Dr RICHARD WORTH (National) : National supports the Trustee Amendment Bill, and in the short time that is remaining to me I will talk about the law of trusts generally and turn to some of the particular provisions in this bill that cause National members some concern. I start by saying that the law of trusts is a complex area of the law, with arcane expressions and difficult concepts. Unsurprisingly, it is studded with case law—case law decisions of the judges in some cases establishing conflicting legal principles.

It is also fair to say that trusts have a very substantial history of use and take a range of forms. Indeed, if one just quickly reflects on how many types of trusts exist, there are to be seen bare trusts, fixed trusts, discretionary trusts, trading trusts, blind trusts, which are known as secret trusts, and, perhaps finally, implied or resulting trusts. So these days it is a real business for law and accounting firms to establish trusts and to be involved in their administration.

I guess as a general comment I would say that people make trusts for a number of reasons. That is why this legislation and the changes that are made to the Trustee Act 1956 are important. One of the reasons for creating a trust is to reduce the personal assets of the settlor, for the purpose of meeting asset-testing or income-testing criteria. There are lots of illustrations of this. One such illustration is the asset-tested benefits in the residential care subsidy scheme for those people over 65 years of age who have been assessed as needing long-term residential care over an indefinite period. That is one reason why a settlor might form a trust. Another reason for forming a trust would be as a means of spreading income and reducing exposure to income tax. That is a common use of trusts today.

A third reason to form a trust would be as a creditor protection mechanism. That is commonly and traditionally employed in the case of professional partnerships—law firms and accounting firms that for a significant period of time did not have the benefit of incorporation. The protection of assets against creditors is a common reason for the transfer of assets to a trust. By transferring assets at the appropriate time from the individual’s personal asset base, those assets need not be later applied to the satisfaction of an individual’s creditors in the event of financial difficulties arising. The family of the debtor will often be beneficiaries of the trust. Therefore, the family will continue to be the recipients of income generated by the trust and will have the use of the assets in the trust, such as the family home.

Another reason, which will be familiar to members, is the divesting of assets to protect against the Property (Relationships) Act 1976. That has an increasing focus in a world in which not only are marriage break-ups common but also financial obligations of quite dramatic proportions can occur, arising from the break-up of de facto relationships. I suppose, finally, one can look at that class of case where a trust is set up to divest assets to protect against claims under the Family Protection Act and the Law Reform (Testamentary Promises) Act 1949.

We have the Trustee Act 1956 and the Trustee Amendment Bill, which is before the House today and which National supports. I noted in my earlier comments that this particular change in the law is based upon a Law Commission report released in April 2002. The commission saw those changes as being urgently required. Sadly, it has taken 5 years for legislation to now emerge—as this, the first reading of the Trustee Amendment Bill. In the time that remains I would like to just touch on a couple of provisions in the legislation, starting with the power to insure. That has been a vexed issue over the years and is now to be resolved by this legislation.

The current law—the Trustee Act 1956—provides in section 24 for trustees to insure in a variety of circumstances; three broadly. The first was to insure any of the trust property up to the full insurable value. The second, with the consent of the life tenant or the High Court, was to insure any of the trust property on a replacement basis, as distinct from the full insurable value. The third was to insure against any risk or liability against which it would be prudent for a person to insure if that person was acting for him or herself.

Quite clearly, it can be seen that the main difficulty with this provision is the need for the consent of the life tenant rather than the remainderman to replacement cover. Presumably the reason for that restriction was to reflect what was thought to be the unfairness of the life tenant’s income being reduced by the additional cost of replacement cover. That is now to be changed, but the legislation in its present form makes it clear that there is still no obligation on a trustee to insure. That must surely be right, because there can be circumstances whereby a cost-benefit analysis justifies a decision to not insure. The absence of a blanket obligation does not preclude trustee liability in the event of failure to insure in circumstances in which the prudence of so doing is clear. That, in very general terms, touches on this change relating to the power to insure.

Another change is concerned with the issue of delegation, but a limited change is made. I do not think it is of particular circumstance. The general rule is that trustees may delegate what are called ministerial functions—meaning, roughly, the carrying out of decisions. But unless they are authorised by the trust instrument, they cannot delegate the power to decide on the distribution of trust property or the exercise of all those many fiduciary discretions relating to the investment of trust property. The current law, as set out in section 29 of the Trustee Act, empowers trustees to employ agents, including trust corporations, to perform what we could call various commercial functions, but the power to delegate falls short of authorising the delegation of the trustee’s fundamental decision-making powers.

It is generally accepted that the present law is defective in two respects. First, the line between ministerial and other functions is less than clear. Secondly, and more important, trusteeship today is an increasingly specialised task, which often requires professional skills that trustees may not have. That is particularly so when family members are cast in the role of having to exercise trustee duties. The legislation in its current form deals with that issue, too.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : On behalf of New Zealand First, I intend to take only a short call. I should say from the onset that New Zealand First will certainly support this bill’s referral to a select committee, but we are hopeful that the select committee will look at the ability individuals will have to transfer their financial assets into a trust, and the level for doing that. As I think most people in this Parliament know—and, indeed, as most New Zealanders know—an individual is allowed to transfer only up to $27,000 per year from his or her personal asset base into a trust. The amount has been set at that level since Adam was a boy, and we believe that it should be increased markedly. By looking back we have come up with a figure—and I accept there could be some adjustment—closer to $60,000 than $27,000. We hope that the select committee will take this issue on board and have a close look at it. I listened to Mr Worth when he spoke a few moments ago. He talked about the transferring of assets, and I felt he was getting very close to saying that $27,000 is not enough. I can see that Mr Worth is nodding his head, so I am hopeful that the National Party will pick up on this issue that New Zealand First has raised.

A second issue that we hope the select committee will take on board, look at very closely, and make recommendations to this Parliament about is the situation that applies, more likely, to elderly folk who have been transferring their assets on a regular basis at $27,000 a year but then who have had to go into care. It is our understanding that if an individual goes into care, Work and Income writes back the $27,000 per year by $5,000 per year for the last 5 years—it writes it back to $22,000 for that previous 5 years. That means, for example, that if a person had a house in the year 1999 valued at $300,000, and for 8 years that person transferred across $27,000, the residue value of that house by 2007 would be $84,000. But if that individual then had to go into care, Work and Income would write back a further $110,000—5 years at $22,000 per year—which means the residue value of that house would be $84,000 plus $110,000, which equates to $194,000. We think that is unfair, and, of course, the calculation of that person’s subsidy would be based on that figure and in that circumstance he or she would lose it pretty much in its entirety. We think that is unfair, and we urge the select committee to take a close look at this sort of legislation.

We hope the Government will react positively. We have advised the Government informally of our concerns, and the feedback we have had is fairly neutral. It has not flattened the idea completely but we are well aware that the Minister of Finance could say that this is a fiscal matter and he could veto the whole thing. So I urge the select committee to take a close look at the ability that individuals have to transfer assets across into a trust, and the level at which they are allowed to do that on a yearly basis. That is our only concern about this bill; we think it goes quite some way towards addressing the technical issues that Mr Worth spoke about.

New Zealand First will support this bill going to a select committee, but we will be urging the members of that committee to take a close look at the value of the $27,000 ceiling. It should be increased markedly, and in our view it should be tagged to Consumers Price Index arrangements in the future. As I said earlier, the amount of $27,000 came into being when Adam was a boy, and it is about time it was adjusted significantly upwards. The write-back regime operated by Work and Income is, in our view, totally unfair and needs to be examined.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) : Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Kia ora tātou katoa, e hoa mā, i tēnei rā. We are here today to see what the problem is with an Act that has been around a little bit longer than I have. The Trustee Act 1956 creates legal entities for specific purposes that were relevant for the days gone by. The problem is that although Māori groups have managed to make these models work, none of the legal entities included in the 1956 Act cater adequately for the multi-purpose objectives of tribal entities. Nor, surprise, surprise, are any of these legal entities specifically based on Māori values and aspirations.

Although I am sure that the Government will be quick to point out that the overarching governance needs of a tribe will be brilliantly catered by means of the “Waka Umanga (Māori Corporations) Bill”, the issue is that the waka umanga bill, no matter how brilliant, is at best a voluntary approach. In effect then, although these entities that are already managing tribal assets may eventually opt to become waka umanga, in the meantime we need to be sure that the deficiencies of trust, company, and incorporated society structures for Māori can be sorted out before then.

Thinking about this notion of trust—meaning we should have confidence and hope that things can work out for us—we acknowledge that there are some aspects of the Trustee Act that can be quite complementary to tikanga Māori. Trustees do not own the property they are trustees of—instead, they are owned by the trust. Their role is to care for the assets and trusts for the beneficiaries. In some ways it is similar to the role of kaitiaki, for the purposes of future generations. But, of course, for a trust to be successful the trustees must be sufficiently on to it to ensure that they understand the full extent of their legal obligations. It is not just about putting, say, uncle in the position of trustee because he is the key speaker on our paepae, or is worthy of our collective respect because of the dedicated service he has given to our iwi. It is also not about putting one of the cuzzies who is an accountant around the table simply because we think our cuzzy should know what the “haps” is.

The critical issue is that anyone assuming the role of a trustee must be prepared to learn about the powers and responsibilities that come with the position. They need to know about the powers they can exercise and the limitations on these powers, if they are to avoid being in breach of their fiduciary duties—in other words, their duty to act in accordance with the trust deed. That is all good stuff, but, unfortunately, a few issues also need to be attended to.

Although trust deeds can be designed to try to promote participation, essentially the structure of trust deeds is not democratic. The trust structure, more often than not, creates a system whereby tribal members get treated like passive beneficiaries. I cannot speak for anyone else but I am pretty sure that if I were to go home and say to my people of Ngāti Rangiwewehi, or my people of Ngāpuhi, that they could not have a say—“just wait and ye shall receive”—I think I would be told to get out of town, pretty smartly. Being part of a whānau, hapū, and iwi means that one gets involved in the business of iwi politics—for life. It is about leaders being directly accountable to the people. Although a private trust, as set up under the Trustee Act 1956, can be easy and relatively cheap to establish, its basic structure does not reflect the accountability and transparency requirements of a collective entity. To cut it short, it does not fit with being Māori.

Another one of the issues is that the trusts are not corporate bodies in their own right, unless incorporated under the Charitable Trusts Act 1957. This means that where there are several responsible trustees, as is usually the case with tribal trusts, all significant legal documents have to be signed by all trustees, whose own names are shown on share registers and titles to land, even though they hold the property as fiduciaries. I need to say, right from the start, that that would take for ever and a day, believe me! It is a process that is extremely cumbersome, and does not suit who we are.

The other related issue, of course, is that additional legal expense is caused every time a trustee has to be replaced or is unavailable. To enforce the terms of the trust, beneficiaries must apply to the High Court to review the decisions of the trustees. Well, just to state the obvious: the cash-flow problem cannot be ignored. We have to remember that the median income of the New Zealand population is $24,400 but that Māori sit some $3,500 below that—on $20,900. So there is not a lot of extra cash left over to go to court in respect of the technicality of trusteeship.

An earlier Law Commission report entitled Treaty of Waitangi Claims: Addressing the Post-Settlement Phase, an advisory report to Te Puni Kōkiriin 2002, found that entities such as companies, trusts, and incorporated societies often have limited accountability and transparency requirements, and there was usually no internal disputes resolution mechanism. Most disputes need to be determined by the High Court, which can involve groups in long and expensive litigation, and often fails to deal adequately with the underlying issues. That is not going to work for us either, unfortunately. The beauty of hui is that we are put in a position where we have to sit across the table from relatives and sort out our stuff. We do not need lawyers. They are usually expensive, and I am not sure about their ability to bring about a resolution, anyway.

What we need is the time to hear the stories of the journey that has ended in our having to meet to sort out our issues. It is not about winning or losing; it is about ensuring that, at the end of the day, whether or not we have resolved our issues, the unseen bonds that tie us—that is, our whakapapa relationships—are sufficiently intact to ensure that in times of crisis we can still awhi each other, we can still hug each other. It all comes back again to this crucial belief in someone or something. “Trust” is defined as “hope or expectation”, and we trust that Labour will pick up on the need to work with Māori in amending the Trustee Act 1956.

KATE WILKINSON (National) : This Trustee Amendment Bill, of which National supports the first reading and referral for some scrutiny in the select committee process, is, as has been mentioned, the result of a 2002 Law Commission report entitled Some Problems in the Law of Trusts. It is puzzling that this somewhat technical and probably non-controversial bill has taken 5 years to reach this House, following the pattern of other similarly technical and non-controversial bills, such as the Wills Bill and the Property Law Bill, that have also arrived some 5 years after the Law Commission reports recommending changes. It is also puzzling that not all the problems highlighted by the Law Commission report have been addressed.

The problems highlighted in the report included the trustees’ power of delegation, which has, I have to say, sort of been dealt with. I think my colleague Dr Worth has mentioned some aspects in relation to that. Other problems included the exculpating of trustees, which has not been dealt with; the remuneration of trustees, which has probably been dealt with; the protectors, which has sort of been dealt with; the trustees’ power to insure, which has been dealt with; the trading trusts, which have not even been mentioned; the power of appointment of trustees, which has not been mentioned; and the obligation to give information, which has sort of been dealt with.

I want to talk, firstly, about the role of advisory trustees and protectors. The practice has been growing over some years to make use of advisory trustees and protectors. The major question outstanding was—and actually still is—what the actual obligations and liabilities were of such roles. The Law Commission report noted that the term “protector” is not a legal term of art; it is commonly used to describe a person who is neither a trustee nor a beneficiary but on whom the trust deed confers certain powers. There has been a substantial increase in the provisions in trust deeds for protectors. So we now have the term “protector” included and defined in the bill, in new section 49B(1) inserted by clause 8, as “a person who by virtue of the terms of the trust instrument may give a trustee … (a) a direction that the trustee is obliged to follow …”, or who may give a “(b) consent that permits, and that is necessary to enable, the trustee to exercise a power …”. This, of course, is no different from what could have been provided in the trust deed itself without the necessity for this bill, and indeed does not even have to be defined in law. However, it is there and I have no issue with that. It does clarify the role of a protector for the good of all, and, if it does that, then it is worth while.

But we do have to be careful—and this is where I would like the select committee to give some thought—that the bill does not unnecessarily also restrict the role of protectors. This bill limits the role to two functions only, but in some existing trust deeds protectors may have been given extended roles. I have two questions, which I hope will be duly considered at the select committee level, in relation to this question of protectors. Firstly, what happens to all the existing protectors who have been appointed under existing trust deeds, and who may, as I have said, have different roles as prescribed by those trust deeds, or who may have wider or lesser roles than contemplated by this bill? What happens to things that the protector has already done but that will not be permitted under this bill? Will those things be rendered null and void, or be rendered unlawful? This provision and the transitional provisions of the bill must certainly be carefully considered and scrutinised by the select committee.

Secondly, and perhaps most important, is the question of the liabilities and obligations of the trustee. The Law Commission report noted: “The Law Commission’s concerns in considering this topic are that the promotion to centre-stage of a player who is neither trustee nor beneficiary necessarily creates uncertainty as to the precise obligations and liabilities of a protector, and as to the effect of the protector’s role on the obligations and liabilities of the trustee. Because there is not much litigation on this topic, it is sensibly arguable that in the interests of certainty there should be statutory intervention.” There is no mention in the bill of the liability of protectors, and consideration should certainly be given to whether, in the very words of the Law Commission, “in the interests of certainty there should be statutory intervention”.

A further omission, I believe, in relation to this bill is the lack of any mention or clarification regarding trading trusts. Again, the use of trading trusts is increasing. It is a sign of the times. Again, I repeat the words of the Law Commission: “There is established a trust, of which the sole trustee is a limited liability company. It is that company that trades, but the assets to which the company has title are beneficially owned by the beneficiaries of the trust, so that if the company fails the only assets available to the creditors of the company in liquidation are the trustee’s right to indemnity out of such assets of the trust as may still be available. While it is probable that this right of indemnity may not be lawfully limited or excluded by the trust instrument, the risks to unsecured creditors remain substantial: ‘This is especially so when persons dealing with the trustee of such a trust do not realise that a trust is involved at all, or that the trustee has no beneficial interest in the assets which he apparently owns. The problems are exacerbated when the trustee is a company of negligible paid-up capital…’ There are also risks to beneficiaries whose only recourse in the event of the failure of the business is against an assetless trustee.”

The major questions relating to trading trusts concern the uncertainty in law: firstly, whether the trustee has that right to indemnity out of the assets of the trusts—that right to indemnity being the only asset of the corporate trustee that may be available to creditors—and, secondly, whether the directors of the corporate trustee should have the same obligations to the beneficiaries of the trust as if they were trustees. Those questions in relation to trading trusts are questions that I believe should be at least asked, and at least considered at the select committee level.

Dr Worth has also mentioned the trustees’ power of delegation. This is one aspect that has been addressed in this bill and should be included in the bill. The general rule is that trustees can delegate or appoint agents for more administrative functions but not for fundamental decision-making powers. The difficulty is in drawing a definitive and certain line between what is an administrative or ministerial function and what is a fundamental decision-making function. This is especially important as fiduciary discretions of trustees previously could not be delegated, but with prudent trustee tests and investment powers and responsibilities becoming more and more sophisticated and increasingly specialised, the obligations of trustees have been becoming more and more onerous.

This bill authorises the appointment of agents, or, in other words, it delegates for those administrative functions. In this respect administrative function is defined in new section 29A(1), inserted by clause 5, as “any function (other than a trustee function) that it is necessary or desirable to perform in executing the trust, administering the trust property,”. The Law Commission report recommended, however, that those functions included others, including the power to decide whether any fees were payable, the power to decide whether payments received should be appropriated to income or capital, and the power to appoint a person to be a trustee, etc. So unless I am mistaken, on a cursory glance of this bill I believe that while the Law Commission recommends that trustee functions should be delegated, the bill provides only for administrative functions, and not trustee functions, to be able to be delegated.

Just before I conclude I will consider what the honourable member Peter Brown stated in relation to the raising of the gift duty limit from $27,000—the amount of which has been in effect for a long time. Unfortunately, that provision is under the Estate and Gift Duties Act, and it is certainly doubtful whether it is within the scope of the Trustee Act to consider the implications of the Estate and Gift Duties Act.

Trustee law is important. This is an important bill; it is an important issue. The bill should be scrutinised at the select committee, and National supports it at its first reading.

LYNNE PILLAY (Labour—Waitakere) : I really have very little to add to all the good speeches from other members. We all know that this Trustee Amendment Bill was based on recommendations made by the Law Commission in its 2002 report. The report related to some problems relating to the law of trusts. In its discussion document on that matter, the Law Commission stated: “There is much to be said for the view that the Trustee Act 1956 is, in important respects, confused and confusing”. Clearly this Government—and, indeed, other parties in this House—has taken these opinions on board and sees that there is a need to remedy some of the problems through the Trustee Amendment Bill.

The amendments will change a number of Acts: the Trustee Act 1956, the Administration Act 1969, the District Courts Act 1947, and the Wills Act 1837 from the UK. A number of these Acts, as we can see, go back for a considerable period. Some of the main changes are to what trustees can do. That includes allowing trustees an ability to insure against loss or damage due to any event, allowing advisory trustees to work alongside trustees in the administration of a trust property, and allowing trustees to employ either an agent or an attorney and to be exempted under certain circumstances from liability for acts of default of that agent or attorney. The bill also moves proceedings against a trustee from the District Court, where they are currently held, into the High Court.

I know that Kate Wilkinson mentioned protectors. That is one of the concerns or problems that the bill addresses. A protector is a person with certain powers, such as the power to direct or veto the exercise of trustee powers, or the power to choose or veto the trustees’ choice of beneficiaries of the trust. Trustees under the Act are obliged to act on the direction of the protector, with no statutory provision enabling them to challenge any such direction if it is fundamentally objectionable. A responsible trustee should be able to disregard the fact that advice from an advisory trustee is, or may be, wrong. A responsible trustee should be empowered to challenge a problematic direction from a trust protector. That is one of the issues this bill seeks to address.

I know, as other speakers have said, that when this bill goes to the hard-working and effective Justice and Electoral Committee—although we may have questions from Mr Finlayson in this House around the timekeeping—the committee will, as it always does, give very, very careful scrutiny to this bill and ensure that submitters are heard in a meaningful way. I would think that if changes are to be made, then the Justice and Electoral Committee will make very clear and meaningful recommendations to this House. However, at this point it is with great pleasure that I speak in support of the Trustee Amendment Bill and commend it to the House. Thank you.

• Bill read a first time.

• Bill referred to the Justice and Electoral Committee.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Transport) : I move, That the Public Transport Management Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the Public Transport Management Bill be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for consideration, that the committee report the bill on or before 14 March 2008, and that the committee have authority to meet at any time during a sitting of the House, except during questions for oral answer, during an evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 192 and 195(1)(b) and (c).

Today we face many challenges—global warming is a reality and there is a looming peak oil crisis. We need to reduce our reliance on fossil fuels and to look at ways to improve the sustainability of our transport system. If we want New Zealanders to move towards sustainable transport, then we must create a public transport system that is a realistic alternative to private car use. Therefore, it is essential that New Zealand’s public transport services are integrated, accessible, safe, responsive to change, and, above all, economically, socially, and environmentally sustainable.

The current legislation governing public transport—the Transport Services Licensing Act 1989—does not deliver this. This Act was created at a time when the priority was to reduce the cost to Government and to maximise the role of the private sector in providing public transport. Thus, we have a two-tier system of passenger transport services. They are services contracted by the regional councils with financial assistance from central government, and non-contracted services provided at the operator’s own initiative, which are funded by fares and advertising revenue, and which must be registered with the regional council. The bill calls these services commercial public transport services.

Under the current legislation councils have limited grounds to decline the registration of commercial public transport services. Once a service is registered, the councils have no information on usage, other than that provided on a voluntary basis by cooperative operators. Regional councils also have limited influence on the quality of the service and the vehicle standards offered to the public. The lack of information about, and influence over, commercial public transport services has frustrated the ability of some regional councils and Land Transport New Zealand to create an integrated, safe, accessible, responsive, and sustainable public transport system.

There is growing recognition of the important role of public transport in the wider transport system—particularly in our biggest city, Auckland. It is critical that we create a world-class public transport system. This bill will help to do that, and it is the result of an extensive review and consultation process prompted by concerns about Auckland’s public transport. But let me make it clear: all regions and all councils stand to benefit from this bill.

This bill is about giving the Auckland Regional Transport Authority and all regional councils throughout the country the tools to create a better public transport system. We are not telling them how to run their public transport, but we are saying that different regions have diverse needs and that there is no one-size-fits-all solution. This bill will enable councils to do what is needed where it is needed. It allows them to have a greater influence over commercial bus and ferry services, and ensures better integration of services and modes.

The bill will allow regional councils to set fair notice periods for commencing, varying, and withdrawing commercial public transport services. The legislation will give regional councils time to respond to change and will ensure the continued delivery of services to their communities. The bill will also enable regional councils to impose other controls on commercial public transport services. These will need to be no more onerous than conditions within contracts to provide similar services. The controls will allow a regional council to access more information from commercial public transport services—like detailed patronage information. This will assist in better public transport planning and will help to ensure that the overall public transport network is providing value for money.

Integration of the public transport network is a key aim of this Government, and specific provisions to enable the integration of services, ticketing, and fares across a region are included in this bill. If regions choose to use this provision, services will be scheduled to connect with each other. All operators will accept the same tickets, and travelling on public transport will become much simpler. It is all about making the services more attractive and convenient for the passengers, and about drawing new passengers on to the services.

Quality and performance controls will give regions the scope to improve the responsiveness and sustainability of their public transport system. These controls will help the adoption of consistent, environmentally friendly, low-emission buses and ferries. The legislation will allow regions to impose consistent standards of accessibility, including super-low floors for buses and other measures to assist in increasing mobility. The legislation will also assist in providing real-time information systems. Performance standards will help to ensure that there is more accountability and that services run on time and to a high standard.

