Water Services Entities Amendment Bill

The Green Party will be supporting the amendment that’s being put forward by the National Party to extend the consideration of this bill until November. This is quite a significant bill. It does make changes that we support in terms of increasing the number of entities to 10, but the proposed consideration by a select committee reporting back by the end of July is too short.

The bill includes a number of detailed provisions affecting local authorities in terms of the transition to the water services entities and the fact that the establishment date for the entities has been pushed out by two years. So there are a number of provisions about how local authorities deal with that. We think these detailed changes do need to go out for public submissions for an adequate time, to have adequate time for the Governance and Administration Committee to properly scrutinise the bill and to consider it alongside the other legislation that has gone through.

It puts too much power in the executive and Government departments when legislation comes to this House and has a very truncated select committee process, so it does not get properly scrutinised. It means everyone is working under pressure. That potentially leads to mistakes and it means that the select committee process becomes much more of a rubber stamp. Changes as significant as the three waters changes deserve better than that. They deserve a proper select committee process with adequate time for submissions, select committee scrutiny, and any changes to the bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d like to rise to acknowledge the previous speaker, the Hon Eugenie Sage—I completely agree with almost everything that she said there—and also to support Simon Watts’ amendment to extend the committee process until November this year.

They have been working on this bill for three or four years and there was significant public input—I think we had over 60,000 submissions—and then to come along and truncate it when you’re doing the amendments to one month, when the usual select committee process would be for a recommended six months, I think is denying people an opportunity to input on something of which there is considerable, considerable public interest.

As I mentioned before, 60,000 submissions at the first stage—there is clearly a lot of interest in this. You go around New Zealand, you will see many “Stop Three Waters” signs. There is clearly a lot of public interest. There will be a lot of people wanting to have a say on that. If we want to uphold the democratic process and allow people to have faith in how this House operates—how everything works here—then we need to allow proper submissions, and ramming this through before the election is not a fair way to go about it.

We really need to move this out, and I just want to acknowledge the previous speaker again. I support Simon Watts’ amendment to extend it to November.