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AGENDA
Presented by RAWDON CHRISTIE
ANNETTE Well all I can say on that there's a lot of work went on with Toll over a long period of time and the deal that was struck was one, as Michael Cullen said we think we paid too much, they think we paid too little, so it probably sits as a fairly balanced deal.
NEVIL You’ve given them a huge advantage over anybody else wanting to move in there because you're effectively subsidising a lot of their operations.
RAWDON And they're already buying up as a result of that.
NEVIL You’ve got a rent holiday virtually for land and that sort of thing.
ANNETTE Well that’s the deal that was struck and the price that we've paid if you like for us to be able to take back rail and rebuild it for the benefit of New Zealanders, and you know what's interesting about this as I've been out and about this last week, and the number of people who've said to me they believe, the public believe, that is a good work by New Zealanders.
NEVIL The public's not necessarily the best people to just the economics of a rail system versus road and that sort of thing.
ANNETTE I've got much more faith in the public than you have then Nevil.
RAWDON That’s the romantic notion.
ANNETTE It's not only the romantic notion. People do worry about – particularly the movement of freight on the roads – and you know this whole argument about whether we should have bigger trucks, heavier trucks, if you ask the public about that they are concerned particularly around safety and the main state highway where you have a lot of big trucks moving freight about, we need them but they would like to see fewer of them, and some of the options are obviously getting it on to rail, getting it on to sea.
RAWDON Minister can I just get back on to roads for a minute. The government's effectively been greeted with a windfall from the GST on petrol, what's going to happen with that GST windfall?
ANNETTE All the money we collect from road users now goes into the National Land Transport Fund as of the 1st of July with the passage of the bill that I've got before parliament, it's called hypothecation of the money and many people have said why has the government dipped their hand into the money that’s collected from road users from petrol, road user charges, motor vehicle licensing, taken it out of the transport fund and put it into the consolidated fund and that’s been an argument for many many years.
RAWDON And GST is going to specifically and 100% into roading projects?
ANNETTE Um no, nothing goes 100% into roading projects, the money goes into the National Land Transport Fund, it is then allocated across all the transport areas including public …
RAWDON Goes 100% into transport projects.
ANNETTE 100% of the funding we collect goes into transport as of the 1st of July which means that in fact over time we will have more money in the transport fund than we had in the past, but there's huge demands on the funding. If you look at the list of projects compared to the funding…
RAWDON I think everyone's very well aware of that. Is the GST allocation, the 100% of GST going into transport projects, is that in the legislation?
ANNETTE No the legislation says that all the money collected from road users is hypothecated to it, to the fund.
RAWDON So should it be in the legislation or is this just a nice idea that the GST windfall's entirely going to go into transport projects?
ANNETTE No, it's not just a nice idea, we collect the money that people actually pay and put that into the fund.
RAWDON Should it be legislated that the GST goes directly into transport projects.
ANNETTE Well I don’t think we've ever legislated that GST is allocated for a particular project in the past and I think that the government would not want to be in that sort of straight jacket, but the money that comes from the road user charges, the petrol excise duty and motor vehicle licensing all goes into the fund from the 1st of July.
DAVID Minister I'd like to come back to this question of taking freight off the road and on to rail, I mean how much freight do you really think you can shift on to rail when you take into account the fact that it's on the road basically because road enjoys very significant competitive advantages over what rail can offer today and you're going to have to spend an awful lot of money to reduce that advantage or eliminate it, subsidisation or penalisation?
ANNETTE We would like to see 25% of freight moved by rail. It's 18% now, move it up to 25%, it will take some work, it'll mean that rail will need to be effective and efficient and work with the operators but we believe with commitment to it that you can move it from road to rail.
RAWDON Okay Minister of Transport thank you very much for coming in – Annette King.
