Dear John,

It's been a busy week at Parliament, and I have to confess to not feeling 100% - I came down with a very nasty bout of the flu over last weekend, and I'm still on the road to recovery. I've had a number of messages from people saying I look pretty terrible (thanks...!) and that pretty much summarises how I've felt! But with the House sitting and Nicola away, I've been the Acting Minister of Finance, so I've just had to push on. Hopefully I'll be able to get some rest this weekend.

Aside from being Nicola's stand-in this week, my big focus has been passing important changes to the Resource Management Act ([link removed]) to make it easier to build housing, renewable energy, infrastructure and more. You might be thinking - I thought you were replacing the RMA completely - so what's this all about? And it's true, we are replacing the RMA completely. Legislation for that will be in the House in November and pass into law next year. But we also want to make sure we can take action quickly and get growth back into the arteries of the economy, hence this RMA Amendment Bill. The Bill does a lot of important things - it makes it easier to consent renewable energy, it gives the government the power to modify or delete parts of council plans to negatively affect economic growth, it puts a stop to regional or district plan changes (with some exemptions) in advance of the new planning
system., it requires Auckland to "upzone" for more housing around City Rail Link stations... and as a special treat for Wellingtonians, it removes heritage protection from the Gordon Wilson Flats and makes their demolition a permitted activity!

PM in the Hutt: Yesterday it was a real pleasure to have the Prime Minister in the Hutt with me for the morning. We started the day with a "Tradie Breakfast" at Carter's Petone. Life is tough for many in construction right now - but we're starting to see green shoots of positive change coming through. Construction has been really battered by high inflation and high interest rates - but confidence is returning as interest rates come down (hopefully we'll get another OCR cut next week) and big government infrastructure projects start to come online like Melling and Otaki to Levin (all of which start before Christmas).

After breakfast we headed to Niche Modular, a fantastic local Hutt company who've been doing a fantastic job supplying the Ministry of Education with standardised, modular classrooms. Niche is a big reason why we've got the price of a new classroom down from around $1.2 million in 2023 to around $600k today - a huge saving - and we built more school classrooms in 2024 compared to 2023 and we'll do even more this year.

After that it was off to morning tea with our local secondary school student leaders. I've been running these morning teas with Prime Ministers in the Hutt since 2015, and Prime Ministers Key, English and now Luxon have taken time out to speak to our Year 12 and Year 13 leaders about their own leadership journey and pass on some hints and tips. It was a very special morning and I know the students got a lot out of the PM's remarks.

Finally we went up the road to Trentham to "turn the first sod" on a major new storage centre for Te Papa. This is actually pretty cool - when it's complete in 2028, the state-of-the-art facility will house over 866,000 preserved specimens, including the world’s largest collection of NZ and Southern Ocean fish, in a seismically resilient and sustainable building - in Upper Hutt. This is a $155 million construction project and is a major investment in our scientific future.

Road User Charges: Speaking of infrastructure, last week I gave a big speech ([link removed]) at "Building Nations", the big annual infrastructure conference. The focus was on the transition of New Zealand’s 3.5 million light vehicles to paying for our roading network through electronic road user charges, rather than petrol tax. This is a really big change but an important one. Here's the logic. Right now, New Zealanders pay Fuel Excise Duty (FED, or petrol tax) of about 70c per litre of petrol every time they fill up at the pump with a petrol car. Diesel, electric, and heavy vehicles pay Road User Charges (RUC) based on distance travelled (this revenue is funnelled into the National Land Transport Fund which funds the building of new roads and maintaining our existing ones).

For years, petrol tax has acted as a rough proxy for road use, but the relationship between petrol consumption and road usage is fast breaking down. For example, petrol vehicles with better fuel economy contribute less fuel tax per kilometre towards road maintenance, operations, and improvements. We are also seeing a fast uptake of fuel-efficient petrol hybrid vehicles. In 2015, there were 12,000 on our roads, while today there are over 350,000

At the end of the day, roads have to be paid for - there's no free lunch - and unless we make this change, we just won't have the revenue that we need. Distance based charging is much fairer - you pay for what you use. The change isn't going to happen immediately and there's a lot of work to do before we get to that point - you can read more here ([link removed]) - but it's the right thing to do

Have a great weekend.

Chris

P.S I was on Q and A last weekend with Jack Tame - check it out here if you missed the interview. ([link removed]) Thanks for the kind comments from people who have emailed.


Visit to Niche Modular
Thanks to Troy and the team for the tour of the factory in Petone. They're doing a great job with our school classroom programme!
Student Leaders' Morning Tea
A good turn-out of HIBS men at the Student Leaders' Morning Tea with the Prime Minister yesterday.
Building Nations
You can read ([link removed]) my Infrastructure Update to Building Nations here. ([link removed])
Bye bye Gordon Wilson!
The RMA Amendment Bill to make sure they could be demolished was passed yesterday.
Visit to City Rail Link

Last Friday it was a huge pleasure to be on the first "test train" for the City Rail Link in Auckland. This is going to be a game changer for Auckland and I can't wait to see it open. No specific open date yet - there's still tens of thousands of hours of testing to go - but they're making good progress.
Te Papa Biodiversity Storage Centre

Which of us handled our spade best do you think?
Visit to OpenStar

Very cool visit to OpenStar Technologies last week, in Ngauranga Gorge, and featuring the Hutt's one and only Dr Rod Badcock!

OpenStar is at the forefront of global efforts to create energy from nuclear fusion - a kind of holy grail for energy. It would be transformational for New Zealand and the world if we can crack it. I don't pretend to understand even 10% of the science going on here, but OpenStar is clearly doing something right - growing strongly, attracting capital, with world-class talent.
Very cool to check it out in person!
Jeremy Update
“Don’t tell Dad about this dress, because Dad doesn’t like road cones”

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