Water Services Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Water Services Bill.

Legislative statement published under the authority of the House.

I move, That the Water Services Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Health Committee to consider the bill.

In 2016 there was a water contamination event in Havelock North which really caused New Zealanders to think about the state of our water system. Five thousand people became sick and there were four associated deaths with that particular event, and then an inquiry started.

The recommendations from that inquiry told us a very significant set of salient points. Firstly, that the event in Havelock was not an isolated event. In fact, it was of concern that the way in which we monitor the compliance of drinking water quality is something that needed to be looked at. So the Government picked up this issue and embarked on a level of reform that would see greater certainty, in the first instance, for the quality of our drinking water, because we know that every New Zealander, no matter where they live, in rural areas, in urban areas, out in the provinces, along the coast—no matter where people live, they should have the assurance of clean drinking water. That was not the case some few years ago and that’s why we’ve embarked on this particular reform.

The Water Services Bill is the second pillar or pou in our water reform journey. The first one was establishing Taumata Arowai, which is a dedicated regulator that will be responsible for ensuring compliance, enforcement, and monitoring of our drinking-water system, and have oversight over waste water and stormwater. This bill in particular will set out the roles and functions of Taumata Arowai as it undertakes its task, but also make clear the obligations of water service suppliers. It’s a process that we’ve undertaken with and alongside local government. In fact, it’s a little bit like having a thousand cups of tea, because when we started the conversation, you can imagine it was challenging and confronting for many councils to really undertake the journey of the level of investment in water infrastructure, their obligations, and, importantly, what a system change would look like. But this bill, by and large, is a step change towards the type of future we want to see, which is robust, resilient waters infrastructure that underpins so many things in our regions.

The Water Services Bill provides the mechanics of a regulatory regime that Taumata Arowai, our dedicated drinking-water entity, will administer, and, as I said previously, it will contain the details of the powers that that regulator will have. It is a step change. It will ensure that we bring together the legislative obligations and regulatory functions into one place and will work alongside water service providers. I do believe that it strikes a balance between incentivising drinking-water suppliers to take responsibility for their supplies. But it also enables Taumata Arowai to have a tool kit to work with them.

I want to highlight significant issues that emerged during the consultation round, because this will undoubtedly be something that the select committee will need to consider, and that is in relation to rural suppliers of services in smaller communities. We’ve agreed that the transitional period for smaller suppliers, for very practical reasons and reasons which rural councils in particular advocated for, will have a transition period to come into this regulatory regime. And it will have the core elements of ensuring that all suppliers should have a duty to provide safe drinking water from the date of the commencement of this bill. All suppliers are required to be registered at the end of year one following the commencement of the bill. And small suppliers serving less than 500 people would come into the regulatory system by the end of year three following commencement of the bill, with full regulatory compliance expected by the end of year five.

As I went around and visited with councils and certainly heard a number of practical views from small supplier schemes and communities, it seems to me that we need to provide that transition period so that some practical decisions can be made in terms of how they can meet the expectation of higher drinking-water standards, but also ensuring that water going back into the receiving environment can be clean as well.

We also undertook to ensure that consistent with our freshwater expectations and source protection, which is a big issue in terms of drinking-water, we were applying the same approach as the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management, and that was recognising te mana o te wai. You’ll see in the legislation that we’ve carried over the same interpretation as has been evident there to ensure that when we think about water coming out of the source, down the pipes, through the tap, into your glass, and then back out into the receiving environment, it is a whole system. Te mana o te wai gives licence to that approach, a holistic approach in the way that we think about water.

Many of the things that the select committee will be asked to consider are complex in nature, but necessary. The reason why I’ve sent this bill to the Health Committee is because they’ve got some knowledge of the independent drinking-water regulator Taumata Arowai, and they’ll have some institutional knowledge of the complexity of the issues.

Can I make very clear that the bill contains in relation to waste-water and storm-water issues, the ability for Taumata Arowai to collect more information. Much of the information held by councils is variable. And in order to get better understanding about how to plan for waters infrastructure, the first obligation of Taumata Arowai will be to collect that from councils and provide some national oversight about the issues in relation to waste water and storm water. The regulatory responsibility for waste water and storm water, I must stress, still sits with regional councils under the Resource Management Act. Again, this makes sense for where we are in terms of our water reform journey.

The other issue that may come up with select committees is the issue of chlorination. The bill provides for an exemption regime. Without going too much into the specific councils, there are councils that hold quite strongly to the non-chlorination position. So what the bill sets out is an exemption regime that enables those councils who do not want to chlorinate but choose an alternative way of residual treatment for the assurance of their clean drinking-water to go through a process of securing an exemption. However, the cost that is associated with going towards an alternative other than chlorination sits on the ratepayer. That’s been very clear as we’ve expressed an approach that is consistent but provides for an alternative, and it is well understood amongst councils, but just to alert the select committee to that particular prospect, because I do think it will come up.