Under the current legislation a public transport operator can register some individual trips on a route as commercial, giving them an advantage over other operators that wish to contract for the remaining services on that route. This frustrates true competition for those contracts. To address this issue, controls will also allow the grouping of services, requiring them to operate to frequency, capacity, and times specified in the regional public transport plan.

Under the bill, public transport operators will continue to have the right to provide commercial public transport services, but they will be accountable to regional councils to comply with the requirements that the council has set after talking with the community. For a region to impose any of these controls, they must be part of the regional public transport plan. The process for developing these plans will be clarified in the bill to ensure that the community and the stakeholders have input into a plan’s development, and that the region’s public transport contributes to the integration, safety, responsiveness, and sustainability of the wider land transport system.

The bill allows Land Transport New Zealand to issue guidelines regarding the development of regional public transport plans and controls. Regional councils must take these guidelines into account to ensure that the plan identifies the transport needs of the region and that the scope and content of any controls contribute to the objectives of the bill.

The bill will also provide for regulations to be made by the Governor-General to impose further conditions, to introduce new types of control, or to limit the scope of controls on commercial public transport services, should this be necessary. I commend the bill to the House.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) : I say from the outset that National will support the Public Transport Management Bill at least to go to a select committee. But, having said that, I am disappointed I did not hear from the Minister a little bit more about why this legislation is needed as opposed to what it actually does. I think there is a chalk and cheese difference between public transport operations that are subsidised and that get taxpayers’ money to help in their revenue stream—whereby the Government has an absolute role to ensure it is getting value for money, quality of service, and so on—and the very different operation where someone decides to get himself or herself a minibus, to deck it out nicely inside, and to provide a public transport service, but who also decides that he or she does not want any subsidy, can do it on a commercial basis, and can make a reasonable return on it. Such people will not see why they should be so regulated.

I think the Minister would have been better to explain to us why the regulations—and I think the quite increased bureaucracy that will go around them—are needed for those commercial public transport services. I think there may be a need for them; it is to do with the integration. If we cherry-pick the commercial services and leave the non-commercials to others, then we may end up with the subsidy being more. There may be a value-for-money, holistic approach to the way we go about it, but I think the Minister should have spent some more time explaining why regulation is needed.

Having said that, though, I think there is a need to ensure that public transport services improve dramatically from the time we are looking at, because as Auckland and other cities get more and more congested, everyone knows it is a fact of life that we will never be able to build our way out of that congestion, in total. Yes, better roads will make a difference; yes, arteries that connect up will make a difference. One of Auckland’s problems is that it has a lot of arteries that do not actually connect, and therefore we can come across the motorway at Māngere Bridge, suddenly hit the end of State Highway 20, and find that it goes nowhere. From there on we have to find our way, on a rat run into town. So, yes, we will indeed dramatically improve the level of moving around the city if we get the connection of those arteries.

But I know that the volume of traffic growth is such, and the volume of people owning vehicles is such—making us the highest motor-vehicle owning country in the world—that we will always need to rely on putting more and more emphasis on people migrating to public transport so that we can keep the city still functioning. So from that point of view I understand why we may be doing this. The Minister said that back in 1989 the focus was very different in terms of the way public administration was operated, but I am still quite concerned about having a sort of nanny State situation, whereby we have a busybody bureaucrat coming in and telling a commercial operator—a commercial operator who is prepared to put his or her own money at risk and take the risks of running that business—how to do it.

We are seeing some of that busybody stuff coming out of Land Transport New Zealand now, with regard to other public transport operators, I think, in the form of hire cars and taxis. I say to the Minister that I find it outrageous that Land Transport New Zealand is saying to hire car companies that it will not let them have meters in their cars. I keep asking why. Why can an operator not decide to operate as a taxi one day, meeting all the rules of taxis and having a meter in the car, then the next day decide, say, to do a run up to Huka Lodge from the airport with some American tourists, operating as a hire car and not using the meter? On another day the operator may decide to be a supplier of services to a school, or something else. Why can operators not do that? Well, I know that at Land Transport New Zealand it is because of bureaucrats who have the tidy-mind syndrome, and who have told a number of the hire car companies here in Wellington that it will be illegal for them to have meters in their cars. What will happen is that people who are caught with meters in their car will be prosecuted. Those are the rules.

I have been trying; I have been fighting with Land Transport New Zealand and corresponding with Wayne Donnelly, asking him what on earth this nonsense is about. The issue should be about safety, about compliance with some safety regimes so that people do not get ripped off, and about meeting certain criteria, but this is what happens when we let bureaucrats and bureaucracy start to run wild. Just on an initial read of this bill, I have a grave fear that we may be setting up a bureaucratic regime for regional councils to impose. And the regulations will not just be on those who receive some public subsidy—the National Party is very, very supportive of holding people to account if they are getting public, taxpayers’ money by way of a subsidy; of course they should be held to account.

But again I say that if I saw there was a need around Pakuranga, for example, to run a service from there out to Middlemore Hospital, if I wantedto put my money at risk and get a mini van, comply with all safety standards and make sure my van was up to all of its services, then I do not understand why I would then want to be regulated by the regional council, which I do not even want to be associated with. I do not even want to talk with it. I should meet the rules relating to the safety of the vehicle through Land Transport New Zealand and the rules of my driver licensing through both the police and Land Transport New Zealand, but I should not even have to know that there is a regional council. I should be able just to post my schedule in the that I am going to run a commercial bus service out to Middlemore, and say that if people want to use my service they can. I would include my charges by way of fares, and if I were not getting any subsidy from anybody else, then I do not understand why that would not be acceptable. I never hear—

Hon Annette King: So you’re just cherry-picking?

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: The Minister says “cherry-picking”. No one runs that service at present. No one runs a service from my electorate out to Middlemore. Here is my question; here is the difference between the left and right in politics. Now we are getting to the guts of it. The left think in terms of control and centre regulation, and “this is how we decide what you do is best”. I ask the question again, because I would really like to know the answer. If I wanted to start a new service—

Hon Annette King: You’ll be able to.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: The Minister says I am able to. I have not finished my question, so she cannot answer it yet. If I wanted to start a new service and bought a bus from overseas—a really nice Daimler-Benz; a real beauty, a cracker—and if I had all the licensing, the commercial driver’s P licence, no demerit points on my licence, and so on, and said that from Monday I would run three times a week from Pakuranga out to Middlemore Hospital and back, publishing my fares, phone number, and route in the Howick and Pakuranga Times, then why do I even need to speak to the regional council? That is my question. I am not asking for a subsidy. I am not even asking for people to use my service; nor am I saying that it is a regulation whereby if people want to go to Middlemore they have to use my bus. I want the Minister to tell me why I should even have to speak to the regional council. This bill will make people have to deal with the regional council, and I want to know why. That is all. In the select committee I will ask those questions, because they are legitimate.

I said earlier on that there may be a reason for it. Maybe if this is not done there will be so much leakage out of the commercial side of it that the non-commercial side will become very heavily subsidised and difficult to manage. [Interruption] No, I do not think that that is the answer. I hear someone saying that he or she thinks the Minister said in her speech that it can force people into complying with integrated ticketing, but for people who are private operators running a commercial service I would have thought that integrated ticketing was a marketing issue. People may want to use someone’s service but they cannot then use their general integrated ticketing regime—or they have not been able to use it so far because we have not had an integrated ticketing regime in Auckland. That is the answer for that one, I say to the Minister. But if all the major operators—for example, Stagecoach, the train service, and the ferry service—all had some compliant integrated ticketing and I wanted to start my own commercial service out to Middlemore Hospital, then I would actually soon learn that every customer who wanted to use my service would not use me anymore because I was not part of that integrated ticketing regime. The market would actually say to me to go quickly and see the regional council, and ask it what I had to do to be part of and comply with an integrated ticketing regime. But, no, the left says that instead of leaving it to the market, to customers, and to choice, it will regulate operators to bring in more bureaucrats, more regulation, and more red tape, so that a poor old operator who is trying to run a commercial business will say: “What the hell am I doing this for! I’ll just go fishing.”

Phil Heatley: No, the ticket prices will go up.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Of course; that is what I had not understood. The cost of the bureaucracy will be added on to the fare in order to recover the costs.

So I finish as I began, which is to say that National will support this bill to go to a select committee. But we will be very, very interested to know why both commercial and non-commercial, or subsidised and non-subsidised, operators are to be treated the same, and why those who just want to get on and run their businesses, not only in meeting all the safety requirements—we fully support operators should have to, as people should be safe when they are on their vehicles—will have to go off and deal with regional councils in order to be commercially successful businesses.

Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) : We are very pleased to have the support of National for this Public Transport Management Bill. It is the norm now for it to do “me too” and support the things it knows people want. Just about all the politicians who stood for the local body elections, whether they were from the right or from the left, said they supported public transport, because they knew that ordinary New Zealanders want public transport. Any of those dumb enough to stand up in a local body election and say they are opposed to it knew they would be history. The National Party is also looking ahead to the elections next year, saying that it better not show its true colours and say what it thinks, which is that it opposes public transport. The member who just sat down was describing legislation that basically exists today, which is the system he wants.

Hon Maurice Williamson: What a load of rubbish!

Hon MARK GOSCHE: Why is he not voting against this bill then? As he said, basically people could set up a bus route. That is why we have the problems we are trying to resolve with this bill.

Also, it is interesting to note these figures. This Government is expecting to spend about $506 million in the 2007-08 year on public transport. Compared with 1999, that is 10 times more. If we went back to 1998 we would find that it was the same, as I think it was in 1997 and 1996, because I think that the member who has just sat down froze the funding for 5 years. He froze it and wondered why public transport ground to a halt in Auckland City.

It does not matter for those who use a car or a limousine. They do not worry about the buses and the trains. That is why that member does not know that there are bus services from his electorate over to Middlemore. He does not know because he has not been on a bus, apart from the odd freebie he gets invited to when a bus service is launched and people are taken from Britomart to the hotel for a drink. He has never been on a bus like an ordinary punter. He was so worried about his electorate boundaries because he might have to represent some working-class people, and he is now a man greatly relieved that he does not have to do that.

If the member looked out the window of his electorate office he would see big sort of maroon-coloured things going past. They are bigger than cars; they are called buses. From Howick, past Pakuranga they go, every day—heaps of them. The problem, you see, is that we want them to be going all day, not just at the most convenient times for the operator, which is one of the problems with the current legislation.

I will get serious now and just read what the problems are. Under the current legislation the public transport operator can register and deregister services, which may be a single trip at any one time of the day and not necessarily a complete timetable for a route. If people rely on public transport, like a growing number of New Zealanders do—rich and poor—because of its convenience in congested cities, they want to be able to get on the bus in the morning, go to work, and know that there is a bus going back at the end of the day. If they have to finish work in the middle of the day, in the off-peak times, then they might also want to get that bus back home again.

We are trying to give decent planning for the operators and the regional councils so they can guarantee the public a system that can be relied on, and not one that is just cherry-picked so that an operator can say: “I will do a bus in the morning from Howick into the city when there are lots of people wanting to go to work. I will not bother about anybody in the middle of the day. They can find their own way, and if they do not have a car, that is tough.” People cannot catch a train, as Mr Williamson knows, because there are no railway lines out to Howick. So buses are important.

People also want to know that they might catch that bus in the morning and get home on the ferry, because there is a very good ferry service that goes out to Maurice Williamson’s electorate. They may decide that they want to be able to do that with the same ticket. Can they do that right now? No. So there is not the ease of use that many international cities with good public transport systems can offer.

Unfortunately, the operators have not all put their hands up and said that they will sign up to an integrated system that says people can get on the bus on the North Shore, get down to the ferry in Devonport, get on that ferry and go across to Auckland City, go across the road to Britomart, and get on a train and go to where they might work in points further south, with all trips using the same ticket. I think that many New Zealanders—and many Aucklanders, in particular—would like to have an integrated ticketing system. The legislation we are putting in place will allow that to happen. Many efforts have been made by the regional council and some operators to have this done under the current legislation, and, I am sorry, but the legislation fails to deliver the powers to make that happen.

We have also seen commercial routes suddenly become non-commercial routes in the blink of an eye. In one case in Auckland—I think many, many people were aware of it, and the Auckland Regional Council was astounded by it—an operator just said it was stopping. Suddenly the council had to come up with $5 million to keep those routes going, and that was not budgeted for. No ratepayers want to have their regional council put in that situation because the law is deficient. That is another good reason why the National Party will be supporting this legislation when it goes through the select committee and comes back to this House.

This bill is good legislation. It gives powers to the regional council to put in place plans to work with the responsible operators to service those routes, those destinations, those times of the day, and all those sorts of things that are important if we want a world-class public transport system. I think that the operators will welcome this legislation, despite the fact that they may have concerns about some of it.

For instance, I know operators are a little concerned about the grouping of services, but when I look at the logic for it, I am not quite sure why they would be nervous about that. What we do want is, obviously, for the public to know that when they get on a bus in the morning, there are pretty good services running at peak time, lesser services in the off-peak time, and then better services again at the end of day when the peak is going the other way. We want to make sure that the operators and the regional authorities, which are responsible for these plans, can draft sensible groupings of services so that that continuity is there. That is what keeps people using public transport.

If there is one thing that turns people off, it is unreliability, a lack of standards, and a lack of knowing that the service deemed suitable for them to get to and from their work or study will be there for the rest of the year. So people make those conscious decisions.

The other thing I would point out—because I think it is quite important—is that quality and safety are important. We want regional councils to be able to put reasonable demands on operators to provide that. We have had arguments for years and years about disability and access to public transport. All sorts of excuses have been made for years and years as to why nothing could be done. People said that it was too expensive and too difficult, and that they could not access the types of vehicles to make it possible. It was just about simple things, like being able to have a loudspeaker going so that people can hear about services if they cannot read a sign that tells them that information.

Lots of people in our communities are visually impaired or have hearing loss or some sort of physical disability, and they are absolutely reliant on public transport because they cannot drive. They just do not have the ability to drive, so putting into place some decent services for those people will be life-changing for them, because reliance on, particularly, mobility taxis in a city like Auckland is just appalling. Why? Because they are mostly booked in the morning to take the kids to school and are mostly booked in the afternoon to bring them home, so people with disabilities are very reliant on trains and buses. They also want to be able to use those disability taxis in the morning and in the afternoon, and from my experience there are just not enough of those sorts of vehicles around to actually make that happen.

So I applaud this bill. I do look forward, like Maurice Williamson, to hearing the various arguments. We must make sure we tease out any difficulties or technicalities in the bill that might get in the way of a good operation from the perspective of both the operators and regional government, because if we go too far in one direction, then the operators will say they are out of here and they will not invest. But if we go too far in the other direction, then ratepayers will have to fork out far too much money in subsidies. That is the sort of balance we will be looking for.

JOHN CARTER (National—Northland) : The first thing I want to do is to defend my colleague Maurice Williamson after the attack that has been made on him. It was a scurrilous attack. The House should know that Maurice Williamson is a deep supporter of public transport and bus systems. In fact, his nickname is “Bus Williamson”. He is so supportive of public transport that he likes to go around saying he is “Bus Williamson”. The House will be interested to know that in the morning his wife Raewyn has to tie up their dog so that Maurice gets a free run at chasing the buses. Otherwise, the dog trips him up. He is very keen to make sure the bus goes past his place, and I just want to put that on the record. The House should know that Maurice is a very keen supporter of public transport.

I want to take a couple of minutes to talk about one or two things. I listened with interest to the previous speaker, but there was one thing he did not mention once in his speech. If we read the notes that have come with the bill, we see that it talks about operators being required to integrate services, fares, and ticketing. There is nothing wrong with that. The bill will also enable operators to maintain their existing commercial public transport systems without change. There is nothing wrong with that until we read the next bit, which says that that is where it is deemed appropriate by the regional council. Let us hang on a minute—there is something wrong with that.

Not once did I hear that member talk about commercial viability. Not once did I hear him say that it is actually important, for a private operator to be able to function, that someone actually pays for the service he or she provides. Not once did the member say that. He talked all around that, about the need to be able to maintain the service. He talked about the cost of subsidies, he talked about the cost of transport, but not once did he say that it is actually important to the private operator to be able to get by commercially. That is quite an important part of providing a private service. We have to be able to afford it; we have to be able to come out on the right side.

One of the things that worries me about the lefties is that that does not matter to them at the end of the day—so long as the services are running and all the poor people can hop on them, then that is OK. Well, as we go through the submissions I will be really interested to hear just exactly what the private operators think about some bureaucrat from the regional council hopping on their bus and saying the council thinks the bus should go left rather than right, because there are a couple of people it could pick up there who may not be able to pay, but that will be OK because the operator will be able to pay for that. The fact that the bus service will actually go out of existence because it is then not viable does not matter to the bureaucrat. That does not matter, and that sort of stupid thinking ends up ruining the services that we have.

Just recently in Northland, a group of us have been working to get our withdrawn bus service replaced, to take it from Whangarei, via Dargaville, through the Hokianga, so that the people of the Hokianga can have a bus service. We had to work with the private operators, the ratepayers, and the regional council to end up making sure that the subsidy was at the right level so that the ratepayers were not screwed to death, but at the same time the commercial operator was able to have a viable service. That is already working. We did not need a bill to make it happen in Northland; we were practical and got on and did it. We did it because it was a necessity, and we were able to sit down and talk about it.

Suddenly, the Government comes along and tells people to hang on a minute, because it has a magic answer. It says it will fix things up by writing some rules and regulations, and it will allow a whole lot of bureaucrats to sit down and start poking their noses in and interfering, without worrying about the commercial viability of anything. That will just put in a whole lot of bureaucratic costs and cause a whole lot of cost to ratepayers. One of the things that worries me about this sort of legislation from the lefties over there on the Government side of the House is that it is all about just loading more costs on to the poor old ratepayers. Those members are not worried about whether a service is viable. They just want to make sure that we have a service, and when it finally all falls apart, they will say it is a bit of a pity that it did not work, but never mind that. They will say people will have to find their own way home until such time as something else comes up.

The good thing that is starting to happen in local government, despite this Labour Government, is that some common sense is actually starting to be shown. We are seeing things happen in New Zealand whereby people are saying we have a system called Transit and a system called local government roading, and they are asking why the two systems cannot mix. Those systems are starting to talk to each other, and we are starting to get some more efficiency out of that—would members believe that? I ask whether that is not a good thing. I say to the House that as soon as the Labour Government catches on that that is happening, we will have to make some rules and regulations so it can happen. Yes, that will be the problem. That is exactly the sort of thing we are talking about here. It is far better to let the locals actually get on and manage a service themselves. If we can make it work in Northland without a whole lot of rules and regulations, it will work everywhere—

R Doug Woolerton: You don’t even live there!

JOHN CARTER: Believe you me, I do not even have to chase the bus; I know where it is. I work to make sure that poor, decrepit old retired cockies from Waikato can come up to Northland and enjoy the buses. I say to that member he is welcome to come up there at any time. It would be better if he were up there rather than doing what he does here, because it does not work down here. He would be more effective if he were up there as the bus conductor. We could do with one of those.

The point is that we support this bill being referred to a select committee so we can listen to the comments—

Hon Maurice Williamson: Does this legislation apply to Zimmer frames?

JOHN CARTER: No, no, Doug Woolerton is too shaky to get on one of those. We support this bill going to a select committee, and we will be interested to hear what submitters say. But I do say to the House it should be mindful of the fact that here we go again, with the possibility of more rules, more regulations, more bureaucrats, more cost to ratepayers, and less efficiency, and with the real possibility of ending up having fewer services, particularly those run by the private sector, because the bureaucracy may not, especially if it is run by Wellington, have a blind clue where the bus runs are in the north. The bureaucrats do not even know where the Hokianga is, let alone other places north of Auckland. So I just say we should be cautious with regard to this bill as it goes through the House. We will support it, but only on the basis that we can let people have their input on it.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : It is just as well we do not take the honourable member John Carter seriously, because if he wants to base transport in Auckland on what happens in the far north, it would be absolutely chaotic. I guess we are talking particularly about Auckland, and possibly the other cities in the country, and if we want to run an efficient public transport service—principally, it is buses we are referring to—then we need to cover most of the hours in the day, as the Hon Mark Gosche said, from early morning, at least, until late at night. It is exceedingly unlikely that any one commercial operator could do that, or would do that, and make money out of it. I listened to the Hon Maurice Williamson, and he is very supportive of commercial operators going along, starting up a bus service—here, there, or anywhere—and if they can make money, then good luck to them. That will not work across the total spectrum, because somebody has to do the hours and the runs where there is no money in it. Somebody has to bring back the passenger who goes on a peak service in the morning and comes back late at night when there are relatively few passengers on it.

Hon Maurice Williamson: But those off-peak are subsidised.

PETER BROWN: Exactly, they are subsidised, but if we say to commercial operators that they can do the cream and they do not have to bother with the subsidised stuff, then we are running into trouble in terms of having a public transport system.

Hon Maurice Williamson: But doesn’t the subsidy block the difference between what’s commercial and what’s not?

PETER BROWN: Not necessarily. If I heard the honourable member correctly, I took the impression that he wanted the commercial guys to simply say: “I will do this run between A and B and C and D because I have got a lot of passengers and I will make a lot of money, but I am not particularly interested in the after-hours run, where I am carrying only very few passengers.”

Phil Heatley: But no one is doing the other run! You’re just saying cherry-picking, and no one is doing it in the first place.

PETER BROWN: The member should listen to the debate before he opens his mouth.

Hon Maurice Williamson: It’s a valid point. The subsidy might cover the gap.

PETER BROWN: The subsidy may cover the gap, but the subsidy might have to be huge if the commercial operator were allowed to cherry-pick the cream runs in the first instance, and left the other runs to the non-commercial operators.

If we want a public transport service, then first and foremost it has to be safe. Secondly, it has to be reliable. People have to be able to depend on it. We have heard an example from the Hon Mark Gosche in his contribution earlier, of the operator that just disappeared overnight, leaving a cost of $5 million, or something along those lines. So it has to be safe, it has to be reliable, and it has to be convenient to the passenger, not the operator. It has to be comfortable. People will not leave their cars at home if they have to go and sit on a hard bench seat and rattle around for—I do not know how long—say, an hour; and, again, it has to be sufficiently regular to suit the passengers, not the operator.

New Zealand First has long advocated for integrated ticketing. [Interruption] I missed the point that the member just made.

R Doug Woolerton: He just said it took a lot longer to get from A to B than an hour. He’s being facetious—he doesn’t even know where B is!

PETER BROWN: No! This bill, as I understand it, will put pressure on the operators to introduce integrated ticketing. It will be not only between bus services, but between bus and rail services, and between bus, rail, and ferry services. We can go to any of the major cities in the world—and I think of the experience in London—and catch a train, a bus, a tube, or whatever, and go from A to B to C, all on one ticket on 1 day. That has been beyond our abilities. [Interruption] Listening to the member who is screaming from the wings, I say that it is no wonder why, if that is the best contribution he can make.

New Zealand First says that it is about time integrated ticketing came. However, having indicated—and I state this now—that New Zealand First will support this bill going to the select committee, that is not to say we do not have concerns. It is my understanding that in the years 2005 and 2006 significant consultation was instigated by the Ministry of Transport and it involved representatives of the ministry, Land Transport New Zealand, regional councils, local authorities, and indeed the bus industry. A series of understandings were arrived at. But this bill seems to have overlooked that. Indeed, page 16 of the explanatory note implies that there have been changes, and, referring to the people who have been consulted in the first place, states: “However, they have not been formally consulted in the preparation of this proposal.”

