Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Green) Link to this

I move, That the Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill be now read a first time. The progress of members’ bills over recent years has been glacial. This bill was written in 2005 to amend the Land Transport Management Act 2003, which was quite new at the time. The bill was put in the ballot immediately. After a couple of years it won the ballot in November 2007—18 months ago. It has sat on the Order Paper for 18 months, and it finally gets its first reading tonight. During those 18 months, there were changes that would require that the bill be amended by the select committee: Transit and Transfund New Zealand no longer exist; reference to them would need to be replaced by reference to the New Zealand Transport Agency. That correction is not beyond the power of the select committee; that is why we have select committees.

It is ironic that this bill is finally read a first time when the new Government is proceeding as fast as it possibly can in the opposite direction from that advocated in the bill. I will come back to that point.

Put quite simply, the bill shifts funding gradually away from funding roading projects and into funding alternatives: a modest 20 percent for alternatives in the first year—which is still a lot better than now—moving up to about two-thirds for those alternatives in year 5. The alternatives are public transport; cycling and walking facilities; travel demand management, like walking school buses and workplace travel plans; coastal shipping; and rail. It also ensures that transport projects that achieve the same purpose can receive the same level of central government funding. It is called a level playing field; the field has been on a very sharply tilted angle for a very long time.

The bill seeks to address the two huge challenges facing transport policy in the 21st century—challenges that are barely recognised and certainly not addressed by current Government policy. The first challenge relates to how long we will be able to continue to import oil, and at what cost. Even the International Energy Agency, which has long been the one outstanding optimist and peak oil denier, said last year that the oil supply would be severely squeezed by around 2015. Many experts and analysts think we have already passed the point where the rate at which any new discoveries can be brought on stream fails to match the rate at which existing oil fields are declining. The total world production is unlikely to ever go much above what it is now, and the trend from now on will slope down. All oil producers apart from those in the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries have now probably peaked, and Saudi Arabia may peak around now. When Saudi Arabia has peaked, certainly the world as a whole has peaked.

Oil costs us around $8 billion a year on our overseas account, even at today’s prices. It is set to double quite soon, reflecting the spike to over US$150 a barrel last August. Achieving our transport goals with less oil is surely an overriding objective.

The second challenge relates to the fact that transport is the source of over 40 percent of our carbon dioxide emissions, and that fact will soon cost us dearly, too. There is no time here to recount the awful risks of climate change to our civilisation, to our way of life, to our farming, and to our survival. Nor is there time to go through our obligations under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce our emissions. Transport is one of the fastest-rising sources of climate change emissions, and this bill would help to lower our emissions. But current transport policies are designed for an era when oil cost US$10 a barrel, which we had as recently as 1998, and we had a limitless atmosphere in which carbon emissions disappeared into infinity, with no effect whatsoever.

Even the easy things to reduce oil dependence are not done. Our vehicle fleet uses double the fuel per kilometre of the new European fleet standard, and cars continue to guzzle more gas each year than previously. We have the second-highest per capita rate of car ownership in the world after the US, with which we sometimes vie for first place. We have more kilometres of sealed road per person than virtually every other country, yet we pour billions of dollars into creating more sealed roads. We are a heavily car-dependent country and an extremely fuel-inefficient country. There are easy answers but successive Governments have not adopted them. Instead, we pour billions, and yet more billions, into new motorways, and we starve trains, buses, and active modes of transport, which, if they were funded, could get people around safely and quickly, with far less fuel and far less carbon emission.