There are other smaller technical amendments, which I don’t think will provide too much difficulty. The last thing I will say is that it was important to me prior to the lifting of the House and the election that there was early exposure to this bill, because the sector needed to know the detail and be well prepared for the select committee process. I anticipate that there will be very well-informed contributions through the select committee process and very targeted in areas of specific concern by councils and by profile of their water infrastructure within their particular areas. I do hope the select committee takes the opportunity to gain some on the ground knowledge within their own council areas so that they can engage in this conversation.

There’s a Chinese proverb that says the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago; the next best time is today. Water infrastructure has been left to languish for far too long. We’ve got to do something about it and I’m glad that our Government is. This is the second pillar of reform. The next approach will be around how we consolidate the way in which water is delivered to our communities, and I’m looking forward to continuing with this journey. Kia ora.

Madam Speaker, this is my first time speaking in this House, and I just wanted to congratulate you on your appointment and to thank you in advance for your guidance and counsel to me over the coming months and years, as I speak more regularly.

We agree; we think this is very important regulation, and the National Party supports this bill through to select committee, where we can discuss it and explore it in more detail, as the Minister just discussed. It is incredibly important legislation, because we all watched the pain of a community in Havelock North go through that water contamination, and we saw 5,500 residents fall ill, we saw 45 people hospitalised, and it was linked to up to four deaths. So this can, fundamentally, never happen again. And, when you put that to one side, it’s startling to think that, in a First World country like New Zealand, every year there are 34,000 incidences of water-borne disease that impact our people. So the bottom line is, anywhere in the world—but, frankly, here in New Zealand—every Kiwi, as the Minister said, should have access to and the right to clean, fresh drinking water. It is time to address it, because we do have a patchwork quilt of regulation in this space, and we need to ensure, fundamentally, that all drinking-water suppliers do actually all work to the same and a common standard that raises the floor of water delivery and water regulation in this country.

National does take the safety of water incredibly seriously. That’s why we established the independent, two-stage inquiry into the Havelock North circumstances, and we clarified, through that first report, what actually happened. The second one really dealt with what were the recommendations and the principles that should guide future regulation as we go forward. Those principles, I think, are important—namely, firstly, to make sure there is always a high standard of care around water; to make sure we are protecting source water in particular; thirdly, making sure we’ve got multiple barriers to avoid contamination happening; and never ignoring change, because it’s often when change happens that it precedes an event like we’ve seen in Havelock North. I know, from my own background in aviation, the importance of a quality, regulated system, because inevitably it’s a series of what we call the “Swiss cheese” effect—a series of issues—that actually build up and create an opportunity for a tragic event to occur. So it’s important that we acknowledge that. The fifth thing, really, is about suppliers owning the safety of their own drinking water, and, finally, just taking a risk management approach and having quality risk-management protocols around that. This bill is, in fact, the third in a part of a broader package of regulatory reforms. The first, of course, was the national environmental standard for sources for human drinking water. The second is the water services regulator Act, which actually did create and form Taumata Arowai, the regulator. And this bill, of course, is giving it the powers that it needs to undertake that work.

I think this bill really does overcome the fragmented and weak regulatory system that we’ve seen, and it does impose, quite rightly, some really strong duties on drinking-water suppliers. It’s very practical things that really will raise the standard of water quality in New Zealand. It’s about providing safe drinking water and making sure that we meet drinking-water standards; making sure that water suppliers are ensuring there is a sufficient quantity of water available to a community; registering drinking-water suppliers with the regulator; and keeping essential details and records, which, again, has been part of the challenge of trying to understand where records are kept and where they are; that each water supplier actually has a drinking-water safety plan; and that we notify Taumata Arowai and take action when there are risks to public health. There needs to be a source water management plan—these are all very practical kinds of things—accreditation regimes, and minimum skills qualifications and experience for those that are assessing water quality, and, importantly, giving the regulator some real reporting, compliance, and enforcement powers. There is a consumer complaints framework in this legislation, and that’s really important so that, actually, consumers who have an issue with a supplier can actually appeal to the regulator, and there are some key processes around that. The Minister talked about waste-water and stormwater environmental measures as well, and, fundamentally, there’s a capacity to be able to take good practice that’s happening with one water supplier and to be able to share that through toolsets with others as well.

