Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill

Kia ora e te Mana Whakawā. I move, That the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill be now read a third time.

This bill is part of a suite of legislation designed to give effect to the affordable water reforms. It introduces an economic regulation and consumer protection regime, which will ensure that the entities promote the long-term interests of consumers by providing services that are efficient, effective, and responsive. The bill empowers the Commerce Commission to oversee this regime and provides it with the necessary regulatory tools.

We know our water services regime isn’t working as it should be. We know the quality of the service being provided does not reflect what consumers demand. We know there has been systematic, long-term under-investment in water infrastructure. We know that there are inefficient pricing practices and a lack of transparency around the costs of delivering water services. Finally, we know there are mounting concerns about the capability and capacity of the water services sector to respond to increasing Government and community expectations. These new entities will have the size and scale to tackle these issues and attract the $120 to $185 billion needed to address historic under-investment.

However, the new entities will be natural monopolies in the supply of water services where competition is impractical. There is a risk that they will act inefficiently and seek to capitalise on their market power. This bill provides the independent scrutiny necessary to protect New Zealanders from the sorts of harm that can occur when essential service providers have substantial market power and consumers are unable to switch between them.

Consumers deserve high-quality services that are safe, affordable, and resilient. This bill will ensure that the full benefit of the reforms is realised for New Zealanders. It will drive efficient investment and pricing practices and make the entities accountable for delivering service quality levels that communities expect. In particular, the economic regulation provisions in the bill will require the entities to disclose certain information directly, govern service quality, and set a strong efficiency challenge to drive lower prices.

This is the same sort of regulation used in other essential industries in New Zealand that hold monopoly power, including the international airports in Auckland, Wellington, and Christchurch; electricity lines businesses; and natural gas pipeline businesses. Information disclosure regulation will require regulated providers to publicly disclose prescribed information about their performance. The Commerce Commission will undertake a summary and analysis of this information, which will increase transparency and make the entities more accountable to stakeholders. Quality regulation will require regulated providers to meet network service quality standards, while price quality regulation will set both quality standards and maximum allowable revenue or prices that the provider is permitted to recover. The bill provides the commission with the necessary flexibility to use different tools at different times for each of the entities or types of water services. These tools will ensure consumers are receiving water services at appropriate prices and quality standards.

I do note that in light of the Government’s changes to the affordable water reforms, there have been some implications for the timing of when economic regulation is implemented. The entity servicing Auckland and Northland, which will be established on 1 July 2024, will continue to be subject to economic regulation from 1 July 2027. However, the other nine entities, which will be established over a two-year period ending 1 July 2026, will now be subject to economic regulation from 1 July 2029.

The economic regulation and consumer protection regime established by the bill put in place strong incentives for the entities to provide affordable, quality water services. However, if entities do not comply with these requirements, the commission can take a range of enforcement steps, including pecuniary penalty orders, compensatory orders, and injunctions. The consumer protection safeguards will give consumers a strong voice on how water services are delivered, and it will also hold the entities accountable for delivering on community expectations, including meeting minimum service standards. The commission will be required to set a service quality code by 1 July 2027, and the code will cover standards related to outages, faults, minimum flow or pressure rates, billing practices, customer services, and consumer rights, amongst other things. The bill provides for the scope of the Consumer Advocacy Council to be broadened so it can advocate on behalf of water services consumers.

Finally, the bill establishes a comprehensive, independent consumer dispute resolution service so that consumers can easily escalate complaints they cannot resolve with the entities themselves. The service will provide for the resolution of low value—that’s up to $50,000—consumer disputes in a way that is more accessible and less formal than the courts. Together, these economic regulation and consumer protection safeguards will help ensure New Zealanders are treated fairly and receive quality water services which offer good value for money. I’m confident the Commerce Commission will be able to quickly drive improvements to the water services sector to ensure it is efficient, effective, and responsive. The commission is a high-performing regulator. It has proven experience in regulating a number of markets. The bill equips the commission with a range of regulatory tools to expand its remit to cover the water services sector.

To further reflect the unique nature of the sector, the bill establishes the position of Water Services Commissioner on the commission’s board. The commissioner will be responsible for leading the roles and functions of the commission for the sector and will ensure that the commission’s water services regulatory role is given the focus and prominence that the sector requires.

