Water Services Entities Amendment Bill

In 2017, together with the Hon David Parker, I received the second Havelock North report, which had been commissioned by the previous Government—I believe, by the Hon Chris Finlayson. It told a story of tens of thousands of New Zealanders getting sick every year from preventable causes, indeed through being exposed to drinking water that was not up to scratch. One of the things that I found most shocking when I read that report was actually getting into the appendices, where there were lists of headlines from exposure cases to poor drinking water that had occurred during the period in which the report was written. This is a very real issue that we have in New Zealand, and this Government’s reform programme is one that I am proud to support. We’re facing a $185 billion bill to bring our water services infrastructure up to the required standards, and achieving scale is an important part of that reform programme.

This bill is a bill which shows the Government has listened to communities, as a result having 10 entities rather than four. It will mean that every council will also have representation in the entities’ regional groups, and voices will be heard. So it strikes a balance, making sure that local voices are heard and also achieves scale sufficient to make sure that the bills that will otherwise occur are at a local level not so extreme as they would be under, for example, the proposal that the National Party has brought forward. Moving from 67 different water service providers to just 10 means the new entities will have the increased size necessary to improve access to funding and management of water services to secure the benefits of reform for New Zealanders, including affordability.

I do want to say that this listening is important. That is something that the Hon Kieran McAnulty has led, and I find it shocking when the other side of the House argues that we should maintain the status quo. They argue against this bill, and their approach really, in my view, has absolutely no credibility. It is the status quo. There is no council in the country that thinks the status quo is a good idea. National seem content to leave New Zealanders facing rates rises in the thousands while a 67-entity structure is incapacitated by debt, and that is something that no New Zealander wants.

I think ultimately—[Interruption] You can hear them; they are so out of touch. They’re like a bunch of middle-aged bald men driving around in their wives’ Government-subsidised Teslas, looking for an opportunity to reintroduce charges for contraception. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you very much, Mr Speaker. Well, that was a manful attempt by David Clark, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I think we can all agree on that. Let’s be really clear what’s happened here: this is the back-down bill. This is the bill in which the Government tries to pretend that this is what they wanted to do all along, and that they’ve listened to communities and that now it’s time to get with the programme and change around things. But this is a back down because they have faced a wave of hostility from around the country over the last two years as the three-waters roadshow has rumbled on, and they have finally figured out that the public aren’t buying what Labour is selling. This is the back-down bill.

We were told for two years by the Hon Nanaia Mahuta and then Kieran McAnulty that it had to be four entities, we had to legislate all the councils to have their assets confiscated, and we had to set up the big four mega-entities—“There is no other way—there is no alternative.” I even think the Minister might have uttered those words in the House: “TINA”—There Is No Alternative.

We were told over and over again—and the Government ran these ridiculously contemptuous ads on TV to tell local government that they knew what was best for them—that there was nothing that could be done: “We had to do three waters.” Local government said, “Well, actually, how about you let us figure it out at a regional level? We’re up for reform, we’re up for the rationalisation, but we just want to keep our own assets and sort it out.” The Government said, “No, no, we know best. We can’t do that. You’ve got to do the big four.” Then they said, “Well, hang on a minute. How about you let us figure it out and you let us sort out the arrangements so that we can get some balance sheet separation, and how about you just remove the mandatory co-governance provisions?”, and the Government said, “No, no, we know best. We’ve got to do it.” Well, now it turns out, actually, they’re prepared to—as David Clark said, “Oh, we’ve listened—we’ve listened.”—and they’ve changed their mind. Well, good on them for listening; it just took two years. But, anyway, we welcome that. This is the back-down bill.

Now, David Clark says that the debate is, essentially, between Labour’s new proposal, the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill, which amends legislation we passed only a few months ago—“Water Services 2.0”—and the status quo. Well, that’s not the debate. No one in this Parliament thinks that’s the debate, other than David Clark, and no one in the public thinks that, because everyone acknowledges the need for reform.

So what do we agree on in Parliament? Well, we agree on balance sheet separation so that you can get debt finance to fund the long-lived assets, because councils can’t do it by themselves. That’s sensible. That is across both models proposed by National and by Labour. Do we agree on economic regulation? Yes, we do. These are, essentially, natural monopolies. They’re actually, in some ways, not dissimilar or any different to local electricity lines companies. They’re natural monopolies that require economic regulation to get a rate of return. So we agree around that. We agree on water-quality regulation. In fact, the starting point for water quality started under the last National Government. So we agree on all of that. We agree on regional groupings, and we obviously don’t like the big four entities that the Government started with.