So, while we are supportive of this legislation, and we’re fully engaged with it, and we think it’s really important and a strong staring point, we, like the Minister, are also very keen to explore some things in the confines of our select committee and better understand and discuss, through submissions, a couple of key things. It’s good to see that there’s a staggered and practical transition of this legislation in implementation, but the sort of thing that we want to understand a bit more is that we note that the intention is that the regulation is proportionate to the risk, the scale, the complexity of each individual water supplier, but we’re interested to better understand what that cost burden looks like on small suppliers, in particular. Domestic self-suppliers are exempt from this legislation and from these requirements, but that exemption in itself excludes supply for more than one property. So there are circumstances where people may have a bore on their property, they have an easement, and that bore actually provides water to one or two, or even three, houses locally. We also see examples where we’ve got people with farms where they are providing housing to farm workers with a residence but they also have their own supply of water as well, and so just getting clear around what domestic self-supply actually means is really important.

The bill also allows for some classes of water suppliers to be exempted by the regulator’s CEO—at their discretion, essentially—and I think that some of our conversations should be focused on whether we think it’s actually better to build some of those exemptions into the legislation upfront so that we know what we’re asking of our citizens to comply with. And I think we need to explore even further with the councils any cost-burden concerns that they have in implementation, but especially there is a component in this bill about the fact that, if there is a local water supplier and they cannot meet the obligations of the bill, there is a responsibility on a local council to then take over those water suppliers who can’t meet those obligations. I think we just need to understand what that means practically for councils on the ground. I note that the Central Otago District Council has expressed some of those concerns publicly as well. And I think we, finally, owe it to ourselves just to reassure ourselves that the emergency powers that Taumata Arowai has are, in fact, appropriate and are fit for purpose. They are very important—that, in a crisis situation, they can step in and exercise those powers—but we just want to double check that they are appropriate and fit for purpose.

Finally, the bill amends the Resource Management Act and it requires consenting authorities to have regard to the actual or potential effects of a proposed activity on drinking water, and that’s something we really just want to understand what that could all mean in terms of how this legislation is actually implemented on the ground. I wonder whether wording like “likely effects” might be better language and we look into it. So they are, obviously, all considerations. As the Minister said, we will explore that all in select committee. We think this is a really important time for us to take action to make sure that we are raising the floor and the quality of water standards across this country of ours, and it’s my pleasure to commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s my pleasure to rise to take a call on the Water Services Bill, and, in doing so, can I acknowledge you and congratulate you on your appointment. I certainly support the sentiment of my colleague Mr Webb in saying that your experience perhaps will serve you well, and I’d like to think that as a fellow alumni of Freyberg High School, that is a quality that you have as well.

My experience in local government certainly tells me that this will be a welcome piece of legislation. Can I acknowledge the leadership of my colleague the Hon Nanaia Mahuta in terms of the work that she’s doing in this space. I know that with local government, with iwi partners, this will be very, very welcome, and it will be welcome because the three waters component is really important to communities up and down New Zealand. This piece of legislation is around providing an ability to regulate drinking water and to do so safely. It provides some confidence but also some certainty for communities that drinking water and the provision of that will be safe and that the source from which that water comes will also be safe as well. The Minister in her speech touched on the management of the other two waters that complete the treble, and that is the waste water aspects and stormwater. They are key responsibilities of any local council, but also it’s important that Taumata Arowai will be able to collect information as it sees fit as well. We only need to look to the Havelock North inquiry to provide some basis for that.

This bill, in essence, will ensure that the supply of safe drinking-water to communities also meets water standards, and that is in line with best international practice as well. So I’m looking forward to this piece of legislation, working through the process, going next step to select committee, and on that basis, I’m happy to commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to speak to this bill, which is a partnership bill—as the Minister described—to a previous piece of work we did, Taumata Arowai—the Water Services Regulator Act 2020. That bill came to the Health Committee, and this is an area that’s much more complex than we otherwise might think.

The very definition—as my colleague has alluded to—of domestic self-supply is quite complex, and I don’t imagine will be relitigated through this partnership bill. But, certainly, in the first bill that came to the House, Taumata Arowai, we grappled with questions around rainwater tanks—is Taumata Arowai applicable to a rainwater tank attached to a house, or attached to a cafe? The answer was yes, because a cafe is not for residential purposes; it has a different set of regulations. Is there a difference between rainwater and bore water? That was another complexity, and we spent a lot of time in Health Committee trying to figure out the difference there, and fundamentally settled on: no, there’s no difference for the purposes of this legislation. Mobile homes that fill up their water tanks from a domestic supply: does it matter where they fill up their water tank? If they fill it up from a domestic supply, or if they fill it up from a commercial supply, suddenly do the water regulations around that mobile home change?