The bill also complements the wider water services framework by requiring the commission and the responsible Minister to take into account the relevant obligations of the regulated water services providers, including with respect to Te Tiriti, Treaty settlements and Te Mana o te Wai, climate change, housing, and urban development. Finally, in recognition that the commission is at the start of its Te Ao Māori journey, the bill requires it to build capability and capacity to ensure it can understand these obligations and effectively engage with Māori.

As I come to a close, I would like to thank the members of this House, and particularly those who participated in the Finance and Expenditure Committee, for their collaborative—

Hon Member: A great committee.

Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB: —a good committee—and thorough consideration of the bill. Thank you in particular to committee chair Ingrid Leary and the former chair, the Hon Rachel Brooking. I would also like to extend thanks to the submitters on the bill, to Parliamentary Counsel Office staff, the Commerce Commission and its officials, and all officials, who all made a significant contribution to its workability.

New Zealanders deserve to have safe and affordable drinking water, waste-water and stormwater services that meet their expectations now and into the future. The bill will safeguard and enhance these critical water infrastructure services by providing necessary scrutiny of these entities’ operations. It’s a critical part of the affordable water reforms and it will help to ensure that the new system is efficient, effective, and responsive. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is obviously the final leg of a final piece of legislation.

Before I start talking about the bill, I just want to put on record just what’s gone on and taken place before with regard to discussion on this bill. By agreement with the whip from Labour and the National Party whip, we agreed to take all clauses as one. We did that mutually. What happened was that after entering into that relationship of good faith, the debate on this thing was closed down after 40 minutes, and it was a breach of utmost bad faith, particularly by the Labour whip. But to have 40-odd minutes—45 minutes—debating an extensive bill that has been months and years in the making and to have it curtailed, even though we’d—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order!

ANDREW BAYLY: —had some arrangement—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): Order! The member is actually now questioning the ruling, and the timing is actually not correct. The debate on that particular bill was well over an hour, because we had begun debating it before we went to dinner.

ANDREW BAYLY: Madam Speaker, I’m perfectly aware of that. We were at clause 39 out of 146 clauses, and that is not the way—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jenny Salesa): The member will come back to his speech on this bill.

ANDREW BAYLY: Yes, OK. I’m glad I’ve got that on the record. So for listeners listening in, this is a shambles of a bill. This is a shambles of a process. This is going to be the touchpoint for the election that’s coming up. It has been the touchpoint for the last two years, as we’ve rambled through the most convoluted, disorganised process, where we have seen thousands of submitters. I’ve been involved in those, being a member of the Finance and Expenditure Committee, across all three bills. This is the final component of it. We have just had an avalanche of submitters who fronted up and who are personally outraged at the thought that their assets are going to be stolen from them and that the arrangement here—this so-called miraculous arrangement that’s going to mean that New Zealanders are better off—is just totally fatuous and incorrect and appalling.

Of course, all of this has hung around because the officials went off and got the Scottish Water regulator to help them formulate that. There was a lot of advice being given around New Zealand, particularly by some of our professionals. There have been big issues around the governance structure, which is very convoluted. There are big issues around the economic assertions made. There’s certainly this claim that the Minister has made in his speech earlier tonight about there being $120 billion to $180 billion of savings, which is just utter tripe, given that most of the expenditure that a water services entity will undertake—whatever it does, most by far, is the greatest portion of that is infrastructure. To get that level of savings would mean that you wouldn’t, perversely, be investing in infrastructure, because that is the key determinant of the cost that these entities will have to incur if they’re going to meet their requirements.

So it is a shambles—a shambles—and this particular piece of legislation is like all of what the Labour Government has done during the course of its term. It’s come out with this massive mallet to smack in to some form of regulation, rather than it being judicious, careful, and thoughtful about what is the nature of the regulation.

We of course accept regulation. It needs to be in place, but it needs to be balanced, it needs to be appropriate, and it needs to provide the right incentives for entities to be able to operate without an overreach of regulation, and that’s where we’ve ended up with this. We’ve had many submitters submitting on it to that effect, and it just goes together with the other two bills that have been ripped through under urgency. This has been ripped through under urgency in the dying days of a Labour Government, and it is a shocking piece of legislation.