What do we disagree on? There are a number of elements, and that’s ultimately why we can’t support this legislation. We disagree on a few things. The first is that the legislation confiscates the assets of the councils and says, basically, “We know best as central government. We’re going to do it for you.” Yes, the Government has moved away from the big four model and moved to a regionalised model, but it’s still confiscation. It’s still legislation that takes the assets and says that the Government knows best.

Our preferred solution on this side of the House is to allow local councils and local communities to sort out how they’re going to rearrange themselves so that they can meet the Government’s water reform objectives and make sure that we can get improvements in water quality and get that economic regulation in place. That will require allowing local councils and local communities to have a go at working it out for themselves. It’s not to say that central government doesn’t or shouldn’t have the back-stop powers in order to step in and make sure that we get the reforms that make sense, but let’s give them a go at it in the first instance. The Government has completely disregarded all of that. So, yep, we’ve got a more regionalised grouping, but the Government’s choosing the regionalised groupings for them. That, I think, is what many people in local councils and local communities find very offensive. That’s the first thing.

The second thing is: co-governance that is baked into the reforms. There’s no change to that through this amendment bill. There’s no change to the existing Act that is now in law. So the regional representative groups, the representative boards: co-governance is baked in there. We regard that as wrong. We will get rid of that after 14 October if we have a mandate to do so. We regard that as wrong.

Thirdly, Te Mana o te Wai statements. This has flown under the radar. The co-governance stuff gets much of the attention, but, actually, it’s Te Mana o te Wai statements in the Act now that I think many people are waking up to. Only mana whenua can issue them—only mana whenua can issue them—and the water services entities must reply to them. So that actually creates an interesting situation. Only one group can issue them. They’re not mandatory, but I just went and looked it up before: the Act says they can issue them for mana whenua of particular rohe, and the water services entities must respond. The scope of those statements is quite breathtaking, or at least potentially quite breathtaking, in its enormity. I think many people are waking up to what that does, and I think people think it is wrong, and we agree. It’s not to say that Māori do not have rights and interests in water—they do. That actually is accepted—oh, I see Grant Robertson is muttering, but—

Hon Grant Robertson: Oh, no; I’m just recording the moment.

CHRIS BISHOP: Well, I’ve said this many times. I said it in the first, second, and third readings of the last bill—the one that you said was the real solution, until this one turned up. They do, and actually, that goes across the Parliament, because when National was in Government, the Crown accepted through the Mighty River Power litigation in the Supreme Court—which led to the mixed-ownership model solution for the energy companies that the Crown owned—that Māori did have rights and interests in water. Now, the question is how you give effect to that; that’s actually the debate. The debate is not: do Māori have rights and interests in water? The debate is about how you give effect to that. Our view on this side of the House is that allowing only mana whenua to issue Te Mana o te Wai statements is wrong, and it’s not an appropriate way of giving effect to those rights and interests; nor, by the way, is the co-governance provisions that are baked into the legislation. So you do not have to go as far as the Government is going with its proposals in order to give effect to the Crown’s obligations that are shared across the Parliament.

So, to return to where I started, this bill is a back down. There’s no real way of sugar-coating it. It’s been a back down, I think, forced by local communities around the country. It has been quite striking to me when you drive round the place, the “Stop Three Waters” signs that you see all over the place, and who would have thought that what is actually quite a technocratic issue—at the end of the day, we are talking about pipes and stormwater and clean, fresh drinking water. I mean, no one gets worked up about electricity lines—well, maybe we used to back in the 1990s, but no one, really, gets worked up now. It’s been interesting, the reaction, and for that, to be honest, I do blame the Government, because from the start this has been mis-sold, the local government sector has been treated with a degree of contempt by many in central government, and there’s been a backlash to that; there’s been a reaction to that.

So do we need water reform? Yes, we do. Do we need confiscation? No, we don’t. Do we need mandatory co-governance? No, we don’t. Do we need Te Mana o te Wai statements in the way they are formed? No, we don’t. Do we need balance sheet separation? Yes. Do we need economic regulation? Yes. Do we need water-quality regulation? Yes. Do we need more regionalised solutions that we let local communities come up with? Absolutely, yes we do.

