Land transport deregulation comes to pass

From the 1936 until 1983, transport of freight within New Zealand was subject to fairly blunt distance limits restricting competition between rail and road.  Initially, road freight was only allowed to haul goods no further than 30 miles from the nearest railhead, whether it be the end of a line, or a railway station with freight service.  It was designed to save the economy money, primarily by ensuring that capital investment in New Zealand Railways (NZR) was not wasted and undermined by competition from road freight, as it was thought the country it would be wasteful to have to upgrade the highway network to handle long-distance road freight traffic, as well as maintain and develop the rail network. "Unnecessary duplication" was the catchphrase.  It gave NZR a monopoly on all medium to long haul freight, and limited truck operators to feeding the rail network, although there were parts of the country much further than 30 miles away from the rail network, so some trucking companies focused on the gaps. 

Some of the largest centres without rail access were (and are) Kaitaia, Taupo and Queenstown.  The 30-mile limit (50km) was extended to 40 miles in 1961, reflecting improvements in road and truck technology, and the shift of the rail network from steam to diesel traction, indicative of the inefficiencies of rail handling short freight movements. This saw some lines close not long after.  However, by 1961 exemptions based on types of goods were also being introduced.  Early exemptions included household removals and livestock, and the list of exemptions would grow over the subsequent twenty years. 

In 1969 US consultants Wilbur Smith & Associates published a comprehensive review of transport policy in New Zealand and recommended removal of the distance limit, but only if road user charging was introduced concurrently.  In 1978 this partly happened, when the limit was increased to 150km and Road User Charges were introduced for all heavy vehicles (over 3.5 tonnes gross vehicle weight) to recover the costs imposed by higher weight vehicles on the road network.  The shift to the 150km limit saw NZR abandon multiple branch lines almost overnight (see Methven, Waiau, Tuatapere), but it was only a short reprieve.  

After the Railways Department was restructured into a business as the NZ Railways Corporation from 1 April 1982, the then Muldoon Government proceeded to remove remaining distance limits on road freight.  The article below reports both on the merging of Trailways and ASC Flowers trucking companies. 

It also noted the curious way deregulation was implemented. Trucking operators had to buy licences based on capacity to operate further than 150km. This requirement was phased out over three years. 100,000 distance permits had been printed to be displayed in trucks.  Licences were available at Post Offices and MoT offices (when there were many of these).  The final stage was the abolition of quantitative licensing in 1984, replaced with qualitative licensing. Quantitative licensing meant that new trucking operators would have to demonstrate demand for their services due to insufficient capacity provided by existing operators and NZR.  Qualitative licensing simply meant that a trucking operator only needed to prove it met basic legal standards around safety and competence.