I’m glad that National will repeal this three-waters proposal and we’re going to scrap all these mega-entities. We are going to restore council ownership and control. We will set strict rules for water quality and for infrastructure investment, and we will ensure water services are financially sustainable. There are ways of doing that, but, unfortunately, this Labour Government has gone down a path that most New Zealanders do not believe in and do not accept. That’s why even now, when I drove round my electorate last weekend, I’m still seeing anti - three waters signs up in my electorate, because they are absolutely opposed to this.

Members on the other side know this, and when they lose their job, one of the reasons they will lose their job is this appalling piece of legislation on which they did not get the buy-in of the people, the general public of New Zealand. It is appalling, what has happened, and the aspersions on many of the councils—some have been poorly managed; I accept that. But many of them have done a great job, and it will come home to roost for the Labour Government as to what a dreadful piece of legislation it is that they’re proposing. It won’t take place under National, and I’m glad it won’t.

If I may bring us back to this particular bill. When I was watching the committee stages, I observed, really, a number of questions from Andrew Bayly, the member that’s just resumed his seat, that, on the one hand, inferred there was going to be competition under the structures that would be set up and, therefore, the regulation was heavy-handed, and, on the other hand, suggested that there needed to be much tighter regulation. So it is little wonder to me that I sense Minister Webb’s frustration, sitting in the chair, having to repeat the same answers. I was very pleased when the debate was brought to a close.

What I’m surprised that the member didn’t raise, though—the one who’s resumed his seat—is the interplay between clause 45 and section 15. Because it was the Finance and Expenditure Committee, which worked together to ensure the flexibility of the regime, that answered the very questions he was asking, which is how the Commerce Commission would be able to use a phased approach, assume that there would be price-quality regulation, but allow enough flexibility in the legislation to make that price quality happen at the discretion of the Commerce Commission at the right time and based on real baseline data.

That is what is so good about this legislation—that, along with the disputes resolution mechanism, which means that consumers will be able to have ready access to justice and they will be able to be represented by consumer groups as well. It’s a good bill; I commend it.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I think, if I could address a comment by Ingrid Leary, I think the issue that my colleague Andrew Bayly was actually talking about is his frustration because there is actually quite a lot more in the bill that he wanted to speak to, and so did I, and to actually have it closed down seemed a little sudden—especially because it was agreed upon in good faith. Anyway, I’ll move on.

As we actually said in earlier parts during the second reading, I think I actually said something along the lines of the fact that National believes in sound economic and commercial regulation, including economic regulation and definitely consumer protection. But we want it for the right water services entity and for local council and the local people to have a say in determining that. And for this water services three waters bill, right from the beginning, it has been an utter disaster. And this bill, the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill, is no different. It is all part of it. As my colleague Andrew Bayly said, this is the last of the bills that we are debating.

I think the issue that we have is that when the regulatory impact statement also states that there is a huge transitional uncertainty created because of this reform, over time, the scope and form of the economic regulation is not in the best interests of the water consumers. Throughout the committee stages, I think one of the questions that I asked the Minister was in relation to whether through this regulation, what kind of cheaper or—I mean, we were talking about a better quality framework for the water entity, but does it actually mean that the customers are, in fact, going to get cheaper water? I think his answer was: could I please point him to the specifics in the legislation so he could actually answer it, but I didn’t quite get to that.

This bill is not a bill that we support. And considering the fact that we will—the National Government will actually repeal and replace the three waters bill, I see no reason why I should waste more time on this particular bill. Thank you very much.

This is the trilogy of bills that will finally deliver affordable water reform and water infrastructure for New Zealanders. It has been one of the most significant pieces of legislation that this Labour Government has been able to deliver, which will ensure that ratepayers are able to afford the infrastructure that we need for safe drinking water, for improved stormwater, and for our waste-water systems.

This all started from my electorate of Tukituki, under the Havelock North water crisis. This legislation will ensure we do not have another Havelock North water crisis in New Zealand. That is the reason that I have absolutely supported this bill right from the beginning, and I commend it to the House. Thank you, Mr Speaker.

The ACT Party has engaged constructively with officials, with the Government, with the water sector, and with councils right through the process of the three waters reform. ACT agrees there’s a problem to solve when it comes to delivering infrastructure in an affordable way to enable land for housing and business to be developed in an affordable way. Because the whole purpose of three waters infrastructure is not so that engineers have some fun stuff to do pouring concrete and laying pipes. I mean, it is a whole lot of fun watching guys drive diggers—and girls; in fact, it doesn’t really matter what gender they are—and build infrastructure. But that’s not why we do it. It’s to deliver social and economic benefits to communities. It’s to deliver land that can be built on for housing or business.

