Sunday 27th September, 2009

Q+A’s Guyon Espiner interviews Transport Minister, Steven Joyce.

Points of interest:
- Government refuses Kiwi Rail’s request for subsidies, want $90 million a year for next five years
- “Kiwi Rail is not in good shape”, but the government will “make the best of it as we promised”
- Government’s goal is that Kiwi Rail should pay its own way
- Road Safety strategy over past ten years has failed to cut road deaths; NZ won’t achieve target of fewer than 300 deaths per year by 2010
- Joyce won’t commit on blood alcohol levels, driving age or speed limits; no new road safety laws until October next year
- Minister: “Some days”I’d like to wake up and drop the speed limit by 5 kph “but I can’t”; needs public acceptance
- “Reasonably confident”of meeting deadline of 2013 for electrification of Auckland rail
- Kiwi Rail will own Auckland trains, but not necessarily run them

The interview has been transcribed below. The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at,
http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

STEVEN JOYCE interviewed by GUYON ESPINER

Guyon Thank you Steven Joyce for coming in and joining us on the programme this morning, we really appreciate that. Transport affects Kiwis a lot, your job affects them a lot, most of us spend a lot of time using transport in some form or another. I want to talk to you today about the ease of travel, about the safety of travel, and about who pays for it. Let's start with the safety aspect. New Zealand is a dangerous place to drive a car, we have ten deaths per 100,000 people, that’s 20% higher than Australia, and almost double the rate of the UK. What are you doing about that?

STEVEN JOYCE – Transport Minister
Well it's actually come down a little bit in the last year which is good news, but there's a lot to do actually, and I think nobody can deny that there's a huge issue in New Zealand with road safety. We've done a few things straight away, the drug driving legislation that’s been sitting in the chamber is being pushed through and is now coming into effect the next month or so, there's the much talked about cellphone rule of course, which we've got that away pretty quickly, that’s a growing problem on our roads, is the level of distraction caused by cellphones and texting. There's also the illegal street racing legislation which we've got coming back through the House shortly, and we're doing a whole review of the road safety strategy, we've had now ten years of the road safety strategy, which has not seen much improvement in terms of both deaths and injuries on the road, so it's time for a pretty quick but thorough stocktake.

GUYON And that strategy is to have a target of no more than 300 deaths by 2010.

STEVEN That was the strategy yes.

GUYON Are you confident of making that?

STEVEN No, there's no way that New Zealand's gonna make that from where we are.

GUYON What is a more realistic figure?

STEVEN We've been tracking around the 400 mark, it came back last year as I said, that was largely because people used the vehicles less because of the high petrol prices, it's come away again this year, it's looking like around the 400 again, and about 2,800 injuries on the road.

GUYON What is your target then?

STEVEN I haven't put a target on it yet.

GUYON Will you?

STEVEN Yeah we might do.

GUYON What would a realistic target be?

STEVEN Well that’s a good question, and there's a danger that you just sort of get too carried away with a numerical target, there's two aspects to this, firstly the government has the responsibility obviously to set the road rules and do their absolute best to make sure that people are as safe as possible on the road, the other side of it is that a lot of people that get killed and injured on the roads now, do it as a result of people not observing the road rules, and so governments can do so much, we actually need an attitudinal change in terms of how people respect the road, and respect these pretty powerful vehicles we use on it.

GUYON Let's look at one of the big factors and that is alcohol, it's estimated that 31% of fatal crashes that was a factor last year in 2008. You’ve talked a lot and been very critical about how much you can drink and still legally drive, do you propose to lower the legal limit from 80 milligrams to 50?

STEVEN I have been critical, but the observation really that I made and it was new to me as a minister was just how much you could drink legally and drive, and I understand for an adult male you can drink three quarters of a bottle of wine in 90 minutes and still be under the limit, i.e. if you went out and did the test you would be under the limit.

GUYON And that’s unacceptable to you?