You can see some of the complexities we have to deal with in this whole discussion. I think we did a lot of the groundwork necessary for this bill to be able to move forward, but we may find—even as we’re progressing through this bill—that there are some definitions that might want to change. So a lot of complexities, and please, this is coming to the Health Committee. If we look at the fundamental actions of the bill, the commitment to drinking-water supplies is to provide safe drinking water consistent with standards, ensure there’s an adequate quantity of supply to register their drinking-water supplies, to have a drinking-water safety plan, and to notify Taumata Arowai when there are risks to public health—it makes sense. The source water risk management is also described in this bill—drinking-water supplies must have a source water risk management plan. It’s actually quite complex. We spent a lot of time on the risk management plans, and local authorities must contribute their information to the risk management plan as well.

I think the last thing I want to talk to on this bill is around some of the interesting points around the exemptions. I understand wanting to have that wriggle room, particularly around the example used in the bill, around chlorination. The Health Committee will want to explore this carefully, because on one level, fluoride can also be a disinfectant. We don’t want to commit ourselves down a pathway here that might lock out future legislation that we were wanting to come to this House. So as we look at exemptions in the Health Committee, we’re just going to be guided by official advice so that we do what we want to do here, which is, effectively, to give people exemptions, if it’s required, give authorities exemptions, if it’s worthy, and require—but not lock ourselves out of future legislation. I look forward to that coming to the Health Committee for further discussion. You can sense our support for this bill, and its progress through the House, and so we commend it to the House now.

Madam Speaker, congratulations on your election to the Speaker’s role, and all of your colleagues. I want to start my speech today in the House just to acknowledge all those who lost their lives in the Havelock North incident a couple of years ago, because I do think as Government and as Parliament, we do have to pay responsibility in terms of regulating our water. That’s why I’m very proud to stand in support of this bill in this House today.

A word that keeps reoccurring in my head is kaitiakitanga, which is our guardianship of the resources that we have on this land while we are here. I think this bill shows a great guardianship that we will have over the water resource which is so dear to our country. I came here as a migrant when I was five years old. I think one of the favourite things that I got to do was drink water straight from the tap. That’s something that I’m not able to do in a lot of countries. In fact, when I go overseas, the first thing I do is turn up at a convenience store and buy litres and litres of water to take back to my hotel room. So I think this is something that really needs to be preserved in this country, and I think, really, this bill will actually build the infrastructure and the oversight needed to keep New Zealand this way.

Throughout the whole entire bill that I’ve been reading, one particular phrase keeps coming up, and that phrase is “environmental performance”. I just really want to not only commend all that have worked on it but also just say to the Health Committee, as well, that this is a really, really important part of this bill, to actually make sure that we do monitor the environmental performance of our whole entire water system to make sure the footprint and the damage that we do to our precious land is kept at a minimal.

So on that note, I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Can I join with others in congratulating you on your election to that role.

The Greens welcome the comprehensive response by this Government, following on from the Havelock North inquiry to the whole issue of upgrading drinking-water supplies and to that big gap in our infrastructure, because, as the former president of Local Government New Zealand, Dave Cull, pointed out, the situation in New Zealand was not consistent with best practice internationally, because we didn’t have a regulator that was strongly committed to compliance monitoring and enforcement. Certainly we had drinking-water standards through the Ministry for the Environment, but the community and district health boards were quite variable in the way in which they sought to implement those standards, and I think the inquiry found that there had been actually no enforcement action between 2008 and 2016 of any of the standards.

So we have had a major gap in our law, and, as Minister Nanaia Mahuta noted, this is the second pillar of filling that gap. We’ve had Taumata Arowai established, and now this bill sets out its functions and responsibilities and the whole regulatory framework. Taumata Arowai is an independent Crown agency. It’s independent of Ministers, it’s had a chief executive appointed, and its role is quite massive. It’s the thickness of this bill, highlighted in terms of its responsibilities for the overall regulatory framework for setting the standards and ensuring that those standards are then monitored and enforced, and being able to take action against drinking-water suppliers that do not meet those standards. The bill contains a raft of tools for compliance and enforcement from infringement notices to being able to actually appoint someone else to take over the responsibilities of supplying drinking water if there has been repeated instances of non-compliance.

It also imposes quite significant duties on drinking-water suppliers, requiring them to meet the standards, requiring them to have a safety plan which has a multi-barrier approach to ensuring that drinking water is safe, and it also puts in place a due diligence responsibility and it has some strict liability offences, and for those offences there doesn’t need to be an intention to commit an offence but it is one of strict liability. So I really congratulate the Minister, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, for her really thoughtful work in developing this legislation and consulting with stakeholders.

In the last term, the Green Party pushed hard for much greater attention to protection of source water to prevent nutrient contamination, to prevent faecal contamination, and to significantly reduce the costs to councils and to ratepayers. If the supply is protected, then the treatment costs are less. So it was pleasing to see that in the bill there is quite a lot of attention now to the protection of source waters requiring suppliers to have this water risk management plan and also requiring local authorities to cooperate in sharing information about risks to water supplies and requiring councils, when they’re considering granting resource consents, to have regard to the potential risks to source water.

