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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker): I regret to advise the member that her time has expired. It may have escaped me, but did the member indicate to the House the particular committee that she intends the bill to go to? I did not hear it.

JEANETTE FITZSIMONS: I had it in my notes, Mr Assistant Speaker. I would like the bill to go to the Transport and Industrial Relations Committee.

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Rick Barker): Very good. Thank you.