Water Services Bill

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I present a further legislative statement on the Water Services Bill.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: That statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

I move, That the Water Services Bill be now read a second time.

Everybody should be able to get drinking water from the tap, knowing that it is safe, no matter where they live in Aotearoa. We should be able to swim or gather kai in our rivers, lakes, or at the beach without fear that our whānau will become sick. We should be confident that our drinking-water sources are protected and that the environmental impact of waste-water and stormwater systems is acceptable. We should be confident that drinking-water standards, which reflect the standards set by the World Health Organization, are being met by our drinking-water suppliers, particularly those which are publicly owned and operated. In many areas, sadly, this is not the case.

Aotearoa is blessed with an abundance of fresh water. It is our most precious natural resource. This Government wants to ensure this taonga is cared for and protected for generations to come. We want to ensure that services that provide us with water are looking towards that future. This is why the Government is engaged in a comprehensive programme of three waters reform. The Water Services Bill, which will provide the new regulatory regime for drinking water, along with better oversight of our three waters services, is a central part of this reform programme.

I’d like to acknowledge the contributions made in both the development of this bill and during the select committee process. Firstly, I’d like to acknowledge the constructive collaboration of local government and the wider water sector in developing this bill in the first place. I would also like to acknowledge the work of the Havelock North drinking-water inquiry, which recommended significant reform of drinking-water regulation and service delivery reform.

I’d like to thank the Health Committee for its work. I understand that the committee worked together in a highly constructive way, and the processes resulted in a number of technical changes to the bill that have significantly improved its quality, particularly for small rural suppliers. In my opening briefing to the select committee, I asked them to consider the workability of the proposals to bring suppliers of drinking water into a regulatory framework, and they have done exactly that. I especially want to thank the organisations, councils, iwi, and members of the public who took the time to make written and oral submissions on the bill. The committee received nearly a thousand written submissions; 130 individuals, groups, and organisations took the time to make an oral submission. It is clear that many submitters, particularly those from iwi, councils, and industry groups, fully engaged with the bill. The changes made as a consequence have helped to significantly strengthen the bill. I thank the submitters for their time and effort.

I want to highlight what this bill will do. It provides clear leadership for drinking-water regulation through a central regulator, Taumata Arowai; it strengthens compliance, monitoring, and enforcement of drinking-water regulation; and it ensures there is a multi-barrier protection of drinking-water supplies, which is an international best practice and is the core of the Havelock North inquiry’s recommendations. It requires all drinking-water suppliers, other than domestic self-suppliers, to be part of the regulatory system and provide safe drinking water on a consistent basis. It ensures source waters are properly protected and monitored. It provides measures that will significantly improve the transparency and public reporting around the environmental impact of waste-water and stormwater systems. It provides mechanisms that enable the regulation of drinking water to be proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of each drinking-water supply. Finally, it requires all those who have functions, duties, and powers under the bill to give effect to te mana o te wai in a way that is consistent with the National Policy Statement for Freshwater Management.

As I have said, the Health Committee has made a number of technical changes to the bill. One of the significant concerns expressed in a large number of submissions, particularly those made by iwi and marae trusts, was that the bill contained a power of warrantless entry, which extended to marae. The committee recommended changes so that warrantless entry to marae requires consent, in the same way as for private homes. This will be welcomed by many submitters.

The bill requires chlorination for all reticulated supplies unless an exemption is obtained from the chief executive of Taumata Arowai. This reflects recommendations made by the inquiry into Havelock North’s drinking water. Some submissions raised safety concerns about small suppliers handling chlorine. The committee responded to these submissions by allowing Taumata Arowai to exempt classes of suppliers from residual disinfection, such as very small suppliers. This is, again, another welcome addition to the bill.

Some submitters were concerned that the bill would duplicate regulatory requirements for food businesses that use water for manufacturing purposes. The committee has amended the bill to exclude water if its use is regulated under food safety legislation. This will be welcomed by submitters.

The committee also made a range of amendments to better tailor the bill to small suppliers, such as rural and marae suppliers. I welcome and support these changes.

While there was consensus in the committee on most items, differing views were expressed in two areas. Firstly, a minority of the committee members expressed a view that small suppliers serving less than 30 consumers should be carved out from regulation. Mr Luxon MP has tabled a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) to give effect to this. This view, however, was not supported by the majority of the committee, who recognised that there must be a way forward for all our communities to have safe drinking water.

The bill provides that regulation of drinking water must be proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of the supply. This is quite a different approach to the existing regime under the Health Act, which is a one-size-fits-all approach.

Taumata Arowai has been working directly with rural suppliers on simple, cost-effective, acceptable solutions for small suppliers, such as end-point treatment devices, like UV filters. Devices like this are not recognised under the Health Act, so this represents a major step forward for rural supplies, where most of the water goes to stock or horticulture. I understand that both Federated Farmers and Irrigation New Zealand are part of a technical group on this approach, and the work has been positive and constructive. Taumata Arowai provided advice in this area directly to the committee, and I understand that this gave many members on the committee confidence about the direction they are taking. I thank those parties for their participation in this process.

Secondly, some committee members expressed the view that chlorination of reticulated supplies should not be mandatory. The majority of the committee, however, recognised that chlorination is an essential public health measure. The bill contains a number of ways for suppliers to provide chlorine-free water to consumers, as long as it is safe and meets drinking-water standards.

In addition to changes made by the Health Committee, I propose to make additional changes by a Supplementary Order Paper, which I’ve already tabled so members can consider it in advance of the committee of the whole House stage. My Supplementary Order Paper will extend the transition window for water suppliers that are not registered under the Health Act, so they have to register with Taumata Arowai by the end of the fourth year and have seven years to comply. This extension will give the system time to mature and for Taumata Arowai to work with suppliers to ensure the regime is fit for purpose. This also aligns with the Government’s reform of water service delivery arrangements, which proposes to establish a small number of national water service entities by 2024.

The Supplementary Order Paper also proposes some new powers and functions for Taumata Arowai, particularly in the area of waste water. These powers will provide much-needed national-level oversight and consistency around publicly owned waste-water networks. Amongst other things, Taumata Arowai will be able to set minimum environmental performance standards for waste-water networks, bringing Aotearoa in line with many other countries. The SOP also clarifies that Taumata Arowai’s oversight powers extend to trade waste.

The Government is committed to reforming the way three waters is regulated and delivered in this country. The bill is a significant milestone in achieving this. I thank the select committee, Department of Internal Affairs officials, and Taumata Arowai for supporting the workability of this bill, and I thank the committee for their amendments. I commend the bill to this House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, and it’s a pleasure to stand here and to speak on this bill tonight. In doing so, I would like to commend my colleague Christopher Luxon, who’s done a huge amount of work on this bill. As well as sitting on the committee and going through the process, he’s been working tirelessly—and we’ve joined forces on it—during the lockdown period in terms of we were going to be speaking on this on the first Wednesday we were back after the recess, which didn’t eventuate, because, as we know, the country went into lockdown. We wish all those people that are currently with COVID and recovering from it all the best.

So Chris was unable to be here tonight, because he comes from Auckland, but I can assure you we’ve done a huge amount of work on this. We’ve done some live streaming. We’ve done lots of talking to various people, and we’ve managed, over the course of that time, to collect almost 15,000 signatures on a petition. The reason people were signing that petition is because there are over 70,000 small suppliers who will be affected by this. We all want clean water. We support Taumata Arowai, but we’re thinking about the amount of regulation that’s coming down on to our communities at the moment.

What’s been really good about this is that we’ve had a lot of discussion recently about the amount of legislation, regulation, rules—some of them work, some of them don’t—that have been coming down on our rural community. Just for an example, there are freshwater regulations, there are slope rules, there are labour workforce shortages to be dealing with with immigration, foreign exemptions for land purchases for forestry purposes—and that’s carbon forestry—failure to provide forestry consent rules to council, climate commission are wanting to cut livestock farming, high-country tenure review, ending live exports, pressuring agriculture into the emissions trading scheme, and, of course, the bill before this that we just discussed, with the ute tax.

So we’re asking ourselves: what problem are we trying to solve here? Yes, we want clean water. Yes, we support Taumata Arowai, but, actually, rather than the number eight wired country that we used to be, we’re becoming a nation that is strangling people in red tape. What we’re really concerned about is by going down to the level that this bill intends to do—and, of course, Christopher Luxon has a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which proposes 30 end-point users. By going down to the level of every single end point where a person is supplying somebody else with water, it’s going to become a huge administrative nightmare.

What’s been really good about this bill—and I want to thank the Minister for putting up at least one SOP, which is around extending the time frames, because this is not going to be an easy thing, for Taumata Arowai to be able to get to this level of compliance and have all the administrators, all the systems, all the inspectors having the conversation. It’s not going to be an easy deal to solve. So I thank the Minister for putting the SOP up that looks to buy some extra time. However, as much as we would like to support this bill, we fairly and squarely believe that by not just keeping this above people who are supplying above 30 people, it’s going to create a huge administrative nightmare.

Why I’ve enjoyed working with Chris so much on this is many of the other issues I mentioned before, around all of the things that are coming down at farmers—is that we’ve been able to have an issue with this one. So if I supply water to myself in my house, that’s fine. If I supply it to a farm worker or there’s somebody out in rural New Zealand that I supply it to, then I get caught up in this regime. People might go, “Oh, well, you know, that’s just farmers pushing back again.” But we actually then talked about marae, where this could be an issue on some of the smaller marae.

We talked about the bach owners. So there’s people with baches in various holiday camps. I’m not talking about necessarily people with big, flash baches. There’s lots of beach baches and lots of little huts that people have bought themselves over the years that they take the family to to go on holiday in the summer. So that’s fine if they’re supplying themselves with water, but if they’re supplying the next bach or two or three baches beside it, as people in rural New Zealand often do—they find one source of water and they share it around—all of those people are actually going to have to comply with this regulation. So first of all, they have to do the administration, and then who are the people that are going to come out and check up? Especially if you think about a situation like bach owners, they’re not there all the time. Who’s going to check it up? How’s it going to work?

What I would really like to know is, you know, apart from clean water, which we all want, what is the problem that we’re setting out to solve here? Because we’re going to create a huge administrative nightmare, and if I could understand—and I wasn’t part of the select committee process. How many of these little suppliers are actually causing massive problems in the water situation in New Zealand?

So look, we’re strongly supportive, as I said, of Taumata Arowai, but we can’t overlook the massive burden that this bill is going to create. So we would actually ask the Minister—and I would strongly urge the Minister tonight, when we get to the committee stage. Christopher Luxon has produced an amendment, SOP 61, to be debated at that stage, and Mr Luxon’s SOP is suggesting we exempt from the bill small water suppliers, like rural water schemes, that supply fewer than 30 end-point users. National won’t be able to support this bill until we get to that point, but if there was a change of heart—and we could make some ground on that front if our SOP is supported and adopted—then National may revisit our stance for the bill’s third reading.

So I think the weight that comes behind this is the fact that our petition has attracted almost 15,000 signatures. There’s a strong feeling around this that it’s going to be quite difficult to achieve the administrative side of it. Nobody’s arguing that they want their water to be clean or that there aren’t special filters or there aren’t things that they could do, and it would be really great if we could look at some other way of incorporating those smaller suppliers where this administrative burden wasn’t so onerous, because if you add another 70,000—perhaps up to 100,000, I’m hearing—people into the system, it’s all got to be managed, it’s all got to be monitored, and it’s really just tying people up in red tape. It’s going to take a long time, I believe, for this Government or any Government to develop a system which is going to be able to be extremely efficient at managing right down to that level.

So I guess there’s probably not a lot to add, really, just that we would like to support it, and we really do urge and ask the Government if they really would—and particularly Minister Mahuta, if we could ask for some real consideration around SOP 61. If we can get to that point, then we would be able to support this piece of legislation. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Speaker. It’s the first time I’m speaking in the House since the country went into lockdown about a month ago, and I just wanted to quickly acknowledge all the Kiwis around the country who have been diligently and patiently following all the public health advice. Thank you for keeping our communities safe.

Coming back to the bill, we live in a beautiful country, but one in five New Zealanders are supplied with drinking water that is not guaranteed to be safe from bacterial contamination. That’s why this Government and Minister Mahuta have brought in a comprehensive range of programmes to help with the three waters reform, and the Water Services Bill is an important part of that substantial reform. At the moment, we’ve got 67 different councils around the country which are dealing with waste water, stormwater, and drinking water in different ways. There has to be a way of making the system consistent so that we are complying with all of the safety issues. What happened with Havelock North—where four people died and 5,500 people became ill—should not be repeated again, and here is an opportunity to prevent another one of these incidents from happening.

As a member of the Health Committee, where this bill came through, I just want to acknowledge all the organisations, the iwis, and the individuals who contributed towards the changes. As the Minister has mentioned, quite a few things were constructively changed around the initial bill that was proposed, and we had over 130 people actually make oral submissions as well—so I just want to thank everybody for doing that. But I strongly recommend this bill to the House as a medical professional as well, because this is about making sure our communities are safe. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Well, I had the privilege of being on the Health Committee and working through the Water Services Bill, and also the privilege of listening to numerous submissions on it—heartfelt submissions, in many cases. It is always a privilege to listen to people who have taken the time to submit on a bill. This bill, of course, is wanting to ensure that there is safe drinking water for consumers, and we would all want to see that. It has a number of obligations and duties for those that supply water, including registering the supply, preparing a safety plan, preparing a risk management plan, and establishing a complaints process. As we worked through the bill and listened to the submissions, I think we worked very collaboratively and very positively in getting a number of changes. We were certainly hampered at the point around the smaller rural water schemes.

We can’t support the bill because of the onerous and overly onerous obligations on some of those smaller rural water supply schemes, but, also, a number of the marae came with the same issues, and so we feel there’s some synergies between those. So the things that we were most concerned about was the disproportionate and burdensome bureaucracy and compliance on these rural water supplies. At one stage, I asked if the select committee members would come out and have a look at some of these supply schemes and talk to some of the people involved in them because—

💬 Hon Member: What? Come out of Wellington? I don’t know!

Well, to me, that’s what you do. You get your feet on the ground and you talk to the people and you find out what the issues are. So I couldn’t convince the select committee to do that, but instead I took my 2020 colleagues from our National caucus and we went to Alexandra, because I knew that there are a lot of these water schemes in Alexandra. I’d had a look at them and I knew that we would get a really good feel for them. We went and listened to a gentleman there, an incredibly capable gentleman, who talked to us about the examples—took us up and showed us some of the examples. He is a fourth-generation farmer in that area. He’s also a qualified engineer and had put in water schemes in Ireland and also in New Zealand and was responsible for two schemes in that Alexandra area.

Now, I’d have to say that gentleman probably knew more about water schemes than the whole of our Health Committee would ever know about water schemes, so why we refused to go and listen to someone like that is beyond me, because it was the best possible education we could have got on this. He was able to tell us that there was somewhere between 70,000 and 75,000 of these small rural water schemes across the country, and, you know, they range. They range from a farm that has a scheme that supplies the main farm house and a worker’s cottage or the shearers’ quarters through to schemes that might have a number of small lifestyle blocks attached to them and a main farm. Some of the schemes provide water for irrigation and for stock feed, as well as drinking water. And in those instances, the end users take the responsibility of putting in place an end-point user filter, such as the UV light filters that you can get. A lot of these schemes are collectives, are unincorporated societies. They’re groups of farmers that have got together and they pay a small amount and they look after them together. They are practical, sensible people who find solutions for drinking water, for livestock water, for irrigation water on a small scale right across the country. They’ve been doing it for decades and they continue to do it in a safe and sensible and pragmatic way.

I found it incredibly insulting to this intelligent, capable, practical person who was running these schemes and who said the only consequence of this legislation on those schemes in Alexandra will be more administration, more bureaucracy, more monitoring, and no better water supply. In fact, the unintended consequences of it may well be a worse water supply, because there will be some suppliers who will say, “This is all too much. I’m not going to allow the water from my bore on my farm to be used by neighbours or by the farm worker’s cottage. They can go back and rely on rainwater, roof water, and, in fact, end up with a worse water supply than they were getting at the moment.” And I’d have to tell you that in Alexandra, some of the water coming into those supplies was the purest water you will find anywhere in New Zealand. So if you went on to a rainwater supply in Alex—well, you probably wouldn’t be able to, because it’s one of the driest places in New Zealand—you would end up collecting dust and grime and dirt off the roof rather than this pristine water supply.

So those unintended consequences have not been thought through and the burden of—

💬 Hon Member: Yes, they have. They have been talked through.

—having to put together—well, if they have been thought of, then they haven’t been taken any notice of. They are putting in place things like auditing and reporting that just don’t need to be there. At the very least, they are going to add considerable cost to these small water suppliers. At worst, they are going to make people throw in the towel and decide not to be part of it. What hasn’t been mentioned here is that if people do walk away from these schemes, then under the last man or the last person standing requirement within this bill, the local authority will have to pick up the responsibility for that water supply.

Now, people might wonder why a movement like Groundswell came about. It came about because time after time after time, these sorts of pieces of legislation and regulations are being thrown at our rural sector. Our rural sector aren’t against change, but they want it to be sensible and practical and to make a real difference, not have perverse outcomes. So Groundswell is a movement that’s come about because our rural people have been having to deal with bills like this: freshwater regulations, slope rules, pugging rules, sowing winter crop rules—all of these things thrown at them when they are trying to deal with a labour shortage, forestry being planted from overseas owners on to beautiful farmland that should be growing food. They are sick of these regulations and bills that don’t make sense. They want to work with things that are going to make a difference, that are going to really make things better; they do not want to be working with bills that only add bureaucracy and cost and administration and make nothing better.

I’m also really interested to know how 75,000 suppliers are going to be able to be registered, even if it is an extended time frame. How are Taumata Arowai going to cope with that avalanche of suppliers being registered? How are they going to cope with that avalanche of plans to be looked at, of audits to be undertaken, of reports on those audits to be looked at? It simply isn’t administratively possible to do that, unless, of course, Labour are thinking of putting in another 10,000 bureaucrats at another billion dollars’ cost a year, which possibly you are thinking of that. So you’re going to have to have something in place to be able to cope with the administration of it.

So I would just say to the Minister: please, don’t put something in place that won’t work for the rural schemes, small rural schemes, but neither will it work for those that are trying to administer it. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. I’m happy to take a brief call on this particular bill because, following my maiden statement, this was the first proposed piece of legislation that I had the opportunity to make a contribution on in the House at first reading. So while my memory of that serves myself quite well, actually, I none the less had a look back at Hansard to see, actually, what comments I had made at the time. For me it was around the importance of water supply and safe water supply to communities up and down New Zealand, but also that we were brought into line with international practice and also that this would also provide some certainty and confidence for the community. Having reviewed the Health Committee’s report on this particular bill, I can see that they have taken a sensible approach to the consideration of it, that they have come back with some sensible recommendations as a result that the Minister has touched on, and on that basis I am delighted to be able to commend this bill to the House.

E te Māngai o te Whare, tēnā koe. Clean, safe drinking water is a basic human right, but it’s one which many people across the world and a significant number in Aotearoa New Zealand don’t have access to. What this bill aims to do is to provide the regulatory framework to help correct that. There are approximately 1,400 community water suppliers in Aotearoa, and they vary from those neighbourhood suppliers servicing 25 to 100 people to municipal suppliers servicing more than 10,000 people. Fifty-three percent of drinking-water supplies rely on groundwater, 26 percent on surface water, and 21 percent on rainwater collection systems.

I was privileged to join the Health Committee to consider this bill. There were 977 submissions, and we heard oral evidence from 130 submitters. I really acknowledge the other members of the Health Committee, ably chaired by Dr Liz Craig, the secretariat, the departmental staff in Department of Internal Affairs and some in Taumata Arowai, the new water services regulator, and Parliamentary Counsel, who have done a huge amount of work on this bill, but also I really acknowledge the hundreds of people who made submissions, from iwi and marae trusts, individuals, councils, rural water suppliers, and the detail and practical information that they provided to the committee to enable us to get a really good context. So the 24-page committee commentary, which the select committee has provided, summarises the changes that we’ve made in response to submissions, and, as the Minister noted, our recommendations, I think, have substantially improved the bill.

The Green Party hopes that this bill delivers on its purpose of ensuring that drinking-water suppliers provide people and communities with safe drinking water and that they protect the sources of drinking water. Taumata Arowai was established as the water services regulator through new legislation last year, which set out the objectives, functions, operating principles, and its governance arrangements. It’s got an external board. It’s got a Māori advisory group to give advice on how to best enable mātauranga Māori, tikanga Māori, and kaitiakitanga to be exercised, and this bill sets out the regulatory regime that Taumata Arowai will administer, its specific responsibilities and powers, and the duties of drinking-water suppliers and local authorities.

It also sets out some quite comprehensive regulation-making powers to help implement the new regime and provides for operational oversight at that national level of both the stormwater and the infrastructure network. I note that Supplementary Order Paper 602 that the Minister has tabled, which significantly expands the oversight of waste-water services, and when 25 percent of waste-water services are on expired consents, I think that is really useful.

This bill is a major step forward, because there has never been a national regulator with such significant powers, particularly in the compliance monitoring and enforcement area before. The Ministry of Health has had some powers, but not these really strong compliance, monitoring, and enforcement powers. And I think one thing is that the three waters changes that the Government is proposing—some have suggested, particularly Canterbury mayors, that we hit the pause button on those. I can see some merit in that and letting Taumata Arowai get established, particularly with its expanded oversight now of waste water and stormwater, and seeing how the system improves and have a substantial conversation about funding, because the billions of dollars of investment that is needed in three waters requires Government to ensure that there is more funding made available to councils.

But this water services bill will be implemented alongside new national environmental standards for sources of human drinking water. It requires that drinking-water suppliers must provide safe drinking water, they must meet drinking-water standards, and they must take action when water is unsafe. They must also ensure that there’s a sufficient quantity of water to meet the ordinary needs of consumers, they must have a drinking-water safety plan and a source water risk management plan, and they must register with Taumata Arowai when there are risks to public health.

On this issue of the registration, the National Party has not been listening. There is a substantial Supplementary Order Paper, where the Minister has taken on board the concerns of a lot of the community and rural water suppliers and has pushed out the deadlines for when these small suppliers must register to four years and when they must provide a plan to seven years. They should be able to get themselves organised in that time. I acknowledge that the National Party is saying we should have gone on field visits, but a lot of the submitters from the rural sector provided very detailed information about how their community schemes operated.

The Green Party supports those small suppliers being part of the bill, because we know that they rely a lot on voluntary hours, we know that they rely a lot on community input, and there is a concern about the cost of registration. But as the Havelock North inquiry found, many small communities have drinking water which does not comply with the national drinking-water standards, because there is no regulatory oversight of them and the Ministry of Health does no compliance reporting on suppliers which serve less than 100 people. Why should we consign a lot of rural people to having water that cannot be assuredly safe? So that’s why we think those suppliers should be under the scheme and that the Minister has recognised the concerns about the regulatory costs by pushing out the deadlines.

One of the other areas that we’re really pleased about is the source-water risk management plans, and that’s in clauses 41 to 45 of the bill. We think these are some of the most important provisions in the bill, because if we control land uses, if we prevent nitrate and sediment contamination of waterways, if we protect the services that Papatūānuku provides us as humans for free, we secure our future and honour the natural world that sustains us.

So the bill aims to ensure that the risks and hazards to source water are identified, assessed, managed, and monitored by drinking-water suppliers and local authorities, and that regional councils regularly publish this information and measure those risks and hazards. We hope that will mean there’ll be much more scrutiny of land-use activities such as dairy intensification, which contribute to a major cause of nitrate contamination of waters.

The select committee also really engaged with the submissions from Māori, from marae and iwi trusts, and their concerns about warrantless entry for Taumata Arowai compliance officers. The recommended change is that these powers of warrantless entry be removed so that marae effectively have the same status as private homes and dwellings. I think there were over 33 submissions on this alone.

The other issue in terms of responding to community water suppliers, those smaller suppliers, is that our amendments suggest that Taumata Arowai have a greater power to exempt classes of suppliers and that also Taumata Arowai have much more flexibility around its review of drinking-water safety plans and compliance monitoring, so that, as the Minister noted, these are proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of the drinking-water supplier. So this flexibility, the work that Taumata Arowai is doing alongside people in the sector, alongside Irrigation New Zealand and others, to develop flexible solutions, to develop off-the-shelf solutions, we think, will provide the flexibility to enable community suppliers to continue to operate. And I think it is irresponsible of the National Party to threaten to block this bill and oppose it—well, not block it, to oppose it, when they set up the Havelock North inquiry, when they have made many statements about wanting to ensure that drinking water is safe, and now they are potentially opposing it when there have been some significant changes to the bill as introduced to respond to the submissions from smaller rural suppliers and community water suppliers.

So the one other final matter is residual disinfection. Most of the 229 submitters on this issue opposed chlorine being added to their drinking water. The Christchurch City Council presented evidence that there were fewer breaches of drinking-water guidelines in Europe and the UK where residual disinfection wasn’t required, compared to the US where it is, and the city council in Christchurch wanted a greater focus on risk management because of the complacency which can result by relying on chlorine.

The bill does provide that suppliers can apply to the chief executive officer of Taumata Arowai for an exemption on a case–by-case basis, and the committee has recommended a further change that there be an ability to exempt classes.

Order! The member’s time has expired.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise on behalf of Mr Court, actually, to speak on the Water Services Bill. I think the members in the National Party duly noted—and I think it has to be noted—that some 70,000-odd rural small water schemes are up and down rural New Zealand, and they’re going to be encapsulated by this.

I just want to make one note, if I may. Eugenie Sage, the Green member who’s just resumed her seat, referenced Havelock North. Now, what happened in Havelock North was a travesty: four people lost their lives; there were several thousand that got ill. Havelock North has got 14,500 people in it, and it falls under the Hastings District Council, which encapsulates some 80,000 people, and I think we’re not having the honest conversation. We’re confusing the issue here between rural small water schemes, that the National member made reference to, and the issue that the Green member raised with Havelock North. They’re diametrically opposite in the way they’re run.

I live in a rural small town of 400 or 500 people. Yes, it has its own water scheme and, I imagine, chlorination, fluorination, would potentially not be an issue for them. However, in the larger Kaipara area catchment, there’s 75 percent that are self-serving water schemes: farms that have one or two buildings on them like dwellings, marae, the Scout hall, etc. These would all be encapsulated in this piece of legislation.

I think what is even further concerning to a lot of people in rural New Zealand is, you talk about—sorry; I beg your pardon, Mr Speaker. We, collectively, have been talking in this parliamentary debate about chlorination. Well, if the methodology that’s pursuant to that is wrong at a very small, localised level, who is it incumbent upon to get it right, and where would any potential legal framework for prosecution go, should someone be poisoned or get ill because of chlorination? So we don’t think this bill has been well-thought-out at all.

We do, however, think the premise—the desire to get safe drinking water across New Zealand—is important. It’s deeply important. We’ve seen what’s happened, as I reiterate, in Havelock North and Dunedin.

The ACT Party supports the premise of the bill, and I think that’s important. We all want safe drinking water, but there has to be a carve-out for the 70,000 small rural supplies and water schemes. That encapsulates all sorts of small communities. We are saying, as the ACT Party, that there has to be a carve-out for those, and we support the amendment that we believe the National Party is going to table for a minimum of 30 dwellings or less than that, because there’s marae up and down the country. Papa kāinga will be affected by all of this: the aspects of what it would mean to register, to be compliant, and to have any authority in auditing.

I noted as I was reading this piece of legislation on behalf of my colleague clause 110, I believe, about warrantless access to marae. That was, obviously, noted by the Minister and it raised a lot of eyebrows and concerns. Yet again, I think this legislation needs further dialogue.

I won’t go on, Mr Speaker, because, as you’re acutely aware, I’m speaking on behalf of my colleague Mr Court, who would normally be speaking to this piece of legislation. But we, as the ACT Party, support this second reading. However, we are asking for the amendment to be noted, that there should be an exemption status given for those dwellings with 30 or less supplies, which, basically, gives effect and pause and recognition to all the rural irrigation schemes, farm schemes, and those that have stock water schemes, etc., which filter into the various farm households.

So we support this second reading. We desperately would like to see that amendment agreed to because, again—I reiterate the point—speaking as a farmer that supports rural communities, we want some clarity that these small communities will be exempt from this. Thank you very much, Mr Speaker.

As a private bore owner myself that supplies two households, I have been watching this legislation with interest. I also lived through the Havelock North water crisis, and my daughter was one of the first to get sick. In fact, the only thing that saved her was drinking from my bore and not from the poisoned water in Havelock North. No one knows more than the people of Hawke’s Bay the consequences of not looking after water infrastructure assets. This is why I see a real need to make sure how we do this for the hundreds, if not thousands, of private bores to meet these new drinking-water standards must be realistic, affordable, and practical. Already, we have Taumata Arowai working alongside small water-holders to make sure we develop these solutions—acceptable solutions—which could just be putting a simple UV filter at the point of entry to your house. This is a practical solution. I won’t need to do anything more than that—safe drinking water is a right for everyone to ensure people do not get sick.

I commend this bill to the House.

This is a split call. I call Matt Doocey.

Oh, thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Well, I want to thank that last Labour speaker who just resumed her seat, Anna Lorck, for absolutely backing up the National and ACT parties’ argument of why they are not supporting this bill, because, of course, the public health incidents have not been caused by small rural suppliers, as that last Labour member quite well articulated. It is the council suppliers that have caused public health incidents like Havelock North, and that is why National is not supporting this bill today. But the power is in the Government’s hand, because, of course, if they do accept my learned colleague Christopher Luxon’s Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 61 that will remove small rural suppliers that have less than 30 end point users from this bill, National, and I’m sure probably ACT, will support this bill.

One of the best things of being an electorate MP is to bring the voice of the local people you represent. In my electorate of Waimakariri, the submission from the Waimakariri District Council, we have around 4,700 properties that will be caught up in this bill but will be exempt under the National Party SOP, because what we do on this side of the House is we back people, and we know they know what’s best for them. We don’t need over-compliance and regulation. This bill is quite rightly aimed at council water suppliers, but, in my view, wrongly aimed at small water suppliers. They’re not the ones that have problems with their water quality. What I would say is that this Government needs to get out of Wellington, get into provincial New Zealand, and hear from them, because at the moment, under this trilogy of water reforms—the three bills that either have been through Parliament or are currently going through Parliament and soon will be coming back to the House—they are terribly concerned about their loss of a local voice.

What I find ironic is that the Government announced recently they advertised for a misinformation analyst. Well, if you look at the advertising campaign that this Government is funding with taxpayer funding, look at the misinformation that’s been put out in that advertising campaign. People turning on taps with green sludge falling out of them—that is misinformation. What provincial and rural New Zealanders worried about right from the start—and I’ll use the metaphor where you are building the plane while you’re flying it. That’s exactly what this Government is doing to provincial New Zealand around water reforms. Not only will people not know what the system will look like—they’re only putting it together like a jigsaw—but we don’t know where it’s ending up. But we’re getting a hint, aren’t we, because Taumata Arowai—the Water Services Regulator Act—all parties approved of that. The Water Services Bill is starting to shed a bit more light on it, and it’s going to be around over-compliance and over-regulation of small water suppliers. And, of course, the big one: the three waters bill, which is going to be a local water asset grab. I’m proud of my local council, which is opting out of three waters, and good on Waimakariri for standing up for the people that they represent.

No one in this House disagrees that we need the best water quality and the best water systems in New Zealand. But, unfortunately, for this Government it’s one size fits all. It’s a cookie cutter, and they’re taking “local” out of local people’s views. I think this Government is increasingly, this one-party State is increasingly, getting out of touch with real New Zealanders in areas that I represent like Waimakariri, and that’s why we don’t support this bill.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka, tēnā tātou e te Whare. Ka tū ahau ki te kōrero mō tēnei take, ā, Pire mō te Wai.

[Greetings Mr Speaker and greetings to all in the House. I stand to speak on the matter of the Water Services Bill.]

When this bill was introduced and our people became aware of the provisions, there was a large outcry from tangata whenua. This is for a number of reasons, but in particular because, just like the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act 2020, the bill would have enabled State officers to enter marae without consent or warrant. We are glad that the select committee has listened to our people’s submissions and removed the warrantless search provisions for marae. The bill now requires owners’ consent on par with private homes. The new wording is “A compliance officer must not enter a home or a marae under this section, except with the consent of an occupier.” This is a good change, and we acknowledge that the select committee in this instance were actually listening to the many hapū and iwi Māori organisations who submitted. However, the Crown should not have proposed this in the first place, and wasted the time and resources of our people, who were then forced to submit and lobby to protect their rights as tangata whenua.

Despite this much-needed change, Te Paati Māori will still be opposing this bill. There remain broader concerns for tangata whenua in relation to this bill. To upgrade marae drinking water to the new Government standard would be too costly for many marae to afford. Many can’t even pay insurance fees. It also undermines Māori rangatira and kaitiaki fresh-water rights, interests, and responsibilities in a number of ways, including relegating Māori to an advisory group for the regulator, Taumata Arowai. Although it has a Māori name, it does not guarantee Māori representation. We are not advisers. We are not stakeholders. We are tangata whenua. We are Tiriti partners. We challenge this Government to adopt Te Paati Māori fresh-water policy, which is to honour the rangatiratanga and kaitiakitanga rights and interests of mana whenua over fresh water. In a Western rights framework, this can be expressed as proprietary rights, customary rights, decision-making rights, or, put more simply, ownership.

The whakapapa connection between tangata whenua and wai Māori is intrinsic. This position is supported by the Crown obligation to He Whakaputanga, Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and by our tino rangatiratanga as tangata whenua. Negotiations of fresh-water rights and interests need to be completed before any significant reform of water regulations and management is undertaken. The Waitangi Tribunal said that the Crown should be working directly with hapū and iwi to create a standard process for addressing Māori rights and interests. Instead, this current Government decided to stop negotiating with iwi leaders, and instead has established its own Māori advisory group, which was Te Kāhui Wai Māori. A water service regime that does not give effect to Te Tiriti isn’t worth the paper it’s written on. Our people have seen time and time again what happens when legislation is put forward that goes against our rights while they are still being considered and negotiated for in the courts and in Government. This must be opposed, as it does not have the active consent or support of whānau, hapū, and iwi Māori. The Crown needs to go back to the drawing board and not rush this legislation through until it recognises and implements Māori rights and interests to fresh water.

Our pepeha tells us the intrinsic connection that we have with our wai. He taonga tuku iho nā Ranginui kia horapa nei i runga i te whenua hei oranga mō te Iwi Māori mō te tira, hunga tangata katoa puta noa i te motu. Engari, kei a te Iwi Māori tōna mana motuhake. Ko te Iwi Māori te kaitiaki o te wai.

[It is a treasure, handed down from the Sky Father, to be spread across the land as sustenance for Māori and all other groups throughout the country. But, Māori hold authority over it. Māori are the custodians of water.]

As King Tūheitia said in 2012, when he called a national hui on fresh water, it negated the National position that no one owns the water. It also negates the Labour notion that everybody owns the water. King Tūheitia said we Māori own the water. And so I end with that quote and continue to advocate for te iwi Māori in this space in terms of our rights to our wai Māori. Kia ora tātou.

I’m really pleased to take a short call. It’s great to hear all of those around the House acknowledging the many around the country who provide, in good faith, to their neighbours and their communities with small water supplies. I want to thank and acknowledge the select committee for acknowledging their concerns and ensuring that the support is there to ensure that they are able to continue to improve the supply of water to their neighbours and their communities.

We were asked what the problem is that we’re trying to solve: 37,000 people who get sick from drinking water—completely unacceptable. We’re told to back the people by leaving them to it. We’re not going to do that. We’re going to back our rural communities and our small suppliers by ensuring that Taumata Arowai and the local councils help them to do what they need to do to make sure that those of us who live in small communities are able to access safe drinking water. I commend the bill to the House.

Hang on, Mr Speaker, I’ve got to get my fashion gear [face mask] off, find my hearing aids, and clean my glasses before I can start. Now, having said that, I’ll get on with the job!

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I can sympathise with the member.

I want to take us back in history a bit, because I’ve had quite a bit of experience with water in my time, and I want to go back to when I was fairly small. I remember going with my father to fix the old MacEwans H2 water pump, and in those days you had a cylinder and a water pump—for those who don’t know—and they had bucket washers in them. It took a fair while to bend those bucket washers round and get them back in the hole to make the water—and they had to be watertight, you see, so it took a while to get that sorted. So that was my first experience of water. The second one was when I had to do it myself, but luckily things have improved significantly since then. We now have Grundfos water pumps with all sorts of stages in them, and they work really well.

So this bill: I then, I guess, after all those experiences with a water pump, became a mayor, and I had experience of the Ministry of Health trying to inform councils how they should run water supplies and the standards they should adhere to, and, frankly, the Ministry of Health had no idea how to do that and they were—in my view—very poor at it. So I think that, from my perspective, the Minister has made a very good attempt, through this bill, to rectify some of the problems that we’ve had in the past with the way we’ve regulated water supplies. So I commend the Minister for doing that, and I think that, for the large part of New Zealand’s community, I have no fear. But what I do have a fear for is the fact we are looking at, in the course of—and we don’t know the answer, and there are so many things we don’t know the answer to in this House when we put legislation through here. One only has to go back to the anti-money laundering legislation and the cost of that, or back to the food safety legislation and the cost of that to small operators, to see what happens when we impose legislation across the board without considering, or without being able to consider, actually, in the course of the select committee process the potential cost to those organisations that are below the average in scale. So we end up with a disproportionate level of cost being imposed on small users—and I want to get to the small users in a minute—but that, for me, is a great concern.

I notice that Taumata Arowai is developing what we term three acceptable solutions relating to rural agricultural suppliers, roof water suppliers—and there are many, many thousands of roof water suppliers in New Zealand—and spring bore suppliers to create a pathway to compliance for small suppliers. I think that’s a great challenge, and I’d be worried about the impact that might have on those small water suppliers, whether they be rural or urban, because there are many properties where they supply their own water as well. For those of you who have been fortunate enough to have a tank water supply, there comes a time when they smell quite bad and you’ve got to get out and clean the tank out. That’s the signal that I’ve always used to keep my water supply clean. Done me no harm to date, but none the less that’s the challenge we face, and that’s the challenge that this organisation is going to face as it tries to implement the recommendations that have come from the select committee and as it tries to implement the recommendations contained in this bill.

I just want to get on to the rural schemes for a bit, because I have this—and it’s been well expressed within the House tonight, the concerns around the smaller rural schemes. And the reason I used that example about fixing the water pump earlier was that those water pumps—modern ones now—actually supply a large number of properties. The question I’ve got, and I guess it’s a question for the committee stage, but the question I’ve got around this is: what happens when the Minister, through her Supplementary Order Paper (SOP), gives communities, I think, up to seven years to rectify these issues? All that will do, in my view, is give them seven years to get rid of the connections, and they’ll end up not having to comply with this legislation, because, frankly, that’s what’s going to happen.

So the other question I’ve got around this is: what happens when you have a connection to a house, you disconnect the connection to the house and shove a hose on the garden tap and stick it in the tank? Does that have the same impact, and how on earth are they ever going to trace that sort of behaviour? So I would be very concerned about how we might ever police the issues that arise both out of the issue that Christopher Luxon and Penny Simmonds have raised in the course of the select committee process—and, I understand, ACT as well—and that is around these small rural water suppliers, and not only rural but they also supply some urban communities as well, the small suppliers of under 30 connections that we are talking about through the SOP introduced by Mr Luxon, excluding from the main part of the bill.

Now, it’s quite possible, I guess, that if they were excluded from the main part of the bill, they could then be part of the consideration for the development of the acceptable solutions relating to those suppliers at a later date, and that might be a much more sensible way of dealing with it. But I do have great concerns about, as I said earlier, the compliance costs that we’re going to impose on small rural water suppliers and small water suppliers supplying everything from marae to the example used by the member for Havelock North a little earlier—with the two houses hooked up to the tank that actually performed better than the Havelock North water supply, which was quite interesting. I was surprised, actually, but not really, because I actually have two grandsons who lived in Havelock North too and spent their life drinking my water, and they had no problem with the Havelock North water either. They were immune to anything that Havelock North could have done to them, and that was probably caused by the same thing! But it is kind of interesting where we might get to with this stuff.

So I do think that the water regulator part of this bill is logical, and I think it’s a very good initiative because it will give some stability around New Zealand. But I’ve got great concerns around how we connect or how we integrate those small water suppliers into it, and how we then integrate, as it says it’s going to do at a later date, those people with roof supplies and other forms of water supply—which I think will be extraordinarily difficult to get control of, and I don’t know why you’d want to, actually, because I think it’s been said in the House a number of times already tonight: those suppliers are actually very safe and very secure and we’ve had very little problem with them, despite the imagination of some in the House. So the bill does very little to influence the quality of water that many, many people collect and then drink. And, as has also been said in the House, you can quite easily provide a filter for the cleaning of that.

The other thing that amuses me a little bit, and I shouldn’t really raise it here, but the interesting thing for me is that if you start to fluoridate and fluorinate these water supplies, just imagine how long the old ewe will last! You know, if you’ve got a fluoridated water supply pumping around the farm, imagine what will happen to the age of old ewes and cows in New Zealand—they’ll live for ever! Anyway, we can’t support the bill for the reasons outlined, and I only hope that when the time comes, the SOPs that are introduced by Mr Luxon do get accepted by the Government. Thank you.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to stand and take a very short call. I want to mihi to the Hon Nanaia Mahuta for this very sound piece of legislation, and also to the select committee, who heard from a lot of people in regards to this matter, and rightly so. Water is incredibly precious. I recall back in the day, when we could travel, travelling to Ethiopia on a Speaker’s delegation, and all water needed to be drunk out of a plastic water bottle. It was a nightmare for me. I ended up on a plane. It was not pleasant, I can tell you. Luckily, there was medical assistance available, and I could take a whole pile of drugs to keep me alive. What we know with the Havelock North situation is that was not the case for some of our older people. Therefore, I’m really, really pleased that we’ve actually got a regulatory system that is going to support and help our people to drink healthy water in this country. I commend this bill to the House.