One of the things the Green Party will be interested in submissions is whether Taumata Arowai has sufficient responsibility to be an advocate for protection of source water in relation to resource consents. It’s something in Canterbury that I was enormously grateful to Community and Public Health and Dr Alistair Humphrey for their representation in a range of resource consent hearings about the potential need to safeguard our drinking water. In Darfield, the largest town in Aotearoa without a reticulated sewerage system, Community and Public Health pointed out that subdivision expansion, more septic tanks, was a potential contamination risk to aquifers which provide us with drinking water in Canterbury. So that advocacy role I think is critical for Taumata Arowai, and we’ll be interested in submissions on that.

On the whole issue of enforcement, which we haven’t seen in the past, the bill provides for Taumata Arowai to develop a compliance monitoring and enforcement strategy and to review that every three years and, of course, to publish it.

I notice in this bill too the first steps to also improving the delivery of infrastructure in waste water and stormwater, with the requirement for national level monitoring, reporting, and advisory functions in relation to waste water and stormwater resting with Taumata Arowai, and the development of a national public database and some environmental performance measures there, and the requirement to actually promote good practice, which I think will help ensure that across Aotearoa there is much more consistency in the provision of waste-water and stormwater services and that we don’t get things like the Kaipara District Council and the severe financial consequences for that council through not really having access to good advice on waste water, when they had commissioners having to be appointed.

I think there will be quite a lot of interest in terms of the community water supply schemes in a number of areas, particularly rural areas; the standards that those suppliers will have to meet; and then whether they want councils to take over the provision of those schemes because of their new responsibilities under this legislation. So the Minister noted the transitional period, which again recognises the potential issues there.

I also note just the huge infrastructure deficit we have in both drinking-water supplies, and waste water and stormwater; and the funding that is being provided—over $700 million—to local authorities if they are supportive of the reform to consolidate the provision of drinking-water services into regional entities, potentially between five and seven. The Health Committee would benefit from some comment in submissions on the nature of this consolidation and how appropriate people think it is for their regions and what sort of scale that consolidation should be at.

The Green Party supports the bill and looks forward to submissions. Thank you.

The ACT Party supports this bill at the first reading. This bill centralises regulation around drinking water and while ACT would usually be sceptical of policy that removed power from local communities and towards central government, in this particular context of drinking water in New Zealand and the way it’s been managed to date by both councils and local government, there is, in fact, a strong case for a new approach.

Now, the context of this bill is very important because it highlights a major issue that’s facing our country right now and we’ve heard it alluded to by other speakers, and that is the infrastructure deficit. The bill came before this House as a response to the Havelock North inquiry, and that tragic event underscored major costs that can be borne by our communities where there is a failure of infrastructure, especially when it comes to a critical part of our daily lives, like drinking water. The bill, therefore, seeks to provide just one part of a solution to ensure New Zealanders can feel safe when they turn on the tap by providing a regulatory framework around drinking water. It follows the recommendations of the Havelock North inquiry so, for that reason, ACT supports the bill.

It also highlights the fact that this issue has occurred because of the infrastructure deficit, and the duties and powers that it gives the new entity will be helpful. But in terms of waste water and stormwater, there is a big gap. The monitoring regime this sets up is designed to monitor councils’ compliance against their own consents and, fundamentally, that is still a major problem for water quality in New Zealand. This bill deals with one of the three waters, effectively—drinking water; potable water—but does not give any teeth to this agency to go after the poor performance of local government in managing waste-water networks and waste-water discharges and I think that needs a lot more work. So we look forward to hearing from submitters at the select committee stage about how they might propose to improve the controls set out in this bill.

The bill is only one part of the solution to address the way we manage our water quality and, hopefully, our infrastructure that will follow. There have been a generation of poor incentives and a lack of prioritising of that type of infrastructure. So further questions, hard questions, need to be asked about the management of that infrastructure and the investments required, particularly when local government can give itself 25-year consents to pollute urban waterways, beaches, and harbours in places like Auckland and Wellington, where we know that local government has a plan—it might be a 10-year plan or a 30-year plan—to repair that infrastructure. That is inadequate compared to the expectations of people in those urban communities. When families go to the beaches this summer, they don’t expect that that water quality will be unsafe for swimming. But it’s more than likely in some of those places, and particularly where I live in West Auckland, which have longstanding water quality issues associated with failing infrastructure. They can have little confidence and this bill does nothing to address that in the short or medium term.