STEVEN Well it seems a heck of a lot to me. What we're going through is a discussion stage at the moment, because I'm a great believer that you only get to enforce the road rules because people broadly accept them, and right now most people, most New Zealanders think that it's the old two in one rule that we were told about, two drinks in the first hour, one every hour from that, and they think that’s about the right limit, so you just rock out and say we're gonna lower the limit and they say well why would you do that, you're impinging on all these law abiding Kiwis who aren’t doing anything wrong.

GUYON Well are you gonna do that?

STEVEN Well I'm going to actually see what they think first, because there's a huge number of things we could do, we put out about 50 of them in a strategy of different infringements changes we could make.

GUYON And how much of an impact would that make lowering the blood alcohol limit?

STEVEN Well that’s one possible way we can go, another way would be to say much tougher on recidivist drink drivers, zero limits for recidivist drink drivers, we could go zero limits for those under 20, that’s been talked about quite a lot, is alcohol interlocks the idea that you can't actually start your car unless you can blow into a device first and be found to have no alcohol on your breath for repeat offenders. These are all options that we can advance.

GUYON Then let's run through a few of them. I mean lowering the limit from 80 to 50, I mean if you strip out the drivers under 20, there were just 19 crashes out of 34,397 of people who were between 80 and 50, I mean that won't make any difference at all.

STEVEN Well that’s right, that’s why we've gotta have this discussion, I mean these things are all, at one level you can say that, on the other hand you can say well actually is it okay to have three quarters of a bottle of wine and drive, that’s the sort of question we'll have, which is why we're floating these options at the moment actually having a decent discussion about it, and I'm thrilled with the discussion we're having. Another issue we've got is young drivers. We've got roughly a third of the accidents and the fatal crashes are caused by people or involve people 15 to 24 years old, that’s a third. They're only about 16% of drivers, we've got a huge problem with young drivers.

GUYON Well let's talk about that because it is a massive problem, our 15 to 17 year olds have the highest death rate in the developed world, I mean that’s a source of shame isn't it?

STEVEN It's pretty sad, and when you hear some of the individual stories they're horrific stories, and of course all the families that have been through that will now tell you that they wished that their child hadn’t been on the road at that time, those that have been involved with driving and those accidents, they all wish that that hadn’t happened, but then also in New Zealand we have this strong culture which says young people should be able to drive at 15, it's been a longstanding debate, I'm just a recent arrival in this debate, but that’s the reality of it and of course all the rural people get up and say, well if you put the driving age up our kids won't be able to go to school.

GUYON And you're worried about that from a political issue, but aren’t we….?

STEVEN I'm worried about it from an acceptance issue because you actually only get to run the road rules because people accept broadly that those are the case –you don’t have a policeman or police woman on every corner, so you can go out and put whatever road rules in place that you like, but if there isn't broad public acceptance of those road rules then you are whistling in the wind.

GUYON This came through overnight from the Police into our newsroom and it probably won't even make the news. A vehicle driven by a 15 year old male left the road, mounting the kerb, the vehicle travelled on the grass and has then collided with several large rocks, the driver died upon impact. 15 years old.

STEVEN Yeah it's terrible.

GUYON I mean isn't that ridiculously young to be driving what can be a death machine?

STEVEN It's like everything, some people at 15 are very mature and they’ve had good experience, they’ve been driving on their parents' farm which is the example often talked about, and they would be better than some drivers at 19. The research suggests that actually the most dangerous time is when you become a solo driver for the first time, whether you're 15, 18, or 21, that’s the most dangerous time to start driving solo. So one of the questions for us as a country is do we put enough into young driver education. Whatever age we send them out there, do they know enough about how dangerous it is and how easy it is to send those cars off the road. Do we actually let them drive solo too soon, should we have them more supervised for a longer period. Those are the sort of questions and as we've said before the nil alcohol …

GUYON So are you going to raise the age that it is legally permissible to drive?

STEVEN I'm not making any calls on that this morning.

GUYON Well let me ask you this way then, there's a bill before parliament which raises the age to 16.

STEVEN It's been there for quite a while, Peter Dunne's bill.

GUYON Yeah, well how would you vote on that?

STEVEN I will wait for this road safety strategy to come out, talk with my cabinet colleagues and we'll make some decisions.