The bus industry tells me that this bill departs significantly from the recommended option B, which was agreed by this working committee a year or so ago. They say there was no consultation with the industry over the changes, and that it gives extra powers to the regional councils and waters down the checks and balances. Significant concerns are being made by the bus industry. It goes as far as to say that option B, the preferred option in this Public Transport Management Bill, in reality is option C in the working document that was discarded, I gather, by just about everybody. I think there is something about this bill—

Hon Maurice Williamson: So we have gone from A to B; we have gone from A to C.

PETER BROWN: We have gone from A to C, but we are moving into options now, and the honourable member might care to take note of that.

R Doug Woolerton: He’s not keeping up.

PETER BROWN: He is not keeping up, no.

Hon Maurice Williamson: It’s beyond me.

Phil Heatley: He’s missed the bus.

PETER BROWN: He has missed the bus completely!

This causes us concern, because we thought this type of legislation was well on track to getting the right amount of cooperation and with the right spirit, when all these parties were involved in putting their ideas together and coming up with some sort of consensus. To learn from the bus industry now that it is really concerned about this bill’s departure from the original working agreement does cause New Zealand First some concern.

We will be looking very, very carefully at the submissions to the select committee. We trust that the various parties will make fairly detailed submissions, and we will look very, very carefully at the submissions in terms of getting the right balance between subsidised services and commercial services. As I said at the onset, it is not possible or practical to rely totally on commercial services. That will, in large part, create a greater need for subsidies for non-commercial services. New Zealand First supports this bill going to select committee, but we will be monitoring it very, very carefully and studying the submissions very, very carefully.

SUE MORONEY (Labour) : It is a pleasure to rise on this very auspicious day—the first debating day in this Chamber since the local body elections at the weekend—to debate the Public Transport Management Bill, because it does have quite an impact for local authorities. It was Local Government New Zealand and the local authorities that asked for these changes to be made. They are critically aware, in a way that the National Party does not seem to be, of the importance of integration, of the importance of having standards, and of the importance of maintaining a quality, sustainable public transport service.

I do want to take a small amount of time to congratulate those who were elected to councils and to district health boards over the weekend, and also to congratulate those who were unsuccessful—those people who do wish to serve their community in this way. It is not very easy for people to put themselves out there publicly, to state what they believe in and how they want to represent their communities, and to put all of the hard work into an election campaign. I thoroughly congratulate all of those who were involved, because it does require a certain level of understanding of democracy, and of the importance of representation, for individuals to put themselves out there before their fellow citizens in that way.

R Doug Woolerton: I put myself out there one night, and got locked up.

SUE MORONEY: I cannot comment on that member’s view of putting himself out there. But, certainly, the calibre of the people who stood at the local body elections was such that they understood the responsibility of being better able to coordinate and guarantee quality, sustainable public transport. It is sad in a way that during this debate some Opposition members are exposing the fact that they do not seem to understand many of those issues.

What does this bill do? Essentially the bill will give regional councils greater powers over non-contracted or commercial services, in order to help regions to get the best value for money and achieve an integrated, sustainable public transport network. When Maurice Williamson spoke, he was struggling to understand the reason for this bill. He seemed to want a series of instructions about why it should be such a good idea. I would have thought that his experience during the 1990s might lead him to some conclusions about the importance of having thorough planning and of being able to take a wholly regional approach to the way one would do such things, but it does not appear that Maurice Williamson has learnt any lessons from that era. The reason for this bill is that under the current legislation, regional councils do have limited control over public transport services that are non-contracted, and by empowering councils to impose controls over commercial services, councils can ensure that commercial services meet the standards expected by their region. It is about people in the regions being able, through their regional councils, to have some say over the service they expect in that regard.

The bill will also allow councils access to ongoing information about commercial services, such as information about demand in particular areas, in order to establish systems that are integrated and responsive to community needs. I just want to reflect on that last statement about being responsive to community needs, because of course that does underpin the whole intent of the bill and I want to make sure that people who are listening to this debate understand that, at its first reading. This bill is about responsiveness to community needs, and that is achieved through local democratic processes. The bill will make it easier for regions to implement integrated public transport systems that do meet community needs.

In particular, I want to pick up on a couple of local issues, because I know that many of the members who have spoken so far have concentrated on Auckland issues. Of course, the public transport needs of the Auckland community are particularly pressing, but there are issues in many other communities throughout New Zealand as well. The area that I am most familiar with is Hamilton, and I do want to congratulate the Hamilton City Council and also Environment Waikato on their recent very good initiatives, such as the free city shuttle bus, that have made quite a difference to public transport in our city. [Interruption] I say to David Bennett that I do use that service frequently. I am not sure whether that member has ever used it. The free city shuttle bus is a great improvement in terms of public transport in Hamilton City, as is the Orbiter network. For the benefit of people who are not familiar with that part of the world, I say a number of services around the outskirts of Hamilton City have now been connected up by a very good bus service, named the Orbiter. That certainly has made a great difference.

The other issue that I want to make sure people know about is the effect of this bill on people with disabilities. This bill will enable regions to better cater for those with disabilities by allowing regions to stipulate appropriate measures, such as the use of super-low-floor buses. Maurice Williamson speculated earlier about a big flash bus service that he might want to operate and, of course, he could not answer a question about whether his flash new bus would have one of those super-low floors and would be wheelchair accessible. He could not answer that question, because in his view—in his mind—the market would sort out that. Well, I tell Mr Williamson that the market has not sorted that particular issue out, and it will not sort it out. Currently regional councils can ensure only that those with disabilities are catered for on the contractors’ services. Operators of commercial public transport services are not required to ensure appropriate facilities are available on the services they run. So that is what happens now; that is what the market-led approach delivers to us.

I am very proud to say that in Hamilton there is again a very exciting initiative on this very issue. Environment Waikato, Hamilton City Council, and Land Transport New Zealand are working together—

Hon Maurice Williamson: How does this member know so much about Hamilton?

SUE MORONEY: Oh, this member does know a great deal about Hamilton, because that is where I am based, as Mr Williamson knows. When local people come to meet with me to talk about their needs, they have been filling me in on this particular issue. The pilot project that is happening in Hamilton is looking at not just the vehicles but also the infrastructure, such as the kerbing and the city council - provided services: what the bus stations look like, where they are located, and how people can access them. So it is a very useful pilot project, and I am proud to say that it is happening in Hamilton. I thank the Disabled Persons Assembly, based in Hamilton—

David Bennett: So it’s a pilot project now?

SUE MORONEY: I tell Mr Bennett that I thank the Disabled Persons Assembly, based in Hamilton, for its advocacy on this particular issue. It has made sure that those bodies have coordinated their roles in order to make a real difference on this issue. When the results of that pilot study are known, I am hopeful that the learning from that study will be translated into work right throughout the country. This very bill will make that possible.

However, I do think that this debate has been rather enlightening, because, of course, it has continued to expose and explain what went so tragically wrong in the 1990s. Although the National Party claims to have moved on, this debate clearly shows that it has not. Although National is to vote in support of the first reading of this bill, its members have not been able to debate this bill without making statements over and over again asking about what is wrong with just the market sorting this issue out anyway. They say the invisible hand of the market will sort out integration in public transport, and will sort out making sure that people can get from A to B in an integrated way. Well, we all know that that is not the case. But it seems that the National Party certainly has not moved on from the market-led ideology of the 1990s. Its members really do not understand yet that having standards—quality standards—in place is something that the New Zealand public of today demand, expect, and require. This type of bill will ensure that those standards will be in place.

Hon HARRY DUYNHOVEN (Minister for Transport Safety) : First, Madam Assistant Speaker, can I congratulate you on re-election in a different mode into local government. I am sure the House will wish you every success in that part of your political career.

The Public Transport Management Bill is an interesting bill because it follows on from the Transport Services Licensing Act, which is now quite old—1989. That Act was really a product of the day, in that the focus on transport policy was about reducing the cost to government, and improving efficiency. It reduced cost by maximising competition and enhancing and maximising the role of the private sector. In the area of passenger transport the Transport Services Licensing Act of 1989 sought to improve efficiency and reduce costs by enabling public transport operators to identify and provide scheduled public transport services on a commercial basis with limited regional authority control.

That Act established the concept of commercially viable routes, and enabled local authorities to, if one likes, allow for licensing of particular routes. Regional councils were left to contract and fund, with assistance, of course, from the Government through Land Transport New Zealand, any scheduled public transport services that were required in their regions that could not be provided by way of normal commercial competition. Routes that were not commercially viable were therefore left up to the regional councils to fund, through their funding and with subsidies from the Government through Land Transport New Zealand. Those services—those routes—had to be awarded through an open tendering process.

So we had a mix—a mix of normal commercial viable routes, which were contestable, and those routes that were not commercially viable but were tendered for. Through that, we really wound up with a hybrid system, in a way, that provided for high-quality public passenger transport systems but on the basis of competition where they were commercial, and on the basis of minimum cost where they were provided by some sort of tendering process.

We have discovered in the time since, of course, that high-quality public transport systems are vital, and they can have a huge impact on sustainability. For those who live in the main metropolitan centres, particularly Auckland, there is a considerable need for public passenger transport that not only is commercially viable or efficient, but also gets people from out of their “one person per car” mode into using public transport.

The bill we have before us today will enable councils to set the quality and performance standards for commercial public transport services and things such as we heard from the previous speaker—with some denigration, actually, from the Opposition—such as wheelchair accessibility or services accessible to those with disabilities so that people can have access to flat-floor or super-low-floor buses to enable them to board those buses. Indeed, we have seen in New Zealand some real innovations of design, and I can think of Design Line, for example, which make one of the world’s best super-low-floor buses here in New Zealand. Those buses, obviously, were responding to a need, but responding to a requirement of the Government by way of regional councils for services accessible to those who had a disability or who were impaired in their ability to get on and off buses.

The bill will also allow for such things as emission standards to be put in place on public passenger transport, so in the centre of cities there might be a tougher standard than, say, in a rural area. The bill will also allow councils to require operators to integrate services, fares, and ticketing, to suit the needs of the community. I have to say that this is an issue that I personally have been very, very keen on for about 25 years. The integrated ticketing regimes, as are used widely in Europe, are something that New Zealand should imitate and initiate as soon as possible, in my view. The integrated ticketing regimes in Holland, for example, in the Netherlands, allow one to use a taxi, a taxi-bus, a bus, a tram, and a train, all on one ticket to go from a particular residence to perhaps employment in a city far away, door to door. Those services accessible off one ticket are simply regarded by the Dutch community now as being the norm and absolutely commonplace.

For us there is still a revolution waiting to happen in terms of integrated ticketing at that level. I think one of the provisions of this bill will be very much welcomed, once the public get used it: the provision to allow for integrated ticketing.

The bill will also give regional councils greater powers over non-contracted commercial services in order to help regions get the best value for money and to achieve an integrated, sustainable public transport network. That is important, because, under current legislation, regional councils have limited control over public transport services that are non-contracted. The bill will empower councils to impose controls over commercial services. Councils will be able to ensure that commercial services meet the standards expected of the region. The bill will also allow councils access to ongoing information about commercial services, such as demand in particular areas, in order to establish systems that are integrated and responsive to community needs.

That will prevent what we would probably call cherry-picking, in that it will allow for the requirement of packages of services so that we do not have operators saying they will come in and do only the most profitable link, and thereby undermine the whole integrity of the service by taking out the ability of another company to provide a package of services around an area. So the bill will make it easier for regions to implement integrated public transport systems that meet community needs.

How will a more consistent public transport system be created under this legislation? Under current legislation, public transport operators can register and deregister services, which might be a single trip at any time on any day—not necessarily a complete timetable for a route—and can put in a notice period of 21 days and simply say they will take out that service or register the service, one or the other. Regional councils may be obliged to replace the deregistered services, but 21 days’ notice leaves them inadequate time to implement the best possible service for the community. That restricts their ability to offer a reliable, consistent, and sustainable service for local people.

The changes in this bill will mean that councils can specify a longer notice period of, say, 90 days, and have better control over other aspects of the public transport services, such as the ability—as I said before—to set quality standards. That region will therefore have the ability, under its local transport planning regime, to ensure that services that are appropriate for the needs of the region will be able to be put in place and be contracted for, with a minimum of 90 days’ notice.

It will also mean that regions can opt to group services together if that best suits the needs of the region and its communities. It seems to me that that is one of the elements missing from our current system. We have a dual system. We have a competitive system in which normal competition rules of business apply. We also have the ability for a regional council to tender for services in its area where those services are not being run on a commercial basis. I think we can get the best of both worlds here. Those who favour competition and business—the market, if you like, being the provider—will see that that will work very well where businesses are truly commercial and where those routes are operating in a commercial way. Those who see the need for a council to respond to the needs of its community will also see that happening.

We are getting the best of both worlds, under this legislation. I believe that this legislation will enhance public transport and see a continuation of the development that has occurred. Certainly, if one looks at the money going into public transport now from Government sources one sees that it is something of the order of 10 times that which was going into public passenger transport services when the Labour-led Government was first established in 1999.

TE URUROA FLAVELL (Māori Party—Waiariki) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Kia ora tātou. The Public Transport Management Bill could not have come at a more opportune time for the new Mayor of Auckland. Six years ago, in 2001, “Banksie” faced the people and said he would solve the city’s biggest problem—transport—with one thing: roads, roads, roads. But apparently, in true “Banksie” bluster, he has now admitted that he has had a transmogrification. If members have any doubt as to what transmogrification means, I will tell them that it means to change form in a grotesque or bizarre way. The transmogrification of the Ferrari-driving mayor is that he has gone from conspiring to build bigger and better roads to declaring a commitment to create a world-class public transport system. He campaigned on a platform of integrated ticketing across the ferries, trains, and buses, and on a package that he calls an excellent marriage between the train and the car: park-and-ride. Whether Auckland City will reap the benefits of this “Banksie” transmogrification will be a matter for the punters in Auckland to consider. But I am sure Mr Banks appreciates the efforts that the Hon Annette King has made to advance the issue of public transport on to the national agenda so quickly.

Our country’s newly elected mayors and councils are essential to the aims of this bill, which are to achieve an integrated, safe, responsive, and sustainable land transport system. My reading of things is that the bill responds to the two competing priorities of the regional infrastructure: to help regions obtain the best value for money in public transport while also enabling fair competition for commercial operators by means of a competitive and an efficient market for public transport services. That tension between best value and the competitive market has been a longstanding issue for local government. Regions want to have the flexibility and commercial edge to host innovative public transport services that would otherwise not be provided. In my own region, we have the BayBus, Twin City Express, and Kati Coach, according to some. Call a Bus can take people direct from Tauranga to Auckland airport. There is also the Bay Hopper and Super Travel Express—to name just a few services.

However, up until this bill councils have been limited in their ability to regulate commercial services, and as a consequence their capacity to plan and develop the necessary integrated, safe, responsive, and sustainable regional public transport systems across the region has been constrained. This bill is about investing in sustainability, while also providing opportunity for significant economic and mobility benefits to be generated.

But there is one particular benefit that is driving—I ask the House to excuse the pun—our decision in the Māori Party to support this bill at its first reading: the benefit of foresight in planning for the future in a low energy - sustainable world. From the Māori Party’s early days since its establishment, we have been talking about the urgent need to reduce Government, personal, and business dependency on oil. In 2005 we called for a cross-party parliamentary commission to look sensibly and collaboratively at addressing the challenge of peak oil. We have talked about the need to become energy literate and to properly evaluate energy options. If we are faced with a menu of renewable sources, such as wind farm generation, solar power, or wave energy, how might we best determine whether it will actually be energy efficient to invest in new infrastructure or to stay with the status quo? We know in New Zealand that our use of our own renewable sources has been declining—mainly as a result of the decline of the Māui field—so there has been a return by the Government to using coal, despite its known disastrous environmental and human health effects.

Rather than looking at non-renewable sources to maintain our current unsustainable modern society, we need urgently to consider renewable energy production and significantly altering the way that we consume. Unfortunately, not one of the political parties in this Parliament was prepared to work with us on the proposal we first put out in 2005. The invitation to work collaboratively was obviously a little too challenging at that time.

But the issue is, as the US peak oil expert Richard Heinberg told us last week, that the challenge of peak oil is very definitely upon us now. When the peaking of oil production happens, a decline in availability and supply follows. The discovery of new fields and new extraction technology is not offsetting declines, because the global demand for oil continues to increase. In fact, for every new barrel of oil that is discovered, five or six barrels are being used. It is too late for quibbling over whether the peak was in 2005 or 2006 or is in 2010; the undeniable fact is that the world’s oil production is peaking now. Thirty-eight of the 48 largest oil-producing countries have declining oil production, yet demand is steadily rising.

The Māori Party supports the further development of public transport systems to reduce road traffic as a key means to lessen the nation’s dependency on oil. We support those initiatives to lessen carbon emissions as an important component of acting to address the global warming crisis. And in the process we also say we should look to Māori operators for ideas about how to achieve an integrated and a safe, responsive, and sustainable land transport system. Māori have always been key players in the public transport system of our nation. The special relationship between tangata whenua and our ancestral lands and resources must take into account the Crown’s obligations as a partner to Te Tiriti o Waitangi. As such, the governance, management, and administration of transport decision-making must involve Māori at all stages.

Māori have provided, and will continue to provide, options as individual operators of public transport systems. Again, in my electorate of Waiariki I think about the precedent established by the legendary Sam Emery. Sam was born at Kakepuku near Te Awamutu in 1885. His is one of those amazing self-made success stories that we love in Aotearoa. Without a single day of schooling and despite being unable to read or write—not even a line—he went on to pioneer motor transport, becoming a transport operator and a launch owner. He eventually served on the Rotorua County Council for 18 years. He never forgot his people. He played a key role in the financing and construction of five meeting houses, including one in his birthplace for Ngāti Kahu.

Our more recent history as tangata whenua has seen Māori involvement in the transport sector increase as a result of the collective aspirations of and projects initiated by whānau, hapū, and iwi. In the decade 1991-2001, Māori participation rates in tourism increased by 72 percent. We believe that our Māori operators give us good reason for optimism in responding to the twin challenge of peak oil and climate change. Again in the fine electorate of Waiariki, Tauranga Moana Maori Tourism Inc. advances cultural tourism that is environmentally responsible and economically sustainable. Its initiatives are not only about supporting Māori tourism but also about recognising and protecting the spiritual, physical, and cultural values of the people of the region. Indeed, it is the ultimate expression of tangata whenuatanga by Māori—te kākano i ruia mai i Rangiātea—that we do all we can to protect, restore, and enhance mauri within the natural environment.

Our aspiration to create a clean, safe, and healthy environment is tied up with the development of cheap, free, regular, reliable, and frequent public transport. Our party supports any policy initiatives for the rail infrastructure to deliver a better service and reduce the number of cars on the road. And, of course, there are many, many other ways of reducing road traffic. In Rotorua, the number of people who cycle to work has been declining, and in that context Bike Rotorua aims to get more people cycling more often. The project recommends, amongst other things, a cycleway network. So I tell members to watch this space—Rotorua will be leading the way once again. In terms of leading the way, we are interested in the debate around the electrification of public transport, including electric car technology. We believe that reducing our dependence on oil makes both good economic sense and environmental sense.

Finally, I am reminded of the whakatauākī “Ruia taitea kia tū ko taikākā anake. Cast off the sap and leave only the heart.” That is a reminder to us to clear away the irrelevant stuff and concentrate on the essential components. The essential component in this bill for the Māori Party is to support initiatives to improve our public transport systems in ways that serve both to lessen the nation’s dependency on oil in the face of the peak oil crisis and to lessen carbon emissions in the face of the global warming crisis. This bill is a positive step in that direction and the Māori Party will support it.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) : The Greens support this bill. It contains a number of measures we have been pushing for, for some years, to improve public transport systems. We know it has been on the Government agenda for a long time to remedy those deficiencies, and we are glad to see that it has finally made it to the House.

A public transport future can contribute substantially to our quality of life. When we compare fighting our way through congested traffic, one person to a car, waiting at traffic lights, poor air quality, and noise, with sitting on a fast train or on a bus on a dedicated busway, able to read, able to listen to music, able to talk to one’s neighbours, and no responsibility for driving, clearly the second is a much better way to move around. But unfortunately public transport is not always like that.

The Greens have been pushing for years to do two things that make it possible for a lot of people to leave their cars at home and use public transport instead. The first thing is that there needs to be more public transport. We need to build the infrastructure, which we are now finally going do in terms of electrifying the Auckland rail and putting more resources into the infrastructure in Wellington, and we need to make it easier to use the services we have and to improve those services. It is on that second point that this bill will contribute quite a lot.

We know that the future for motoring will become more difficult and more expensive, both as a result of the end of cheap oil and the rising prices that will follow that, and as a result of accelerating climate change and prices on carbon. But it is not just because of those gloomy ideas that we need to foster public transport, it is also because it can contribute so positively to a good quality of life.

I know people who have come from the country to Auckland with a real commitment to using public transport to get around who have been totally stymied. They need a different ticket for every bus company that runs there. Even on the same route they may need a different kind of ticket from one day to the next, depending on who is running the service at that time. The buses do not connect very well with the trains. Neither connect very well with the ferries. The Land Transport Management Act, the drafting of which the Greens worked on with the Labour Government in a previous term, requires an integrated transport system, and this bill will contribute to achieving that by providing that a regional council can require all those transport operators to cooperate in integrated ticketing.

The difference it would make to travel around a large city by being able to get one ticket and use it on all of the public transport services is enormous. Many, many years ago that was seen as quite a difficult technical task to achieve. It is no longer a difficult technical task. Many other cities do it. It can be done with a simple swipe system. It is time it happened. The Auckland Regional Council has been trying to get it to happen for years but the transport service operators will not cooperate. This gives them the power to make it happen, and it is certainly not before time. It gives the regional council power to set the quality and the frequency of services and to demand that they be met.

We have this funny residue from the attempts to apply the market and competition to public transport services, which never really worked, whereby a company that believes it can run a commercial service with no subsidy is left entirely free to run that service any way it likes—or not run it—or, after claiming it can run it, suddenly to give very short notice to the regional council that it will stop running it unless it is subsidised. That is completely unacceptable. Every time members of the travelling public get caught up in one of those messes and they go and buy a cheap car they did not have before, or they go back to travelling by car, we do not get those people back on public transport for a very long time. So we need to make the service reliable. We need to make it comfortable and clean. We need to make it frequent. People need to know that when they get on the train or the bus they will get where they need to go, on time, and have a pleasant journey.

This allows the regional councils to set the quality of the services, even if they are not being subsidised—the ones that they licence—and it allows them to investigate just where public money is going in subsidised services to make sure the public are getting a good deal. It also allows them to set emissions standards for the vehicles that operate public transport services. It is not a good look, as we move to tell motorists, around the end of this year, that vehicles that come into the country will have to meet certain emission standards, to not apply the same standards to public transport vehicles. Visitors to this country comment on the black smoke they see coming out of exhaust pipes, and comment on the quality of our urban air. Many years ago it used to be the case that the Department of Health had a view that we did not need to worry about air pollution in New Zealand, because New Zealand cities were “well ventilated”. I remember that statement very clearly from back in the 1980s: that we did not have air pollution problems, because New Zealand cities were well ventilated. It made them sound a little bit like a public toilet. In fact, that ventilation is not preventing the fact that air quality in New Zealand cities is dropping below what is recommended by the World Health Organization. So we need to clean up the air, and lead the way with our public transport vehicles so that they are seen to be clean, and, when full, mean that another 40 or so cars are off the road. That cleans up the air even further.

The bill also makes it possible for councils to get data about who is using the buses and how often. One thing I have certainly learnt from the last 2 years of leading the Government’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy is that we cannot make policy and cannot make targets, if we cannot get good data. In that field there are still a number of areas where we do not have good enough numbers and we do not know exactly what the experience is, and that really limits what we can do in terms of setting policy. This bill makes it much easier for regional councils to find out their patronage numbers and costs, and adapt their policies, and set frequencies and requirements, accordingly.