The Government, not content to inherit Labour’s biggest motorway-building spree since Julius Vogel, as Labour members were proud to point out in the last Parliament, has now stolen a further $420 million of the measly funding allocated to public transport and active modes and given it to motorways, along with another half a billion dollars from the taxpayer. When it comes to building roads, money is no object and there is no recession. The Minister responsible for this theft says that because 85 percent of people travel to work by car, we must spend $7 on roading for every $1 we spend on everything else put together. He does not seem able to understand that if all we offer people is more roads, and if trains and buses are few, expensive, uncomfortable, late, unreliable, and with limited range, then most people will take the only option he has given them: travel by car. We saw what happened last year when the price of oil went up. Traffic on Auckland motorways actually dropped, and public transport numbers increased by a record amount, despite the unsatisfactory service. That is a measure of the unmet demand that is out there

Members of the previous Government used to say to me in the House that tradespeople with their tools cannot take the train instead of their ute, and that buses need roads, too. They seemed incapable of understanding that if those people who commute on their own used a bus or a train instead of roads, the roads would no longer be congested for the plumber with his tools and for buses, and we would not need to keep building more roads. That is why it is to the advantage of road users to pay for others to have the public transport they need; it is a faster way of relieving congestion than building motorways. Other countries have recognised this. Even Los Angeles, long the motorway heaven the Minister dreams of, has realised that one cannot motorway one’s way out of congestion, and it is investing in rapid transit. We can look at Toronto, Fremantle, or most European Union cities for the answer.

I spent a weekend in Bruges a couple of years ago, and two acres of bikes were parked at the railway station, because biking was, by far, the easiest way to get around. It is a civilised city, compared with cities in New Zealand.

There are two major obstacles to sustainable, people-friendly transport systems, lower oil costs and lower carbon emissions, cleaner air, and liveable cities. The first obstacle is the extreme imbalance of funding, and I have described how the bill remedies that fact. The second is something obscure called the financial assistance rate. I will give members an example. If the Auckland Regional Council decided to build a brand new motorway across Auckland, 100 percent of the cost of that motorway would be paid by central government out of the National Land Transport Fund. It would not cost Aucklanders a penny. On the other hand, if the council decided that a more efficient way to carry people from one side of Auckland to the other was by train and that it wanted to invest in a new rail system, it would have to come up with half of the funding itself from Auckland’s rates. That is why, for decades, public transport has not been built, but roads have. This is the tilted playing field I spoke of earlier.

This bill creates the opportunity to vary the financial assistance rate for projects, so that some public transport projects qualify for 100 percent funding from the National Land Transport Fund, just as roads qualify now. It also creates the obligation, before the allocation of funding in the National Land Transport Programme, to ensure that there is support in the local authority regions through which those projects will run. That is a basic democratic principle of the Land Transport Management Act. There is also an obligation for the Minister to publish a review each year of whether the Act is meeting its objectives of safety, sustainability, integration, and responsiveness to local needs. The Act was ground-breaking legislation in 2003. The Greens and Labour worked together on it, and it is time that its very fine objectives—

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) Link to this

I think it is a very wise choice by the Green members to send the bill to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. It is a very fine committee. It has great chairmanship and a great membership. It will do a fine job. But saying that the bill should go to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is the only good thing that the Green member said; the Green Party disappoints me in this case.

The Green Party should be representing new ideas and seeing the vision of the future. It should be a party that tries to take this Parliament towards some goals and ambitions that Parliament is not ready to move towards. That is the whole idea of what one expects from a Green Party. However, this Green Party is looking back at a technology that is going out of business. The whole assumption of this legislation that the Green Party is putting forward is that cars run on fossil fuels and, therefore, roads are no good because cars run on roads. That is the assumption the Green Party is making. It is making the assumption that cars run on fossil fuels. That was true 50 years ago, but a party of vision, a party that looks to the future, would understand that there is technology, there is development, and cars will not run on fossil fuels in 50 years’ time. Cars will run on different fuel sources. The Green members will not admit that. They are looking to the past. They say that the automobile industry can only ever have one source of fuel and that is fossil fuel.

I disagree completely that that is the way things are going. Anybody who had an idea of what is going on in the automobile industry would see that the big investment now is in non - fossil fuel car energy sources. If we look at what is happening in the US automobile industry, we will see that the big car makers are shutting down. They are being made to come back and produce electric cars, because that is the market of the future. In 50 years’ time the most efficient form of transport will be the roads, and the roads will have electric cars on them. That is the future of the world in transport.