Unfortunately, this bill, while it attempts to create an economic regulator to work out what’s the right amount of money to invest in infrastructure, it fails the mark on a number of points. That’s because it gets confused by Labour’s confused and incoherent policy agenda around three waters. Imagine if Labour had said, “We need to find out what the condition of council’s pipe network is. We’ve heard it’s really bad. There’s drinking water running down the street in Wellington.” In fact, about 30 percent of the drinking water that’s treated and supplied runs down the street and never gets into a home or into a tap or a glass of water. You can go to places like West Auckland where I live—there’s regular waste-water overflows from the waste-water network there—and, of course, North Shore beaches and other places, metros and the regions around New Zealand.

Now, if Labour had wanted to find out how bad things were and how much money to spend on the networks, or whether smaller councils actually do need direct financial support or grants or whether, in fact, you could share some of the enormous amount of money that central government collects from building houses in New Zealand. About $2.5 billion a year is collected by the Government; that’s the GST on the invoices that builders send when they build a house—$2.5 billion a year. What ACT says is that a Government should return half of that to local government to build infrastructure.

So the Government could have said, “We need to find out more about the problem and we need to provide some revenue from what we take from the building sector. All of that building and housing that imposes costs on local government, we should share some of central government’s revenue back with them.” But they didn’t do that. Instead, they came up with an incredibly complex, unjustified co-governance proposal that’s turned into one of the most divisive political proposals ever laid on New Zealand by an ideological Government that got itself so bent out of shape and tied itself into a pretzel trying to explain the rationale behind co-governance in three waters.

Hon Peeni Henare: Don’t get salty.

SIMON COURT: So bent out of shape, the Hon Peeni Henare. I’ll tell you what, because if there was a case for iwi Māori to have their rights and interests in freshwater assessed by a Government or a court, this Government would have done that. But this Government doesn’t care about property rights. It doesn’t really care whether iwi Māori, hapū, marae have property rights in water, because if they did they would have said, “Hey. Let’s explore that.” But they’re too gutless—they’re way too gutless to have that conversation. Instead, what they did was come up with—

Hon Peeni Henare: ACT supported the Waikato River settlement.

SIMON COURT: The Hon Peeni Henare raises a good point about the Waikato River: a Treaty settlement identifies rights and interests and allocates them. What this Government has done instead is try to say that water infrastructure, sewerage pipes, drinking water plants, all of that stuff built after 1840 somehow should be subjected to co-governance because there are rights and interests that iwi Māori have in these assets that are of greater weight than normal or other New Zealanders.

When I asked the Hon Nanaia Mahuta about that, she replied “No”. They do not have rights and interests above anyone else, any other ratepayer in their community. In reply to a written question, that is what the Hon Nanaia Mahuta said. At that point the tied up pretzel that Labour had got itself in should have been binned. But no, they persisted with their co-governance agenda. That is one of reasons why Labour will lose the next election.

Now I want to come to the member Anna Lorck, who made a comment. Anna Lorck, along with other members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee travelled to Hawke’s Bay and we heard from councils and submitters.

Anna Lorck: I didn’t need to travel; I live there.

SIMON COURT: Oh, the member certainly did travel with the Finance and Expenditure Committee, even though it might have been just down the road from her house. What they told Anna Lorck is that “We reject your co-governance agenda. We reject your centralisation agenda.” The Hawke’s Bay councils, including the regional council, central Hawke’s Bay, Napier, Hastings, what they said, Anna Lorck, was, “We’ve already solved the problem that the Havelock North inquiry told us that we needed to solve. We formed a voluntary regional alliance where we’re pooling our resources and we’re getting on with the business of funding, financing, and fixing our three waters infrastructure.” That is why they said: “We don’t need these water reforms, Anna Lorck.”

Now, I don’t know what Anna Lorck went back and told her caucus, but, whatever it was, it wasn’t enough to convince the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, the Hon Kieran McAnulty, or whoever the Prime Minister was at the time. Because the same confused pretzel policy appears here in the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill. As a result, Anna Lorck and a whole lot of Labour MPs are going to lose their seats in about seven weeks’ time.