GUYON Lot of talking going on, when are we gonna get some action?

STEVEN It's very early.

GUYON When are we gonna get some action Minister, when is this work going to come to fruition?

STEVEN My intention is we'll get the safety strategy away by late this year, early next year, and I want to see – it's slightly different to a lot of strategies we've seen in politics in recent times, we want to see some action points out of that, take them through parliament and get the first changes made by about October next year.

GUYON Cos you could argue that you guys have gone for the glamour stuff the headline stuff, you’ve attacked the boy racers and you're gonna move on cellphones. If you look at cellphones, I mean how many lives is that going to save?

STEVEN Well we inherited the cellphone one to be fair.

GUYON Yeah but you’ve pushed ahead with that and yes this other stuff's on….

STEVEN You either push ahead or you drop it, there'd been a lot of work done on the cellphone problem.

GUYON Minister, how many live from the November 1 rule change when you're not allowed to use your cellphone, how many lives will that save?

STEVEN I think there were six or seven fatal crashes involving cellphones in 2006, 2007, only one in 2008, but some already this year and we've heard them, and they’ve been horrific examples. Now it's an issue which has been getting steadily worse, more and more people – I don’t know how people think they can text and drive, more and more people thinking that they can, and we do have to get on top of it, but it's not a case of just we do one thing or the other, that one's in the pipeline, you get it through the pipeline and out.

GUYON If you're serious about saving lives, which I'm sure you are, your own report says that to reduce the open road speed limit by five kilometres an hour would save 60 lives a year.

STEVEN Yeah I'm not sure – yeah well there's a lot of debate around that, and of course we've talked to the AA of course, who are the biggest road user group in the country, they would say that’s the wrong approach and that we've gotta tackle the recidivist, which brings us back to actually getting some form of consensus on what's appropriate and which steps are most appropriate to take first, and you have to do that with the consent of road users, you can't just have the Minister of Transport wake up one day and say I'm just gonna drop the speed limit by 5ks, some days I'd like to be able to do that, but I can't.

GUYON Okay let's move from road safety to ease of travel and start with Auckland. I mean it costs nearly as much to get a taxi from Auckland Airport and into the central city as it does to fly from Wellington to Auckland, is that acceptable?

STEVEN Well there are reasons why that of course, you have a huge number of taxis waiting at the airport for a long time, and I spose they factor in the cost of their….

GUYON But the congestion is what I'm getting at, I mean it's still a nightmare of a city to drive around at times.

STEVEN Oh it is, and we're moving pretty quickly on that, there's a couple of key projects that will make some significant difference and I'll give some credit to the previous government in terms of reasonably late in their term they started pushing pretty hard on the western ring route, the big bit that’s missing of course is Waterview, which will make the significant difference to access from the airport into the city, and also improve congestion issues on State Highway 1, and the other one is Victoria Park, well Victoria Park contract's been let and it'll be done in two years, Waterview's more challenging because unfortunately successive governments didn’t actually put a designation in place for that last four and a half ks, the previous government came up with an incredibly expensive option which was 2.8 billion dollars, which in the current environment particularly ….

GUYON I don’t want to relitigate that so much, your focus has been though, and you’ve just illustrated it here on roads, and to an extent it has been at the expense of public transport. You’ve got a billion dollar highway fund, 420 million of that diverted from other budgets including walking, cycling, public transport.

STEVEN Well no that’s not quite right, because this is what Labour was proposing to do, we looked at it and said well hang on a second 76% of New Zealanders go to and from work each day by vehicle, whether we like it or not that happens to be the reality.

GUYON But is that because the public transport isn't available. I'm just wondering in a world worried about obesity and climate change, whether your lack of public transport cycling and walking initiatives is really short sighted.