Actually, there’s not so much between the parties on this, and there’s still time—there’s still time—for Labour to come to the party of genuine local water reform. Thank you very much.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. That was the longest definition of a Clayton’s policy—a policy that’s not actually a policy. I’ve never heard so much hot air put out into the debating chamber in the explanation of a policy that is, essentially, a defence of the status quo. Christopher Bishop claims to support all the underlying imperatives, the policy drivers of reform, but actually National doesn’t want to do anything. I’m sorry; I should be surprised by this, but it’s happened too many times.

I want to credit Kieran McAnulty for the refocus that this bill actually brings to the policy. Kieran McAnulty listened to what the public was saying. He listened to what local government was saying. This bill contains some important changes: 10 entities instead of four; longer lead times for all the entities except for Auckland; regional representative groups that will now be able to accommodate every district council in New Zealand; and a locally led, streamlined merger process. This bill contains some important tweaks to the affordable water reforms.

I want to say, as an Auckland MP, that these reforms cannot come fast enough. Where I live in West Auckland, every time there’s heavy rainfall, raw sewage is pumped into Te Wai-o-Pareira, the waterway that runs right through the middle of my electorate. Why? Because for decades successive councils simply haven’t invested in enough waste-water infrastructure. Why did thousands of people in Auckland get hit by catastrophic floods on the anniversary weekend earlier this year? Because our stormwater completely failed because successive councils have not invested adequately in stormwater infrastructure or the designs and the modern approaches to stormwater management that are necessary.

Under this bill, we will see specialist water entities with more robust balance sheets and the ability to borrow nearly three times as much to make the investments that are necessary. There’s a strong legislative mandate to deal with these issues—all three of the waters—and with a regulator looking over their shoulder to keep them honest and keep them focused on the job at hand. I commend this bill to the House.

Look, ACT has played a constructive role in terms of the water services reforms. I remember back to June 2020 when I was first invited to a briefing from Department of Internal Affairs officials, who outlined for me—as an ACT candidate, not an MP, but trusted with the information and insights from officials—what the problem was with three waters infrastructure. The officials told David Seymour and I that there is a problem: around New Zealand, there’s an infrastructure deficit of potentially $100 billion—apparently, now, it’s $180 billion; that may have something to do with inflation under Labour—and they said, “Look, we need to fix this infrastructure. Councils haven’t fulfilled their obligations and there’s not enough money to do it, and the current regulatory framework doesn’t make it likely that this work’s going to be done any time soon, and in the meantime, we’ve got waste-water overflows and there’s not enough infrastructure to allow for housing growth and housing densification in our cities.”

As a civil engineer, I thought, “That’s a very reasonable and sensible problem definition.” Then they introduced the Water Services Entities Bill, now an Act, which set up four mega entities and established an incredibly complex co-governance arrangement which allocates 50 percent of the seats—essentially creating water parliaments—on the regional representative groups to iwi Māori representatives, which are complemented by 50 percent of the seats on these enormous boards, potentially being people from local government, but we don’t really know.

If the problem was how do we find more money to fix infrastructure, to repair and maintain the infrastructure we’ve already got, and to provide for growth in our cities—whether it’s green fields, subdivisions, places where young families might want to live, where there’s enough room for the kids to ride their bikes around the backyard or to put a trampoline; or whether people want to live in higher density cities, where you need actually water infrastructure, stormwater, waste water, and drinking water to be delivered before you can connect new homes to the systems. So that’s the problem to solve. We need to find the money and we need some regulatory mechanism to force asset owners of water infrastructure to actually deliver the infrastructure.

The Water Services Entities Act, passed in November 2022, failed that test. It introduced complex, expensive co-governance into water infrastructure management. It introduced concepts like Te Mana o te Wai and requires these water services entities to give effect to Te Mana o te Wai statements. Now, while it’s true that New Zealanders of all cultures understand how important clean drinking water is for communities and how important it is that waste-water treatment plants and the networks operate in a way that doesn’t result in regular discharges of waste water into our special places, it’s not true that only one ethnic group in New Zealand has special insights into how water should be managed—how water resources should be allocated. In fact, it’s engineers and scientists and ecologists. Those are the people with those specialist skills who can tell us whether freshwater wetlands or coastal environments are in fact suitable for recreation or to get drinking water from. There are no special insights that those scientists or engineers have because of their ethnicity, but that is what this Government has proposed by including Te Mana o Te Wai statements as a requirement for water service entities.