The Greens support this bill unreservedly. We look forward to debate on some of the issues, in the select committee. We particularly support those issues that I have talked about and look forward to supporting the bill on its third reading, as soon as possible.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) : The National Party will be supporting this bill. Maurice Williamson raised a very good point when he asked why the Government would want to put this bill forward, and I think Harry Duynhoven explained the reasons very well. He said the need for some kind of coordination was an issue, especially in relation to cherry-picking of services. I think everyone will accept that point when looking at the development of a public transport network in New Zealand.

This bill is not without its flaws, and I have a story to tell about something that is happening in a community in New Zealand. It was mentioned by an earlier speaker, who has no real idea of what is going on and who failed to mention the real point in my city of Hamilton. In Hamilton we have a very effective bus network, which has been used as a model for many other bus networks around the country. We have an Orbiter bus, which is great. It travels right around the city, both ways. However, there is one problem: our bus network in Hamilton is determined by the regional council—Environment Waikato. That council has the role of managing public transport in the Waikato region. The trouble is that 85 percent of its services cover just Hamilton City, which is within the Hamilton City Council’s boundary. So there is an eternal debate going on between the regional council and the city council over who should control and dictate what that bus service is about.

If the earlier speaker had known anything about Hamilton, she would have realised that the real debate around public transport in Hamilton relates to which council will control and dictate how public transport will be provided. This bill gives control over public transport to regional councils. [Interruption] The Minister is making a comment, but I will come back to her. With this legislation, the regional council will have all the control, which it does not need in the case of Hamilton City Council. The city council should have that control. Within its boundary it has 85 percent of the total public transport needs that have been dictated in the Waikato region, yet the control is with the regional council. This is a flaw in the bill, in the sense that it looks just at the model of the regional council and says that it is the great god who will decide everything. Well, that great god had its day of come-uppance last week when the regional council in Hamilton was thrown out. Basically, it was destroyed at the last vote cast on Saturday.

And that will happen to the Labour Party next year, because it awaits the same fate as members of Environment Waikato. Those members will be on the way out next year. They will be out on the bus next year. There will be no more limousines for those guys. They await the same fate of those who do not listen to the public. That happened to Environment Waikato, and sure as day that will happen to the Labour Party. [Interruption] Oh, yes, and we can talk about Hamilton City Council elections as well, if we want to.

The Minister opposite is waving. She is the Minister who said that public-private partnerships are alive and well in New Zealand. I have the Hansard from last week, where she was asked a simple question about what she thought of the comments made by her colleague Steve Maharey: “The Government is ruling out the use of public-private partnerships in the state sector … even to help construct new roads,”. That is what she had to deal with from one of her own Ministers last week. And what did she do? She made some kind of excuse about what public-private partnership actually means. She tried to defend her own Minister—a Minister who should have stood up and said: “I was wrong. I made a mistake. I don’t know what I’m talking about.” Instead, she tried to make excuses. She said: “I made it clear that we already have public-private partnerships. We have the private sector building the roads; we have the public sector paying for them.” Well, that is not a public-private partnership! She passed legislation enabling public-private partnerships, so how can she say they already exist? The Minister was trying to cover for her colleagues.

Those members opposite do not have any idea of what is going on in the transport sector. They do not know what a public-private partnership is. They do not know what the regional councils do in Hamilton—for example, with regard to public transport. They have no idea, yet they set about creating pieces of legislation all the time—like this bill. Why do they do it? The reason is that they have nothing else to do. They are not attacking the real problems facing New Zealand.

Let us look at some of the phrases in the commentary on the bill. It states the bill will “give regional councils greater powers to regulate”. Is that not great Labour terminology! I bet you it could put the words “greater powers to regulate” on a billboard at the next election. It states the aim is to “obtain the best value for money”. That is a joke in terms of transport under that Minister. She had a ministerial advisory group do a report and she said she has no aim for best value for money in the transport sector. How can she say that in legislation now? It is disgraceful. But this is the best phrase—“enables fair competition”. How can we have “fair” competition? What does one have to do to make competition fair? Is it not of itself fair? We do not have to regulate competition. That does not make sense. But that is Labour Party mantra. This is a philosophical debate between the Labour Party—

Hon Annette King: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. This is a very amusing speech and a very good Wednesday debate speech, but the member has not touched on the first reading of this bill in any aspect, at all. You might like to ask him just to mention a little bit about this bill. After all, National says it supports it, but the member is making a raving speech about opposing the bill.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I was just about to wave the bill at the member; so perhaps he could refer to it.

DAVID BENNETT: Perhaps it is because the Minister has not read her own bill. Where does she think I got the words “greater powers to regulate”, “best value for money”, and “fair competition” from? I got it from her bill. I was talking about her bill. She has not even read it. She might join the New Zealand First Party next, if she has not even read her own bill.

The Labour Party talks terminology. It talks about things like “greater powers to regulate”. This is all about setting up a bureaucracy that Labour can put on New Zealand local government. This is another case of where the Government puts more and more rate demands on local government. Local government then has to meet those requirements, and the local consumers have to pay through the rates to regional councils. This is what will happen here. The Government is setting up things like regional public transport plans to cover all these public transport issues. Is that not more compliance costs for local government? That is what it is. It is nothing to do with dealing with the issues. It is to do with setting up bureaucracy and compliance costs. That is what the Labour Party is about.

Another great aspect of this bill is that the Government is going to create—get this—a new public service. And what is it called? It is called the “public transport service”. Do we need the public transport service? No, we do not. We need transport that works. We do not need another public service set up by this Government, but Labour continues in that history of bureaucracy, setting up more and more Government quangos to tell people how to live their lives. This Government is just telling people how to live their lives. It will not actually give people the resources or the money so that they can live their lives. Its failure to do so will result in it having the same fate that Environment Waikato had last weekend.

DARREN HUGHES (Labour—Otaki) : I just want to take a very brief call to say that I am in support of the first reading of the Public Transport Management Bill. After that extraordinary speech from the temporary National Party member of Parliament for Hamilton East, I think that listeners need to have it made really clear to them that the National Party is voting in favour of the bill that its associate spokesperson on transport just ranted about, incomprehensibly, for 10 minutes. Considering the look of pride on the face of his colleagues, I am really pleased to have taken this very brief call.

• Bill read a first time.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Transport) : I move, That the Public Transport Management Bill be considered by the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, and the committee be required to report back to the House in 5 months’ time, on or before 14 March 2008, and that the committee have the authority to meet at any time while the House is sitting except during oral questions, and during any evening on a day on which there has been a sitting of the House, and on a Friday in a week in which there has been a sitting of the House, despite Standing Orders 192 and 195(1)(b) and (c).

• Motion agreed to.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of Transport) : I move, That the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) be now read a first time. This is a very busy day for transport. We have two bills in a row being presented in respect of the transport sector. It is an appropriate time that we move this bill, and at a later time in the passage of this bill I intend to move that it be referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee for its consideration.

Hon Maurice Williamson: A very hard-working committee.

Hon ANNETTE KING: It is a very hard-working committee, with very, very good members on it, and an excellent chair.

This bill deals with two important issues: introducing a new offence of driving while impaired by illegal drugs, and the implementation of measures to protect personal information held on the motor vehicle register. The bill will also make a number of amendments to facilitate the administration of the register and improve the quality of vehicle owner information.

I will deal first with the road safety initiatives. There was considerable comment from the community about the dangers of drug-driving during the road safety consultation that was undertaken last year by the National Road Safety Committee under the See You There—Safe As banner. The community and the Government have for some time been concerned about the risks of drug-driving. Under this bill we will make it an offence to drive while impaired by illegal drugs.

A roadside impairment test will become compulsory under this bill. When an officer at the roadside has reason to suspect a driver is impaired, the driver will be required to carry out a series of tests. At least 200 police officers will be trained to carry out the roadside impairment testing. There will be occasions where, for safety reasons, an immediate roadside impairment test may not be possible, such as on some busy motorways or narrow roads. It may be that the police will need to take people to a safer and more suitable place in order to carry out the impairment test. The select committee may want to consider how the law might allow for this. The impairment test will be published in the New Zealand Gazette. If a driver cannot satisfactorily complete this test, he or she will be required to provide a blood specimen. If an illegal drug is detected in the blood specimen, an offence would have been committed.

We already have an offence under the Land Transport Act of driving while incapable of proper control due to alcohol or drugs. Together these two offences will send a clear message that people must not drive under the influence of drugs. The new impairment offence will enable an officer to make a well-informed decision about a person’s ability to drive safely, and if the person is not safe, he or she will not be able to continue. It should, however, be noted that any evidence of drug use gathered as evidence of a driving offence will not be able, by law, to be used as evidence of any offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act. This measure is a transport measure.

The bill’s definition of an illegal drug does not include prescription medicines. This means that if a driver is taking prescription medicines as prescribed, he or she has a defence under this Act. As a result of consultation with parliamentary colleagues, I believe that it is important that the instructions given by the health practitioner, along with the drugs themselves, should be considered part of the prescription. If, for example, a driver is told not to drive while taking a medicine because it will make him or her drowsy, but does drive and is found to be impaired, there will not be a defence under this bill. This is also a matter that the select committee might like to consider.

The penalties for this new offence have been aligned with the penalties for drink-driving. The message for drugs is the same as for alcohol: “Stay sober and drug-free, drive safely, and you won’t endanger yourself or anyone else.”

This bill also enables some important research into drug-driving in this country. We will make sure that blood specimens taken as evidence of alcohol-related and drug-related driving offences can be used for research purposes. This will help establish the extent of the drug-driving problem in New Zealand, and make sure we can introduce further measures in future if necessary.

This bill also implements measures to improve protection for personal information held on the motor vehicle register. This register is administered by Land Transport New Zealand and contains the names and addresses of all persons and organisations registered as the owner of a motor vehicle. The law under which the motor vehicle register operates establishes the register as a publicly available publication. Under that law, any person may obtain the names and addresses of the present and previous owners of a motor vehicle simply by quoting its registration plate number. This information is available over the counter at post shops and other registration agencies. There are no safeguards on the use of this personal information. The system is open to abuse. There are instances where angry motorists, in the aftermath of a road-rage incident, have used the register to trace a person then harass that person. The police report that professional car thieves who target high-value vehicles use the register to find out where the car is kept.

Further, vehicle-owner names and addresses began being made available over the Internet in bulk during the 1990s. The intention was to assist local authorities to identify parking offenders quickly and efficiently. But the law did not explicitly limit this information to law enforcement agencies. Specialist marketing organisations were not slow to spot the opportunity. The motor vehicle register is a rich resource for marketing purposes; it contains the names and addresses of 2.3 million people. Information on the make and age of cars owned by people assists marketers in identifying socio-economic groups and targeting their campaigns. The figures speak for themselves. Bulk downloads have grown from 2 million in 1999-2000 to 7 million in 2005-06. The largest single commercial customer downloaded 2.2 million records in 2005-06. By contrast, all local authorities put together obtained just over 1 million records.

In New Zealand, information on the driver’s licence register is well protected, and it certainly is not possible to download drivers’ names and addresses for commercial purposes. Why should motor vehicle owners be treated differently? This bill addresses that concern. The bill removes the current obligation on the Registrar of Motor Vehicles to release information to anyone who asks for it. Instead, requests for information will be dealt with under the Official Information Act in the same way that any request to a Government department or Crown entity is dealt with.

To assist with the consideration with Official Information Act requests, the bill clarifies the purpose of the motor vehicle register. The principal purposes are law enforcement and the collection of revenue. The bill also recognises that on occasions the individual’s privacy interest may be balanced against the wider public good. Therefore, the bill will empower the Minister to authorise information to be released for certain purposes at the discretion of the Minister. Prior to issuing authorisation, the Minister will need to seek the views of the Ombudsman and the Privacy Commissioner. The authorisation may be one-off or it may be a standing authorisation valid for up to 5 years.

The bill also recognises that it is common practice for a person buying a car privately to first check on the motor vehicle register who owns that car in order to find out whether the person selling it is the registered owner. To avoid the need for an official information request in such cases, the bill will enable Land Transport New Zealand to provide instant confirmation whether a specified person is registered as the owner of a specified vehicle. The buyer of the car will provide to Land Transport New Zealand the number plate and the seller’s name, and the computer system will respond with a yes or no. It is expected that the confirmation service will be available over the telephone and over the Internet.

I believe that the bill strikes a good balance between personal privacy and general public interest. This bill also improves the quality of information held on the motor vehicle register. There are a number of measures to improve that information. Where information on the register is inaccurate or out of date, enforcement of offences that rely on linking a vehicle to a person is seriously hampered. This bill seeks to overcome some of those problems. Offences like speeding, red-light running, parking tickets, expired warrants of fitness, and so on, are very difficult to pursue—as are licensing fees—if we do not know who the vehicle owners are. Unfortunately, some vehicles stay in the name of previous owners for months if not years. Currently something like 100,000 vehicles are registered as owners unknown. This bill helps to address that issue.

I believe that the bill gives protection, but it also gives that balance between the right of the public to know and the privacy of vehicle owners.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON (National—Pakuranga) : I say from the outset that National will most certainly be supporting not just the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) going to a select committee but also, as long as we can be assured of all of the various bits and pieces, we will support it through the Committee stage and right through the entire process. I am very, very supportive of any measure that will stop people driving motor vehicles while they are impaired. I do not actually care what causes the impairment—whether it is a legal drug the driver has been prescribed but on which he or she should not be driving, an illegal drug, or alcohol—I am really happy with any way we can get our road toll down by taking those impaired people off the road, and I tell members that they can count me in for it.

This issue was canvassed during my time as Minister. One of the concerns back then, which I think technology and time have overcome, was that it would always be difficult to work out what level of drugs were in a person’s system and how much of an impairment it created.

One of the issues I would be very keen to get teased out in the committee is the fact that some illegal drugs are different from alcohol. You see, if alcohol is in someone’s system, then he or she is likely to be impaired during the time the alcohol is there—for a period of about 8 or 12 hours. By the time that person has had a good rest, a sleep, some breakfast, and so on, the impairment will have gone, unless he or she is really blotto. But in the case of some drugs, quite high residual levels will stay in a person’s system for some weeks, or for days at least.

Hon Annette King: Yes, but this only measures the time that it was active.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: I understand that. But what happens is that a person may have lost all of the buzz or the little kick he or she gets out of the drug.

Let us say that a person took some drugs, some marijuana, or something at a party on a Friday night and was badly impaired for that night—and if that person was not caught, then he or she should have been. But what if on Saturday that person did nothing, then on Sunday night he or she was driving to a friend’s place and still had quite high levels of the marijuana or substance in the bloodstream but it was not having any effect in terms of impairing that person’s driving ability? This was always the debate in the past—that some of these things have residual levels remaining in the body for a longer time frame but they do not have the same sort of impact that alcohol has. Alcohol knocks a person around when it is there, but once it has worked its way out of the body, it has gone.

Hon Annette King: They can now measure that.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Yes, I understand that. I think the Minister is right in saying that we can now measure some of that stuff. The technology is getting better and better.

There was always the difficulty about trying to assess it. First of all, the initial test on the roadside was always a little bit subjective as to whether someone was actually impaired. Then we get into blood testing and checking, and I am delighted to see that the legislation has imposed an almost complete mirror of what the alcohol stuff is. The penalties are all mirroring the penalties for driving while alcohol-impaired.

Frankly, I do not think the public really care what is creating the impairment; what they do care about is that people should not be out there driving if they are impaired. Those people should not be on the road. Another person’s rights cease when my family is in danger, and I am happy to say that if I know of anybody who is driving while impaired, then I want that person off the roads. I am sure that every member of this House feels the same way. No lame excuse for any of that behaviour will work. Drug-impaired people should not be driving.

This is not a “we are against illicit drugs” campaign. In my view this is nothing to do with a judgment value about whether marijuana or anything else should be allowed. It could turn out to be Prozac, Viagra, or something else—I do not know; I struggle with the name for some drugs these days. Maybe Zantac, or something like that, is a more common drug. Any of those drugs can impair a person’s ability to drive, and the clinician makes that clear by way of the script when the drugs are prescribed.

I understand that if people are not told that a prescribed drug has an impact on their driving, and they are taking, say, Prozac to make them feel a bit better, then it should not be an offence. I am pleased to hear the Minister say that there will be a defence in the case of legal drugs, provided the person was not told they cause impairment. But I know that some scripts and some doctors will say that a person must not drive a vehicle within 24 hours of taking medication. If people ignore that advice, then they should be dealt to in the exact same way as if they knowingly drink alcohol and then drive a vehicle.

This is the sort of legislation that National was always desperately keen to try to do, and there was always some sort of civil liberty argument against it, or we were told that the technology was not quite ready yet but that we would get there one day. I think it was about 10 years ago we were looking at the Land Transport Bill—

Pansy Wong: 9 years ago.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: In 1998 we were looking at doing it and now, in 2008, it will become the law, which is good.

The second part of the bill is, again, something I think we certainly support in principle, but we know there will be some difficulties in regard to technical bits. We think that personal information on the motor vehicle register should stay personal. I think it is just wrong that guys can spot a hot chick driving past and say “I think I might find out where she lives and whip round to catch her to see if I can get a date with her.” That is simply wrong, and I understand that has gone on in the past. Or, in the case of road rage where, for example, a person is cut off, then that person can find out where the offender lives, go round to the offender’s place, and throw rocks at his or her house, and so on.

But there are some legitimate reasons for using the motor vehicle register, and I think the legislation will allow those ones that I am interested in. If it does not, then I hope the select committee will work in a cooperative way—as it does—to try to ensure that the register is not readily available to members of the general public. Certainly, it should not be possible to access information just by making a phone call. I find it really galling to think that big marketing companies can do mass downloads of two-point-something million names and addresses, and suddenly we find our letterboxes full of spam, as if we do not have enough already. We think electronic spam is bad enough, but my letterbox bursts at the seams most days from catalogues, brochures, and stuff I simply do not want. Even the “no circulars” message does not stop it. So we should stop all that.

I know, for example, that if motorcar manufacturers find a fault in a particular model—

Hon Annette King: We can do that.

Hon MAURICE WILLIAMSON: Yes, I know that. That is what I am saying. One of the things we would most certainly want is for the Ford motor company to be able to say that, for example, there is a particular problem with the latest Mondeo version and, because it involves a faulty brake cable or something else dangerously wrong, it would like to do a recall and it needs to know who the current owners of that particular model are. I know that 4 years after the release of the Chrysler Voyager I own, that model was recalled because a particular fault had been identified. Those cars could easily have been through two or three owners in that time. So that is a legitimate reason for access to the register. Some people in the motor trade industry have expressed to me the need for balance in terms of allowing some legitimate access to this information but not allowing open access to it, as there is right now.

Having said that, I say that the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) contains two very good measures. National has always been supportive of these measures, and I think the time has come where technology will allow for drug-driving testing and for a punitive measure to take effect. We will watch with great interest to see what the various submissions will be on the question of access to personal information on the motor vehicle register. We have to make sure we get the balance right so that access to information is allowed where it can be justified for legitimate purposes, but it should not be allowed willy-nilly—for example, for car thieves trying to get high-value motor vehicles.

Hon MARK GOSCHE (Labour—Maungakiekie) : It is good to be able to take part in this debate, knowing there is widespread support for the measures in this Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). I know there will be some debate around what is being labelled the drug-driving situation, but I think that for a long time—as the Minister and the Hon Maurice Williamson both pointed out—there have been concerns about drug-driving and the threat that implies for ordinary New Zealanders driving themselves or their families.

For a long, long time there has been a search for suitable measures. We looked at examples overseas, and we know that the Australians have tried some other measures that are not allowed for or contemplated in this bill because they were found not to be satisfactory. I suppose, to a degree, it is going back to a fairly old-fashioned method that many older New Zealanders might be aware of: the impairment test.

R Doug Woolerton: Walk the line.

Hon MARK GOSCHE: There will be the walk-the-line test and, as the Minister said, it will not be done in the middle of the motorway. It will have to be done in an appropriate place, although the select committee will have to look at that because there are some questions about the appropriateness of these tests. We also know that the police will be giving a significant number of their officers special training to do this, and that is important too.

There will be questions around the level of penalty. As I understand it, penalties are aligned with the penalties for drink-driving, and so they should be. There will also be questions about whether there should be double jeopardy. My understanding also is that the penalties contemplated here are very severe. They are actually more severe than the illegal drugs penalties that other legislation deals with. I think that will answer, quite sufficiently, any calls for double jeopardy to be imposed. It will also send a clear signal to drivers who contemplate the idea of drinking or drug-taking and then driving, because the penalties that exist in the law already are, as we know, pretty severe.

We want to give our law enforcement agency, the police, the ability to take drivers off the road and prosecute them if they are impaired. This law will give those officers the ability to say to such drivers that as they have failed the test they will have to have a blood test so they can guarantee their rights under the law, basically to prove they have drugs in their system.

Hon Maurice Williamson: What about someone who has been both drinking and taking drugs?

Hon MARK GOSCHE: Obviously, that will be something for the officers to detect. They have the existing ability under the law to do the evidential breath-tests, and the like, so I guess that will come down to the discretion of the officers who are doing it. Each way, they will get the same sort of penalty. That is the important thing—to get those drivers off the road and hit them with a penalty that is either for drink-driving or for drug-driving.

The other aspects of the bill are also very important. They deal with the privacy issues, about which many concerns have been raised publicly. I watched the Fair Go programme fairly recently—within the last week or two—that highlighted the ease with which a person could claim to be the owner of a vehicle and change the registration of that vehicle into his or her own name. Obviously, that can be done because of the ease of access to the information.

As Maurice Williamson and the Minister have also pointed out, I do not think anybody contemplated the huge amount of downloads that would enable people to send out junk mail. I must drive the wrong sort of vehicle because I do not get the same sort of mail that Maurice Williamson gets. I am probably thought of as being too poor, so those who send it do not bother sending me all the things he has been inundated with. But I know it is of huge annoyance to people up and down the country to have junk mail of that sort visited upon them. So if this bill in any way helps that situation, then I think we will be doing a lot of New Zealanders a big favour.

Obviously, there are more serious problems in terms of the criminal element who have been able to go to the post shop and get the information for a couple of dollars, figure out where a particular vehicle is kept, and then steal it. There have also clearly been difficulties where other people in road-rage situations have been able to access information. I think the register has also been used in domestic violence situations. People have tracked down partners very simply by having access to the register. Of course, that is something we would all want to cut out in terms of the abuse of the system.

I am also interested to look at some of the smaller aspects of the legislation. No doubt we will hear all about them at the select committee. These deal with questions about what is a moped and what is not a moped, and highly important issues like that. Also, there is the use of supplementary plates for people who have dogboxes on the backs of their vehicles, or bike racks. I am hopeful that we will spend all of 30 seconds dealing with those issues, as long as the bill has been drafted correctly.

Hon Annette King: A moped for Maurice.

Hon MARK GOSCHE: And a dogbox for David Bennett, I would imagine.

The more important aspects are in terms of making sure that our police are able to enforce the law for those who take illegal drugs and then drive, putting others at risk. A way that obviously gives balance to the situation, as the Minister said, is to ensure that people are not picked up erroneously and accused. So the specially trained police, with the impairment test and the following blood test, I think should satisfy those who want to make it clear in the law that we do not nab people just for the wrong reasons.

As I said, and as the Minister has pointed out, in terms of access to the register there are legitimate reasons why people should have access to registration details. It is most important that people who want to buy a vehicle are able to know that the person who is selling a vehicle over the Internet or privately through the newspaper is actually the registered owner and is entitled to sell that vehicle. So it is a simple act of ringing up, giving the details, and getting a yes or no answer over the phone, and the 0800 number that Land Transport New Zealand runs is a very efficient service. That is important. All the other things that one would want to be able to check without the need to identify the name of the owner are still very accessible, such as whether any money is owing on the vehicle and those types of things. So this bill does not interfere in any way with the current situation in that respect.

