18th October 2019.

Quote; The Prime Minister made the comment on 30th September in a post-Cabinet address after a reporter asked her if she had any thoughts on the backlash the 16-year-old has been receiving for her climate stance.

https://www.tvnz.co.nz/one-news/new-zealand/jacinda-ardern-speaks-in-defence-climate-activist-greta-thunberg-expresses-deep-admiration

Government involvement in climate change policy is admirable.

In our defence of our coalition Government policy on climate change, we fully support Government plan to use rail funding for rail infrastructure upgrades to promote use rail infrastructure for freight around NZ.

Labour embraced NZ First who was the driving force to get rail reinstated as “the backbone of freight movement through all provincial areas in NZ.”

This will finally lower speeding trucks, make roads safer, and rail use will lower climate change emissions which is a win-win for everyone.

This will make a safer trip for other vehicles on our narrow single lane roads that are simply not fit to use for road freight or speed.

Fact; Fallacy - that use of bigger trucks would lower truck numbers.

• We recall the last National Government had promised using bigger trucks would lower the amount of trucks on our roads when they advocated for bigger, heavier, longer HPHV freight trucks from 2010 through 2017.

• We were horrified when the last National Government said that using increased size/weight/speed of freight trucks would reduce the number of trucks on our roads, but now NZTA data has proved this was a total fallacy that was untrue.

• this was actually suggested by National, while all our roads were falling apart during the 2008/2017 National Gov’t regime to advocate for increased size/weight/speed of freight trucks during that time.

Fact; increasing the speed of heavier freight trucks would cause further destruction of our public roads as they would suffer from further “rutting – pitting and surface damage” from increased speeds, according to roading engineers reports.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2019/04/19/heavy-truck-damage-michigan-roads/3474156002/

Quote;

“LANSING — Michigan’s highest-in-the-nation gross truck weights are responsible for significant damage to state roads and bridges, experts say, despite years of denials from the Michigan Department of Transportation”.

Un-quote

CEAC discussed this truck issue back in 24th June 2019 about roads not capable of carrying larger heavier truck freight. “NZ roads are not coping with heavier trucks”.

http://community.scoop.co.nz/2019/06/nz-roads-are-not-coping-with-heavier-trucks/

Fact; The increased size and weight and speeds of trucks will cause more serious road failures, accidents and fatalities to occur, while increased climate change emissions will occur.

Rail use is a NZ First ‘common sense’ policy.

End.

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