It became clear late last year that the high-water mark for co-governance in this Government’s divisive agenda—when it came to allocating different rights to iwi Māori based on their ethnicity, when it came to infrastructure like water assets. The waka had gone a long way up the beach, but the tide had gone out. When Chris Hipkins said that policies were going on the policy bonfire and he was rethinking the three waters policy, I thought, “Wow, maybe they might have listened to all of those councils, all of those communities; all of those New Zealanders who signed ACT’s petition saying, ‘Stop the steal; we’ll repeal three waters.’—maybe they’ve listened?” But no, they hadn’t.

What Chris Hipkins did was announce that, instead of four mega water entities, four new chief executives, and four new bureaucracies, there’s going to be 10. Only Labour could solve a problem of centralisation and red tape of its own making by adding even more bureaucrats and more red tape, hiring more office space and yet delaying the implementation of the legislation by two years so that waste-water overflows into places like Te Wai o Pareira / Henderson Creek—where I live—will continue for another two years or maybe another decade, while all of these things are worked out; and they won’t be worked out by this Government.

We’ve heard today that the Minister responsible for the bill, the Hon Kieran McAnulty, intends that it be reported back from select committee by 27 July, and no doubt they will intend to have it pass through all stages under this 53rd Parliament. Well, we in ACT will do our best to prevent more bad legislation being rammed through the House, but actually, it’s up to New Zealanders. They will get to vote on this legislation in October, and by 15 October we’ll know whether they agree with the former Minister, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, that there is no alternative to co-governance. Well, now, if they agree with Kieran McAnulty that 10 massive border bureaucracies are better than four—or maybe they won’t agree and they’ll agree with ACT, because what ACT says is that there is an alternative. If we want better water infrastructure, we should simply spend more money on water infrastructure. How about that?

Well, I went down to the West Coast of the South Island, and one of the mayors said, “You know, Simon, the reason we’re going for three waters is because we think we’ll get more money out of it, but what we really need to do is—if only central government would share some of their revenue with us. Remember, we have hundreds of thousands of tourists come up and down the West Coast of the South Island every year. We don’t get any revenue out of that. If only they’d share a small amount of central government’s revenue with us, we might be able to fund the delivery of better water infrastructure for some of our most deprived communities.” How practical would that be? Central government sharing some of the revenue it takes from the regions with the regions that need it. Well, that’s what ACT says.

What ACT says is that we should share 50 percent of the GST on all new builds, backed with local government, on the basis that 30-year infrastructure plans between central and local government identify where the infrastructure needs to be built and what the time frames are, and then local government is held to account to meet those time frames. We need to provide for growth by actually building infrastructure well in advance of when the houses come, and that will actually help with delivering service land: not just with water, but also with transport infrastructure. That means, whether they’re for high-rise residential development in existing towns and cities, or whether they’re greenfield suburbs where mums and dads want to be able to put a trampoline in the backyard for the kids, those sections and those land prices will become more affordable. That’s what ACT’s solutions for building New Zealand and conserving nature would deliver, and that is what New Zealanders will have the opportunity to vote for in October.

So ACT will not be supporting this bill; we will be opposing it. We will continue to be constructive, we will continue to offer alternatives, and we will continue to listen to New Zealanders, including councils, the engineers, the asset managers, all of those people in the regions and in our towns and cities who have said, “Simon, there’s a better way. Labour won’t listen to us; thank you, Simon, thank you, ACT New Zealand, for listening. We look forward to seeing a change of Government in October 2023, with ACT at its centre.” Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Tēnā koe e te Māngai o te Whare. I cannot understand why the party that has just spoken, the ACT Party, is so opposed to mātauranga Māori being recognised in decisions about water, why it is so anti - Te Tiriti o Waitangi being implemented, and why it stokes up concern about this when we want decisions that are fully informed by all of Aotearoa New Zealand, all aspects of our community, and we want to implement Te Tiriti. So that is a lot of nonsense that Mr Court has spoken.

It is strange, though, to be speaking on the first reading of the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill when we haven’t had the second reading of the Water Services Legislation Bill, which has had so many of the issues around the establishment and the transfer of responsibilities of the water services entity, and when this bill makes so many changes, as the Water Services Legislation Bill does, to the original Act that the Parliament passed last year, the Water Services Entities Act. It is really disappointing that the Finance and Expenditure Committee was not given the opportunity to consider this bill and the changes that are proposed here in association with the Water Services Legislation Bill.