As the chair of the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, I know this bill will be coming our way very shortly. We look forward to the public having their input on those two major issues: drugs and driving, and access to the motor vehicle registry. No doubt we will get some submissions on the other less important issues, but they are in there for a reason. As the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee is a very efficient select committee, we hope we can get this legislation back as quickly as possible so that we do arm the police of New Zealand with the tools they need to enforce the road safety legislation.

As the Minister said in her speech, we want to make sure that we can get the numbers of road deaths and hospitalisations down. We have a very good target of 300 road deaths and 4,500 hospitalisations per year by 2010. This bill will go some way to help in our strategy to achieve those targets. I commend the bill to the House, and I look forward to the select committee process that will follow.

DAVID BENNETT (National—Hamilton East) : The National Party has no problem at all in supporting this Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). It brings about two pieces of law reform that, as Maurice said, we had been thinking about for some time.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): The member will use the member’s full name.

DAVID BENNETT: As Maurice Williamson said, he considered this matter during his time as a Minister. I guess we could even take a leaf out of New Zealand First’s book and say it is something we have long advocated, and finally it has been presented to the House.

The bill is one that I do not believe the public will have any problem with, either. I think there will be public support for it. In general, people do perceive there is an issue here. They perceive there is an issue relating to the drinking of alcohol and the taking of drugs, and then driving, and that there is a need for legislation to be consistent between them. As the Minister alluded to, it is probably a matter of having the technological ability to develop a testing system and regime that accommodates a drug component. That is still something that will be quite difficult to achieve because there is no test to immediately identify whether somebody is on drugs. The test that is being employed is, in some cases, a very rudimentary test that we used to use for alcohol-related impairment many years ago. Basically it is, as somebody mentioned earlier, “walking the line”. It is getting people to walk along a line in order to see whether there are any obvious impairments in their physical ability. It is asking them to touch their nose and turn round in order to see whether they have the coordination and ability to operate on certain angles; it is to see whether they have that balance of their human nature, which could, I guess, be impaired by drugs. The test is not as sophisticated as we would probably like it to be, and I think we will see this legislation change over time as more sophisticated tests are developed that will actually determine what level of drug taking is sufficient to impair a driver, and what the timing is of that drug-induced impairment.

An issue within the legislation, and with the way we draw up legislation in respect of drug laws, is how we actually test, as those substances have the ability to stay in the body for some period of time after the actual impairment. It is an issue we see on the sports field, for example. Many sportspeople get caught out in drug tests as having, for example, marijuana in their system, even though they may have taken it some time before being tested. It may be just the residual effects of the drug that have stayed in their system, yet they get pinged for it even though their ability to perform on the field, for example, is not affected. So it is a developing area. We have made a start, I guess, in this legislation by identifying that it is something we want to codify and have in law, now that the ability is there to at least make a start in preparing some kind of testing regime.

The heart of the testing regime will necessarily be the blood test. With the inability to test with some degree of efficiency at the roadside, the blood test will become the major testing vehicle. I imagine that most people who are brought to the police’s eye under this legislation will deny having taken drugs and will therefore seek a blood test. That may well incur time and commitment on the part of the police in the initial years as this legislation goes forward, until we eventually get a better testing regime.

The National Party is very supportive of this legislation. The public have waited for a long time to see this happen, and there is no doubt their mood is to support this testing regime. The devil will be in the detail, as always, but the conceptual basis of testing somebody for drug-related impairment will, I think, find support through most parties in this House. I believe that even those who may not support it will find over time, as technology develops, that they change their minds, because the tests will be able to determine the level of impairment present at the time of a person’s being picked up by the police.

The other issue that this legislation talks about is the registration of motor vehicles. The bill sets up a stricter regime on the information flow to people with regard to the register of motor vehicles. We have heard examples of people accessing information to a level of detail that one would not necessarily expect could be accessed easily. With the amount of information that is out there in society, people want to see that they have certain protection of their privacy. We have seen over the last decade or so the introduction of privacy laws, and, through a lot of different pieces of legislation now, the privacy of the individual is seen as paramount. If we look at the way we deal with our Government departments, for example, in heath care, in the beneficiary status of somebody, or in general within many Government departments, we see that the privacy of an individual is something we cherish and want to retain. I guess this legislation is the next step towards the motor vehicle register becoming one of the more practical registers of public information in terms of seeing that that privacy element is retained. So in that regard this step is really just part of the progression towards the privacy of personal and individual information that has been ongoing for a number of years.

As long as we ensure there are balances, this legislation should be sufficient not only to retain privacy but also to allow people to carry on business, as one would expect in this industry. We need to work through the detail to make sure there is still credible access to information for industries and people who have a reasonable and proven need for it. I believe that people will come to the select committee and make submissions on the bill. They will make their case and say that there is a situation where information on the register needs to be found out. Primarily those submissions will be business-related or individual-related with regard to motor vehicles. It is something we can accept, and we can find a balance between the privacy of the individual and the need for some consistency in business so that people can carry on their business with that information flow. Overall, the two issues that this legislation deals with are ones we support.

• Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

METIRIA TUREI (Green) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. The Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) does two major things. Firstly, a large part of the bill involves quite uncontroversial changes to the motor vehicle registration regime that increase the privacy protections for those who are on the register, and the Green Party fully supports those changes. Secondly, the bill goes on to provide a regime for dealing with drug-impaired driving and the safety issues around that.

The Green Party has agreed to support this legislation through its first reading. We want to support legislation that makes our roads safer. We want to encourage the creation of deterrents and the use of enforcement against drivers who are driving while they are impaired. We do not want legislation that appears to be addressing the problems but is simply complicating the issue with what would be well-intentioned but otherwise ineffective provisions. The Greens are always after the best possible law.

We are very concerned that impaired drivers are on our roads, causing harm to property, and, most important, harm to our community and to our people. The primary culprit for this harm is, of course, the use of alcohol while driving. In 2005 there were 23,000 convictions for driving with excess alcohol. Alcohol remains the No. 1 problem drug for road safety and we believe that further measures could be taken to reduce that harm. A recent Institute of Environmental Science and Research Ltd study shows that of 408 drivers killed, 208 had alcohol in their system—that is, more than half of those drivers had alcohol in their system.

I want to take the opportunity to thank the Minister in charge of the bill, Annette King, and her staff, who have worked collaboratively with the Green Party to design a much better piece of legislation than the one originally proposed. Thanks to Green Party involvement, we have retained the focus of this legislation on impaired drivers and have not allowed this law to become a back-door way of prosecuting drug offences. The presence of illegal drugs detected in drivers’ blood samples will not be allowed to be used as evidence of prosecution under the Misuse of Drugs Act. If we are to go to the point of allowing blood tests as a legitimate form of search and seizure for the presence of drugs, then we need to have a very serious community discussion about the human rights issues implied in that and whether it is the right thing for our community to do. That discussion may well happen in time; the Misuse of Drugs Act is going to be reviewed. But we must not let those kinds of practices be enabled through legislation by assuming it into a bill that does not have that as its purpose. The purpose here is not to find convictions under the Misuse of Drugs Act; the purpose here is to get impaired drivers off our roads because they pose a danger to our community.

In addition to that issue, due to Green insistence—and we have been insisting for some weeks now—legal prescription drugs that are used in such a way as to cause impairment will also be captured by the new offence provisions in this legislation. This is a consistent and cohesive approach to removing dangerous drivers from our roads, irrespective of the cause of their impairment. There is a case, I agree, for dealing with drivers impaired by a variety of causes, and the same Institute of Environmental Science and Research study showed that of the 408 drivers I quoted before, about 11 percent had only cannabis in their system and about 9 percent had other drugs like legal tranquilisers, methadone, morphine, and amphetamines, which are legal drugs. So if there is to be an assumption that illegal drugs cause impairment, the research clearly shows that legal drugs are equally implicated as a cause of impairment that can lead to driver death. The bill as currently drafted needs to be made clearer, and I thank the Minister for her assurances in the House today that the wording around this particular point will be made clearer in the committee process.

Overseas jurisdictions seeking to implement similar measures to combat the problem of driving while impaired by things other than alcohol have faced considerable difficulty in providing effective legislation. No reliable objective test exists for roadside testing of impairment. Roadside testing for the presence of drugs—illegal and legal drugs—faces similar difficulties. A European Union research project in 2006 looked at nine different devices for on-site detection of legal and illegal drugs and found that there was no device considered reliable enough for roadside screening. So the only alternative is the subjective impairment test, with all the inherent problems that surround that test.

The physical impairment test in the bill will be administered by the police and we are very concerned about its subjective nature, particularly as it leads immediately on to a blood test. One of our concerns—and we have raised this before—is the racist filters in the police force that lead to unjustified targeting of Māori, and particularly Māori men, when it comes to drug offences. Research in 2002 from the Christchurch Health and Development Study, the work of Professor David Fergusson, who has done very good work in this area, clearly shows that one of the primary risks for being targeted by the police for drug offences is being a Māori man. The research concluded that the administration of laws relating to cannabis was inequitable and biased against Māori and males, and that the current cannabis laws are discriminatory. The difficulty is that the choice to target one particular person for a search or for being stopped in a car is strictly a matter of individual police decisions. These racist filters have been recognised both in the policing area and in health. This bill will give police another tool for stopping drivers and being able to utilise these racist filters but with only limited instruction and education that will break down those racist filters so that the legislation is used fairly as intended and not as a discriminatory tool against Māori.

The second step in the legislation is the blood test, and we are very concerned about this, of course, because a blood test is a highly invasive form of search and seizure. A blood test is used for detecting alcohol-impaired driving; we know about that and are very used to that process, and that is because we have in the law a lawful blood-alcohol limit under which a person is legally entitled to drive. If a person goes over the limit that person is in breach of the law. That limit is established through proven scientific methods that show definitively that, at that specified level of blood alcohol, a person is impaired and should not be driving. But for the evidence-based legal blood-alcohol limit, a blood test would otherwise be an unreasonable search and seizure.

The same principle should apply when we are talking about other drugs, particularly cannabis. The law should establish, using quality science, a level of drug use for specified drugs that definitively shows that a person is impaired by that drug at that time, and that limit should be set out in law. Our laws should be evidence-based and scientifically sound. The subjective view of a police officer is not a robust test; nor is the simple presence of a drug with no scientifically-based assessment of the level of impairment that that drug can cause. Maurice Williamson just talked about how long it takes for some drugs to wear off; the current research shows that it takes about 1 to 2 hours in the case of cannabis use.

This bill is a very blunt tool for dealing with the issue of impaired driving, and we expect the law will evolve into something much more mature as more research and technology become available. Professor Fergusson—I referred to him before—has produced further research that suggests that young people are simply not aware that driving under the influence of cannabis or other drugs can cause impairment. In large part, that is because of the legal status of the drug; it creates considerable barriers to getting across to young people truthful and trusted information about the harms cannabis can cause. Again, I hope that sometime in the near future we may take a much more mature approach to this issue. Excellent progress has been made towards developing legal limits for driving under the influence of cannabis. In Germany there has been some great research that shows that about 10 nanograms per millilitre is associated with a distinct and identifiable level of risk. That research needs to be brought in and be part of the discussion that we have at select committee. Science and technology in this respect will eventually provide us with much better guidance that will enable us to have good quality law that is based on science, that is based on evidence, and that does not abuse the fundamental rights of our citizens. Until then we still have some way to go. Thank you.

TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Māori Party) : Tēnā koe, Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā tātou katoa. This Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4) is more than a matter of a technical amendment to the Land Transport Act 1998. There is a bigger picture here, which we cannot ignore. It is the situation that motor vehicle traffic crashes are a major cause of mortality and morbidity for Māori, and particularly young Māori; a situation that 23 percent of all drivers involved in fatal crashes are Māori; and a situation that 28 percent of all casualties involved in fatal crashes are Māori. There is literally a fatal attraction between motor vehicles and Māori, particularly our young.

Just over the last few years, from 2004 to 2006, the figures tell us that driver alcohol and drugs was a factor in some 29 percent of fatal crashes, and that includes both legal and illegal drugs. It was a factor in 19 percent of serious injury crashes and 12 percent of minor injury crashes. I hate data like this, but the casualties from the crashes give us every reason to explore all avenues possible to prevent the ever-rising growth of such sobering statistics.

This bill tries to address this by increasing the power of the police to deal with drug-impaired drivers, and I take into account what my friend from the Greens has been saying about the powers that the police will have. The bill also seeks to address issues that have arisen around the use of personal information held on the register of motor vehicles. Both of these are serious, yet very different, matters and might have been addressed through introducing two separate bills.

The whole area around motorcar injury and the impact of drug impairment is, however, clouded by uncertainties and dubious information. There has been very little research identifying the key factors associated with crashes involving Māori. This has inevitably restricted our capacity to develop effective strategies aimed at reducing Māori mortality and morbidity related to motor vehicle crashes.

In an article published in the New Zealand Medical Journal in 2004, it was suggested that one of the reasons for such a lack of information has been the difficulty in obtaining data by ethnicity. Police traffic crash records, which are required for all crashes involving injury, have not included ethnicity.

The New Zealand Medical Journal article was able to report that alongside being young and male, a high proportion—70 percent—of Māori who were hospitalised or who died were from areas with very high levels of deprivation. The age factor is of particular concern. Two-thirds of Māori casualties were between 15 and 34 years, with the group between 15 and 24 years being particularly overrepresented. This one group makes up 45 percent of the non-fatal casualties and 39 percent of the fatalities. That figure is absolutely criminal. Our rangatahi, the hope of our future, the leaders, the designers, the shapers, the thinkers, are those who lose their lives in their prime.

Of course, when we think of Māori who were hospitalised or who died as a result of motor crashes I am reminded that for every 100 drunk or drugged drivers killed in road crashes, 56 of their passengers as well as 39 sober road users die with them. The loss of benefits that can flow from having competent, healthy, and skilled whānau members being able to grow and develop as fully functioning families can never be accounted for.

As a worried mother and grandmother, my cautionary advice to our young ones who have been venturing out late at night has been everything to do with their driving ability. I have always told my children to call me, regardless of the time, if there was not a safe driver available or if they had consumed alcohol.

I look at this bill today as being one way to address what we know to be a contributing factor in the appalling car crash data, though we agree that alcohol is the major cause of all accidents. Of course it is not a perfect science, and we know that drugs other than alcohol can be difficult to identify and recognise as having a role in any accident. Research also suggests that the contribution of drugs other than alcohol to accidents may be under-represented in the police-reported crash system. With or without the data, with or without the ethnicity records, there is little doubt that any drug that has an effect on the central nervous system has the potential to impair driving.

So we in the Māori Party support this legislation that ensures our roads will be safer. We support also the intention to make the penalties identical to the penalties for drink-driving and the intention that the police can apply the same powers to stop people from driving under the impairment of drugs, provided there is proof.

However, there are some concerns, which we will be seeking further advice on. We are concerned about the possibilities of the test being used as evidence in drug charges. The bill brings into the testing regime a compulsory impairment test that police officers can require people to undergo if they have good cause to suspect drug taking. But there is a real concern with a provision in the bill allowing blood specimens already taken to be re-analysed for research purposes. The aim of the exercise, supposedly, is to enable a better picture of drug-driving in New Zealand to be established, but we believe there is sufficient concern around privacy, confidentiality, and basic human rights to warrant that a far more robust rationale be provided to justify such an intrusive approach.

The other key intervention introduced in this bill is the establishment of a regime to protect personal information held on the register of motor vehicles, although we are still permitting that same information to be used for purposes consistent with the purposes of registration. Currently the names and addresses of the current and any previous registered owners are able to be given to any person who quotes a vehicle registration number. Violent offenders can track down their partners, direct marketing agents can access addresses for their own commercial gain, and debt collectors can use the data for credit profiles. There have also been concerns about the use of vehicle names and addresses by persons who wish to trace owners to harass them or to steal their vehicles.

Privacy and confidentiality concerns have, therefore, led to the amendment in this bill to protect personal information from release, and that is all for the good, of course. But the question will arise as to whether the overly rigorous requirements about having ownership details recorded are justified. The bill creates an infringement offence of failing to notify a change of ownership, and, if enacted, would mean that the police would be able to order someone’s car off the road or impound the vehicle if ownership details are not on the register.

I return to the research cited in the New Zealand Medical Journal, which identified that a disproportionately high number of Māori casualties were representative from areas with high levels of deprivation, deciles 7 to 10. This finding is consistent with international research that suggests there is a strong association between the social and economic determinants of health in relation to injury in motor vehicle traffic crashes. With this being the case, we raise the question as to whether having sufficient income to go forward towards the registration papers or the change of ownership papers has any relevance to the high mortality and morbidity rates of Māori attached to motorcar crashes. We will support this bill at this stage through its first reading, but we do have many questions that we hope will be fully addressed at the select committee. Kia ora.

Hon PETER DUNNE (Leader—United Future) : I want to speak briefly to the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). This is a difficult but necessary bill. It is difficult because the issues it deals with, particularly in regard to drug-impaired drivers, are issues that most New Zealanders would agree need to be addressed, and most New Zealanders would have some concern about the current situation in regard to that. But at the same time, there is this dilemma about how far one intervenes, how effective the testing regime might be, and whether there are undue implications for the human rights of individuals.

I note that according to the explanatory note, this bill will contribute to reducing some 300 deaths and 4,500 hospitalisations each year up to the year 2010 as part of the Government’s overall Road Safety to 2010 strategy and its policies in regard to harm minimisation in respect of the use of drugs. That is good and worthy, but the question we need to focus our attention on, and which the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee will want to give particular consideration to, will be precisely the regime that is being introduced in regard to the way in which drug-impaired driver tests will take place, the possible risk of information that is gathered through those tests being what some people might regard as misused, and also how the samples can be obtained and analysed in a way that will provide for much more effective results.

We have been through many exercises over the years in regard to the testing of alcohol-impaired drivers. We have moved a long way from the days of one simply being asked to walk on a straight line. We then moved to blowing in the bag. We now have sophisticated breath-testers and more sophisticated blood-testing arrangements that flow from those. Each one of those steps has been accompanied by a level of debate and testing before the courts about both the efficacy of the measures being employed and the extent to which the human rights of the individuals concerned are being infringed upon. I suspect we are about to go through something similar in regard to the drug-testing regime that is introduced in this bill.

I appreciate that what is set out here attempts to mirror to the greatest extent possible the provisions in the legislation relating to the testing of perceived alcohol-impaired drivers, and I hope that the reality works out that these two sets of measures are consistent. But there will be difficulties here at one level, it seems to me, simply because prescription medicines are included—and I think they should be. One cannot talk about prescription alcohol—one is either over the limit or not over the limit in respect of alcohol use. There will be a debate, I am sure, about people on medication who suddenly find they may be caught by this regime. That is something that I think the select committee will want to give some considerable attention to.

I note also from previous discussions over the years where matters of drug impairment have been on the agenda that some of the toxicology and pharmacology issues involved in regard to drugs are going to have a different lifespan than alcohol—for instance, the fact that there can be traces in the bloodstream of certain drugs for long periods of time and the implications that may have for a testing regime. So they are issues that the select committee will need to pay some considerable attention to—to get expert medical and professional advice on, then to ensure the legislation that emerges as a result deals with those concerns.

I note that from towards the end of the explanatory note there has been considerable consultation so far with a wide range of agencies that might be presumed to have some expertise in this area, and one hopes therefore that the bill largely reflects their considered advice, and that some of the concerns I have been expressing have either been considered already or have been mitigated in the drafting of the legislation. But there will be many groups in the community with an interest in this who will want to have their say both as to whether they regard the regime being applied here as too rigorous or insufficiently rigorous, whether they think the safeguards are adequate or inadequate, and whether they even think that the issues being addressed here are those that are worthy of consideration.

The second part of the bill, as the previous speaker mentioned, relates to the register of motor vehicles. I do not want to say too much about this other than to observe that this has also been an area of some considerable attention over the years. The steps that were taken by the Ministry of Consumer Affairs in the late 1980s and early 1990s to provide for people to be able to check previous ownership arrangements for vehicles was a dramatic step forward at that time. It was not uncommon for people to suddenly find, upon the purchase of a second-hand vehicle, for instance, that they had also incurred a second-hand debt. It seems to me, from a quick read of the provisions in this section of this particular bill, that it seeks to update and modernise many of those provisions, with a view to also making it a little easier to check whether vehicles have been either misappropriated or are being used in a way that, as the law says here, could threaten the security of New Zealand.

These are going to be difficult issues in themselves to resolve, but I think we are in an environment now where the public is more accepting of these sorts of issues being considered and some restraints being applied that they may not have previously considered were appropriate because of the greater public interest. I note that there are a variety of provisions relating to number plates. I think that on the face of it, although they look tedious, they are necessary in terms of public protection against both fraud and misuse. On the whole it seems to me that this bill, which is essentially a technical piece of legislation, despite some of its potential pitfalls is a positive step forward. We are certainly prepared to support it going to a select committee. We hope that the committee does take the opportunity to hear the specialist evidence and to make recommendations for change where it considers this might be necessary so that we end up with legislation that is not just worthy in its intent but viable in its practice.

LESLEY SOPER (Labour) : I am happy to take a short call on the first reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4), which does have wide support for its introduction, and I am looking forward to considering it at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee.

When one considers that transport officials estimate that illegal drugs were probably responsible for 38 serious injuries, 77 minor injuries, and 12 road deaths in 2006, one can see why there has been considerable public concern over the dangers of drugged drivers and why this bill was necessary. The bill will send a very clear message to people that it is unacceptable to drive while drugged. Of course, we do already have an offence under the Land Transport Act for driving while incapable of proper control due to alcohol or drugs, but prosecuting a person under the influence of drugs has been difficult under that existing legislation. “Incapable” has been a high threshold to meet, as has establishing that the cause was illegal drugs.

The new offence proposed in the bill is committed when a driver is impaired and there is evidence of illegal drugs in the driver’s blood. “Impairment” is a lower threshold to meet than “incapable of proper control” and will be determined by a more robust published test under the provisions of the bill. Under those proposed new provisions police will put a suspected drugged driver through a roadside test of balance—the one-leg stand test, coordination, the walk-and-turn test, and eye-pupil response. A driver who fails those tests will be given a blood test, and a positive result will lead to prosecution. It is expected there will be around 400 prosecutions a year. The emphasis, of course, is on illegal drugs. If a person is impaired but found to be on a prescription medicine, then, of course, that person should be off the road, and if that prescription medicine was properly taken, then he or she has a defence to prosecution.

There will no doubt be some debate in the select committee around the question of being prosecuted under both driving and drugs laws, which New Zealand First has indicated they want to see, but the bill is currently written so that blood samples taken by police investigating driving offences cannot be used as evidence in drugs cases—that is, no double jeopardy. As to penalties for the new offences, they have been aligned with the penalties for drink-driving, which I think sends a very clear message again about the unacceptability of drug-driving. For a first or second offence that means imprisonment up to 3 months or a fine up to $4,500, plus disqualification for at least 6 months. For a third or subsequent offence it means imprisonment up to 2 years or a fine up to $6,000, and disqualification for more than 1 year.

The other good, balanced aims of the bill are around the protection of personal information held on the motor vehicle register, and some changes in respect of registration and licensing of motor vehicles. There is no doubt that in the past the motor vehicle registration system has been open to abuse. The register has been a publicly available publication. Anyone can obtain the name and address, and some other details, of someone through the system by quoting a licence plate number and paying $2.25c, and there are no safeguards on use of that personal information. It has been used by angry motorists in road rage aftermaths, it has been used to harass women, it has been used by professional car thieves to target vehicles, and it has been used in bulk by direct mail companies to fill up our mailboxes with intrusive material we do not want or need about products we would rather not consume. The bill will remove Land Transport New Zealand’s obligation to supply names and addresses on request. Applications for release of personal information will be treated like any other Official Information Act request, taking into account the principles of the Privacy Act.

