KEY POINTS:
Don't you love the strange bedfellows MMP throws together? Any day now, all going to plan, Parliament will pass a bill permitting the control of Auckland's highly subsidised public transport network to return to public hands. And joining Labour and its more natural allies such as the Greens and Maori will be that supporter of free enterprise, the Act Party.
Leader Rodney Hide assures me his planned move is very "pro-market". He says Auckland Regional Council (ARC) chairman Mike Lee had lobbied him, arguing that a party representing consumers and taxpayers had to support such a bill, and after consideration "I said, absolutely".
Mr Hide says what the bill allows "is exactly what you'd want to do if you were looking at spending a $94 million subsidy and looking at getting best value for money, so I was on board".
Not on for the ride is the National Party, which, when in power 15 years ago, forcibly privatised the publicly owned Yellow Bus Company, and, strangest of allies, Winston Peters and his New Zealand First Party.
The Public Transport Management Act won't drive private bus operators from Auckland's commuter bus network. It just gives the Auckland Regional Transport Authority (ARTA) the power to design an integrated passenger transport network that serves the needs of the passengers and the subsidisers first, rather than the bus company shareholders.
Merchant bankers Infratil, owners of Auckland's biggest bus operator, New Zealand Bus, have been lobbying around Parliament as though Karl Marx was coming up the hill behind them. But the case for the status quo does not stand up to scrutiny.
When Infratil bought the old Stagecoach Bus company in 2005, patronage in the year to June was 43.1 million passenger trips. A year later, the service had shed 900,000 passenger trips. By the year ended June 2007, a further 200,000 passengers had disappeared.
It took a war in Iraq and rocketing fuel prices to reverse this downward trend. In the year to June 2008, passenger numbers bounced back to 2005 levels. In that time though, subsidy payouts soared. When Infratil entered the scene, public handouts to regional bus operators totalled $45 million. Just five years on, the budgeted annual subsidy has more than doubled to $93.1 million.
As ARC chairman Mike Lee wryly noted in a letter to Transport Minister Annette King this year, "It would appear that the private bus companies in Auckland are much more interested in increasing bus subsidies than increasing passenger numbers."
As the law stands, despite these huge subsidies, ARTA cannot inspect operators' books to check whether they are gouging the system. Their need for a subsidy has to be taken on trust.
ARTA has no powers to design a transport network linking buses and rail and ferry services into a rational, user-friendly web. It can't even insist on integrated ticketing. Operators can cherry-pick the profitable routes, calling them "commercial", then stand aside and wait for the public to come to them, cap in hand, offering subsidies if they will graciously fill in the "non-profitable" gaps left unserved after the plums have been plucked.
ARTA and ARC lobbied strongly for the right to introduce a fully contracted system in which ARTA would design a network of services where, for example, subsidised buses didn't compete with subsidised rail services. Regional councils up and down the country backed Auckland's campaign, even though they were not faced with Auckland's problems.
The bill initially offered a compromise which annoyed both sides. Ms King was sympathetic to ARC's case and has enlisted the Greens to introduce the amendment supporting the full contract model. With luck, and Rodney Hide's support, the amendment will be passed tomorrow or Thursday and the bill itself soon after.
The revolution won't occur overnight, more's the pity. First, a new regional public transport plan will have to be drawn up and go through the normal consultation processes. Seeking changes to existing commercial services requires a 12-month transition and existing contracts don't expire until the end of 2009 and the beginning of 2010.
The only quandary now is what the National Party might do if it wins the election. With such broad support in Parliament and across Auckland for this bill, leader John Key owes it to voters to signal whether he will throw this act in with the recently passed Regional Amenities Funding Act as bad law he will repeal if he becomes Prime Minister.