We’ve also heard from people who’ve discussed the bill today, and from my discussions with others in the professional community who contributed to putting this bill together, that the infrastructure deficit is not starting with the $500 million to $700 million that we’ve heard about as an initial contribution. Potentially, the infrastructure deficit for the waste-water networks on their own is somewhere in the region of $10 billion to $15 billion and that doesn’t include all of the time factors and finance costs as well. So we’re looking at about $4 billion to upgrade water treatment plants for waste water and maybe another $6 billion to $7 billion on pipes. Now, you know, once you add up service relocations, land acquisition, consenting and additional costs, potentially, we’re talking of an infrastructure deficit of about $30 billion.

That’s a major constraint on housing supply. Councils can’t finance this new infrastructure when they’re up against their borrowing limits. So we need to consider what other mechanisms might be available to help close this deficit and to help fund this work that needs doing. The Government has suggested potentially three or five regional water entities to take over the management of the drinking-water, the potable water infrastructure, and what we know is those entities like Watercare in Auckland or Wellington Water in Wellington also have the additional function of managing the waste-water networks. So these entities are likely to have a multidisciplinary approach to managing three waters. And that needs to be taken into account potentially in amendments to this bill or in other legislation that we would hope would follow to address the infrastructure deficit.

Now, we understand the Government is proposing public sector ownership for these new three waters corporations, which, unfortunately, seems to exclude any private sector investment in these types of assets and networks. And when you consider the deficit is potentially $30 billion—the amount of money that would need to be applied in as short a time frame as possible to address urban water quality issues—it seems like there’s an opportunity there waiting to be taken. We know that organisations like the Accident Compensation Corporation and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund have expressed an interest to invest in infrastructure. So we believe that there’s an opportunity for public-private partnerships to add to the amount of funding that’s available to close the infrastructure deficit far more quickly than would otherwise be available through normal local government or central government borrowing.

So on that note, I’d like to conclude by confirming that ACT will support the bill to the first reading and we look forward to making a positive contribution to this discussion going forward. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, and, also, I’d like to echo the comments that have been said this morning to congratulate you around your recent appointment—congratulations. I’m delighted to take a brief call on the Water Services Bill, and I’d like to begin by acknowledging the work the Hon Nanaia Mahuta has done in this space over many years. This bill is the first step in a suite of policies in order to futureproof our water supply over the coming years. This bill, as we’ve heard, basically sets up a new water service regulator. Our current system is very fragmented. If I look at the Waikato region, where I’m a member of Parliament, we’ve got around 15 councils, each with their own, sort of, rules and regulations, many of them with their own water supply infrastructure, and the reality is this fragmented system is not serving our communities or our economy well.

I would like to highlight the point the previous speaker, Simon Court, spoke to in terms of hard questions around infrastructure. I agree with what the member was saying there, and we need to have these conversations. As central government, working in with local councils and, potentially, various private providers, these conversations need to take place, and we need to ask the hard questions, because as our economy continues to grow and develop, providing opportunities for people, water will play a key role. It will be front and centre in that economic development.

So this is an excellent piece of work. I’m pleased we’ve got support right across the House. It’s certainly something that needed to happen, and I’m very pleased that it is happening. I wish the Minister all the very best following this bill through to completion. I commend the bill to the House. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Four years and four months since the Havelock North water contamination issues. That’s quite a long time, and I make the point not to criticise the Government for the slowness to act but the complexity of the solutions. The royal commission report into the water contamination outbreak made a number of very, very substantive changes, both to organisational structures, responsibilities, and standards, and then the big thing that we haven’t even got to, which Simon Court, the member from ACT who has just resumed his seat talked about, is the massive infrastructure challenge, both in term of structure and cost.

But this is a milestone and the National Party will support it, with some caveats. The one that I’m particularly concerned about is that I think the population of Havelock North is about 14,000 or 15,000, and one would expect, living in a town of that size, that water contamination issues and the standards for cleanliness of our drinking water should be high, but we are a quite large and geographically dispersed country with a large number of small hamlets, townships, villages, and so on. We’ve already heard from the Central Otago District Council, who have publicly stated that there are at least 27 communities that would struggle enormously to meet the standards that are set out in this bill when it’s passed.

Now, that is not to say that people should be unnecessarily put at risk—and I need to reinforce that point. But in, for example, the township of Hampden, I think it is, in North Otago, in the boundary between the Dunedin and Waitaki electorates, there is an issue that the community have responded to with treatment processes that would not meet this standard, as far as I can tell, and there are a higher number of boil-water notices during a year than other communities might find acceptable if they lived in large, metropolitan areas. That is the cost of living in little paradises right around the country, and to impose a single standard across all of those communities is going to be costly, difficult, and, arguably, very highly bureaucratic.