It’s also peculiar that this bill is going to the Governance and Administration Committee when it has been members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee who have heard all of the submissions on the water services legislation and understand the complexity of the issues involved. Nor does the Green Party support—though we will be supporting the bill, and I’ll explain why in a moment—the truncated select committee process and the report back of 27 July, because of the quite major changes that this bill makes to the three waters reforms, particularly with things like the establishment of the Water Services Entities Funding Agency, and we’re really pleased that the Government has moved to do that, and with the ability, potentially, that entities will have to get access to loan finance at a more competitive rate. The bill makes it very clear that there’s no Crown liability and support, sort of as a backstop, for that entity unless the Minister of Finance has made decisions under the Public Finance Act, but that does mean that Government is recognising the other ways of doing investment, rather than just assuming that all of the infrastructure deficit can be funded purely by debt finance through the entities.

The Green Party is supporting the bill primarily because of the move to 10 regional entities which are much closer to local communities than the big four mega-entities. That was something that the Green Party supported and promoted with the former Minister, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta—and we acknowledge all of the mahi that that Minister has done on this reform project. We also support the recognition that there can be some mergers between the entities, that it is more of a voluntary process there, though we do note that the Minister still has quite substantial powers of direction in this bill to direct the entities, if they are not performing adequately, to require shared services, to direct them to develop expertise and capability and to ensure business continuity. So there are still significant ministerial intervention powers.

We remain concerned about the huge degree of corporatisation in these reforms and the limited accountability that the entities have back to their communities. There is an attempt in this bill, as a previous speaker noted, in relation to the community priority statements for water services. I have a major concern, which I hope the select committee will address, with the overlap between this bill and the Natural and Built Environment Bill and the Spatial Planning Bill. Under the Resource Management Act (RMA) reform, communities can provide statements of community outcomes, statements of regional and environmental outcomes, to the regional planning committees for incorporation into regional spatial strategies and regional plans. Those statements of community outcome—surely the water services entities could have regard to those rather than having a separate process under this bill where they identify the issues in relation to particular water bodies. It is the regional councils and now the regional planning committees which have got responsibility for that water management. This seems quite a duplication—the potential for quite a lot of mix and overlapping work here—that’s not really necessary.

The other issue here is that, with the new RMA reform legislation, the Natural and Built Environment Bill already will be requiring water services entities to have regard to the regional spatial strategy, so you get that integration between infrastructure and what the water services entities are doing with their asset management plans. So, when you’ve got that connection there, I’m still to be convinced that these new community priority statements are not just “make work” and that they will actually have any weight and be of any value.

The other issues in the legislation that we’ll be commenting on when we talk about the principal bill include our continuing concern about the transfer of stormwater and the fact that that is completely untested internationally, but we do wish that the Government had remitted this to the Finance and Expenditure Committee and that there was more time to integrate this bill with the water services legislation changes, because this is at risk of becoming a patchwork quilt of ad hoc changes. While patchwork quilts may have character, they can also have significant holes.

The complexity of the legislation requires a good process and, as the Finance and Expenditure Committee reported back on the Water Services Legislation Bill, there was concern that for whatever reason officials had directed Parliamentary Counsel without always coming back to the select committee to ensure that the Parliamentary Counsel was making changes to the bill on the recommendation of the select committee. This truncated process, with only just over a month, means there is potential, with the complexity of the bill, for other issues to arise in terms of real parliamentary scrutiny and limited chance for public submissions.

So, while we support the bill, we have a number of concerns about it and hope that submitters will have some time at least to comment on it and to raise those issues with the Governance and Administration Committee.

Madam Speaker, thank you very much. It’s my pleasure to speak and take a call on the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill. I just want to thank the Hon Kieran McAnulty for bringing this important piece of legislation to the House, because this bill is all about improving infrastructure across New Zealand.

Especially after decades-long underfunding, our water network is in a poor condition, and Dr David Clark, in his contribution, raised the point around people getting sick as a result of poor water quality. In 2020—

Matt Doocey: Green sludge coming out of the taps—remember?

DAN ROSEWARNE: Well, I see the member for Waimakariri there has woken up. While he’s been sleeping in the Waimakariri electorate, I’ve been mowing his grass like a Masport lawnmower, picking up all his constituency work.

I just want to raise the point that I live in Woodend, which is in Waimakariri—just for the member of Waimakariri there, it’s just north of Kaiapoi. In my home of Waimakariri, rates would have gone up by as much as $4,900 by the year 2054—$4,900. But, under this new system, we will save $2,470, so it’s going to be half the cost if we go through with these reforms. This is a fantastic bill, and I commend it to the House.