What would ACT do? Because that’s what New Zealanders want to know. What would an alternative Government have done with three waters? Well, this is what ACT says.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, no. The rest of the people might want to know. The House wants to know what is in the bill and everything relates to the bill.

SIMON COURT: Well, let’s come to the role of the Commerce Commission. The Commerce Commission is going to carry out a discovery process over three to four years to find out what the actual asset condition is of all of these pipes in the ground. Now, imagine that. They could literally ring up the councils and say, “Could you send us your information?” They’d get it the next day. But it’s going to take three or four years. If there are gaps in information, how do you close those gaps? You send out all of the CCTV and jetting trucks to CCTV your pipe networks. In about a year, you could have a complete up-to-date asset management database for all of the three waters infrastructure in New Zealand. It might cost a few tens or even $100 million to do it across the country. You could do that in a year. No. In two to three years, the Commerce Commission is going to faff around and work out how to do it.

Now, if the Government was serious about working out how much money should be spent on building three waters infrastructure, there’s a test for that. Currently, councils plan where people could live—it’s called spatial planning or urban planning, district planning, regional planning. It shows where the people are going to live and how many are coming. In Auckland where I live, in the north and west another 250,000 people are projected to come and live there between now and 2050. Therefore, we know we need to provide 250,000 peoples’ worth of water infrastructure. Work it back from 2050. I’m a civil engineer. I reckon I could ring up a few firms and ask them to give us a ballpark price. That’s how easy it is to work out how much money should be spent on infrastructure.

Then you say, “How much to maintain it?” Well, you work out how many trucks, how many people, how many visits they’re going to do a week. You work back from there. No. The Commerce Commission’s going to spend another three years after they get the information. We’re talking nearly 2030. If this Government was serious about fixing three waters infrastructure, they could have gone back to 2020 when they came up with the original concept for the reforms, and they could have issued an instruction to councils: “Update your asset management system. If you can’t afford it, come to us, we’ll find a way to pay for it.” If you can’t afford growth to fund growth, guess what? A sensible Government would have taken advice from economists and said, “We’re prepared to share some of the revenue central government gets from building and construction, just like ACT would have”—$1.2 billion a year to cash flow the borrowing.

Now, I’ve heard from Hon Kieran McAnulty: “$1.2 billion, that’s not enough. This is an infrastructure deficit of $120 billion.” Well, guess what, Labour; guess what? $1.2 billion a year, leveraged at the same rate as this reform would allow for, somewhere between four and six times revenue delivers you somewhere between four and six times $1.2 billion. Somewhere around $6 billion or $7 billion a year in additional borrowing if local government had access to the revenue that ACT says they should keep. All of these problems are able to be solved.

And that’s before we get to telling a Commerce Commission that they need to somehow work out whether a water service entity is upholding the Treaty of Waitangi, enforcing tikanga, and somehow working out whether they are spending enough money and time on guaranteeing that the spiritual life force or mauri of the water is sufficient. ACT will repeal this legislation, the rest of the three waters reforms, and replace it with our own. It’s on our website: ACT.org.nz.

Tēnā koe, Mr Speaker. Thank you. Pleased to take a call on the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill. This is the last in four major bills making major changes to drinking water, waste water, and stormwater. Though the Green Party has opposed some of those bills, I do acknowledge the huge amount of work which Minister Nanaia Mahuta and then Kieran McAnulty and officials have put into this big tranche of legislation which creates substantial change in the way our drinking water, waste water, and stormwater is to be managed.

The previous speaker, Simon Court, did not mention anything in this bill. This bill is important because the big thrust of the reforms is to move to these 10 entities. They are natural monopolies. Councils have a very limited ability to influence the entities’ performance, the way they carry out their responsibilities, or require any changes to the entities’ operational documents—things like their asset management plan, their funding and pricing plan, their infrastructure strategy. And given that you’ve got limited ability of councils to influence a natural monopoly delivering an essential service, there needs to be economic regulation and consumer protection, particularly as they’re not—well, they are publicly owned; they’re not directly accountable to shareholders, and they’re not operating in a market and they don’t have to pay a dividend to their shareholders.

But I was a bit puzzled by National’s contribution because Mr Bayly was talking about competition in the committee of the whole House, as if more competition would be desirable. So that makes me question what National’s changes would be to the water services regime and whether they are really interested in privatisation and will take this corporate structure and then privatise it. So we do need economic regulation so that the services that the entities deliver to consumers are cost-effective, and that we have transparency and accountability in the way they deliver those services.