STEVEN No no no no, let's look at the numbers in Auckland because that’s the topical one, in Auckland about 7% of people travel to and from work by public transport each day currently, it's roughly 7%. About one seventh of that is by train, so 1% of Aucklanders travel to and from work each day by train, we're spending 1.6 billion dollars over a number of years to improve the train services in Auckland to get that 1% to maybe 2 or 3%, now that’s a massive effort, and I think it's the effort we've gotta make, but when you think about that, you think well on the other hand if three quarters of Aucklanders are going to work by private vehicle we also have to invest in those areas there where it makes sense as well, because you just can't achieve the sort of impact on congestion that you want to get with changes in those other modes.

GUYON Okay, electric trains for Auckland is one of the big public transport issues, it's a billion dollar project by 2013 where's the money coming from?

STEVEN Well we've committed about 1.1. billion dollars of that, previous government committed with the …projects, we've committed with the electrification side of it, the 500 million dollars for the trains will be committed, the government has said that we will commit that.

GUYON So that project is still on track for completion in 2013?

STEVEN Well if possible in 2013.

GUYON How confident are you about that?

STEVEN I'm reasonably confident, but let me tell you a couple of things, one of the things I discovered on becoming Minister was there's been a whole lot of talking past each other going on in Auckland around this electrification project. We've had discussions around which trains to buy, but there's been some discussions about whether the platforms were long enough, and I've actually put all the groups in a room and said guys we've just gotta get this all sorted out, you know we want the trains to be the right length for the platforms, I want to know where the platform money is coming from, just a few you know minor details like that and then we'll order the damn trains.

GUYON Okay Kiwi rail will operate this ultimately.

STEVEN The intention is that Kiwi rail will own the trains, they may not operate the services….

GUYON What sort of state are they in, they got a 90 million dollars subsidy this year, Jim Bolger the Chairman says they need that sort of amount for each of the next five years, are you going to commit to long term subsidies of this SOE.

STEVEN No we're actually encouraging them and working them very hard to actually get to the point where they can survive without subsidy, and I'm please that they are taking a more commercial approach now.

GUYON So they won't get that subsidy over the next five years?

STEVEN Well we're going to try and put them on a glide path to take it out yes.

GUYON When does that end?

STEVEN We haven't decided yet, we've got a big business plan coming from Kiwi rail, Kiwi rail is not in good shape, some would say, and I know we've got Richard Prebble on the panel today, some would say it's not been in good shape for 50 years, it's a difficult issue to try and get rail to make sense…

GUYON Well it's in awful shape isn't it, their statement of corporate intent shows deficits rising to 300 million dollars in 2011 and 2012.

STEVEN It's a challenging business, I actually think we can make the best of it as we promised we would prior to the election, it's cost New Zealand around 900 million dollars already in terms of the purchase price plus the loans that we took over when we purchased it back, it has very high fixed costs, the costs of renewing the track is very difficult, but on the other hand it's a sunk investment, so that you don’t want to just trash that sunk investment because the money has now been spent, we have to make the best of it.

GUYON Under the State Owned Enterprises Act 1986 it says and I quote it "that an SOE must be as profitable and as efficient as comparable businesses that are not owned by the Crown, now clearly…

STEVEN Just as well there's no comparable railways businesses isn't it?

GUYON This is clearly not the case, are you looking at taking Kiwi rail out of an SOE model.

STEVEN No what we're trying to do with Kiwi rail is literally get it into commercial shape that it can at least to use the term wash its own face, i.e. it can sustain itself from the income that it generates, and that is going to be a challenge, done underestimate the size of that challenge. Now I actually think the structure of it ultimately is slightly academic in that respect, it will be a commercial operation but it is important to do our absolute best to get it to pay its way, because we can't just keep tipping taxpayers' money in the back of it, and not only that it's unfair on the competing modes, whether it's coastal shipping or the road transport operators.

GUYON That statement of corporate intent's a three year document 2009 to 2012, it says it won't return any dividends over the course of that time, in fact it'll be in the red.

STEVEN I wouldn’t have made the investment let's be fair, if it had been me I wouldn’t have made the investment and certainly not at that price.

GUYON Is it acceptable for it to be in deficit for that long?

STEVEN They're doing their best and I'm asking them to do better.

GUYON There we'll leave it, thank you very much for coming and joining us this morning, Steven Joyce.

ENDS

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