Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-02-11-Speech-2-160"
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"en.20030211.7.2-160"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, much has been said already, and I can keep my speech relatively brief. What is this about? Firstly, Parliament accepts that Austria is entitled to have a derogation extended. I consider this a quite extraordinary course of action, one which has not enjoyed my support for a long time, and one that, tomorrow, we will adopt by a large majority. That is something of which we must not lose sight. I warn, though, that we must not now start attaching a very high value to one section of the human race and a lower one to others.
I have the honour of representing an electoral district right on the border with Austria, that lovely country, and I would like, here and now, to make it very clear that I cannot accept that people in the Tyrol are worth more than the people on the estate near Lindau's customs house, who, every day, by night and day, have to endure traffic making a detour on the short route from Bavaria to Switzerland. This has nothing to do with crossing the Alps or with ecology; it is because they would be liable to ecopoints if they went via the autobahn.
That is not acceptable; you simply must see that. Having traffic doing such things as taking detours or going elsewhere altogether is just not on. Only 11% of HGV traffic in Austria is liable to ecopoints. It is not on when, in the Tyrol, representatives of citizens' initiatives tell me that they have no problem with this if the HGVs have Austrian number plates, but that they do have difficulties if the vehicles are registered elsewhere. That is no longer acceptable, and I want to make that clear here and now.
These are not tall stories. I have had such conversations. After all, I live there and have contacts there. I cannot accept that a certain segment of Europe's population is being treated as being worth more. You can see from the figures that what matters to the Austrians is that their own haulage firms should be put in a stronger position, and that is precisely what they have used the ecopoints regulation to achieve. It cannot, though, be one of Europe's tasks to step in for the benefit of one region's economic interests."@en1
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