Sam Uffindell—a five-minute call.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. That was good; I wish the member Dan Rosewarne had have kept talking. I was hoping he was going to use up all 10 minutes, but he almost got to two. But that was all right; it was an enjoyable contribution nevertheless. I’d better get straight to the point on this one: I oppose this bill, but I will be using up my full call on this.

This is a back-down bill, let’s be perfectly honest. It is a back-down bill. I had some friends who were in New Zealand recently and they were driving around and they said, “What are all of these Stop Three Waters signs?” Evidently one of them was on my gate! But, when you drive around Tauranga and the Bay of Plenty, there are a lot of them. It’s such a strange thing for this Government to hang its hat on, and it could well have been the thing that started the demise—

Angela Roberts: Affordable water?

SAM UFFINDELL: And the horrible water we hear being called out. I saw the ads, too, where you turn on the tap and all of the green sludge comes out. We don’t have that problem in Tauranga; we don’t have it at all, because our councils have invested in their water services over the decades. We have some of the best water, not to mention the best sunshine and the best beaches in New Zealand. But we don’t need this; we do not need central government coming in and telling us how to manage our water. It’s not just Tauranga that doesn’t need it; there are many councils around New Zealand that don’t need it.

I go back to the start of where this all began with three waters—and I’ll keep calling this three waters, because that’s what it is. It’s just had another lick of paint and a new name, but it’s still three waters, and it will still be repealed as three waters and replaced with Simon Watts’ wonderful Local Water Done Well. I look forward to the repealing and replacement of three waters. Now, we saw what happened when this came in. It is strange; I remember talking on this at the end of last year, and I came in here with “Wattsy” and we were there talking away, trying to hold this up—and he did a magnificent job holding it up—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! In this House, we refer to members by their full name.

SAM UFFINDELL: My apologies, Madam Speaker. Getting a bit too laissez-faire on a Thursday afternoon. I’ll add an element of professionalism for the last three minutes.

It seems that here we are again talking about a bill that was only passed recently. Here we are amending it. Let’s talk about what’s wrong with this bill. Well, there’s no local accountability, because the local people don’t have an opportunity to call out people if they are not doing a good job managing their water services. It takes local assets off local councils, and make no mistake about it: it takes their assets. It upholds co-governance, and those are the two extremely contentious parts of this: that it takes local assets off local councils—and this amendment hasn’t addressed that—and it further continues very divisive co-governance arrangements that we have seen under this Government.

The Te Mana o te Wai statements were talked about quite well by Chris Bishop when he came in here. I’m sure Simon Watts talked about it well, but I came in during Chris’ speech—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order!

SAM UFFINDELL: Sorry, again. Thursday afternoon. I will not get it wrong in the last minute and a half.

Why is it that only mana whenua can make statements on this? I find that that is the wrong way to be going about it. We are all New Zealanders in this House, in this country, and we should all be treated with the same rights and responsibilities as everyone else. To say that one set of people, based on their ethnicity, can make Te Mana o te Wai statements and other New Zealanders can’t, I think, is a pretty poor direction for us to be heading as a country.

Now, I’ve heard the other side of the House piping up about all of the financial benefits that this is going to reap. They looked at what they’d done over in Scotland and they got a bit of modelling and they said, “Oh, this is going to save councils thousands of dollars and save ratepayers thousands of dollars.” I mean, what a load of rubbish. When you’ve looked at people that have come in and done peer-reviewed studies on that, that’s not what they have found—that’s not what they have found.

So this Government has used fear. They’ve used fear of green sludge coming out of taps and they’ve used fear of incredible rate hikes that are completely out of touch with reality to try and ram this through. We had the Greens member Eugenie Sage before. She has left the Chamber, but she tried to—

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! You nearly made it. But the member will not refer to the absence of a member.

SAM UFFINDELL: Thank you, Madam Speaker. I won’t be posting this one online. What am I saying? There was an attempt by the Green Party at a 60 percent entrenchment. This Government went along with it.

Glen Bennett: When’s your professionalism coming in?

SAM UFFINDELL: Well, we will see plenty of professionalism come October, and we will repeal and replace three waters—

Order! The member’s time has expired.

We have heard it all today from the National Party. First of all, we’ve had Chris Bishop stand up and say, “The National Party supports reform and believes in reform.” Then, we’ve had Sam Uffindell stand up and say—and I quote—“a strange thing to hang your hat on”, and then talk about his community and why his community doesn’t require reform.

Throughout this entire debate around water infrastructure over the past couple of years, the National Party have done two things: they have flip-flopped on their position, back and forth—back and forth—and then they have stoked misinformation and fear amongst our communities about what the reform programme is seeking to achieve. So I’m going to talk about my community of Nelson, because my community of Nelson has done an excellent of job of investing in water services. But—and I’m going to say “but”—a lot of that infrastructure was invested in a very, very long time ago. We saw the impact of that last year in the Nelson floods, where some of our infrastructure failed and continues to fail when we have heavy weather events. It’s not to say that we haven’t invested; we have. However, the cost of continuing to sweat that asset will be far too great for our community and for the people who come in the generations after us.

What this bill seeks to address is one of the issues that was raised around the nature of the entities. We will be moving from four large entities down to 10 entities. One of the critical pieces of this reform is the need—which is something that the National Party have not addressed—for us to have balance sheet separation so that we can actually have a step removed from the councils, who are unable to invest. It’s not that a lot of them haven’t wanted to invest; it’s that the system has not been set up in a way to enable them to do so.

This bill continues our good work of reform to ensure that we do address the thing that we do need to hang our hat on, and that is that people in this country have died from drinking poor quality water. That is actually, fundamentally, what is at the heart of it: affordable water that is safe to drink and that supports our communities. I commend this bill to the House.

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure to be involved in the process of listening to the other submissions, etc., and dealing with the other water entities bills on the Finance and Expenditure Committee. I’m actually very pleased to see it move to another committee, as it’s time we had a fresh set of eyes on this one. Share the love, I say!

This is the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill, and it’s actually really simple. It’s a case of the Minister listening to the communities, taking into account the misgivings over the amount of entities, changing the number to 10 so that there can be more involvement by the local bodies, and making sure that that representation is the expectation. That’s a really good thing because it’s making sure that that balance is right.

When we had the floods in Auckland—I live on a park, and the park is about 10 acres, and it is a zone where floods are supposed to come into the park. I’ve lived there for about 29 years, and I have never seen that happen, but when I woke up that morning it was actually a proper lake, and there were people who came to the park to swim in that water. I really worried about what was going to happen next, because the sewage is not dealt with appropriately there, and so they were swimming in water that was really suspect.

So this isn’t just a problem for Hawke’s Bay; this is a problem throughout our country, and it remains a problem for Auckland, despite having a much better system in Auckland than elsewhere. So the best of the model of water care comes across here to a water reform, which we do sorely need. I think that was conceded today by Chris Bishop, who actually accepted there needed to be change. Sometimes these changes are rough: there are misgivings; there’s fear. Hopefully, this amendment means that people feel that they are actually more involved than they had felt, and it strikes the right balance. I commend the Minister for his efforts here and speaking to his community and coming back, and I support this bill.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It is a pleasure on Thursday afternoon to rise on behalf of the National Party in opposition to the Water Services Entities Amendment Bill in its first reading. Not only do I rise on behalf of the National Party, which opposes this ideological bill, but I also rise on behalf of hard-working Waimakariri ratepayers, who, when they were asked for their feedback on whether the council should support three waters, voted overwhelmingly to oppose—95 percent of ratepayers who responded opposed the Government’s three waters.

So the Minister, in his first reading, can stand in the House and say it was in good faith that he brings this bill into the House, but, of course, he knows—and the former Minister that held the responsibility for this work reform knows—that, in the first days, councils were promised the ability to opt out. That’s what they were promised, until Official Information Act documents revealed it was an all-in. So this bill doesn’t come to the House in good faith; it comes to the House in bad blood. People have been misled. This is theft by stealth. No matter how you want to package it up and amend it, if it’s still a dog, it’s a dog. That’s exactly what this bill is.

Can you believe it? Picture the Labour Party caucus this morning, right? They’ve had a car crash of a week; in fact, probably several weeks. Morale is low and they’re thinking about the day and some backbencher who hasn’t read the Order Paper pipes up and says, “Well, at least we don’t have to talk about three waters anymore.” Then the Leader of the House says, “Whoops, we actually do. We’ve got to swallow this dead rat again and again and again.” And they think they’ll quieten this down before 14 October! I’m looking forward to getting on the hustings, because the public oppose this ideological approach.

