgrade Programme funding mainly being used on highways was not very smart. It’s mainly highways in urban areas and it has mainly just inflated the cost of delivering those highways, because the sector was already at capacity and then the Government threw a whole lot more cash at it to ask them to deliver more roads, but, actually, we’re just getting the same roads for more money.

So, look, we just have to think long term, and there’s huge opportunities here. We can have more livable cities. We can have a more resilient transport system. We can tackle this challenge of climate change. But the only way we’re going to do that is by trying to tell the truth to New Zealanders and not settling for these short-term half measures. They’re like a short-term sugar hit that ultimately take us backwards and the wealthiest New Zealanders benefit much more than the poorest New Zealanders from this policy. The oil companies, the petrol companies will benefit to a certain extent, and our National Land Transport Fund is not sufficiently funded to pay for the maintenance and the rebuilds and repairs that we need on our roading network.

It’s kind of amazing how extreme the National Party’s rhetoric is around what the Green Party’s position is, because all we’re saying is some of the roads that they’ve promised are not the most cost-effective way to solve people’s mobility problems, and that we would like to see the money invested in things that actually would give people real choice, that would reduce their reliance on private vehicles and fossil fuels, because that actually benefits people to have that choice. But in order to do that, we need to invest in the networks that have never been delivered and that is: protected bike lanes in our cities, joined up with high frequency, clean public transport that is frequent, all day, every day, even on the weekend, so it can provide a real alternative to a car—and, of course, investing and maintaining and protecting roads in our rural areas. But that doesn’t mean gold-plated, four-lane roads that would take 300 years to deliver.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m sorry, it gives me no pleasure to speak on behalf of the ACT Party on this bill—the ACT Party is not going to support this bill. And in one of life’s remarkable and fortunate coincidences, there are some things that we agree with the Green Party on about this bill, because it turns out that one of the things that the Green Party and the ACT Party have in common is that we’re generally interested in the welfare of New Zealanders—it’s just that we have different ideas about how to deliver that.

So I just want to note that this policy, including extending the discount on road-user charges to motorists who would buy diesel for trucks, buses, four-wheel drives—like my favourite, the Toyota Hilux Surf—that they are going to be able to obtain road-user charges; they have to pay for every kilometre on the highway at a discounted rate. And while we’ve heard from the Minister responsible for the bill, Minister Michael Wood—and various Labour MPs—that this is going to help with the cost of living crisis, actually, when we look at the regulatory impact analysis provided by officials, what it says is there are other ways to achieve this and other ways which it might be actually more practical, more cost-effective, more targeted at people who are in hardship. Because while New Zealand’s truckies—and I’m sure those people who read my column in Truck and Driver every month would agree with me that if they could actually get the benefit from all the money they paid in their road-user charges by actually having roads that were available when they wanted to drive their truck on them, they might be prepared to forgo the discount if they’re actually getting the roads that they thought they were paying for.

And if we just consider what the National Land Transport Fund that road-user charges—these charges that are going to be discounted; what the fund pays for—in fact, I just did a quick calculation, and sorry, I’ve got a lot of bits paper here, because a lot of it’s had to happen on the fly; that’s what happens when legislation is brought to the House under urgency in all stages in one afternoon. In the three years of the National Land Transport Fund period, 2021 to 2024, about $5 billion of money was collected from motorists, including truckies and people who drive diesel vehicles, $5 billion out of the $15 billion is allocated to capital spending on State highways and local roads and road maintenance. That’s only a third of the money in the Land Transport Fund; only one-third of the money collected from motorists, truckies, and road-user charges in fuel excise duty—only one-third of the $15 billion is allocated to building and maintaining roads. And that is the shocking statistic that you can obtain by looking on Waka Kotahi’s website and having a quick shoofty at the National Land Transport Fund.