Now, the bill doesn’t actually do that. It does provide an exemption framework at clause 56. So, firstly, that’s been delegated to the chief executive. I think we need to hear from submitters about whether or not the primary legislation, or even secondary legislation, should set out the circumstances more prescriptively wherein exemptions would be appropriate, and I have no doubt that geographical isolation and the number of people who are connected to the water supply are two key determinants of that exemption framework. It’s not clear to me—and the committee will have a look at this—about the duration, the longevity of the exemption. So we have at clause 57, on residual disinfection—which I think speaks to a temporary contamination or problem with the water supply. But I hope that whoever has the final say—this Parliament or the chief executive—the exemptions can be longstanding, because those communities are prepared to live in places where there may be extra steps that need to be taken in order to keep water of a high quality.

The examples used in the bill don’t talk about townships like Hampden or the 27 communities in Central Otago; they talk about “backcountry huts”, “isolated campsites”, “marae”, “farm buildings on a bore water supply”—all important exemptions. But I would suggest that they’re not comprehensive enough and that they should go further than that to enable communities to make conscious decisions about the source, the transmission of the supply, and what needs to be done in order to make sure that the water is safe to drink, because it’s not those communities—it’s not an event in a small community—that we are responding to. This was a town of 14,000 people, and I hope that we are not imposing a very high urban standard on very remote rural areas, and the costs that go with it.

But with those caveats, obviously, I’m sure the Health Committee will look at those in some detail. I’ll be looking forward to what they hear.

Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. I’d like to take a brief call in order to speak to this bill. Water is a critical part of our lives, and perhaps it has taken something as sad as the incident in Havelock North for us to fully realise and take value of the value of water. It was only when I travelled overseas for a number of years, in the OE that all Kiwis used to be able to do, that you fully comprehend the value of being able to walk over to your kitchen sink and fill up a glass of water and drink from it.

The importance of this bill is that it continues the theme that this Government has set in place to put first people’s wellbeing and to put first the health of New Zealanders, and it’s important that we continue to invest in this space to make up for the deficit that has been left. It is true that we have had years of inaction on drinking water and that the infrastructure that we have existing right now is broken in many areas. So this bill strikes a strong balance between incentivising drinking-water suppliers to take responsibility for their supplies and also giving Taumata Arowai a modern regulatory tool kit to promote good-practice compliance and enforcement.

All drinking-water suppliers will be required to consistently provide safe drinking water to consumers through this legislation and meet drinking-water standards. They will be required to have drinking-water safety plans in place, and these are core elements of international best practice. I wish to commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to the submissions we receive in such a critical areas for New Zealanders’ wellbeing.

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. This is a historical moment in this House, where a Tongan-speaking New Zealander is addressing Madam Speaker, who is also a Tongan-speaking New Zealander. I want to congratulate you, ‘Eiki Sea, in your role as joining the Speaker’s team, and it is definitely an honour and privilege for a Tongan New Zealander.

I want to take a short call on the first reading of the Water Services Bill. I want to acknowledge the leadership of the Minister, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta. What I want to bring to this contribution is in her legislative statement. There’s a sentence there that talks about “Te Mana o te Wai”. I will quote the Minister, because I think it’s important that it’s repeated in this House—that it is more than just naming things in te reo Māori but actually being part of governance. And I quote: “The bill requires all persons who perform or exercise functions, powers, and duties under the legislation to give effect to te Mana o te Wai. As part of its governance arrangements, Taumata Arowai will have a Māori Advisory Group that is charged with advising on how to interpret and give effect to te Mana o te Wai; on how to enable mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, and kaitiakitanga to be exercised.”

I totally support this bill. Ka tautoko ahau i tēnei pire ki te Whare. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to be talking on this Water Services Bill. As many speakers have traversed, it’s a long time coming to get to this point today, where we have the introduction of a new bill which essentially puts in place a new regulatory regime. It’s interesting, when you go around the world, and I’ve been involved in water projects around the world, New Zealand has been a bit of an outlier in the sense that we do not and have not had in place good sets of regulations, or even independent oversight, of our water system. I think, in New Zealand, we’ve relied principally on the fact that territorial local councils, or authorities or councils, in the main do a pretty good job managing water supplies. But, unfortunately, that Havelock North example, showed that that is not always the case.

I think this piece of legislation brings New Zealand into the main with what we see internationally, and perhaps we should have had it earlier. For those who were affected by Havelock, I certainly express my best wishes for them and for those who lost their lives. It’s truly a tragic event. But this piece of legislation obviously is sort of a step towards, in terms of the continuum, of the different types of models we could put in place. It’s reasonably prescriptive in terms of what it sets out, and I think many people have gone through the various aspects of what the new authority will have power and oversight of—principally about making sure, approving, and overseeing the types of plans that have been prepared. But also, it puts an obligation on councils, particularly, and for regional councils to publish the results.

