Your vote counts: Ask the hard questions
BY THE TIME YOU READ THIS THE GENERAL Election (on Saturday September 19) will be less than three weeks away. Hopefully, you will have kept your eyes and ears attuned to the news media, attended some candidate meetings, or researched online to learn about the political parties’ transport policies.
Here are some of the issues National Road Carriers has been working hard to address over the last 18 months. Exploring these issues and asking hard questions about the parties’ approaches to them should help you decide who to vote for.
Last year our road maintenance campaign – dubbed by Transport Minister Phil Twyford as the “NRC Pothole Campaign” – received 6000 Facebook views in its first two days…and appeared on television news.
The problems have not been fixed, so we have relaunched the Facebook campaign to highlight the continuing deterioration of our roads. Check out the campaign and comments on the NRC Facebook page and then ask the politicians: ultimately be built into the price of goods. So, the simple question is:
In March, the Labour-led Government pledged to plough $54billion into transport investment over the next 10 years – upgrading and building roads, railway lines and cycleways.
In July, the National Party announced a $31billion transport and infrastructure package including a four-lane expressway linking Whangarei, Auckland, Hamilton and Tauranga, the reinstatement of the East West Link and the repeal of the Auckland regional fuel tax. Our question to each party is:
To get some commonsense thoughts on the issues around moving the Ports of Auckland to Northport, we commissioned business consultant Tony Garnier to interview road transport stakeholders.
The key findings of his report were that Ports of Auckland should stay put at least until 2050, that Northport was logistically impractical and that the key issue is the efficiency and safety of road and rail access to the three upper North Island ports – Auckland, Tauranga and Northport. Read the key points summary of the NRC report on our website and then ask: connect with new employment opportunities or training.
We have also teamed up television production company Stripe Studios with support from Teletrac Navman, Mobil Oil NZ and Bridgestone NZ to produce NZ Truckers, a new TV series to improve the image of the industry. The question for the politicians is:
Road transport accounts for about 20% of the country’s carbon emissions and there are a lot of pressures to reduce these. We know NRC members are keen to know more because when we held a Future of Freight seminar last year to look at clean diesel, electric vehicles, biofuels, and hydrogen we had 125 attendees. So, the question is:
Several operators have expressed concern about the potential legalisation of marijuana as a result of the referendum. Their questions are about the safety of their drivers from potentially impaired road users and whether they will they have to test drivers daily? Also, the possible increased costs of insurance and ability to employ staff who are drug free.
Over the last two years, more people have had drugs in their system than alcohol in road death stats. We don’t want to see this increase, particularly when we keep talking about making the roads safer. The question is: