Water Services Bill

on behalf of the Minister of Local Government: I move, That the Water Services Bill be now read a third time.

It is with pleasure that I rise for the third reading of this bill. I do want to acknowledge the efforts of all parties in ensuring that this piece of legislation has reached its final reading today. Everybody in Aotearoa should be able to get drinking water from the tap, knowing that it is safe. We should also be able to swim or gather mahinga kai in our rivers, lakes, or at the beach without fear of becoming sick. We have an obligation to ensure this for current and future generations.

I’ve previously outlined to the House the systemic failure of the existing drinking-water regulatory arrangements. The existing arrangements allowed the Havelock North campylobacter outbreak to take place in 2016, leading to the deaths of up to four people and forcing thousands to become sick. They allowed, at a conservative estimate, 34,000 New Zealanders to get sick from drinking their household water every year. They allowed over half of supplies serving 5,000 or fewer consumers to operate without meeting drinking-water standards. This is completely unacceptable, and I’m sure it’s unacceptable to every member of this House and to the vast majority of New Zealanders. This is why the Government has committed to the three waters reforms, with the Water Services Bill playing an integral part.

The Water Services Bill will provide a new regulatory regime for drinking-water suppliers, along with targeted reforms to improve the environmental performance of our three waters infrastructure. This bill will provide a clear leadership for drinking-water regulation through a new central regulator, Taumata Arowai, and will strengthen compliance, monitoring, and enforcement of the drinking-water system. It will create a requirement for a multi-barrier approach to protecting drinking-water supplies. It will include all drinking-water supplies in the new system apart from the domestic self-suppliers. It will ensure that source waters are protected and monitored. It will provide measures to significantly improve the transparency and environmental performance of our publicly owned three waters infrastructure. It will enable flexibility so the regulation of drinking water is proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of each drinking-water supply, and it will require 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 Fresh Water Management.

I’d like to briefly respond to some of the points that were raised during the committee of the whole House stage of the bill. Some members of the Opposition questioned whether the regime would work for small and rural supplies, particularly those that are run by volunteers or community groups. Some members of the Opposition also questioned whether the offences in the bill were too high for very small suppliers. Significant work has gone into the design of the legislation to ensure it is fit for purpose for small supplies. Suppliers will have to provide safe drinking water and meet drinking-water standards, including those supplies that are run by volunteers or community groups.

The existing regime under the Health Act has applied to supplies run by volunteers and community groups since 2007, so this is not a significant change to the existing law. However, the Water Services Bill does contain a legal defence specifically for volunteers and this is new. The bill also has significantly lower penalties for individuals than for organisations. The financial penalties are equivalent to those in other similar regimes like the Health and Safety at Work Act and the Food Act. More importantly, I need to emphasise that the bill contains very practical, simple, cost-effective ways to allow small and rural suppliers to comply. This is a significant improvement to the existing regime, which is one-size-fits-all. The aim is to make it easier for small suppliers to provide safe drinking water to communities, not to take them to court.

Finally, I also need to emphasise that Parliament has now amended the bill so that unregistered drinking-water suppliers will have a full seven years before they have to comply with the new regime. This is a long period and it will give a significant amount of time for small suppliers to understand the new requirements and allow Taumata Arowai to work with them, appropriately tailor the system, and provide support.

One member of the Opposition, Barbara Kuriger MP, spoke at length about the need for an exemption for small suppliers. I want to reiterate that population cut-offs have not worked well in this area as populations change. It is simply not workable for a supply to sometimes be in the system and sometimes be out. The better approach is to have a regime that can be tailored to small suppliers and to give them a reasonable period to understand the new obligations.

I also want to respond to questions raised by the Hon Eugenie Sage MP, who was a member of the Health Committee, which considered the bill. At the late stage of committee deliberations, the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment wrote to the committee and suggested that the provisions in the bill enabling Taumata Arowai to have oversight of the environmental performance of three waters infrastructure should be relabelled. The committee received advice and changed the name of these powers and functions to “infrastructure performers”. In retrospect, this was the wrong decision. The Government always intended Taumata Arowai to have oversight of the environmental performance of three waters infrastructure, and this role is reflected throughout the objectives and functions of Taumata Arowai—the Water Services Regulator Act 2020, which was passed last year.

I want to reiterate how proud I am to see this bill come to this final parliamentary stage. This bill, along with our broader package of the three waters reforms, demonstrates this Government’s commitment to addressing the significant problems that face our three waters infrastructure. It also provides a comprehensive response to the recommendations of the Havelock North inquiry. Outside of this bill, the House will be aware of the service delivery reform proposals the Government is discussing with local government and iwi to establish water services entities. These entities will have the benefit of superior funding mechanisms, including overcoming council debt constraints, the ability to spread costs over wider pools of population, and operational efficiencies.

Service delivery reform is also essential, as many of our publicly owned drinking-water supplies, particularly those that service provincial or rural communities, have not complied with drinking-water standards for too long, and some have never complied. In addition, environmental standards are rising and communities no longer accept the discharge of sewage or mortuary waste to waterways on the ocean. We need to face up to these challenges, not shy away from them. I’m really proud to be a part of this side of the House, passing this bill. This bill, as I said, will deliver on transformational change for the health and safety of our communities as well as upholding a high standard of Te Mana o te Wai. I commend the Water Services Bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Madam Speaker—once I can get my mask disconnected from my glasses—thank you. Look, it’s a pleasure to take a call on this third reading of the Water Services Bill. It’s not really a pleasure to be in this position that we’re in, because National is still opposed to this bill. It could have been quite simple to repair this piece of legislation so that we could have supported it, because it does create a number of sensible duties and obligations for large water suppliers, such as councils, which are where more of our water contamination incidents and public health risks tend to originate. And so, in light of that, that would have been a reasonably easy bill to support. We support the formation of Taumata Arowai, and we have no problem with people providing and receiving clean water, and in particular clean drinking water, in New Zealand.

I was just interested in that speech from the Minister, Hon Meka Whaitiri, who spoke about this bill being not a significant change, and yet the changes in this bill require people to register their drinking-water supply, require people to prepare a drinking-water safety plan and lodge this with Taumata Arowai, prepare a source water risk management plan, establish a consumer complaints process, and Taumata Arowai must review drinking water safety plans and monitor compliance. So, therefore, the Government is asking more than 70,000 small suppliers to comply with these issues and then expecting Taumata Arowai to review those water safety plans and monitor compliance. Now, where the confusion sets in, after the speech that I just heard this afternoon, after the Minister’s saying that it’s not a significant change—she said that this is practical, it will be simple, and they are going to make it easy for small suppliers. And then, in the next sentence, the Minister said they have extended the time for small suppliers to be part of this compliance to seven years—and we commended the Minister on that the other day—before the compliance sets in for the small suppliers. The Minister said it will give them seven years to understand it. So what I don’t understand is, if it’s so practical and it’s so simple and if it makes it easy for small suppliers, how come it’s going to be so difficult for those small suppliers that they need seven years to understand it.

Now, the reason we supported the Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper, even though the Minister didn’t support Christopher Luxon’s Supplementary Order Paper the other day, was because it does give time, because we actually think that Taumata Arowai has got quite a bit on their hands just trying to work through the process for the larger suppliers, let alone the smaller suppliers. But what was interesting the other day, also, during the debate the other day, in response to Penny Simmonds, the very good National MP for Invercargill, the Minister quoted from a letter from Federated Farmers, from Andrew Hoggard, and said, “I want to take from a letter I received”—and I’m quoting this now—“on 21 September, from Andrew Hoggard, national president of Federated Farmers, the following quote, and I apologise for the length of time taken to extract this quote for the committee’s benefit. He has said: ‘It is encouraging that compliance with acceptable solutions, including end-point treatment, will remove the need for drinking water safety plans and source water risk management plans, and that consumer complaints processes will not apply to various small suppliers. We support more time being provided in the legislation for registration of water suppliers, and we welcome your assurance that registration processes will be simple and free with templates and guidance available. Much will depend on the detail of acceptable solutions for small rural water supplies.’ ” So, in the quote that I’ve just read here, Federated Farmers understand that it will be free, with templates, and there will be guidance available, but much will depend on the detail. So, over here, I’m a little bit confused about what the detail is, because what the bill says, what Federated Farmers says, the seven years—all of this stuff is starting to sound a bit contradictory, which is worrying in itself.

Then the Minister went on to quote: “ ‘… Federated Farmers is committed to engaging with Taumata Arowai to ensure that acceptable solutions are fit for purpose and provide for safe drinking water at a reasonable cost, with as little compliance hassle as possible. However, at this stage at least, there are still many uncertainties.’ ”. And she said, “In saying that, they’ve indicated at the end of the letter ‘Thank you again for hearing our concerns and responding to them.’ and they would welcome maintaining a dialogue with myself and officials to develop win-win solutions.” Now, we support win-win solutions on this side of the House, but it was really interesting that I’ve just received an email last night from Federated Farmers, who have quickly pointed out that there was a paragraph that was left out of the letter that the Minister read in the House in her response to Penny Simmonds last week. And that says, “On balance, Federated Farmers continues to prefer an exemption for small rural suppliers. Although we are open on whether the cut off should be 50 or a smaller number, with a focus instead on education and information, including developing best practice guidance.”

So, over the course of the most recent lockdown, Christopher Luxon and I started a petition, and that petition gained over 15,000 signatures in a relatively short period of time, and that was supporting the Supplementary Order Paper that we put to the House the other day, that the House decided not to support, that any person supplying with end-point users of less than 30 should be exempt. I even went to the point of saying to the Minister on the day: if she would accept our Supplementary Order Paper, in line with her Supplementary Order Paper, which gives seven years—to go, well, if it’s that simple and we need to find the most simplified answers and the way of achieving this, why would the Minister not exempt those users until the point where we get to the seven years. And if simplified answers are not found, we could have a relook at it, because what most people fear, when they see legislation coming out of this House, is that it comes out of the piece of legislation and then it’s sent to regulators to make regulations, and, despite everything we read and hear and people say about how simple this is going to be, we have no guarantee at this point that it’s going to be simple.

We have no guarantee at this point that it will be simple for those end users, and what I can see—so we have farmers supplying farmhouses, we have marae supplying small groups of people, we have bach owners supplying other bach owners, we have people supplying their neighbours, and people have been very good at organising water systems that work in small communities. And what I can see people going, when they read this and they look at the threats of how much they’re going to get fined and all the rest of it—they’re just going to pick up those water pipes and say, “Look, sorry, I’m just going to supply my own place from now on”—because you can—“I’m not going to supply those three baches down the road.” or “I’m not going to extend my water.”, especially if there have been subdivisions. We’re going to have lots of disputes about who’s actually the person, at the end of the day, who’s supplying the water. So there are going to be some real problems here, and what will happen, at the end of the day, if those people don’t supply the water, that’s going to be left to the councils, on top of the three waters legislation.

So National cannot support this bill this afternoon, and thanks for the opportunity to speak.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Everybody should be able to turn on the tap and know their drinking water is safe, and for me it’s a real pleasure to be able to stand here at the third reading of the Water Services Bill, because this is a bill that the Health Committee spent a considerable amount of time looking at and discussing over the past few months. So it’s great to see it move forward to this stage.

In total we had 977 written submissions and we heard 130 oral submissions, and, basically, as a result we made quite a few changes. But one of the common themes, and it’s already been debated in the House, is the need to make sure that our response fits the scale and complexity of the water scheme. So we did hear from a number of submitters—often rural suppliers who supply a lot of stock with water but also supplied a few houses for drinking water; similar issues of scale around marae and also around some holiday homes.

So we were really pleased to be able to have a look at some of the acceptable solutions—there was an exposure draft on Taumata Arowai’s website—because the bill allows Taumata Arowai to develop acceptable solutions which mean that you can actually scale the response and mean those suppliers don’t have to comply with the full regulatory regime. And so looking at the one that was on the website, looking at households being able to install off-the-shelf water treatment devices in their homes is really important.

This is an important bill. There’s been an extension in the Supplementary Order Paper stage for smaller suppliers to come on board, but really great to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Well, first of all, I want to start by thanking my colleague, Barbara Kuriger, for reading out that paragraph that was missed by the “most transparent Government ever” when they read the Federated Farmers letter out last week. I also just want to clarify a fact, because the Minister who spoke on this bill today is as equally numerically challenged as the Minister of Education is when he thinks 29 percent is a majority—can I just clarify that 96.7 percent of the population gets drinking water from a fully compliant supply. So that does not mean that many water supplies are non-compliant; 96.7 percent.

Now, I’m often asked, when I’m out and about, why Parliament is so adversarial. Why can’t we work together to get the best outcome? And, you know, we really wanted to do that this time. We really wanted to support this bill. We agree that so much of this is the right thing to do. Taumata Arowai is going to mean that standards are set and are monitored, and we really want to show our support for that. The problem is that 80 percent of this bill covers sensible restrictions and sensible requirements for large-scale water suppliers, but there is a disproportionate and burdensome obligation on smaller water schemes. And now I have found that it’s not only the 75,000 to 100,000 small rural water schemes that aren’t registered, but there’s also a small group of registered water suppliers—very small water suppliers—around 500 of them, and 200 of those are community owned.

I was contacted by the Tukurua Water Supply Society Inc., up in Golden Bay, and they are incredibly concerned about this bill going through because they understood that they were going to have five years to become compliant. They are a small, incorporated society that thought they would have five years to become compliant. But what has happened—in the Supplementary Order Paper that came through, the extension of time from five years to seven years for the unregistered ones has left out the 500 small registered ones and they are now going to be required to become compliant within a year.

Now, this is going to impact on a number of small suppliers in my region, in the Southland region, there’s about 10 registered water supplies in Southland that are small. Most of them have a bore source, three of them use a stream or river or lake source. No acceptable solution has been worked through yet for these small surface extraction suppliers, and they have no idea what they are going to be able to put in place. Now, you might say, “Well, the endpoint users UV system would be good for them,” but currently they can’t have that in place because the Health Act doesn’t allow them to. So they have got to find an acceptable solution, they’ve got to work through an acceptable solution within the space of a year. I don’t think the Minister has looked at that very thoroughly.

Also, the Minister last time talked about how this is going to be incredibly cost effective for these smaller schemes, whether they are registered or non-registered. Well, in the regulatory impact statement, when they thought that there were around 5,000 small suppliers, the range was between $154 million to $409 million for capital expenditure for those small suppliers and between $24 million and $110 million in annual operating expenditure. Now, I’m not sure where the Minister got her cost effective data from, but that doesn’t sound terribly cost effective to me, to small rural water schemes with a low number of users. So what we’ve got here now is an incredible mishmash of legislation trying to be applied one-size-fits-all across a whole range, from big water suppliers through to small registered water suppliers through to thousands of small unregistered water suppliers. I’d have to say, if I was Taumata Arowai I would be quaking in my boots as to how we’re going to round up all these small schemes, let alone monitor them and look at their reporting.

So what we have, again, is this ideology of centralisation, of us taking a sledgehammer to a walnut instead of taking a practical, pragmatic, and sensible approach to these smaller schemes. Had the Government been prepared to think about something that was more practical and more sensible, we could have supported it. And, as my colleague Barbara Kuriger said, if we had been able to exempt these smaller suppliers for that seven-year time period, developed the practical and pragmatic and sensible, acceptable solutions, then they would have been flocking to go into it. So why is the Government not confident enough that they will be able to show how wonderful these acceptable solutions are and therefore there will be no need to enforce it? The water schemes and their suppliers and the people that run it will be flocking to go into them. But my fear, like the fear of many of my colleagues, is that this legislation will develop a life of its own. I think Ian McKelvie may have said something about this earlier on last week when he said it could be like the health and safety legislation where it develops a life of its own.

Now, it’s all very well for Ministers to stand in this House and say that we’ll develop something that is fit for purpose and it won’t be overly burdensome and it will be pragmatic and it will be practical. But these things leave the House and then bureaucrats run them and it does develop a life of its own. People will be finding that the solutions are not practical and they are not pragmatic and they are not sensible and they do not take account of the size of the schemes and what is appropriate for the size of those things.

Now, I just want to refer again to these handful of small suppliers who have already been registered. They feel that they have been completely left in the lurch with this, the one from Golden Bay, they wrote to the Minister back in August asking her to clarify why now they would only have one year to be compliant. They haven’t heard from her. So they wrote to the Minister Damien O’Connor, because he’s supposedly going to look after the rural sector, and they asked him if he could help them—to explain why and tell them what sort of practical and effective and fit for purpose solution would be put in place for them. He handed it on to the Minister Mahuta and, again, they’ve heard nothing more.

So when the Government say that they have consulted with a number of small registered suppliers, in actual fact there was only a handful of the registered suppliers that were able to have any input into the development of this bill. The rest of them—well, some of them don’t even know it’s happening, to be quite honest. And for the rest of them, they’re going to be scrambling to look at draft acceptable solutions that may come out in about February, and then they’re going to be rushing around to see if it’s going to be workable for their scheme. So we have got a one-size-fits-all, except it doesn’t fit all. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to stand and rise and take a call on this piece of legislation. I just want to commend the Minister for being bold enough to bring this piece of legislation to the House, because, as we’ve heard, at the end of the day, and everyone agrees—including those across the other side of the House—that people should be able to turn their taps on and have safe drinking water. That’s just an everyday human right in my eyes and, as we’ve heard, the members opposite agree.

I’d also like to commend and acknowledge the select committee who heard all these submissions from those in person and all those that wrote in, and interesting to note that due to some of the submissions, some of the concerns that were raised in those submissions, there have been changes made to this piece of legislation which will be better for those that we’ve heard members on the opposite side of the House talk about: our small and rural suppliers. One of those changes is the additional time that has been allowed; seven years for people to be able to comply with this piece of legislation.

Much of what I would like to say has been said by my other colleagues who have stood and taken a call this, so I have nothing further to add, except to commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā koe, Madam Speaker. Thank you. It is a major step forward to have a national regulator for drinking water, and I really congratulate Minister Mahuta and officials in the Department of Internal Affairs, particularly Michael Petherick and Francesca Algie and others, for taking the recommendations of the Havelock North inquiry, for working with councils, with iwi, and others in developing the legislation last year to establish Taumata Arowai, seeing it formally established in March this year as a new Crown entity, and this bill putting in place the regulatory framework that Taumata Arowai will administer and operate.

So it is bringing all drinking-water supplies, except domestic self-supplies like those that depend on a rainwater tank, within the framework. It means that all drinking-water supplies must provide water that is safe, that meets drinking-water standards, and it obliges suppliers to act when drinking water fails to meet those standards or there are risks to public health. So there are certainly increased responsibilities and duties on drinking-water suppliers. They do have to register with Taumata Arowai. They have to have a source water risk management plan. They have to have and implement a drinking water safety plan with a multi-barrier approach to protection, and they have to review that regularly. There are also duties of due diligence, similar to those in the health and safety at work legislation.

Really importantly too, Taumata Arowai has more tools and a much more comprehensive compliance, monitoring, and enforcement regime. It’s got the ability to issue compliance orders, the ability to have infringement offences, and also a requirement to do much more comprehensive monitoring. The Havelock North inquiry was damning about the previous system for regulating drinking water. It found that district health boards had taken no formal enforcement action over 11 years between 2007 and 2018. That’s why it’s really disappointing that the National Party, having established the inquiry into the Havelock North contamination, is not supporting this bill, because we need an effective regulator, and we need one which has got adequate compliance monitoring and enforcement powers.

Certainly acknowledge, in the Green Party, the concerns of some of the community and rural water suppliers about the administrative costs of this legislation and its impacts on them, given that they provide a lot of time, energy, and expertise on a voluntary basis. There will be costs of registering with Taumata Arowai. There may be some costs of having consultants in to develop things like a drinking water safety plan. But the Greens really support small suppliers being under this law because the Havelock North inquiry found that many small communities have drinking water which doesn’t comply with drinking-water standards because there’s no regulatory oversight of them. It found that there had been no marked improvement in the number of suppliers providing safe drinking water since 2009, and non-compliance with the drinking-water standards was entrenched amongst those small suppliers. In fact, in the Ministry of Health’s 2018-2019 report on compliance with drinking-water standards, only 28 percent of the community drinking-water suppliers, which were supplying between 100 and 500 users, complied with the drinking-water standards. That is not acceptable.

The Government has committed $30 million in the Budget last year to help drinking-water suppliers, the smaller ones, get up to standard. There has been a real commitment, both in the legislation and practically by Taumata Arowai to develop these acceptable solutions or safe harbour arrangements which provide a pathway to comply with the law. If you have a look on the website, not only is there an acceptable solution for agricultural supplies but there is also one for spring and bore water drinking-water supplies. So I think Taumata Arowai has recognised the importance of really developing these practical safe harbour standards which are fit for purpose for the different types of small suppliers. It may well be that they need an off-the-shelf cartridge filter or a UV treatment, which can be provided at the end of point.

So the National member Penny Simmonds’ claim that the legislation was a one-size-fits-all—I totally reject that, because the bill has never had that one-size-fits-all approach. It’s really got a strong ethos of being proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of the drinking-water supply. In fact, there were further changes made in select committee to give Taumata Arowai more flexibility here, particularly around the review of the drinking water safety plans. So it is proportionate.

But one thing I would really like to encourage the Government to do is in relation to Part 4. Now, clauses 191 and 192 of the bill enable the Government to set regulations which provide for Taumata Arowai to recover all of its costs in performing its functions, duties, and responsibilities from drinking-water suppliers, waste-water and stormwater network operators through fees and levies. Some policy work is under way, I understand, on this, but that the Government hasn’t yet made decisions on the cost recovery component of Taumata Arowai’s funding.

We want the suppliers to focus on improving infrastructure and improving service delivery. It would be a false economy if those in Treasury thought to impose a really high cost recovery regime which meant that Taumata Arowai was setting high fees for suppliers to comply with the responsibilities in the Act. It will create resentment. It will undermine the cooperative relationships which need to develop, and it will undermine the process of developing trust in the sector. It’s in our national interest that this new regulatory framework works well. It will benefit both human health and the environment. So central government needs to invest adequate Crown funding in Taumata Arowai to avoid the lumpy funding which a cost recovery regime can create, and then the lumpy resourcing and staffing that can result from that.

Just in the remaining time, the three waters changes that Government is proposing relate to this bill. We’ve got a new regulatory agency. Because of the number of suppliers, it’s going to take a lot of work to ensure that those are all registered and meeting the Act’s requirement, and yet we have this major reform in three waters. The Green Party recognises that the status quo isn’t adequate. We need more investment in three waters infrastructure and we need more scale to achieve that. Yet only yesterday, the Christchurch City Council unanimously decided to opt out. Other councils like Waimakariri are doing the same. Canterbury mayors have called for a pause on three waters to enable the Government to explore more options for how governance works in the new system, how funding and service delivery works. You’ve got former Labour Ministers—the mayors of Christchurch and Auckland—calling for more work here. Yet Minister Mahuta, in her responses in the House today, was indicating that there’s no opportunity for a pause.

This reform is too important to get wrong. There needs to be more work to ensure that there is a direct role for councils in the governance of the assets that communities have developed over decades. There needs to be a real conversation around how central government can help better fund this infrastructure. Certainly, there has been an additional funding proposed so that no local councils are worse off through the changes, but we need to ensure that council ideas—because it’s councils that know how these systems operate in practice. There is an opportunity for other options than this complicated regional group which decides on the nominations for the boards of the new entities, that there’s more direct and community involvement, because these are community services and community infrastructure.

So I really congratulate the Government on getting this bill to this point, but it needs to listen to councils in terms of the three waters reform and allow a greater opportunity for that dialogue and genuine consultation with the public, which hasn’t happened to date. Kia ora.

Well, thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this Water Services Bill. It’s a bill that is designed to put in place a set of standards for regulating water for drinking, waste water, and stormwater as they are used and the assets that support them are developed up and down New Zealand. That’s what this bill is supposed to do.

I should add, before I go any further, that I am deputising for Mark Cameron, our rural issues spokesperson, who was taken away from Parliament this afternoon. He was deputising for Simon Court, our environment and infrastructure spokesman, who is incarcerated in his house in Te Atatū under what they call alert level 3 in Auckland. It just goes to show the benefits of voting to get more ACT MPs in, you never know when you might need a series of them to get a speech up on a bill like this. And it really matters what sort of regulations we have for three waters, because we have problems, real problems. We know about lead in Dunedin, campylobacter in Havelock North, sewage on the Auckland beaches where 50 to 100 days a year, instead of cleaning the water, the council puts out a sign saying, “No swimming today, there’s too much sewage on the beach.”

We have real difficulties with the way things work, but also with developing three waters infrastructure. You talk to people who are developing property, often building homes so the next generation has a pathway to a property-owning democracy. What do they tell you? Dealing with councils and developing that infrastructure is one of the most expensive and time-consuming things they have to do, creating many delays. So we’ve got a lot of problems with our three waters infrastructure. The basic idea of a national regulator, as legislated last year, and a set of standards for water quality, as set out in this Water Services Bill, is a very good idea that the ACT Party has supported at its first reading and its second reading, but we can’t support it at the third. And why? Because when the Government was asked to do one vaguely sensible thing to make this bill work for New Zealand, they couldn’t. And what was that thing they were asked to do? Well, Mark Cameron, as I mentioned, was up here giving speeches, and I see that—hang on a second, what’s this? The member from Havelock North is furiously writing. She’s been listening. She’s thinking, “I know something really funny I can say when I speak.” Well, look forward to a Berocca-laden speech coming up soon from Anna Lorck. I just want to warn people at home, she may be out of camera shot, but that’s coming up now.

Back to the topic at hand. They were asked to do one very simple thing, and that was to exempt water systems with fewer than 30 end users. Madam Speaker, when you go back to Waitaki, in between studying up the Standing Orders, you will know that there are many people in rural areas who don’t get their water from a big system like Watercare or Wellington Water or even Havelock North or Dunedin. They might be a little bit like where I grew up in the outskirts of Whangārei—without town supply. Let me tell you, Madam Speaker, we and a couple of our neighbours, we decided to drill a bore to see if we could get water and we went in together with a plan to share that water. Sadly, there was a lot of iron content in the water. We couldn’t use it. We got it tested and we decided not to drink it. We didn’t need someone to come all the way from Wellington to tell us not to drink water with too much iron. We thought maybe we could use it for showering, but then we consulted some chemistry and we knew what happened when iron oxidises and we thought if we washed our hair with this water, we could end up looking like Chris Hipkins. So we didn’t even use it for showering, because we could make sensible decisions for ourselves. This was in 1994, by the way, back in the olden days. We didn’t need someone from Wellington to come and tell us that we needed special regulations. So they should have exempted people like that, because a lot of people do strike good water and they do get together and share resources.

This legislation—by putting extra regulatory burden that is completely unnecessary—will just stop people cooperating, getting together and developing their resources for no benefit whatsoever. Because you can understand why you’d regulate Havelock North, it’s a town of thousands, if not tens of thousands of people—

💬 Anna Lorck: Tens of thousands.

—the people that are drinking the water don’t know—and there’s Anna Lorck, she’s saying “Tens of thousands.” A little bit like when the Prime Minister said tens of thousands of people might die. There’s often exaggeration coming from the Labour Party.

But we know that, in Havelock North, the people drinking the water don’t always know the people that are responsible for running the system, and that’s when it might be worthwhile having a regulator from Wellington coming along and saying, “You’re not doing that very well. You need to raise your game.” In a city, in a town—a town of tens of thousands, perhaps. But in a small group of people with fewer than 30 users, it makes no sense for someone from Wellington to go up to Ruawai, where our rural spokesman Mark Cameron is from, and say, “You two neighbours can’t share a bore or tank or a dam. We’re going to tell you how to do it.”, because those people already have the incentive to get it right, because it’s them drinking the water.

This is a wider problem in New Zealand. And I quote, as I have a few times before, Emeritus Professor Tim Hazledine from my alma mater at the University of Auckland. Professor Hazledine is an economist and he says one of the challenges with productivity in New Zealand is we spend less and less time on transformational activity: actually building dams and building tanks and drilling bores and processing and cleaning water. We’re not spending time doing practical things. We spend far too much time doing transactional activity: getting permission, being inspected, filling out forms for people from Wellington. This is another example of that. We have a perfectly good system for people up and down rural New Zealand who are able to make their water work for themselves, thank you very much. They don’t need the incursion of a Wellington water regulator telling them what’s good for them. That’s why the ACT Party, while we believe in a national water regulator for cities, cannot support this legislation.

At some point, we have to actually stand up and say, “There is too much regulation, there is too much bureaucracy.” Its benefits do not outweigh its costs, and if we keep on doing this to ourselves, we are simply going to make New Zealand a poorer country and we’re going to be worse off because we spend all our time making work for the bureaucracy, writing forms that we then have to fill out and not enough time providing for ourselves, our families, our neighbours and our friends to make tomorrow a better day than today was.

Here’s another couple of predictions: not only will it stop people getting together and cooperating; it will actually create huge ructions amongst people who are currently sharing water supplies. People are going to say, “Actually, with these new rules, it doesn’t make sense for us to keep sharing.” So they’re going to say, “Sorry, we’re just not going to share that bit of water that we said we would in a friendly handshake agreement 20 years ago. We’re just going to have to stop doing it.” And you know what the other person is going to say? “Hang on, you promised. It’s a right. It’s an easement now. Actually, that bore kind of points under my property. I want some too.” And then you’re going to have even more transactional activity—what Professor Hazledine calls it—more fighting and more arguing, more work for lawyers and less work for engineers. That is not a pathway to prosperity for any country and it’s not a pathway for a united or cohesive society.

This Government is passing hate speech laws to boost social cohesion, and it’s passing water laws that are actually going to lead to battles between neighbours. That’s how crazy this Government is. That’s how out of touch it is. But when you’ve got 27 union organisers and a dozen former civil servants—half of the Labour MPs are from the Wellington bureaucratic machine—don’t be surprised if they feed the beast and make that machine bigger and more costly for New Zealanders trying to make a difference in their own lives, especially rural New Zealand. And for that reason, the ACT Party opposes this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a pleasure to take a very brief call on this bill. I was going to say that’s a hard act to follow, but the least I can do is at least speak to the bill that’s before us, the Water Services Bill.

We all agree that we want clean, safe drinking water and while this is the case for most New Zealanders, on this side of the House we prefer not to leave people behind. We want to make sure that the approximately 20 percent of our population whose water quality is not currently guaranteed can also feel assured about the safety of their water. Many of those 20 percent live in rural communities, and it would be such a disservice to not extend the same level of drinking water quality to them as their counterparts in the cities. The Minister’s Supplementary Order Paper extends the deadline for when small suppliers can register with Taumata Arowai to four years, and when they must provide a plan, if required, to seven years. These amendments were the direct response to concerns raised by the community and the rural suppliers. This extended transition window, in conjunction with acceptable solutions, provides sufficient time for these suppliers to organise themselves and become compliant with the legislation. It is certainly not a one-size-fits-all solution, and doesn’t need to be.

Although not strictly part of the third reading, it was a pleasure to be part of the select committee and, given that I missed the second reading, I would very quickly like to extend my appreciation to all the submitters for ensuring that this process was as informative as it was comprehensive. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise as the member of Parliament for Southland and the Opposition spokesperson for rural communities to speak on the third reading of the Water Services Bill.

Look, the National Party supported the establishment of a new drinking-water regulator, Taumata Arowai, which has the power to set and enforce drinking-water regulations. However, regrettably, the National Party cannot support the Water Services Bill, which puts onerous rules, regulations, and compliance costs on small rural water suppliers. It is not for want of trying. The National Party tried to engage with the Labour Government. It sought to obtain some sensible and pragmatic changes to the bill, which would have meant the National Party could have supported it, but, regrettably, the Government chose to push ahead. When it became clear the Government would not engage with us in the Parliament over these changes, Barbara Kuriger and Christopher Luxon launched a petition asking that rural water schemes be exempted from the bill. That petition garnered over 15,000 signatures in a short period of time, showing the level of interest in the community. My colleague Christopher Luxon then produced an amendment, Supplementary Order Paper 61, which would have exempted from the bill small water supplies, like rural water schemes, that supply fewer than 30 endpoint users. Regrettably, the Labour Government voted down this amendment.

Unfortunately, this is reflective of a Labour Government that continues to rain down regulatory reform on rural New Zealand, and is simply not listening to rural New Zealand. There are tens of thousands of small rural water schemes in New Zealand, estimated between 70,000 to 100,000. These range from someone letting their neighbour draw water from their bore, to water schemes that primarily feed stock and some houses draw water from them, to farmers that supply water to their home as well as to their workers’ homes, to marae, as well as holiday home schemes. Under this bill, those rural water schemes will be required to meet inappropriate and disproportionate obligations, such as: producing drinking water safety plans, risk management plans, consumer complaints processes, and it goes on and on. This is reflective of regulatory reform that this Labour Government is raining down on rural New Zealand, which is putting the community under huge stress. I cannot stress that enough. I’m hearing this again and again and again throughout rural New Zealand, that they cannot keep up with the pace of change and the regulatory reforms that this Government is requiring and bringing down on them, and making them complete more and more and more paperwork to comply with the rules that the Government is bringing in rather than getting on with the job. Let’s remember that rural New Zealand comprises approximately 600,000 people. That’s the biggest population group outside of Auckland. This Labour Government simply isn’t listening to them.

Last week, I asked the Hon Nanaia Mahuta if she would give some more certainty about what was intended by the wording that there would be “mechanisms that would enable the regulation of drinking water to be proportionate to the scale, complexity, and risk profile of each drinking water supply;”. I asked that question because the bill does not make it clear what it means. It is a very important question that will need some explanation to provide guidance to Taumata Arowai. It is particularly important for another reason. I asked the Minister last week about whether it was proportionate and appropriate for a small drinking-water supplier, such as someone with a bore also supplying their neighbour with water, to be subject to a penalty regime exposing them to a maximum penalty of five years imprisonment or a maximum fine of $600,000. The Minister replied that there would be a level of responsibility for such a small water supplier who failed to provide safe drinking water. Now, I note that the Hon Meka Whaitiri referred to an exception in clause 160, with the liability of volunteers that would mean they would be excluded from prosecution of offence under a specified number of offences in the bill. Unfortunately, I note that this only refers to clause 163, which is an offence involving negligence in the supply of unsafe drinking water. It does not involve clause 162, which is an offence involving recklessness in the supply of unsafe drinking water, and there’s no good reason that I have heard for why that has not been done.

Just looking at my time, I do note with regret that the Minister referred to a letter from the president of Federated Farmers last week in support of the bill, but left out a part that had been written in bold to her, noting that, “On balance, Federated Farmers continues to prefer an exemption for small rural supplies (although we are open on whether the cut off should be 50 or a smaller number) with a focus instead on education and information, including developing best practice guidance.” We cannot support this bill.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break. The House is resumed at 7 o’clock this evening.

Sitting suspended from 5.58 p.m. to 7 p.m.

Members, the House has resumed. Members, before the dinner break, we were debating the third reading of the Water Services Bill. We were on split call No. 9.

💬 Debbie Ngarewa-Packer: Tēnā koe e te Pīka.

Tēnā koe.

Tēnā koe e te Pīka. Tēnā tātou e te Whare. I rise to speak on the third reading of the Water Services Bill. Tangata w’enua, as you know, have been protecting wai since we arrived in Aotearoa. Wai—water—is central to our w’akapapa and is embedded in our very essence, our wairua. You don’t even need to look at our history or activism to understand this connection. Just listen to our waiata and our pepe’a.

This bill, as it was introduced, threatens to sever that connection, and it’s that I’d like to speak to, and like the COVID-19 Public Health Response Act, it was met with a large outcry from our people. To allow Crown agents warrantless entry to marae without consent would be a direct attack on our mana motuhake. It’s despicable.

I would like to mihi to the many tangata w’enua marae and Māori organisations who made their voices heard at select committee: to Te Hiiri marae and Ngā Pae o Rangitīkei, Rānana Māori Committee and Rānana Marae Trust, Pariroa Pā, Kokiri Marae, the National Urban Māori Authority, the Māori Climate Commission, Te Kotahitanga o Te Atiawa, Te Korowai o Ngāruahine Trust, Te Hunga Rōia Māori o Aotearoa, and to the young wahine Maringi James and everyone else for their leadership on this kaupapa. We also acknowledge the significant concerns of local government and rural sectors and the large degree of uncertainty that they also face with this legislation, and, finally, the Health Committee for listening to our concerns by removing the provision that would have allowed warrantless entry into our marae.

I believe this process has been somewhat of a learning curve for the Government, and the lesson I hope the Crown will take from this is that kāwanatanga does not sit above mana motuhake and tino rangatiratanga. Clean drinking water is fundamental to tino rangatiratanga, and our marae is where tino rangatiratanga is held.

I guess too the other thing that we’d want to talk about is that we will never accept your perceived right to impose your own rules in places governed by tikanga. Our tikanga are vital for our cultural safety and our sovereignty.

Before I go any further, I would like to applaud the intent of this bill and mihi to that—that is, to ensure that people have access to safe, clean drinking water so that we do not see a repeat of what happened in Havelock North. Nobody should ever have to worry about being made sick from drinking water in this nation or lose their life because of it. The legislation, however, has been rushed and it puts in place wide-ranging reforms that would centralise power and decision making in response to a localised event. I’d also like to note that no marae water supply has ever caused an outbreak of illness.

I stand here as co-leader to echo my tungāne’s challenge to Parliament last week. Let this be the last time we see such a provision brought before this House. We’re tired of making speeches justifying our rights. I’d like to once again commend our people, who, time and time again, at our own cost and their own energy, have to organise and lobby to protect our most basic rights.

Once again, tangata w’enua have been sidelined and treated as every other stakeholder and not Tiriti partners. This is wrong. Major reforms in water regulation and management should not go ahead while tangata w’enua rights and interests over water remain unresolved. We also have raised concerns about compliance costs associated with this legislation, including upgrading and maintaining drinking-water infrastructure, paying annual registration fees, building a workforce, and developing safety and risk management plans. Without exemptions, their extra cost would cripple many of our marae—many of our marae who are there, serving their communities when they’re needed.

This bill was a missed opportunity for meaningful engagement that would embody Te Tiriti o Waitangi and our rights as Māori. Would it be unreasonable to allow us to do our own monitoring, or to work alongside Taumata Arowai to grow our own workforce?

As the only tangata w’enua party in this House, we cannot support this bill as it stands. Start over, come back to us when you are ready to talk about indigenous rights, about Te Tiriti, and about tino rangatiratanga. Nō reira, tēnā tātou katoa.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I wasn’t able to speak to the second reading, unfortunately, so forgive me if I stray slightly for a few seconds from third reading protocol. I just want to take a minute to thank our chair of the Health Committee, Dr Liz Craig, but also to take a minute to thank the many officials and the clerks who worked incredibly hard on what was a substantial body of work with 977 submissions, 130 of those in person or via Zoom. We did listen to or read every single one of those submissions, and changes were made as a result.

My colleague across the way has referred to the warrantless entry to marae being declined, and that was unanimously supported and championed by the entire select committee. Christchurch residents will also be pleased to hear that a strong focus was on enabling suppliers to provide chlorine-free water to consumers, so long as it is safe and meets drinking standards, because ensuring safe, clean drinking water for all New Zealanders is the clear intention of this bill and something we can all get behind. Thank you so much, and I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m happy to take a call on the third reading of the Water Services Bill. Whilst the National Party aren’t supporting this bill, there are parts of this, and in fact the wider water reforms, that we do support.

Clearly, the Havelock North inquiry was instigated some time ago with a view to reviewing how water was supplied, regulated, and managed in New Zealand. I, obviously, from my background, have had experience in this sector for quite some time and I’m very pleased to see the establishment of Taumata Arowai, because under the old Ministry of Health command, there was very little regulation. It’s been stated already in the course of this debate that in fact they really abdicated their responsibility to it. I came into local government in 2002. It was extremely topical at that time and some very onerous measures were put in place, which clearly a lot of councils couldn’t afford to, or communities couldn’t afford to, and didn’t want to meet. That consequently led to some relaxation of, I guess, improvements that were required and some other issues that happened within the water sector. And here we are today as a result of the Havelock North water inquiry.

We in the National Party accept, and, in fact, firmly believe that everyone should have access to clean and healthy drinking water. I think that should be a given right of all New Zealanders; in fact, it should be a given right of all people in the world. It’s not, of course. So we support any measures that are going to make that fact easier.

The Minister in the committee stage tried to reassure us that our small water schemes would be catered for differently in this bill; in fact, we’ve heard a number of speakers say the same thing. Of course, many of us in this House have had experience of a number of bills going through the House before this one on other topics where we were assured the small users and the small operators and the little people in the country—that costs wouldn’t impact on them like they do on the big ones. Well, we’ve never yet, in my experience, seen a bill that’s actually taken any different approach to costs than lump the same costs on everyone.

Of course, unfortunately, the Wellington bureaucracy—and I’m not criticising it at all because, effectively, they’re Wellington people. They live in Wellington and they drink the water that comes through their tap and they turn the tap on and they expect it to be there. Now, many of us don’t have that experience. We turn the tap on and quite often there isn’t any there. And of course, when you do that, you’ve then got to go and find it. So I think that to lump us all together and think that the country can operate as one in this respect, I think, is naive and I think to think that the costs will fall equitably across the sectors in this country is also naive. We’ve seen that with numerous pieces of legislation, most notably, I think the power reforms of the 1980s, which effectively cost the small users and the users that are more isolated a whole lot more money than it costs someone who lives on Lambton Quay—they don’t live on Lambton Quay, do they—or they might, but people who live in the city and on a street that’s very heavily populated. So nothing that you think’s going to happen through legislation in this House actually happens and it always turns out differently than we anticipate.

The reason for the National Party being opposed to this particular bill was actually quite well outlined by the Māori Party speaker a moment ago, who said this bill has been rushed in some respects. Now, I absolutely accept and give the Government credit for the fact that they’ve spent quite a bit of time looking at the Havelock North inquiry and then coming up with some response to that. The problem is, as I see it, they haven’t adequately dealt with provincial and rural New Zealand, the small water schemes, the fact that that many farms—many, many farms in New Zealand—are going to be impacted by this piece of legislation simply because they have water supplies in place that in some cases for generations have been delivering perfectly safe drinking water to houses, and all of a sudden we’re subject to regulation and a couple of inspectors from Wellington turning up to see how we’re getting on. We could tell them without them turning up, of course, but they’ll still turn up and they’ll then charge us for the privilege of turning up to do it.

That’s the reason that we’re opposed to this piece of legislation, because that’s what happens when you put legislation in place. We’ve seen it with the food safety Act. We’ve seen it with the power reforms, as I said. We’ve seen it with the anti - money-laundering legislation, where it costs as much to deal with a massive great amount of money as a little wee amount of money. That’s just not equitable and it’s very difficult to manage. So that’s one of the reasons.

Now, the second thing I want to just deal with quickly, because the Minister did in the course of her third reading speech, was the relationship between this and the three waters proposal. Clearly, you’ve got to have a regulator and, as I said earlier, we accept the need for a regulator. The problem is that the Government has then turned its attention, I guess, to establishing the three waters proposal, which this organisation, Taumata Arowai, will regulate, and it will regulate everything that happens within the proposed three waters structure.

I absolutely support the comments of Eugenie Sage—something I don’t always do, but I absolutely support the comments she made about this proposal, which has clearly not been thought out logically. In fact, in my case, we’re discharging water into the Rangitīkei River, we’re taking water out of the Rangitīkei River, and we’re governing the river itself half from Hamilton and half from Wellington. I don’t know how that’s going to work.

So there’s a whole lot of things I think that whilst the intention on both of these things is good—and I don’t think there’s any doubt that from a local government perspective the water situation needs to be reviewed—the problem is the three waters proposition as it’s been put to the communities doesn’t account for what effectively will be a whole lot of costs imposed on council as a result of them having their assets and the asset base and the operation of it taken away from them. And also, it doesn’t account for what happens to the debt that’s left behind as a result of that. I think it looks to me like it’s completely inequitable.

So there’s a whole lot of challenges that come out of this water reform. As I said earlier, there’s really only one piece of this Water Services Bill that we specifically don’t support, and that is the fact that it’s not clear how it’s going to regulate those smaller water supplies. And it’s all very well for the Minister to stand there and say that the bill enables different treatment, and it does allow exemptions and it does allow for different treatment, but will that, in fact, be the case? I very much doubt it. So there’s a whole lot of challenges, I think, coming out of that and I’m not comfortable with it at all.

I was very interested to see that the ability to enter a marae unsolicited has been withdrawn—I just hope that applies to my marae as well—because I do think that we take a lot of liberty with the way we enable organisations and Government officials to enter people’s private lives. This is one of those cases that, in fact, that’s exactly what’s happening.

The other thing that concerns me, and I accept the fact that the Minister has extended the inclusion of the small water schemes to seven years, given them seven years to comply—I think what will happen in a lot of cases is we may well see an adverse reaction to that and we may well see a lot of those water schemes that we think are going to be included in it dismantle themselves to an extent that it no longer applies to them and consequently they get out of it. That may or may not be a good thing, but you’d have to suspect that it’ll lead to a whole lot more suspect water supplies throughout New Zealand.

So I think it’s quite sad that we can’t support this bill, because I do think that, as I said earlier, Taumata Arowai—having a water regulator in place like that is very useful from a New Zealand perspective and it would have helped councils. But, of course, councils won’t be in charge of their own destiny now because that ability’s been taken off them and been taken off local communities, so no longer will we be in control of what goes on in our local communities.

So that’s the reasons that we can’t support this bill. And as I said, I think it’s sad we can’t support it, because I think the intention of it was good. That’s my lot, Mr Speaker. Thank you.

Talofa, Mr Speaker. I’ve taken a call on the first reading and second reading of the Water Services Bill, and so it’s my pleasure to rise and take what appears to be the final call for the third reading this evening. This bill is, fundamentally, about health, but it’s about infrastructure as well, and particularly around waste and water, but the latter being the key focus there. As we heard earlier in the House today, when it comes to drinking water and the safe provision of that to communities up and down New Zealand, doing nothing is simply not an option. And so what’s pleasing in the bill that’s currently before the House is that it does actually enable a transition period that sets a pathway forward for communities to understand what the expectations are, and to simply move forward in that particular light.

The observation over time is that there has been significant under-investment when it comes to water service infrastructure, for many, many years, and so, fundamentally, this bill is about the intention to ensure that there is the provision of safe drinking water to communities. Some, as we know, have paid the ultimate sacrifice for that not being the case, and that, quite simply, is not good enough. So when it comes to infrastructure, when it comes to good, safe delivery of water and safe drinking water—that is fundamentally what this bill is about. I commend it to the House.