I think that’s all good stuff, and I think what we’ll see over time is making sure—particularly amongst our 64 councils, where we’ve got some that are more financially constrained—that the requirement to provide a certain level of quality of water is absolutely paramount in the decision making. That will stop the deferring of essential investment in upgrading, not only our water but our stormwater and our waste-water assets, because that requirement to meet a safety requirement, a health requirement, will be now a paramount objective for them. I think that will force, in some ways, expenditure in these smaller councils, many of whom, at this stage, are financially constrained—so it gives rise to a much wider issue about how they’re going to fund that, and how they’re going to meet their requirements.

But that is a different issue. What this is principally about is a health issue. I think that’s an excellent point to start, and a great way to drive organisational change if we are to see much better levels of quality of water across all of New Zealand. I think there are areas of debate within the bill, and no doubt the Health Committee will be looking at it. But I think the first one is the level of reporting that the councils have to do, and the management plans. Whilst it’s good in principle, and it’s great that it’s set out in legislation—and I’m not saying that that’s not appropriate—what I am suggesting is there will need to be care around making sure that we strike the right balance between what is necessary and what, over time, we get: scope creep. I think we just need to make sure the scope creep is—people want to make sure that they get every piece of information, which may not always be relevant, but we do not want to end up imposing on local authorities, particularly an undue burden that doesn’t actually deliver a better outcome. So I’m being careful, there is a balance. We certainly need the right information, but we need to make sure that we don’t end up in a situation where we overexpose councils to unnecessary requirements.

The other thing, I think—and I know my colleague beside me traversed this issue slightly—is the issue around those who supply less than 500 people. We do need to make sure that those small communities—and Hon Michael Woodhouse was talking about that before—are in a situation where they have good arrangements. In many cases, they would have been in place for maybe 100 years, or whatever, and we want to make sure that we don’t, again, start overlying sort of an Auckland-Wellington solution to something that is very local and actually the community is very happy with. I think that, again, is the next level of balancing act we need to make sure.

The last one, and this is one that particularly affects my electorate of Port Waikato, is the issue around supply at a very small level. Where, on farm supply, the definition of a building—obviously, an apartment is ruled out under these arrangements and therefore would be captured. But where people grow up on farms, and there are businesses located on those farms which may not just be related to normal, ordinary, course of business, but it might be a processing plant or whatever, or in many cases, farms have multiple houses and dwellings. Again, I just think we need to be very mindful about, again, ending up with regulations—actually in the legislation, but it will be captured in the regulations as well—that are not fit for purpose. We want to make sure that our horticultural industries—even large farms, and large parts of my electorate who have multiple dwellings—do not end up being unnecessarily caught out. Because, after all, the people that own the farms in many cases are living on the farms, and they have as much incentive to make sure the water quality is up to standard to meet their own family needs, as well as the people that might be working with them on those properties.

So I think, again, I’d just say to the committee, be careful, be prudent, and be focused on making sure we end up with legislation and regulations that are very appropriate and, over time, serve the community well in terms of delivering a much better delivery of outcomes over the longer term. I think that’s about all I want to cover. The Resource Management Act aspect is another one that is talking about actual and potential effects. I’ve heard a couple of people speak about that, I don’t quite know what that means, but I’m sure the committee will take the opportunity to explore what that means. Is that to give priority to? I don’t know. I don’t know what the wording means. I’ve had a bit of a look here, but I think that’s another sort of aspect. But in the main, I’ve got to say, I think the bill certainly looks like it’s heading in the right direction, and it would be interesting to see it progress through not only the select committee process but through the House. Thank you very much.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. It is my absolute pleasure to take the final call on the first reading of the Water Services Bill. As a former Far North District councillor and now the MP for Northland, water is a huge issue for us in Northland. We are heading into summer; already the drought warnings are out, the signs are up at the supermarket to conserve our water in places like Paihia. I know that throughout the last couple of months, as information has been out about this bill, there is some concern and trepidation amongst our local authorities up north. However, I am pleased that all the local authorities have signed up to the memorandum of understanding and are at least looking into the options for it.

We expect as New Zealanders to all be able to turn on the tap and drink the water knowing that it is safe, that we can swim in our rivers and lakes or gather kaimoana at the beach without fear of becoming ill. As has been referred to in the speeches today, with the Havelock North inquiry following the deaths of several people and those falling ill to poor quality drinking water, we know that this isn’t consistent across the country and that something needs to be done. I want to acknowledge the Minister of Local Government for taking the leadership on this issue and bringing it to the House, the support of all those that have spoken on it this morning, and I wish the select committee well. I look forward to reading the submissions coming from my area in particular, as I am sure they will raise matters for the consideration of the select committee. With that, I commend the bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Water Services Bill be considered by the Health Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Health Committee.