So why would ACT oppose this bill that would actually make it a little bit cheaper for truckies getting around the country right now, that would give them a discount on road-user charges? Well, here’s the thing. I’ve done some quick analysis using this high-tech tool called Google Maps. And what it tells me, because the Brynderwyns are closed—State Highway 1 at Brynderwyn, north of Auckland, is closed, it’s taking an average of an extra hour in a truck through any available detour. Because the State Highway 1 at Mangamuka in Northland is closed—and has been since August of last year due to slips—it’s taking truckies about an hour and a half extra to get between Whangārei and Kaitāia. So any small discount this Government is offering truckies through this discounted road-users charge is being more than gobbled up by the extra travel time, by the extra cost of paying drivers, and by the huge inefficiencies that the failure of the State highway network is causing to businesses. That alone will be pushing up the price of food, fuel—everything that you buy in a supermarket in Kaitāia will be more expensive because the State highway network has been unfunded, and slips haven’t been repaired.

And what ACT says is that this temporary reduction in road-user charges—which apparently is intended to help reduce the cost of living in New Zealand—doesn’t address any of the fundamental underlying problems that we face. For 30 years now, rather than maintaining, improving, and renewing the State highway network and the local road network to deliver the level of service that New Zealanders need to allow our cities to grow in the ways that they are planned, we’re actually going to be kicking the can down the road when it comes to funding.

So the ACT Party has identified that in the time this policy has already been in place—these discounts on fuel excise duty and road-user charges—that’s cost the future taxpayer about $1.3 billion, which hasn’t been collected from motorists and used for roads; it’s been borrowed by the Government, and that borrowing, that debt has been allocated to taxpayers—some of whom probably aren’t even born yet.

So this Government, while telling us today that in fact they’re giving Kiwis a little bit of a boost, a little bit of a help in the hip pocket with the cost of living, actually is only telling them half the story.

When we look at the assessment carried out for the Minister of Transport, Michael Wood, by his officials, what it says is that “officials did not have time to investigate the problem thoroughly … more time could have allowed evidence and data to be obtained and analysed and greater clarity gained about the problem and desired objectives”. This is policy making on the hoof. This is a crisis caused by this Government. This is not solving any of New Zealand’s short-, medium-, or long-term problems.

When we look further, when we look at diagnosing the policy problem—there’s an interesting graph here which viewers at home might find it hard to see. But if you jump online and you look for the regulatory impact assessment associated with this bill, what it will tell you is on page 4—that, actually, about half the price of petrol is petrol tax collected by the Government and about 20 percent of the price of diesel is excise duties collected by the Government. So what possible alternative could there be to helping Kiwis in a cost of living crisis? Well, what ACT says is that firstly the Government could cut some wasteful spending.

Now, there are members in this House who think it’s a good idea to focus on lowering serious harm and fatalities on our State highway network; that’s the Road to Zero programme. But the problem with the Road to Zero programme is a whole lot of it is comms and spin. When you jump on Waka Kotahi’s National Land Transport Programme and you have a look at what they’re planning to spend over three years—2021 to 2024—they’re planning to spend $171 million on telling you to drive slower and showing you ads on television about their Road to Zero campaign: lecturing Kiwis, infantilising the issue of road safety—$171 million over three years. If the Minister, Michael Wood, and his Government wanted to offer Kiwis some savings, they could stop lecturing us around road safety, maybe fix the roads, but certainly not waste $171 million on communications.

And as much as I like walking and cycling, if I ever have the chance in the busy calendar of an ACT MP, this Government has budgeted $670 million over three years for walking and cycling initiatives. So if there was a serious consideration—which there hasn’t been—about alternatives, then potentially some of that $670 million allocated to walking and cycling, which is a personal choice, and I know that the Green Party likes to make the personal choice to walk and cycle more, so do I. The ACT Party also believes that motorists should be able to make the personal choice to drive.

And, in fact, if they’re going to make that choice, there are alternatives to road-user charges, and that includes road pricing. And that’s what this Government should have considered as an alternative to cutting the amount of money collected from motorists. They could have actually considered cutting some of their wasteful and unnecessary programmes that could not possibly have a high priority at this time, with our nation’s road network smashed by flooding, communities cut off, and roads like State Highway 1 at the Mangamukas in Northland out of service for years and years.

That bill is set down for committee stage immediately, and I declare the House in committee for the consideration of the Road User Charges (Temporary RUC Reduction Scheme) Amendment Bill (No 2).

In Committee

Parts 1 and 2, and clauses 1 to 3