Even look at the legislative process they’re going through. I mean, I presume, because the bill has been introduced in the House, that it can be under the Standing Orders, but who’s ever heard of bringing a bill to the House that amends not one but two bills that haven’t even been passed into law yet—that are still going through the legislative process. No wonder they’re called the “coalition of chaos”. It’s more like a circus. We are here, six months into the year, in 2023, to amend an Act, the Water Services Entities Act, that was only passed in 2022. I mean, this is an absolute shambles.

To be told by the Minister responsible that this is in good faith—and then we had the audacity of the Hon David Clark standing up and with a straight face, and I hope we get that on the clip of Parliament TV, saying the statement “Listening is important.” They’ve spent the whole time blinkered. They know best, Wellington knows best, Labour knows best, and here they are trying to say they’ve had an epiphany: listening is important. Look, that’s not a flippant comment, because it actually has impacts on this bill.

Read the regulatory impact statement. It outlines—and I quote—“Constraints on timing have limited the amount of research and analysis in the development of options. As a result of these constraints, officials are continuing to work with Ministers and the sector on the impacts of the 10 entity model on transitional arrangements for local government during the establishment period.” The former Minister who was responsible, the Hon Nanaia Mahuta, said they’d been working on this policy train for three, four, five years. Now we find ourselves in a position where we’re passing a law that the officials haven’t had time to explore the actions and the impacts and the analysis of, and this is what happens. These guys went into it blinkered. They knew best, and now, they’re paying the price for it.

You’ll have to get up on the hustings over the next few weeks and defend this bill. Duncan Webb’s sitting there—the MP for Christchurch Central. He knows because his former campaign manager—the left-leaning Mayor of Christchurch—wrote a letter to the editor to the Christchurch Press, who said that, because of three waters, not only was he resigning his Labour membership, he would never vote for Labour again.

Hon Nanaia Mahuta: Rubbish.

MATT DOOCEY: And that’s what it went—rubbish, they say. This is how out of touch—it’s actually in black and white in the newspaper. In Canterbury, it went down like a cup of cold sick.

So you can dress it up about how you want to make good-faith amendments, but the reality is that this bill does not address the issues. Yes, you can broaden it out to a representative group that will represent and give their views on the issue. The issue was never about councils not having representation; the issue was that councils wanted ownership of their ratepayer assets—that is the issue that they’re overlooking. Yes, you can package it up. You’ve gone from three to four and now to 10, but it’s still not going to work, and that’s really concerning. They’ve had years at this. They’ve been wedded to an ideological position that they have failed to move on.

What we get back today is a bill that will amend two current bills before the House and a bill that was passed only last year. So what we’ve got is the “back-down bill”. We’ve got a bill that they were forced, dragging their heels and kicking, to change, because they know that this is unpopular. They know that the public does not want this. So that’s why—let’s be very clear about this bill: undemocratic, unworkable. National will repeal this bill. In coalition, I’d like to think it will be on the first 100-day bonfire. It’s very clear for voters, as they go up to 14 October, when they look at the two options: the National Party’s, led by Simon Watts, Local Water Done Well, which will keep local ownership of water assets, or a Government that is wedded on ideology that Wellington knows best and that will ram through reform. I’m really concerned about this: what this Government will do in the next few weeks of pushing through their legislation, which, in fact, has no mandate.

I’ll finally leave it to say: you can put in that we’re going to have a community priority statement, and you can package it up that you’re going to listen to the community and that you’re going to bring interest groups together, but take a note of this legislation. The representative groups don’t have to take that statement on board; not “must consider” but “may consider”. So, for all the speeches tonight that we hear from Labour—that they have listened and they have responded to the public—this bill is actually no different from where it was before. Will councils own the water assets? No. Will community views be taken into consideration? No. Has there been the removal of co-governance that’s hard-baked into these reforms? No. This is the hill that this Government will die on: the hill of three waters. We will always look back at this bill that actually represented a Government that was out of touch and that thought it knew better than the people they were put in to serve.

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Well, this evening, I have heard nothing from the National Party about what they are going to do when they talk about repealing, and this bonfire they plan to have, which I don’t think they’re going to have, around what they are going to do in terms of what we’re going to do with the three waters—nothing. All they’ve presented is negativity and what they’re against, not what they stand for, and that’s all we see time and time again. That’s why we have a plan, and we plan to implement it. I commend this bill to the House.

The question is, That

Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.

Instruction to Governance and Administration Committee