So the bill is intended to ensure that the objectives of the reform are delivered: increasing infrastructure investment and ensuring that the pricing practices for those services are efficient. So the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment’s view, as the department advising the Finance and Expenditure Committee, was that this bill would promote the long-term benefit of consumers. There was also a note that there is, of course, a trade-off between regulation, the cost of implementing that regulation and its benefits. This will cost about $10 million, we were told, over two years to develop the information base on which any regulations would be based, and then cost $7 million to $10 million annually to implement. And recognising, too, there’s quite a lot of flexibility in what the Commerce Commission can do, because the entities are differently sized, have different circumstances, so the bill does provide for that.

It enables the commission to issue guidance, input methodologies, and determinations around how the water services entities would implement the charging principles and any regulations made under the Water Services Legislation Act now. It is similar in terms of the way the Commerce Commission regulates fibre, gas, telcos, and it does have this provision for a specialist Water Services Commissioner and also for a dispute resolution tribunal for any disputes around pricing, for example, between consumers and the entity.

So it’s not the job of the Commerce Commission to regulate drinking-water quality—that’s the job of Taumata Arowai—but the two entities will work together. We do need this consumer protection and we need an economic regulator of the entities, so the Green Party is supporting the bill.

We know that our water services sector is not performing as well as it should be. We know that the quality of service being provided does not reflect what consumers demand and we know that there has been systemic long-term under-investment in our water infrastructure and we have seen the effects of that at a local level. So this bill introduces an economic regulation and consumer protection regime, which will ensure the entities promote the long-term interests of consumers by providing services that are efficient, effective, and responsive. So I commend the bill to the House.

Five-minute call—Chris Penk.

Oh, thank you, Mr Speaker. I can assure you, it won’t be all of five minutes. It’s standard to get up and say it’s a pleasure to speak on a certain bill, but it’s not really a pleasure to speak on this one. I’ve heard so many other people speaking on it that I don’t think I can improve much on the contributions, at least the ones from this party.

The politicians have had a lot to say on three waters and various bits of legislation associated with that. The people will get their say on it soon enough. While I don’t pretend that the whole thrust of the general election is a referendum on three waters, it does nevertheless go to some of the themes that will decide how the country wants to be taken forward.

In relation to this space, we say that local control of these assets is still an important value. We think that scrutiny is important. Of course, the thrust of this bill, by its own telling is to provide independent commercial scrutiny, and, of course, that’s the purpose of appointing the Commerce Commission as the regulator.

But we say that other forms of scrutiny are important as well, not only in terms of the election coming up but scrutiny through local government and responsible and accountable government—accountable to the ratepayers, of course, who own the assets—are important values. We think that scrutiny is a more important type. We say that the purpose of this is merely to try to give effect to that which the Government has set up. So it talks about a natural monopoly—well, it’s created a particular form of monopoly. We don’t think it’s very efficient. We don’t think it’s very accountable. What can be done can also be undone; we intend to do that if we should be so lucky as to win the election. I do not commend the bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. It’s a real pleasure to rise and speak on this third reading of this bill. Basically, what we’ve heard already is that this bill is part of a suite of legislative reforms that are very necessary in terms of providing the water infrastructure that we need.

I just want to congratulate all of the Ministers and the officials that have been involved in getting it to this point, because once we’ve passed this bill, what we’re going to be seeing is a much greater likelihood of having affordable drinking water, affordable waste water and stormwater, and making sure that that’s available to consumers and communities right across the country. And what this bill does is it adds some extra things in terms of making sure that we’ve got greater service quality and we’ve also got consumer rights protections for New Zealanders. So on that note, I am happy to commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I rise to take a short call in support of this bill, the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill. As we’ve heard from many speakers on this side of the House, it will establish the economic regulator and also protect consumers in terms of much-needed water services, as part of the reforms with the oversight of the Commerce Commission. This bill will deliver improvements for New Zealanders in terms of having tighter regulation. It will be the best option for New Zealanders because our local councils cannot afford the under-investment of water infrastructure. On that note, I would like to finally finish by thanking the Finance and Expenditure Committee members for their work, and also the officials and the submitters. I commend this bill to the House.

Bill read a third time.

I declare the House in committee for consideration of the Taxation Principles Reporting Bill.