The Greens are looking backwards at an old technology. They are not taking into account the way in which the world is progressing, the way in which the big automobile industry is progressing, or even the way in which fuel companies are progressing. Do members not remember that BP changed its name from British Petroleum to “Beyond Petroleum”? What was the reason for that? The branding was done because the company knew that there was going to be a different future. The Green Party will be consigned to the small ranks of political destiny if it does not think outside the square and if it does not look at technology and use that for green purposes.

The National Government is willing to accept technology and we are working towards it. Today in question time the great Minister of Transport in this National Government put out the policy on electric cars. We made an incentive for electric cars to become part of the New Zealand transport mix. National is looking forward at technology. We are looking forward at delivering a green vision for transport. We are not looking back at old technology, at old ways of doing things, and at an old party political philosophy, which is what the Green Party aspires to. That is the difference between National and the Greens, and the people of New Zealand know that. They know the future and the world economy knows the future.

An electric car is the best investment that a young person could make. In the next generation the richest person in the world will not be the Bill Gates of our generation. The richest person in the world will be the person who cracks the issue of how to get fuel sources into automobiles in the next 10 years. That person will be the new Bill Gates of this world. That person will find a way of transferring energy into what we use as our main mode of transport. If anybody can crack that—and someone will crack it—it will become the big opportunity in transport in the future of the world and in this economy going forward.

That is an opportunity that many countries are taking up. If we look at countries like India and the US, they are investing huge amounts of money in technology to get electric cars to a commercial stage. They probably have the technology now, but to make it commercial is a different ball game. There are incentives to buy electric cars. At the last US election, people got a discount if they bought an electric car. That was one of the big policy planks of some of the political parties. They know the future. They are not looking at old policy and old dreams about fossil fuels driving our transport sector. They are looking at the future of our transport sector, but the Green Party denies that.

The Green Party is hell-bent on the measure that the only answer to solve our transport woes in regard to environmental concerns is public transport. I remember that in Hamilton at the last election, Labour Party members jumped on that bandwagon. They went into the election campaign saying: “We want to have the greenest way of travelling from Hamilton to Auckland.” They proposed a rail link between Hamilton and Auckland, because they thought that was what the Greens had always said was the best way of doing it. Little did they know that the only part of the main trunk line that is not electrified is from Hamilton to Auckland. Those members would have dirty diesel trains on that line with no people on them. Would that be environmentally friendly? No! That is the nature of the debate that the Green are having.

The Greens do not understand public transport. They do not understand what it actually means. They say: “Let’s look at cities like Los Angeles and Toronto.” I ask those members what the populations are of those cities. They should think about that. Public transport works very well where there are large densities of population. It does not work as well where there are spread-out cities, or where there are cities of a smaller size within 2 hours of each other. That does not work well with public transport.

I had the fortunate experience of going on Mexican public transport in January. In Mexico, people can go any way around Mexico City, from point to point, for one peso. That is because there are nearly 30 million people in that city. Their officials can deliver a train system where people can go into a train and it is literally packed. Those trains go all the time, and they are efficient, smart, and clean. The reason for that is that there are the numbers of people required to make it work, which is what public transport demands. It demands high concentrations of people.

The other thing I want to look at in relation to this legislation is what the National Government is actually doing. National is actually investing in the infrastructure of New Zealand. We are looking forward and we are investing in our roading structure. The previous Labour Government did not invest in road construction going forward. Labour spent money on the maintenance of roads, not on the construction of roads. That is the difference between these two political parties when we look each party’s roading policy. National wants to build roads that will have clean, green vehicles on them in the next 50 years. That will save people time and expense in travel, and it will provide jobs in the short term as we build those projects going through the economic recession.