The bill will enact a provision stating the purposes of the register: law enforcement and security, collection of revenue, and transport law and policy. Those purposes will guide consideration of requests. The existing right to obtain vehicle details remains, as does the right to seek confirmation that a specified person is the registered owner of a specified vehicle. But the proposed bill restricts the right to fishing expeditions to obtain any other personal information about car owners, including their phone numbers, email addresses, and home addresses. Legitimate inquiries, however, such as insurance company advisers and sales yard staff checking trade and vehicle ownerships, and manufacturers recalling vehicles are catered for by the bill’s provisions and will still be allowed full access.

Another very good feature of the bill is that it will improve the quality of owner information held on the motor vehicle register by tightening up current requirements to register changes of ownership and by dealing with the problems of vehicles with no known owner. This is no small issue. About 100,000 vehicle records are currently tagged as “owner unknown” or “gone no address”. It is likely that the real numbers are much higher. They are not usually revealed until there is an inquiry. Some vehicles stay in the name of a previous owner for literally years. Strengthening the requirement to notify a sale or purchase, enforcing more effectively the existing requirement to advise a change of address, and giving police powers to order unknown owner vehicles off the roads are sensible and necessary provisions.

This bill is a good, balanced bill. I am looking forward to sitting on the select committee that considers it. Thank you.

PETER BROWN (Deputy Leader—NZ First) : I want to start from the outset by saying that New Zealand First will be supporting the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). In all probability we will be supporting the bill through all its stages. We recognise that it will be tidied up at the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee, with amendments and adjustments made. When the bill comes back to the Committee of the whole House there may be further amendments. We believe it is very important that we come to grips with drivers who are driving under the influence of drugs, so we have little choice but to support this bill—whatever shape or form it comes out in. It is important that we in Parliament address the issue.

We recognise that by far the most common offence of driving under the influence is people driving under the influence of alcohol. We would like to see the penalties toughened up for that offence. We are pleased that drugs have come in to the legislation and that at least there is the same punishment for driving drug-impaired as there is for drunk driving.

We are concerned about what the Greens have achieved, and indeed what the Government member who has just spoken, Lesley Soper, described as double jeopardy. We believe that if a police officer stops a car and finds the driver to be under the influence of drugs—if the officer suspects that the driver has been up to no good in terms of drugs and suspects that there could be a prosecution against the driver under the Misuse of Drugs Act—then we believe that that police officer should go ahead and do his or her job. But the Greens want—and Labour has agreed—to stop at just the driving offence. We say that is not good enough. We certainly say it is not double jeopardy. We say it is protecting the drug user and drug supplier, to some degree. Worse still, it is politics and politicians getting involved in operational police work. It is telling the police where to draw the line. [Interruption] Yes, it is telling the police where to draw the line.

Let me give the member a hypothetical example. Two people leave an establishment; both have smoked cannabis or taken drugs. They have both committed the identical offence. One is walking home in a very unsteady movement and a police officer suspects something is going on and wants to pull him up, so he does. He can search the guy because he suspects he has committed an offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act. But the guy who gets in his car and drives home, according to the Greens, can be picked up only for impaired driving. I am absolutely disappointed that the Minister of Police has concurred with that. I am absolutely disappointed that the Minister of Police has been bought off with that argument.

We have argued strongly with that Minister—my colleague Ron Mark has, in particular—that we should segregate policing from transport duties. I have heard the Minister say it. She has said it to my face and she has said it on TV.

Metiria Turei: Just a blood test.

PETER BROWN: Would that member mind giving her jaws a rest.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): I just say to the member on my left that backbench interjections in close proximity to each other lead to interference with the microphone. It is a convention that it does not happen. I refer the member to Speaker’s ruling 59/3 by Sir Basil Arthur in 1984.

PETER BROWN: I was talking about the hypothetical guy who got in his car and is driving home. The police officer stops him, tests him for being impaired, and finds him to be impaired and driving under the influence of drugs, but that officer cannot take it any further. The Minister of Police told me to my face—and I have seen her on nationwide television saying the same thing—that one of the principal reasons, if not the principal reason, for keeping traffic duties under the control of police per se is that when officers stop a driver for whatever offence they think might have occurred, they look in the car and check around the car and around the person to see whether any other offence is being committed.

We are saying quite clearly that if the police pick up a person who is drug-impaired and driving a car and they suspect that there is a bigger offence being committed under the Misuse of Drugs Act, then they should be able to do their job.

Metiria Turei: That’s right.

PETER BROWN: The member says they can, but I listened to her carefully a while ago and that was not the thrust of her speech. Indeed, I have a letter from the Minister of Transport that actually says, in part: “I understand you do not support the provision that says the evidence of drugs found in blood samples cannot be used as evidence in an offence under the Misuse of Drugs Act 1975.”

Metiria Turei: Under the Misuse of Drugs Act they can.

PETER BROWN: I am saying to the honourable member that she has it wrong. If we are going to allow people to get involved in drugs and drive their cars and pick them up only for the fault of driving, then I say that we have stopped well short of the eight ball.

In terms of prescription drugs, I think we share the concerns that the Greens have. If it is written on the container that holds the capsules or tablets that one should not drive after taking them—if people are told outright that they should not drive after taking the specified number of tablets or whatever—then we have little sympathy for those who take their medication and drive. If they overdose on the tablets, or take so many that their driving ability has clearly been impaired, we have little sympathy for them. But if people have taken a prescribed medicine that is likely to have negligible effect on their driving, and they stick to the amount they are supposed to take, then if the wording on the canister says something along the lines of “this could in circumstances …”, I think they have a defence. But if people are impaired as a result of taking a prescribed drug, and they knew it would affect their driving before they took it, then we have little sympathy for them and they should be held to account.

In terms of the car register, we think it is about time those issues were addressed. I do not have time to go into detail on it, but I will say that I thought the honourable member Lesley Soper covered it very well. She outlined the concerns. I could not do a better job of outlining the concerns than she has done. She did it very well. The bit we did object to was the reference to double jeopardy.

New Zealand First will most certainly support this bill going to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee. We believe it will be amended there in order to cover the differences of opinion that are emerging between the Greens and New Zealand First. I am certain that our way will prevail and that the member will see common sense in the end.

Metiria Turei: You’ll come round, I know. You are nearly there, Peter.

PETER BROWN: Does the member think so?

We look forward to this bill being addressed at the select committee. I am a member of the committee and I look forward to hearing submissions on it. I know that its time has come. Most members of the public who speak to me about this matter ask me when we are going to do something about it. They have no problems with us doing something; they ask when we are going to do something about it. We look forward with pleasure to working on this bill at the select committee and putting it through the system. Thank you.

DIANNE YATES (Labour) : I rise to speak on the first reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). It is amazing to note that if any illness or war killed around 400 young New Zealanders in a year we would be outraged, yet our road statistics are absolutely appalling. I think some people are very cavalier and almost seem to regard road accidents as being like catching a possum in headlights—that it is natural with cars and something we have to put up with. This bill says that it is something we should not have to put up with.

Around 400 people are killed and thousands are injured on our roads every year. One of the worst places to be on a Saturday night is the accident and emergency department of any hospital in New Zealand, to see the people who come in as a result of drink-driving and drug-driving. Often they are young people with terrible, terrible injuries, and often they lose their lives. It is absolutely horrendous. I have been many a time on select committees looking at transport law, and the people who influence me most are the medical people who work in accident and emergency departments in our hospitals. They are often in despair at the fact that we are not strict enough with our road rules and our road legislation. I will support any legislation that comes before this House that will save lives, and I hope many more people will support it and make submissions on it. I look forward to this bill coming into law. We look forward to receiving submissions and I hope that many of the people who work in this area—who work at saving lives—will make submissions.

The bill sends a clear message that it is unacceptable to drive while drugged. I went to a school reunion on the weekend and one of the things that struck me when I walked into the school was the Students Against Drunk Driving poster. It was the first thing that hit me when I went into the school. Thank goodness the young people there are getting the message out that they want to save lives, including those of their fellow students. It is largely young people who are caught up in these accidents and who are caught up with the drugs. Drugs are a huge problem in our society. The police are constantly reminding us that drugs are the curse of this modern age and we have to deal with drugs in whatever way we can. I thank the Minister of Transport for this bill, which increases the penalties and tries to deal with this issue in some way.

As I said, if 400 young people were to die from any other cause people would be marching in the streets. People have said to me that I am against young people because I want to bring in these sorts of laws. I am not. I love young people, and I like them alive, not crushed on a road on a Saturday night or in our hospitals. Mr Worth might screw up his nose, but if it was his child who was killed in this way, he would be asking why the Minister does not do something about the people who are taking drugs and driving. Of course, it is not only young people. Some older people are also doing this, but the statistics show that those who are killed are largely young people under the age of 25.

I commend the Minister for bringing forward this legislation. It also includes provisions relating to buying and selling cars and access to information under the Official Information Act. A number of constituents have come to me about this provision. I am glad that the Minister has listened to what people have said and included provisions relating to the privacy of motor vehicle registration, especially in relation to the purchase of motor vehicles and access to that information. As the Minister said, the bill aims to reach a balance between the right to privacy and the interests of the general public. Hopefully, this bill will do that.

I commend the bill to the House and to the select committee. I hope that some of our Youth Parliament people will make submissions on this, because it was one of the issues that concerned them. I look forward to improved statistics on accident rates on the roads as a result of this bill. I am sure the Minister will be monitoring the efficacy of this law very, very carefully. Thank you.

NATHAN GUY (National) : I wish to make a contribution on the first reading of the Land Transport Amendment Bill (No 4). This is important legislation and we have heard from the Minister tonight that it is all about people driving under the influence of drugs. Police officers will be able to carry out an impairment test—a practical test—and I heard from a member on the other side of the House, although I could not get it out of the Minister today, that it is something along the lines of hopping on one foot on the side of the road. So when the bill gets to the select committee, we will be interested to see some of the practicalities around it.

We have heard tonight, as we have traversed around the House, about some of the very bad statistics we have, and about the fatalities that have occurred throughout New Zealand on our major highways, and on some of our rural and provincial roads as well. We are never quite sure whether those people involved are under the influence of alcohol, drugs—

Dianne Yates: Or both.

NATHAN GUY: —or both. Possibly they could be fatigued from long hours of driving or they could be suffering from sleep deprivation. A whole range of issues is involved.

I think it is important to think about an area up the coast from here—the Kapiti coast—where Transit has recently put some barriers down the side of the road, not the centre of the road, to block some culverts and a drain. When we think about the importance of median barriers for saving lives, we should also think about Centennial Highway, or “Killer Highway” as it is called. The Government is currently investing in the extension of the median barrier up there, which I fully endorse, but I want to talk a little bit about how long it has taken the Government to do that, and about some of the terrible statistics on that “Killer Highway”. Unfortunately, 40 lives have been taken in a 20-year period, and 120 serious injuries have occurred on that portion of Centennial Highway. Just recently another very bad incident occurred by the Fishermans Table Restaurant, and I am sure that while the contractors are there putting in the median barrier, the Government should be considering extending it along the centre of the road to Mackays Crossing. The statistics that I got from Transit showed that the median barrier has proved its worth over time. A study done from 1999 to 2003 showed that a median barrier on this section of road would save $40 million.

Somewhere in the bill it is mentioned that a fatality or loss of a human life, in terms of the social cost to the country, was about $3 million—now $3.2 million. It is unfortunate that we have to put a cost on a human life, but that is the cost of the loss to the country. We need to do our utmost with this bill to ensure not only that motorists who are under the influence of drugs are captured, fined, and dealt to but also that the practicalities are taken into account. It will be very important for the select committee to sort out the practicalities of dealing with, say, someone who is under the influence of a drug like Codral, or some other drug like Prozac, which was mentioned earlier tonight.

Gerry Brownlee: What does the local member think about that median structure?

NATHAN GUY: I am not sure what the member is doing, actually. I do not think there is an awful lot of activity going on in Mana or Ōtaki with the local member. That is why I am champing at the bit to challenge the Government, given that it is sitting on a huge surplus, to extend the median barrier along this dangerous piece of road, while the contractors are there, by a couple of extra kilometres through to Mackays Crossing. That seems to me to be paramount.

I want also to talk about registration, which is another very important part of the bill. We have heard tonight, and we already knew, that it is very easy to find out the number plate of a vehicle and the address of the person in whose name the vehicle is registered. It might be that a driver has made a wrong turn and cut a person off, and, as a result, there could be a period of road rage. It is very easy for anyone to get information through the register of motor vehicles. This provision will tidy that up, and that is a good step. Another problem is that the owners of expensive vehicles are often worried that people on the public highway could note their number plates, track where they live, and therefore come and steal their vehicles—do some form of car conversion. There are also safety issues concerning female drivers to take into account. So the purpose of the register of motor vehicles will enforce the law.

I guess all of us—well, most of us, no doubt—in the House have been caught on a speed camera, after which one has the discussion around the table at home as to who was driving the vehicle on that day, and then requests the photo and the time. Then someone has to put a hand up as to who was driving on the day. Another mechanism in the bill is to allow for the collection of charges. We know there are millions of dollars worth of unpaid fines currently, which this Government is unable to get people to pay, so I am sure that issue will come out in the select committee as well.

Part of the legislation will also empower the Minister of Transport to release names if there is a fault in any vehicle through manufacturing. I think that is a good thing. Any person can still seek information, but it will be tougher to do that than it is currently.

There is also a new category for someone carrying on the back of a vehicle a bike or a dog box that obscures the current number plate. The person will be able to get a supplementary number plate.

In conclusion, I say that National will support this bill to go to the select committee. We believe that it is fundamental that we move to reduce a lot of the fatalities and serious crash accidents on our highways and provincial and rural roads. Although a lot of those occur because of the use of alcohol, a whole lot of others occur, unfortunately, through the taking of drugs. I urge the select committee to think about the practicalities of that to ensure that we get this legislation correct. National supports this very important legislation to go through the House this evening.

• Bill read a first time.

• Bill referred to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee.

Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister of Energy) : I move, That the Biofuel Bill be now read a first time. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee. The bill introduces a biofuels sales obligation, which will see the widespread introduction of biofuels into our transport fuel mix. The bill also makes a number of changes to existing legislation to provide for the consistent regulation of modern fuels used in engines, including biofuels and biofuel blends.

Sustainability and climate change are obviously important issues. As countries around the world grapple with the challenges of the Earth’s changing climate, living and acting sustainably has been propelled to the front of the Government’s decision making and business planning. Sustainability is a key focus of this Government. We recognise that the goal of an environmentally sustainable New Zealand is central to future prosperity and international competitiveness. In particular, global trends towards more environmentally conscious consumption have created an opportunity for New Zealand to build on, and to present, our clean, green image and our reputation for business integrity.

The Government’s sustainability work is under way in diverse fields, including climate change, energy, transport, biodiversity, and science and technology—just to name a few. One of the major initiatives is the development of the New Zealand Energy Strategy, which sets out the vision for a sustainable energy system for New Zealand within which renewable energy plays a critical role. As one of the suite of policy initiatives in the New Zealand Energy Strategy, the Government is committed to encouraging the uptake of biofuels as an alternative transport fuel.

Transport in New Zealand is responsible for more than 40 percent of New Zealand’s energy greenhouse gas emissions, and is particularly dependent on imported oil and oil products, which make up over a third of our total energy supply. The Government has set a target of halving domestic transport emissions per capita by 2040, relative to 2007 per capita emissions. That will require improved vehicle efficiency, continued improvements to public transport, and the substitution of renewable alternatives for some fossil fuels, including in the electricity sector. Substituting carbon-neutral biofuels for fossil fuels will be part of the solution, and will contribute to transport emission reductions. When biofuels replace petrol and diesel, our net carbon dioxide emissions are reduced, because biofuels absorb as much carbon dioxide when they grow as they emit when they are used.

Biofuels are a renewable energy source derived from organic matter such as agricultural crops and residues, forestry residues and forestry products, and by-products from some agricultural, and industrial processes in some waste streams. Domestic tallow, a by-product of the meat industry, for example, can be used to produce bio-diesel, and whey, a by-product from the dairy industry, is already being turned into ethanol for blending with petrol. Biofuels will also help to reduce our reliance on imported fossil fuels by diversifying the transport fuel mix, some of which will be produced from local resources. That will increase the resilience of our transport system and economy to sudden disruptions in oil supply, as well as address longer-term concerns about the security of global oil supplies and about price uncertainty. Biofuels can also reduce harmful vehicle emissions such as those of carbon monoxide and particulates, creating positive impacts for air quality and human health.

For the purposes of the biofuels sales obligation, the term “biofuels” refers to those fuels that are used as a direct replacement for petrol or diesel. Such biofuels can either be used neat or blended with petrol or diesel. An example of a biofuel blend is the blend of 10 percent bio-ethanol and 90 percent petrol recently introduced by Gull Petroleum in Auckland. It is important to ensure that the biofuels available to consumers are of an appropriate quality and form, and I will come back to that. A range of likely developments will enable biofuels, over time, to make up an increasing proportion of transport fuels. The biofuels sales obligation should be viewed as being an initial step in the transition towards a greater uptake of biofuels in future years. It will trigger important changes in infrastructure that are needed to cater for these new fuels.

The Biofuel Bill is in two parts. Part 1 provides for the introduction of the biofuels sales obligation and the regulation of fuel quality through amendments to the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Act 1989. In 2005 the Government agreed in principle to the introduction of an obligation to facilitate the entry of biofuels to the New Zealand market. That was followed by a period of consultation with key stakeholders to determine the appropriate design for and level of the obligation, and the final policy was announced in February this year.

The biofuels sales obligation applies to firms that first purchase or obtain petrol or diesel from a New Zealand manufacturer, such as the refinery at Marsden Point, or that import petrol or diesel directly from overseas. The liable firms would currently be the oil companies BP, Caltex, Gull Petroleum, Mobil, and Shell. The obligation will require a percentage of the energy content of the combined petrol and diesel sold or used by each oil company to be biofuels. The requirement will begin from the passage of the legislation at 0.53 percent, and will increase to 3.4 percent by 2012. Actually, we may change the inception date to 1 July 2008 rather than have it start at the passage of the legislation, because I think the oil companies would like a bit more certainty as to the date. That seems a pretty reasonable request, so we will look at that at the select committee.

Except for the first obligation period, which is a part-year, each subsequent obligation period is for a full calendar year. To ensure that firms meet the obligation, there will be financial penalties for non-compliance with it. Those penalties can, however, be reduced for a firm that fails to meet its obligation because of events outside of its control.

A point-of-excise collection is used as a proxy for measuring the sale and use of petrol, diesel, and biofuels. Aligning it with existing systems is intended to reduce compliance costs for fuel suppliers and reduce administrative costs for them and for the Government.

The Ministry of Economic Development will be the administering agency for the obligation. Liable firms will be required to submit independently audited reports on their compliance, with the obligation to report to the administering agency being within 4 months of the end of each obligation period.

The Government is keen to see that only sustainably produced biofuels are supplied to the New Zealand market, so as not to create a new environmental problem as we fix another. There are legitimate concerns that some biofuel production causes the destruction of rainforests, causing greenhouse gas emissions and the loss of biodiversity, or competes unduly with food production. From the commencement of the obligation, firms will be required to report on the country of origin of imported biofuels and biofuel feedstocks. The bill also contains a clause that enables environmental sustainability standards to be introduced to ensure that only sustainable biofuels count towards the biofuels sales obligation. Those standards will be developed in consultation with the industry. The issues around deforestation are expected to be reasonably easy to define. The line is more difficult to draw around what constitutes undue competition with food production. Sugar conversion to ethanol, for example, is seen by most people to be acceptable, but some grain and seed - based biofuels are less so.

The obligation will allow flexibility to liable firms in a number of ways, so as to facilitate firms in pursuing the least-cost option to supply biofuels. Firms can apply to have the obligation partially or fully deferred in years 1 or 2 of the obligation. That allows time for firms to put in place infrastructure and for local biofuel suppliers to build plants. However, firms that defer the obligation will be required to supply an additional 5 percent of that year’s biofuels sales obligation at a later date. Liable firms can trade their biofuel sales in order to meet the obligation, so biofuels supplied by one firm could count towards another firm’s obligation. Biofuels supplied by third parties can also potentially count, which provides another incentive to biofuel producers. To provide for the normal irregularities in fuel supplies, liable firms will be able to bank shortfalls and surpluses of up to 10 percent of their annual obligation into the next year. Those shortfalls or surpluses must be used or made up in the next year.

In terms of quality, it is important that the biofuels supplied to consumers meet appropriate quality standards, so that consumers can buy them with the same confidence with which they currently purchase petrol and diesel. Where appropriate, biofuels will also be required to be labelled so that consumers are suitably informed. The bill also provides for a requirement that no petrol or diesel blend containing 1 percent or less of biofuel may be promoted as containing biofuels or as a biofuel blend.

Biofuels and biofuel blends are bought within the scope of the levy that funds monitoring activities. Responsibility for collecting that levy—to be known as the petroleum and engine fuel monitoring levy in future—is transferred from the Ministry of Economic Development to the Customs Service and is aligned with the collection of excise duty in the measurement of the biofuels sales obligation.

Part 2 provides a number of amendments to other pieces of legislation that are associated with the introduction of biofuels and caters for future diversification of the fuel market. The Petroleum Demand Restraint Act 1981 and the International Energy Agreement Act 1976 were enacted with only petroleum-based fuels in mind. This bill amends those Acts to explicitly cover or provide for the modern fuels used in engines, including biofuels and blends of fuels. In addition, the bill makes biofuels and biofuel blends subject to the local authorities petroleum tax and renames it the local authorities fuel tax. The bill also makes a number of amendments to the Customs and Excise Act and the Tariff Act. Those amendments are made to facilitate the use of the excise point in the administration of the biofuels sales obligation and the collection of the petroleum and engine fuel monitoring levy, and to ensure that the ethanol component of the petrol-ethanol blends is not subject to excise or excise-equivalent duties. Section 286 of the Customs and Excise Act is amended to provide more flexibility in the ability to make regulations to exempt facilities from being customs-controlled areas in appropriate circumstances.

I look forward to the consideration of this bill by the select committee, which I am sure will improve it further.

GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam) : The National Party will be supporting the Biofuel Bill going to a select committee because we think there are some aspects that, while very laudable, do need a degree of scrutiny. I want to point to a couple of things that the Minister David Parker said in his speech. The first of those points revolves round the consultation that has taken place with the five large importers of oil products into New Zealand. It is our understanding that when the biofuels obligation was first talked of in 2002 some relatively small targets were set, but between 2002 and 2005, and then the New Zealand Energy Strategy released yesterday, those obligations appear to have increased quite considerably.

One of the questions that immediately comes to mind is whether the oil companies have the capacity to meet their obligations. That, of course, is also caught up in the proviso that any biofuel that is imported into New Zealand then blended into product here—or, in fact, imported as blended into product—has to be able to carry certification that it has been sustainably produced. There is no doubt that the world will have a considerable amount of biofuel available in the foreseeable future. The United States, for example, has established a very, very ambitious target of 20 percent of all motor fuel being biofuel by the year 2017. That is not because it wants to see biofuels replace other carbon-emitting fuels, but, rather, because it is concerned about security of supply. That is fair enough; that is its issue. But we hear of programmes in the United States where there are federal and some state tax incentives in order for biofuels to be produced in the first place, then blended with either diesel or petrol. What would concern us is that the actual source of the biofuel may not be all that clear. So part of the select committee’s work should be, I think, to work out what sort of regime will exist around that certification process.

Although the Minister has been quite open—and I think quite appropriately so—in saying that the date for the implementation might go out by 6 months or so, and we would support that, what is important is that any of the oil companies that decide that they have to defer for a period of time are not unduly penalised because the deferral is a result of their inability to source sustainably produced biofuel. The evidence coming at a rate of knots out of various countries around the world is that much of the biofuel being produced en masse at the moment is barely carbon neutral, and is, in most cases, carbon positive. So I think a problem may be faced there. I am sure that the select committee will be able to work with those oil companies to work out a reasonable regime. My point about the deferral, though, is that simply saying a company can defer for 12 months, but then it will have the added obligation of an increased amount of biofuel inside its mix, may, in fact, not be easily achieved. I urge that there be some sort of flexibility in this—particularly if a strong biofuels industry is to be developed in New Zealand.

The Minister and other members of Parliament will be aware that there is a company currently looking at some very substantial investments in the conversion of locally sourced tallow into biofuel. We would hope that that operation gets off the ground and that its production of biofuel is as carbon neutral or as low in its carbon emitting as is claimed. It is interesting to note that another company that was set up in New Zealand was looking at growing substantial acreages of maize for the purpose of producing biofuel in a plant that was to be fuelled, I understand, by a wood-fired source. That was a very, very difficult proposition in that event. It would have been pretty much closed cycle in terms of carbon dioxide emissions, but it has unfortunately fallen over. The question I would have—and I hope that company comes to the select committee to discuss the issue—is why that particular proposal has fallen over. Surely it cannot be because of the price of biofuel, because that will always be set internationally.

One of the interesting things about the biofuel initiative is that there will be a cost for consumers. The estimate is that a litre of biofuel will be between 4c and 6c dearer than a litre of standard fossil fuel. The question that arises for us is whether that will be shared across the whole of the consumption of combustion fuel inside New Zealand, or whether it will be borne individually by motorists who make that choice. I see the Minister is nodding and saying it will be borne across the whole portfolio. I think that is something we will want to hear more firmly during the select committee process.

Another aspect of the biofuel sales target is whether the target can be met by perhaps completely ignoring the vehicle fleet in New Zealand, and by simply supplying a greater percentage of biofuel to the stationary engine sector, and, therefore, meeting the obligation across the entire consumption of motor fuels at the present time without the need for blending. I know that the concern that oil companies have is that when a fuel mix changes, people inevitably experience things going wrong with their vehicles, that are—in their eyes anyway—directly a result of that changed fuel. We have seen it before with the taking of lead out of petrol and with the reductions of sulphur in diesel, and we will no doubt see it when it comes to biofuel, as well. I can understand the oil companies’ concern about that. So I think there is also a need for a strong education programme around the sorts of cars that can take this particular fuel. I understand that any car produced after the year 2000 can quite adequately take fuel blends of up to 5 percent and possibly even up to 10 percent, while cars produced before that time may not take them so easily. Given that the average age of a vehicle in New Zealand is now some 11 years, it means that the vast majority of our fleet will be able to run perfectly adequately on biofuels from the day of their introduction.

It was interesting to hear the Minister say that the excise that is levied on petrol, diesel, and other motor fuels at the moment will not be levied on biofuel or the biofuel component. Nonetheless, we have an increase in the amount of funds that are currently collected for measuring the quality of our motor fuels. At the moment, I understand it is 0.025c per litre—a very, very low figure, which I think produces only $15 million a year, or some such. The interesting point will be how much it increases, and what the actual value to New Zealanders of that particular increase will be. If it is desirable that more New Zealanders embrace the concept of biofuel, readily want to put the stuff in their tanks, and even ask for a higher level of blending in their fuels, we may want to mitigate the bureaucratic costs that go alongside of that.

The penalties regime is one that I think the Minister might want to have another think about. That is simply because it appears to me that the five companies importing oil into New Zealand have a willingness to try to make this work. They have concerns—and we have outlined some of those concerns—and we want to work through the select committee process to try to mitigate those concerns. But putting a pernicious regime in place exposes us—and by that I mean the country—to the risk that some of those biofuels that are eventually introduced are not as clean as they might be.

Can I conclude by saying that National thinks the population of New Zealand will probably quite willingly embrace the concept of biofuels. I think very few people in this country do not know that trying to clean up the exhaust emissions from vehicles will be useful. I do not think, frankly, that too many people understand the importance of reducing carbon dioxide emissions—largely because they do not see them—and it is hard to say that they experience the effects of them. One can guarantee the moment one tries to explain those effects, some sort of counter-activity will occur in the atmosphere that gets people away from the original point.

Overall, our view is that we will support this bill going to a select committee. We have a number of questions about the implementation of the legislation. I will reiterate what those questions are. Essentially, they are about the certification of the manufacturing process for biofuels, to ensure that it is not a carbon-emitting process, and, therefore, of very little value to New Zealand’s efforts; and, secondly, making sure that the biofuels obligation can be met from those clean sources without those companies experiencing unnecessary penalties, which we know are ultimately passed on.

I understand that the bell is not working this evening. Oh, I have another 2 minutes. In that case, can I simply say to the Minister that we hope the select committee process does not see the usual performance at select committees where the officials treat the Opposition members as though they are a completely adversarial party in these circumstances, and we hope that the Minister recognises that we support this bill—with considerable goodwill—going to a select committee, recognising the importance of all of this for New Zealand’s future. It has to be said that as an agricultural producing country with a huge emission problem from our agricultural sector, and not wanting to penalise ourselves unduly in the future, getting this part of the emissions profile in better shape is in all of our interests. So we hope we have that assurance from the Minister. With that comment, I simply say that we will participate in the select committee process very honestly and very willingly, but with considerable and diligent scrutiny.

Hon MARIAN HOBBS (Labour—Wellington Central) : I welcome the National Party’s support for the first reading of the Biofuel Bill, and its commitment to an honest and clear debate in the select committee. It is obvious that that member has not been a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee, because in that particular committee we have very good working relationships, most of the time—it does sometimes depend on the membership—and that has been worthwhile, particularly when we have been dealing with the waste legislation. With that legislation I saw the most honest work I have experienced in my 11 years in this House in a select committee. So I am very proud of the Local Government and Environment Committee.

I am also very proud of this Government’s response to the challenges surrounding climate change. We have to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. Our Minister has chosen to move on a number of fronts, mainly because our greenhouse gas emissions come from a number of different activities. New Zealand’s distinctive greenhouse gas emissions portfolio has always been of interest. When one is with a European group whose members say: “You mean half of it comes from your animals?”, with a look of great query on their faces, one has to gently explain about methane and agriculture. This completely puzzles the Germans, as it does people from many other European countries. They just do not understand that sort of issue.

Elliott Morely, the previous Minister in the British Government who was responsible for climate change policy, was extremely complimentary when he was here of the manner in which we are dealing with this issue in New Zealand under our emissions policy. In other words, not one sector alone, or not one contributor alone, is bearing the total cost and responsibility. Every emitter is inside the framework. So, yes, the agriculture sector will come on board later, and, yes, it is quite obvious because it has some enormous scientific research issues to face in order to find some of the solutions there.

Questions of deforestation are being dealt with upfront, as are those relating to the energy needed to power industry, and also the energy that is needed to power our homes. So a focus comes on renewable energy rather than a reliance, as has been developing, on fossil fuels in terms of thermal energy. Our focus is therefore on conserving, and using less energy in our homes. It is about the kind of energy we use and the fact that we should be conserving it, particularly through how we build. So we have the Minister of Housing involved in that, as well, and the building industry in terms of how we insulate and heat our homes.

Then there is transport. As the Minister said tonight, 40 percent of New Zealand’s emissions come from transport, and there is a commitment out there to halve that by 2040. When we look at the options, we see a move to efficiency in the movement of freight. Too often when people talk about transport they are thinking about the movement of people, but if members sit in their offices and look down Lambton Quay, they will see that it is not about the movement of people they see during the day; it is small freight on the move, in vans and trucks, up and down and through our cities. So there has to be some efficiency that is gained there. A lot of work needs to happen in that particular area.

The other option is the move in the transport of people out of private vehicles and into public transport. We have already seen the investment the Government has made. I look at my own area of Wellington and see the investment that has been made there—the investment in trains. Our trains—and I particularly think of the trains coming in from the Wairarapa—were pretty basic, to put it mildly. They were very rarely on time. So what has gone in there? Seven new sets of trains have gone in, and they are beginning to run on time. And never let anyone talk to me or lecture me about the efficiency of private companies, when the private company that bought and sold our train system totally let down this country in the way it managed both its rolling stock and the actual railway lines. So whenever anyone quotes the sort of God-given efficiency of private enterprise, I can think only of what happened to our railways in New Zealand when it went into private enterprise.

Gerry Brownlee: Don’t be so narrow!

Hon MARIAN HOBBS: No, I am not narrow; I just get very suspicious of people who are so black and white and rigid in their presumption that private necessarily is always good. So we in Wellington have come in and put an extraordinary amount of money into trains.

We also, thank God, solved the issue around trolley buses, and now we will see those trolley buses. If members have ever been down Lambton Quay and seen the diesel buses go through, they will notice the noise they make in that narrow canyon of Lambton Quay and Willis Street, compared with the quietness of the wonderful trolley bus.

There is still room to improve, so we come to biofuels—the subject of this bill. Biofuels lower emissions. Biofuels also—and I did not notice this in Mr Brownlee’s speech—lower our dependence on fossil fuels. I think that is quite important. It is not only that they are carbon neutral in themselves, but that a number of people out there are reminding us that oil may not last forever. It is a fossil fuel. So I think I read that this Biofuel Bill will require 3.4 percent of total fuel sold by oil companies to be biofuel by 2012. This requirement will begin from either the passage of the legislation or July 2008, and at that stage it will be 0.53 percent. I heard Mr Brownlee say he was worried about the capacity of oil companies to meet the obligation. I understand that 0.53 percent is almost about where they are right now. So as it goes up gradually over those numbers of years, to 3.4 percent, I think it is attainable.

However, a number of questions are asked around these particular issues.

Gerry Brownlee: You know; you’re in the pocket of oil companies.

Hon MARIAN HOBBS: I doubt that anyone would ever say I was in the pocket of an oil company. That completely amuses me.

What is the Government proposing regarding biofuels? The Government is developing and introducing a biofuels sales obligation for the sale and use of biofuel blends in New Zealand. The aim is to ensure that oil companies selling petrol or diesel must also sell a small amount—3.4 percent—of biofuels. It would be up to the oil companies—and this is important—to determine which combination of biofuels, which blend levels to use, and where to market them. So inside this—and this is worth exploring in the select committee—there is actually quite a lot of room for the oil companies to move. It is not saying that every time I lift the handle to put petrol in my car that 3.4 percent of that particular blend will be going into my car. It may not be. As I think Mr Brownlee pointed out, it could also be just in stationary engines and not actually in the car fleet.

The second question asked at the end is: what are the benefits of biofuels? There are a number of benefits, not only to do with the lowering of emissions; they are about air quality and human health, and if we are looking at Auckland, then anything we can do—as we did—around the amount of sulphur and diesel used is therefore to meet the needs of improved air quality. Better fuel lubrication reduces deposits in diesel engines. It is also non-toxic, biodegradable, and speeds up the break down of any spills of diesel that may be made, and that is also important in a country with so many rivers.

Thirdly, does the use of biofuels affect vehicles? Modifications are not necessary for petrol or diesel engines using low-level biofuel blends. Petrol engines, tuned correctly for the use of ordinary petrol, would normally not exhibit any problems when using bio-ethanol petrol blends of up to 3 percent. Diesel engines tuned correctly could take biofuel blends of up to 5 percent bio-diesel. Most modern vehicles are compatible.

There is the controversy around biofuels that they can compete with growing for food—and we have heard a lot about that in recent weeks—and that they can affect the biodiversity by massive agricultural farming. That question about biodiversity is about how one farms, not about whether one farms for biofuel. It is that that we have to look at. When there has been a wholesale taking out of certain kinds of rainforests in order to replace them with certain plants, either maize or some other palm oil plants, there are some real problems around that. It is the same thing when working out about timber. There are ways of actually being able to do that. The world is far better now at looking at and being able to measure whether something is sustainable. In New Zealand biofuels may come from initially tallow, animal fats, and, afterwards, from things like wood waste, syngas derived from biomass, or algae grown on sewage ponds. There is room to develop here.

Finally, I would like to say that this whole issue around climate change and managing these emissions is an incentive for us to get going in research and actually get out there and find some solutions to the problems. For too long we have said that this issue is so big that there are no answers. This bill is an incentive to companies and people to start providing the answers. Thank you.

ERIC ROY (National—Invercargill) : I am quite enthusiastic about taking part in this debate. I think this is a debate we need to have, and this is a process we need to go through. We need to look at this Biofuel Bill, and we need to hear what the public has to say through the select committee process and the submissions. I acknowledge the Minister of Energy, David Parker, who is still in the House listening to the debate. Quite frequently, it has been the habit of Ministers to drop a bill into the House, make a prepared speech, and then have other pressing business, so I just acknowledge his interest in staying here.

There are a number of complex issues that come together and focus us on this issue of whether biofuels are part of the solution we have in terms of our response to the whole issue of climate change. I believe that they are a part and that therefore it is important that we have this debate. I also believe that New Zealand has to be in there at the developmental and experimental stages, because we will gain credibility in terms of the products we sell. You see, we sit at 19.5 tonnes of greenhouse gas emission per head of population, and the rest of the world is at 5.5 percent. I happen to believe that there is something immoral in First World countries saying that, yes, the planet is in crisis but that they will just hold where they are, and everybody should hold where they are, which means that underdeveloped countries stay underdeveloped. So we need to look for solutions.

We have a situation now where planet Earth is combusting fossil fuels and producing over 6 billion tonnes of carbon equivalents every year, and when we look at the sort of activity that is creating that, we see that the transport industry is a significant part of it. It is important that when we are looking for solutions we do not just provide placebos—things that sound good, such as holding international forums and making great speeches, and setting in place criteria that actually make no difference. If we are looking at the transport industry, we have to say that there are probably, with the knowledge we have at this time, three areas we can develop. There is the electric motor, and probably the thing that is holding that up is that at this stage we are pretty reliant on lead-acid batteries that negate any advantage. So we are looking for further development of titanium batteries or lighter batteries and also a quicker way of charging them. There is the possibility of converting internal combustion engines to burn hydrogen fuels, but there are two or three problems surrounding that. At this stage that technology is quite expensive, and the sustainable forms of generating hydrogen through electrolysis in tidal waves, photovoltaic cells, or wave action are not developed far enough. Biofuels are actually something we can engage in almost immediately. Both our diesel engines and our internal combustion engines can get straight into utilising these fuels. So we have an advantage there, and while not neglecting those other things, we are off first base in terms of working with biofuel solutions.

The concept of biofuels is not new. When the first oil shocks came along there was a company in Southland that grew oilseed rape, and with only 5 percent diesel added to the oilseed rape, most of the diesel engines that were either in tractors or transport vehicles would run quite well on it. They smelt a little bit like fish and chip shops, but there was not any noticeable lack of power, and they actually operated. Dr David Stewart at Invermay Agricultural Centre in the late 1970s, about 30 years ago, did a lot of work on growing biomass and digesting it under anaerobic situations to produce compressed natural gas (CNG), and that looked to have some considerable possibilities. So this is not a new thing that we are doing. The problem with CNG was that one could not actually compress it into a liquid unless one got up to about 1,200 atmospheres, so a very large tank was needed to make it work. Again, with CNG a bit of power was lost.

There are a variety of options that have been tried, and some exciting things are happening right now. The previous speaker, the Hon Marian Hobbs, suggested anaerobic sewage. Right now I happen to know that both Rolls-Royce plc and Pratt and Whitney are testing jet fuel equivalents. I guess it is a kerosene equivalent that is being produced that way, and some of it is coming out of Invercargill. They are actually looking at that as a jet fuel alternative. So there are some quite exciting possibilities. We have looked, as previous members have said, at the use of animal fats and tallow to create bio-diesels and ethanol equivalents, which will replace gasoline.

There are some traps here, though, and that is why we need to have this debate, take the public on board, and seriously consider the submissions. Although National is happy to support this bill through the select committee process and the first reading, we want to see those things aired, and we want to get our heads around exactly what those issues are. As I said earlier, it is important, if we are going to solve this, that it is not either a knee-jerk reaction that might be going in the wrong direction or a placebo that does not work.

The economics surrounding a lot of the decisions that have been made in some countries look, to me, to be very, very questionable. A significant portion of North America’s arable land—in some states it is about 40 percent—is now going into maize production to produce ethanol. The figures on that look to be very negligible. We can read figures that say that there is from about a 7 to 30 percent gain in terms of the carbon imprint. It would seem to me to be quite impractical to try to create ethanol out of a crop that has a high requirement in energy for tillage and a high requirement for fertility in order to grow anything in any way of a decent crop. I think that the world is just now starting to notice the impact of converting significant areas of its arable land into ethanol production. In the balance of what the world is producing in foodstuffs to consumption, there is normally between 110 and 120 days worth of food in the food chain. That is from harvest to consumption through shops, etc. Right now it is under 50 days; it is down at about 47 days. There are obviously a lot of complex issues in that. It is maybe more that just the fact that quite a considerable amount of arable land has been taken out to put into ethanol production. But, again, we will get distortions if we do not approach this whole process of ethanol production or biofuel production in a way that is sensible and does not cause disruptions that put us in a worse place than where we would be if we never did it.

There are also some exciting developments in New Zealand in the ethanol areas. I have talked a little bit about anaerobic activity on sewage to produce kerosene equivalents. I have heard and seen presentations from Genesis Energy, and it has very cautionary comments to make about lurching into fertility-hungry crops to produce ethanol. Genesis has done some very interesting work on a couple of crops of Salix, willows, which can be planted and harvested every 2 years, and which can provide products like lignans and sugars that are not glucose-based. The economics of that look to be on. Sawgrass is another one, but the future could be in harvesting gorse, for all we know, and we do not want to close our minds to what will actually be the answers. Who would have thought that sewage would fly a jet plane?

The field is wide open for us, but there a number of things that we need to be very clear about. We need to make sure that what we are doing is viable and not just something we are doing to mitigate against our liability to the Kyoto Protocol. We need to be sure that it will fix the problem. There are issues about the durability of engines. To replace my No. 1 tractor with a new tractor today would cost $150,000. I do not want to force that to happen any sooner by being forced by legislation to burn fuels that might shorten the life of that tractor. There are compliance costs. There is the whole net gain in the carbon footprint. There are issues in the distribution of what may be new fuels.

Change is already happening. We need to engage in it. We have a responsibility not only to look good but to find solutions. I believe we should have this process, and National is certainly supporting this bill’s referral to the select committee.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS (Co-Leader—Green) : People would expect the Green Party to celebrate a technology that replaces scarce and polluting fossil carbon with cleaner, renewable carbon in our motor vehicles, but, in fact, the Greens approach the issue of biofuel with very considerable caution.

The advocates of biofuel claim it will reduce climate-changing greenhouse gases, provide oil security and energy independence for the future, revitalise rural communities with new farming and processing industries, and clean up local air pollution. The critics point out that some biofuel takes as much, or more, fossil fuel to make as it saves, that it replaces one scarce resource, oil, with an equally scarce and probably more precious resource, fertile land, that it will seriously increase world hunger, and that it could destroy the last great areas of wilderness and biodiversity such as tropical forests. There is some element of truth in both of these claims, and that is why the Greens have negotiated a clause in this bill that sets out criteria for biofuels that qualify to meet the New Zealand standard.

There is no doubt that burning ethanol or bio-diesel in vehicles does have lower harmful emissions that contribute to respiratory disease, and that it releases no fossil carbon directly into the atmosphere. But we have to take a life cycle analysis here and look at how the biofuel is made. The biofuel with the worst press—and deservedly so, and the previous speaker referred to it, as well—is ethanol from corn. In the United States, Government subsidies encourage diversion of corn from food markets to fuel, and the high price of petroleum with which it competes has encouraged a large increase in corn growing and has just about dried up US exports of corn for food. The price of tortillas in Mexico has doubled as a result, and a source of food grains for Africa has virtually gone. Some say that raising the price of corn will help struggling farmers in developing countries, but the simple fact is that the poor in those countries cannot buy food at that price. Worse, high corn prices for fuel are international, so the market will divert corn grown in developing countries into exports for fuel production in the West, perhaps making a few farmers in those countries a bit richer, but starving many more of their people. To put it crudely, to make ethanol we need sugars or starches, to make bio-diesel we need oils—those are what food is made of too.

Biofuel can be made of any food, grain, or sugar, or oilseed; the determining factor is how much can be got from an acre of land. Even if biofuel is not made from a food crop, it may be grown on land that would otherwise be used for food production. If it needs nitrogen fertilisers, water, and tractorable land, it is competing with food production, and in the competition of the market the engines of the rich will always out-compete the stomachs of the poor, even though the result is large-scale death.

Food is not the only land use that can be out-competed by biofuel. The forests of South-east Asia, last home to an incredible number of rare species, like the orang-utan, are being clear-felled to plant palm oil plantations for bio-diesel. Add to that that some biofuels do not even reduce carbon dioxide emissions; the amount of fossil fuel that is used to grow them, fertilise them, cultivate them, harvest them, transport them, and process them outweighs the benefits of having a renewable fuel.

Why, then, would the Greens support this bill? We are supporting the bill because there are some possibilities, particularly in New Zealand, of making some biofuel without causing starvation or destruction of habitat. There are some possibilities of making biofuel with a significant net energy gain, and we want to provide for that kind of industry here.

First of all, there are wastes: wastes from all forms of farming and crop production, wastes from food processing, and by-products from agricultural industries such as tallow and whey. We could get maybe 5 percent of our current fuel use from those sources. It is a very small amount, but it is a start and it could be very valuable in an oil-constrained future. Getting a small-scale industry started, and getting the cars and the fuel distribution system organised and capable of accepting biofuel will set the stage for second-generation biofuels, which may give us much more than that, if they come to pass.

The first of those, and a particular advantage for New Zealand, is wood, waste wood, and woody biomass of many kinds. It is harder to break down the lignin and the cellulose, but wood does not need top-quality food land to grow, it generally does not need added water, and it generally does not need added nitrogen. The energy yield may not be all that high, but if the energy inputs are from wood, that may still be acceptable. We do not know when or if that will be commercial, but we do know there are some very interesting trials going on—for example, with willow.

I have spoken to Genesis Research and Development, the firm that is developing the Salix to ethanol projects, and it has this exciting vision for the Taupō basin, where we have to de-stock land where animal excreta are causing serious pollution of Lake Taupō. The company reckons it can offer dry stock farmers as good an income from growing willow and coppicing every couple of years for biofuel as they currently get from animals. At the same time, the willow would tend to suck the nutrients out of the subsoil and would not add more nitrogen into the lake, and some of that land has to be de-stocked anyway. So there are some possible win-win solutions—where there are environmental benefits as well as fuel benefits—and they are the ones that we should be pursuing.

A second possibility in New Zealand is bio-diesel from algae grown on sewage, and if that actually becomes commercial—and there are still a lot of questions around it—it is a real win-win. It does not take any land, it grows on sewage ponds, and it cleans up the sewage much better than current treatment methods. It is hard to think of something that could be more of a win-win solution than that. It is a very long way from being commercial, but I have driven in a car fuelled from a small quantity of bio-diesel obtained from that algae, so it is not totally a pipedream.

Because there are good biofuels and there are bad biofuels, the Greens have negotiated for a requirement that biofuel cannot be counted towards the sales obligation unless it is produced sustainably, and that is given effect to in clause 34G(2)(e), which provides for an Order in Council to set a sustainability standard, really, that the biofuels are not significantly impacting on food production or the environment and biodiversity. I am not convinced the wording is quite right yet; I think the select committee needs to have a look at it, and needs to amend it to make it an absolute requirement, rather than an opportunity, for an Order in Council to be passed to set those standards, and we will certainly be looking for that in the Committee stage.