In all ways, our economic policy is interrelated with our transport policy and it is environmentally friendly at the same time. We cannot help but win with that policy. That is the nature of it. We have considered the options, and we have come up with a policy that is effective yet environmentally conscious. We have taken into account the need to invest in public transport, and we have done so. We are continuing the electrification in Auckland; we are not making grandiose promises that are not reality. We are looking at what can be done to make public transport as efficient and effective as we can, but we also realise what the future of transport will be, and our roads are going to be important parts of that because those roads will have clean, green, efficient electric cars on them before this generation is out. That is the future of transport and that is the future of environmental consciousness.

CHARLES CHAUVEL (Labour) Link to this

As Labour’s spokesperson on climate change issues I am delighted to say that Labour will vote to send the Climate Change (Transport Funding) Bill to a select committee for public submissions. It is interesting to follow the previous speaker, David Bennett, because I think we should examine the National Government’s record to date. Its policy statement on land transport funding has allocated funding away from public transport. That has put at risk important projects that the previous speaker spoke about, such as the continuing electrification of Auckland rail, integrated ticketing for public transport in Auckland and in other areas, and walking and cycling facilities. By those actions this Government has set back public transport so far that the only way to rekindle the debate is to support this bill. By doing so I hope we will be able to show the public that there is a political will within Parliament to support public transport to a much greater degree than the Government is currently prepared to do.

It was also interesting to hear the previous speaker talk about the record of the current Minister of Transport. He is fast tracking seven highways of so-called national significance, and he claims that the National Land Transport Fund will provide $10.7 billion over 10 years for investment in State highways. That needs to be seen in perspective. In Budget 2006 Labour announced a 5-year $13.4 billion spending programme, in New Zealand’s largest ever roading programme. So much for calling it maintenance, as the previous speaker did! But our approach to transport funding was also based on a multimodal programme, involving not only State highways and local roads but also public transport, sea freight, and rail. Labour believes that we cannot just keep on building motorways, even if we have electric vehicles being signalled up as a large growth sector in the future. Inevitably, those motorways would soon reach their capacity and we would be back to where we started, with gridlock. We believe in an integrated approach to getting people off the roads and into more efficient and attractive public transport systems, because taking the pressure off the roads lessens the immediate need for more motorways. That is an obviously sensible approach, demonstrated in many forward-thinking cities around the world.

But sadly, Mr Joyce’s approach means that the balance between public transport and roading projects will be lost very shortly. He is effectively robbing metropolitan areas of effective public transport systems in order to pay for a few big-ticket motorway items that will please his friends. In order to justify this position, Mr Joyce claims that Aucklanders do not use public transport. Well, people use it when it is available. Whenever improvements are made to public transport, such as the Northern Busway—which my friend and colleague Darien Fenton knows about—patronage increases sharply.

It is interesting to compare National’s policy on land transport funding, released in May—last month—with our last statement while in Government, which was released in August 2008. The numbers are as follows. Public transport service funding is down by $85 million. Public transport infrastructure funding is down by a quarter of a billion dollars. Walking and cycling facilities funding is down by $15 million. The major communities that are suffering in these cut-backs will be those in Auckland. So much for the Government’s super-city plan! How can Auckland grow without having an effective transport system?

Finally, I will say just a few words about coastal shipping and rail. It is well known that Labour was developing coastal shipping because within a relatively short time frame our roads will be unable to cope with the projected increases in total freight volumes. An integration of roading with an upgraded rail and coastal shipping network is the only possible solution as we look 10 to 20 years into the future. We bought back KiwiRail with that integration is mind, but now this Government has cast a cloud over the future of rail by not guaranteeing the funding that is needed for an infrastructure upgrade. We put $30 million into helping to get coastal shipping up and running, so that rail wagons could be rolling on and off ships at various ports throughout New Zealand, but now that development funding is cancelled and the future of coastal shipping seems to be uncertain. What is certain is that the containers will now be on trucks being driving up and down our State highways, thus creating an ever-increasing hazard for Kiwi motorists.

The record of this Government is dismal, which is why we must support the referral of this bill to a select committee. Thank you.