This bill is very tentative—a toe in the water. By 2012 only 3.4 percent of our fuel will be biofuel. That is less than 1 year’s growth in demand at the moment. It shows the futility of our starry-eyed belief that we can carry on just as we are with our inefficient transport systems, our inefficient vehicles, and stick biofuel in the fuel tanks instead. But New Zealand is much better placed than most countries, with its land, and its climate, and its knowledge of growing things, to make a success of biofuels if it can be done. But they will only ever provide a part of our needs.

We have to face the unsustainability of our wasteful vehicles, and our wasteful use of them. We can save far more oil much faster through efficiency standards for vehicles, as provided for in the National Energy Efficiency and Conservation Strategy, with a stretch target of 25 percent better efficiency for vehicles coming into the country by 2015. We also need to expand our provision and use of public transport and travel-demand management. If we do all those things on the demand side, not just on the supply side, then 3.4 percent by 2012 might actually mean something.

TARIANA TURIA (Co-Leader—Māori Party) : Tēna koe, Mr Deputy Speaker. Tēna tātou katoa. In simple economic terms, this bill is a demonstration of the principle of energy returned on energy invested. The bill amends the Energy (Fuels, Levies, and References) Act 1989 in order to implement the biofuels sales obligation policy. In doing so, it puts into being the equation that energy is required to make energy. The biofuels sales obligation policy will require suppliers of petrol and diesel in New Zealand to also supply a proportion of biofuels up to a level of 3.4 percent by 2012. Basically, for every petrol supply provided a certain percentage of biofuel will be included.

The amendment to the Customs and Excise Act 1996 ensures that biofuel and blends will be free of excise or excise-equivalent duty. In terms of the 3.4 percent by 2012, this is certainly not fast enough, from the Māori Party’s point of view. The Māori Party supports the use of alternatives to oil-based fuels to address both the immediate crisis of peak oil and the longer term crisis of climate change. But we must do more, as progress is far too slow. Biofuel—the liquid fuel produced from biological fuel sources like vegetable oils, animal fats, sugars, and other food crops—can act as either a substitute for, or an additive to, petrol and diesel.

The most commonly used biofuels are bio-diesel and bio-ethanol. Biofuels are a renewable energy source, they are non-toxic in the event of spills, and they reduce carbon emissions. Of course, that all leads to the emissions cycle proceeding rapidly through the atmosphere, resulting in less adverse effects on the climate. One would think, therefore, that there should be a great deal of optimism related to this bill. Soaring oil prices have made biofuels economically viable. Energy demand is predicted to keep soaring, the future for oil supplies is constrained, and, to top it off, biofuels are resoundingly eco-friendly, or so we are told.

So what does it all mean? Will the humble tortilla chip become the next black gold? Or will Kellogg’s cornflakes become the new luxury breakfast item? One of the challenges of biofuels is that the energy produced is always less than the energy that created it. The energy utilised in the manufacturing process is lost in the fertilising of the land used to grow the biomass; the irrigation, maintenance, and harvesting of the biomass—all usually done with oil-dependent heavy machinery—the transportation of the biomass; and the biomass to biofuel conversion. What all this means is that there are difficult choices and decisions around how we can rationalise the viability of the whole process, especially in a future that will be energy scarce.

The Māori Party has advocated for a genuine progress index as providing a measure of comprehensive, sustainable, and inclusive advancement. We believe that a more comprehensive indicator of progress towards sustainable development would be useful to this debate. When measured by the genuine progress index we find there is a deficit, and the production of the biomass overall ends up being uneconomic. So how sensible is that?

A particularly useful contribution to this debate has come from Cuba and its revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. At the end of March this year Mr Castro warned American President George Bush “against the sinister idea of converting food into fuel.” Mr Castro’s concern was that the United States’ use of corn to make ethanol biofuel to reduce the country’s dependence on foreign oil has already driven up the price of corn, and as corn is used as animal feed, when the price of corn goes up, the price of meat goes up. Given that more land is used to grow corn rather than other food crops, their prices also rise. In other words, the poor people of the world go hungry while America’s greedy, guzzling Chryslers are well fed on biofuel.

The key issue for us, therefore, is that the materials used to produce biofuels—[Interruption] Did Mr Mapp have something to say? Does the member want to take a call?

Dr Wayne Mapp: When Africa had decent Governments, they grew their own food; look at Zimbabwe.

TARIANA TURIA: I thank Mr Mapp for his contribution.

The key issue for us, therefore, is that the materials used to produce biofuels must be sustainable and do not have adverse consequences for any other consumer. We would be extremely concerned if actions taken to reduce energy consumption and conserve energy led to food shortages and increased food prices. In New Zealand it appears the single biggest source of bio-diesel could be tallow—an animal fat that is a by-product of meat processing. Likewise, bio-ethanol in New Zealand is made as a by-product of the dairy industry. However, the worst case scenario would be that increasing the value of biofuels may incentivise farmers to grow biofuels and not food.

It is in light of such concerns that the International Food Policy Research Institute has issued a warning that in order to make strong environmental and economic contributions and to look after the interests and well-being of the poor, we need to take a precautionary approach. Such caution is of particular relevance as we approach 17 October, the International Day for the Eradication of Poverty. The theme for this year’s International Day for the Eradication of Poverty—“Working Together out of Poverty”—promotes the concept of a global anti-poverty alliance.

The Māori Party believes that any further consideration of biofuels must take into active consideration the impact of biofuel production on the lives of poor people as both energy producers and consumers. The regulations in this bill go some way towards giving us confidence in this regard. Included is a regulation that provides for an Order in Council to specify in the future that biofuels having certain characteristics may or may not qualify as biofuels.

We would hope this will mean that the bio-diesel we use as a substitute for ordinary diesel, or the bio-ethanol we use as a substitute for ordinary petrol, will meet specified environmental or sustainability standards. We want to make absolutely sure that the green alternative we take on to power our cars, buses, and trains does not create famines, trash rainforests, bump up food prices, and create a market opportunity for the corporate world to exploit. We want to avoid a fuel versus food trade-off, as well as developing an efficient and sustainable bio-fuels industry. The Māori Party is acutely aware that the transport sector is responsible for 45 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions, and we appreciate too that as bio-fuels are produced from biological material they are, to varying degrees, carbon neutral.

Finally, I want to return to Cuba for inspiration as to how we survive peak oil and create alternatives for vehicles and generators through the consistent regulation of modern fuels used in engines, including bio-fuels and blends. Mr Beres from Cuba Solar, a renewable energy organisation, in talking about the challenge facing humanity, concluded: “There is climate change, the price of oil, the crisis of energy, and what we must know is that the world is changing and we must change the way that we see the world.”

It is indeed a challenge to find new ways to reduce energy consumption, new ways to conserve energy, new ways to address the longer time crisis of climate change, and new ways to eradicate poverty, and to take collective responsibility for the well-being of future generations. The Māori Party will support this bill, in order to open the doors and allow the debate to take place for the new ways to be given life. Kia ora.

MARTIN GALLAGHER (Labour—Hamilton West) : It is certainly wonderful to note the enthusiasm on all sides of the House for this very important bill, the Biofuel Bill. As a member of the Local Government and Environment Committee I certainly look forward to being on the committee that considers this very important bill as, of course, does the chair of that committee, Steve Chadwick.

To restate the situation, the bill introduces a biofuels sales obligation that will potentially see the widespread introduction of biofuels into our transport fuel mix. Indeed, the bill will start in terms of its current proposal with the obligation that 0.53 percent of petrol or diesel content sold be biofuel, increasing to 3.4 percent by 2012. Firms will be encouraged to meet that target, and those that do not do so will potentially face financial penalties. The bill also changes existing legislation to provide for the consistent regulation of modern fuels used in engines including biofuels and biofuel blends.

I listened very keenly, albeit on the TV monitor, to the first reading speech of the Minister in charge of the bill, the Hon David Parker, which, indeed, was a very good speech, and I think summarised the issues very, very well. I have to say that although I acknowledge some of the points that Jeanette Fitzsimons has made, and some of the areas that we do need to look at with some caution, I am particularly excited and enthusiastic by this legislation and by the leadership that this Government is showing in addressing an overall energy efficiency strategy. Indeed, I am delighted that this is part of the Government’s sustainability and climate change plans.

The point that has been made, and made very well, by the Minister, is that transport is responsible for more than 40 percent of New Zealand’s energy greenhouse gas emissions and, of course, we are particularly dependent on imported oil and oil products that make up over one-third of our total energy supply. Indeed, the Government has taken an in principle decision to set a target of halving domestic transport emissions per capita by 2040 relative to 2007 per capita emissions and, of course, logically and obviously, this will require improved vehicle efficiency, continued improvement to public transport, and the substitution of some fossil fuels with renewable alternatives.

I am certainly delighted, in the context of talking about this bill, about alternative sources of fuel that we are boosting, encouraging, and putting in major, major investment into public transport. That is, indeed, the most spectacular and dramatic investment in public transport that has been seen in many, many years.

Hon David Parker: 1,200 percent!

MARTIN GALLAGHER: It is 1,200 percent, and I know it is not just the Green Party that is enormously impressed with this Government, but many people in addition to them as well. That is actually unparalleled, I believe, in terms of our history. Historians can correct me, but I reckon that will be unparalleled for any Government in our country’s history. I note also that biofuels are carbon neutral so will contribute to those emission reductions in transport. Biofuels will also reduce, as I pointed out, our reliance on oil, are better for our air quality, and therefore better for human health.

This bill is only one of a raft of measures—of strategies, if you like, for climate change, a strategy tool box, if I can use that word—looking at alternative supplies of energy. Indeed, Minister Parker, who spoke in the first reading, recently visited the University of Waikato in my city and looked at its electric car initiative and the work being done in developing different forms of locomotive power. I want to take this opportunity to say that just the other day I popped into the University of Waikato. The school of science and engineering hosted a wonderful open day, and I was taken around by Dr Michael Walmsley and others from the school. It was wonderful to see some of those initiatives at very early stages—New Zealand inventors and New Zealand developers looking at different forms of powering vehicles—and looking at electric vehicles is certainly one of the options.

The Biofuel Bill in itself is very important legislation but is not the only tool in the Government’s tool box in terms of addressing our obligations to limit the negative effects of climate change. It is certainly not the only tool in the tool box in terms of looking at a range of alternative forms of energy, particularly when it comes to transport. But it is potentially quite an exciting part, so to speak, of that tool box. As a member of the select committee I will be listening with huge interest to what I believe will be a number of very positive submissions from people, not just in the science community and the transport community, but across the board. I think this is a very good example, again, of leadership.

One of the issues that I want to take up, which the Minister certainly touched on in his first reading speech and which I think is very important, is how we encourage motorists into consumption of alternative fuel sources. The point he made was that it is very, very important that biofuels supplied to consumers meet appropriate quality standards so that consumers buy them with the same confidence that they currently purchase petrol and diesel with. I know everyone in the House would agree with that. It is a very obvious and clear statement, but it is important that it be stated and restated. Indeed, in terms of the legislation, where appropriate, biofuels will obviously also be required to be labelled so that consumers are suitably informed as to what goes in their vehicle tank. The bill also provides the requirement that no petrol or diesel blend containing 1 percent or less biofuel may be promoted as containing biofuels or as being a biofuel blend. Again, that product information and consumer information is very, very important. Biofuels and biofuel blends are brought within the scope of the levy that funds fuel-monitoring activities. I think that is an obvious, good idea. Responsibility for collecting this levy—I note it is to be known in future as the petroleum and engine fuel monitoring levy—is transferred from the Minister for Economic Development to the New Zealand Customs Service and aligned with the collection of excise duty and the measurement of biofuel sales obligations.

In the time I have left I think it is very, very important to say that along with this legislation there is a really adequate information and education campaign to raise motorists’ and others’ awareness of alternative sources of fuels. This has to be a situation where—believe you me—as a country we work together with industry and we certainly work together with the major transport sector groups to have an outcome whereby we meet those targets. It is very interesting to observe other nations that have a relatively high production of biofuels—for example, Brazil, and there have been other countries. In a sense—and the Minister David Parker will correct me if I am wrong—I do not think we are necessarily pioneers in this area. There is certainly overseas practice to have a look at. Jeanette Fitzsimons quite correctly gave some words of caution in terms of ensuring that we look at the good and bad and that in our enthusiasm to look at biofuels we also acknowledge that there are some dangers. We need to be very aware of that, as well.

At the end of the day, it is really excellent that we are looking at legislation that is addressing the problem posed by the fact that 40 percent of New Zealand’s emissions come from the transport sector. It is a big challenge and a very significant challenge to halve those emissions by the year 2040. Frankly, I do not see us as a nation having any alternative whatsoever but to take up that challenge. Again, I want to compliment this Government and the Minister in what I think is superb leadership in this area. It is excellent that we have such a very hard-working Minister. I will also say as a member of the select committee that all members of the committee will be considering this bill with enthusiasm.

Dr Wayne Mapp: You don’t have to fill up all the 10 minutes.

MARTIN GALLAGHER: I know Dr Wayne Mapp is just as enthusiastic for this bill as I am. We look forward to its coming to the select committee. In his heart of hearts, Dr Mapp acknowledges the wonderful leadership of this Government. Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker.

JACQUI DEAN (National—Otago) : I rise to support the Biofuel Bill going to the select committee. I believe that the Biofuel Bill raises far more questions than it actually answers. I will elaborate on that a bit further in my speech. National supports the first reading of the Biofuel Bill but would like to note that the ongoing support of National will depend very much on the evidence heard at the select committee. I understand that this bill has been referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee. I am very pleased to be sitting on that committee, because I look forward to hearing submissions on the bill. As I say, I believe that the proposals of the Biofuel Bill raise far more questions in practical terms than perhaps have been addressed tonight—questions over the environmental benefits of introducing biofuels into New Zealand, the cost-effectiveness of a biofuels regime, the risks to motorists around the different fuel mixes, and, of course, the feasibility of the production timetable.

The bill introduces a mandatory biofuel sales obligation, which, assuming this bill is passed, becomes effective from 1 April 2008. That is an interesting date; it is April Fool’s Day. The obligation goes from 0.53 percent and increases to 3.4 percent by 2012. That is for ethanol in petrol, and biodiesel in diesel. Regulation does not require a mandatory blend but requires an overall flexible sales obligation that can be met by a mix of blends, as well as allowing trading between fuel companies. Those companies have already been named in this Chamber tonight. Biofuels are defined as deriving from biomass, so they have no net impact on atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations, except for the energy expended in their manufacture. They are therefore said to mitigate against climate change. There is another question. The biofuel obligation is expected to reduce New Zealand’s greenhouse gas emissions by 1.1 million tonnes to 2012, but, again, at what cost?

It seems to be the view of this Government that we somehow caused climate change in the world, and somehow that it is our responsibility to fix it on behalf of the world. I wonder sometimes whether the Government has considered the impacts of its climate change policies on the consumers of New Zealand. I would cite the example of the Government’s air quality standards, which are still making their shaky way through regional councils, and of the Government’s seeming inability to recognise the impacts of air quality standards on the people who live in communities. Those people then have to conform to those standards, as prescribed by the Government, in what I view as sometimes being unreasonable time frames. I believe that it is unreasonable to expect citizens who live in parts of New Zealand where there are adverse snow, rain, and flood events to shut down the possibility of using wood fuel burners in favour of electricity generated heating supplies in a climate where we do not have surety of electricity supply.

So that is a climate change policy of this Government that I do not believe has been well-thought-through. Drinking-water standards is another example of a policy that this Government has brought through the House with very little consideration of the real impact. I am talking about the real impact on small communities and, in particular, on local government. On the one hand there has been a cry to keep down rates, but on the other hand this Government seems determined to bring through legislation that it does not really know the effects of, and which has impacts on people who have to conform to it.

We need to be careful that when producing biofuel we do not incur a greater environmental cost in doing so. There are questions over the greenhouse gas inputs required to produce the biofuels in the first place, and, of course, there are the flow-on effects on other commodities like food. That issue has been well canvassed in the House this evening because in trying to fix one problem we need to be very careful that we do not create another. The issue of the use of corn to produce ethanol has also been raised in the House. It brought to mind an issue that has been brought to me whereby in trying to fix a problem another problem is created. That has happened with pig farmers in Australia. As we all know, the cost of grain is going up because of the drought in Australia. Therefore, that has a flow-on effect to pig producers, and of course the cost of pork goes up. How does that relate to our pork farmers and their relativity to Australia? In trying to fix one problem one must very carefully examine the consequences of those policies. That is where I believe that a close examination and a good submission period will come in very useful.

It is very hard to predict what will happen in practice when fuel-mix changes are brought into New Zealand. Of course, that was discovered when lead was removed from a certain grade of petrol. What happened at the pump and in people’s vehicles was that the vehicles were not as efficient and their emissions were raised. The risk is that biofuels are not as clean as they might be, that vehicle engines will not run as well or as smoothly, and that as a result the reduction in emissions, which is desirable to all of us, may not take place, or it might be marginal.

I was reading newspapers online and I have to congratulate the Daily Post in Rotorua, which stated that the Biofuel Bill was introduced into Parliament on Tuesday. I read this before the bill was introduced, so well done to the Daily Post, but its article raised a lot of questions. I started this speech by saying that although the introduction of this biofuels regime is supported by National, it also raises a number of questions. This fine, pre-emptive article by the Daily Post notes that a Rotorua car importer says that the Government will struggle to achieve anything by introducing biofuels, which popular Japanese vehicles cannot take. I do not know whether popular Japanese vehicles cannot take these biofuels, and I do not know whether anybody else really knows until we hear the submissions and evidence from those people who will be directly affected by this. It is noted that cars that are able to take these biofuels are more expensive to buy, and that in the short term used-car owners—and this is a quote from a Mr Robinson—“will be punished for not being able to afford a car that meets emission standards.” That is a valid point that should be considered during the select committee process. He further goes on to note: “If you want to be clean and green, then it’s going to cost.” A lot of people in New Zealand own imported cars—I am one of them—and having to pay more just because they own an older car is patently unfair.

The Automobile Association of New Zealand put out a table on biofuel compatible cars, and notes some interesting things. The list applies only to cars sold brand new in New Zealand, and that raises the question of whether this biofuel will be of any use at all if it is only suitable for vehicles like an Aston Martin. Biofuel mix can be used for all Aston Martin vehicles post-2004. It is possible that our chardonnay-swilling socialists on the other side of the House might have an Aston Martin, a Bentley, or a Daihatsu Charade but the list of vehicles that can take biofuels is extremely restricted. I see that my aged Toyota Land Cruiser, which I drive around the gravel roads of the Otago mountain passes, will not be able to use biofuels.

This is a serious question that will need to be addressed in the select committee, and it will need to address the environmental benefits, the environmental cost of production of biofuels. There is a question over whether emissions from vehicles run on biofuels will be reduced to any degree. We also need to evaluate the cost-effectiveness of bringing in a biofuels regime—for example, the cost to the motorist. Will it be so unaffordable that it is not effective to do so?

• Bill read a first time.

• Bill referred to the Local Government and Environment Committee.

Hon ANNETTE KING (Minister of State Services) : I move, That the Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I propose to refer the bill to the Government Administration Committee. I realise that some people are off to put their jamies on, but this is a very important first reading. This bill is short. It is designed to build on the current purposes of the principal Act, which are to promote the public interest by facilitating the disclosure and investigation of serious wrongdoing in, or by, an organisation, and to protect employees who, in accordance with the Act, make such disclosures.

The bill has two parts. Part 1 contains amendments to the Protected Disclosures Act 2000, and Part 2 contains a transitional provision.

In December 2003 Trevor Mallard, the then Minister of State Services, tabled a report in the House on the Act’s first few years. The report was prepared by Mary Scholtens QC. It concluded that the Act had not been used a great deal and that it had not always been used well. Without a central coordinator, the range of appropriate authorities to which employees disclosed was confusing. Some disclosures fell between the gaps in the jurisdictions of those authorities.

Ms Scholtens also referred to a strong perception amongst some of those consulted on the Act that the identity of the whistle-blower employee would not be protected. Ms Scholtens concluded that the Ombudsman could assist whistle-blowers, coordinate referrals between appropriate authorities, and guide and review the Act’s operation.

The Protected Disclosures Amendment Bill gives the Ombudsman that enhanced role. It also picks up on a number of other recommendations designed to improve the Act’s protection and processes.

The Ombudsman will be authorised to provide information and guidance to public or private sector employees on using the Act at any time, not just on request. For example, the Ombudsman will advise on what is serious wrongdoing and on whom to complain to. This should provide a filter for misguided disclosures, as well as encourage whistle-blowers to throw light on serious wrongdoing.

Public sector organisations are required to have internal procedures on how disclosures must be made, and on how disclosures will be investigated. The Act requires that whistle-blowers must first—

Chris Auchinvole: Have a whistle!

Hon ANNETTE KING: —disclose in accordance with their employing organisation’s internal procedures. I am sorry, did the member have a comment?

Dr Wayne Mapp: A sensible one.

Hon ANNETTE KING: It was a sensible comment?

Chris Auchinvole: Indeed.

Hon ANNETTE KING: Well, it did not sound sensible, but I am pleased he had a comment. No doubt he will take a call on this bill straight after me. The Act requires that whistle-blowers must first disclose in accordance with their employing organisation’s internal procedures, but complying with internal procedures can be difficult if there are none. New section 6C empowers the Ombudsman to request the internal procedures and related information from the organisation concerned. As a result, organisations may be encouraged to have a good, effective protected disclosure policy in place. Employees’ confidence should also increase if they know what the employing organisation’s internal procedures are.

The Ombudsman will also have new powers to review and guide public sector organisation investigations of whistle-blowing under new section 15B. The power to guide investigations is facilitative rather than directive, and the power will be activated either on the organisation’s request or at the Ombudsman’s discretion. That should help to prevent disclosures of serious wrongdoing from circulating around various agencies without resolution.

Currently, the Ombudsman may make reports to Parliament under section 29 of the Ombudsmen Act. The bill provides for a new section 15C of the Protected Disclosures Act, which specifies a number of matters on which the Ombudsmen may report about the exercise of their powers under the Protected Disclosures Act. The list includes the number and type of inquiries made to the Ombudsman under the Act. This list is designed to provide Parliament with more information on how the Act is operating and on how the Ombudsmen are carrying out their powers.

These new sections just described come with information-requiring powers conferred by new section 15E(3). The Ombudsman will be able to require information from public sector organisations, in keeping with current limits on their investigative jurisdiction. Private sector organisations will not be required to comply, but will be encouraged to do so.

In-built protections from misuse of such powers are already in the Ombudsmen Act and in this bill. Under new section 15A the Ombudsman will be able to take over a public sector organisation investigation of serious wrongdoing alleged against it. The triggers are that the Ombudsman considers that insufficient progress has been made by the organisation and that the whistle-blower consents to the takeover. The Ombudsman may also investigate in conjunction with the organisation.

In addition, the Ombudsman will be able to take on a coordinating role under new section 15, in relation to protected disclosures that have already been made to another person or body. This again applies only with the whistle-blower’s consent, in exceptional circumstances such as urgency. An Ombudsman may refer the disclosure on to an appropriate authority or to the Minister to investigate. Alternatively, she or he may investigate when the matter relates to a public sector organisation.

The bill extends the Act to a wider range of people, and bolsters the Act’s protection. The term “employee” will include volunteers who work for no reward. Board members and members of local authorities will be able to whistle-blow under the Act. Both groups will be considered employees for the purposes of confidentiality of identity, immunity from liability, and anti-victimisation protections in the Human Rights Act. Contractors are already covered by the Act.

Even with the protection of the Act, whistle-blowing carries some personal risk to the employees.

• Debate interrupted.