Local Government (Water Services) Bill

We now come to the debate on clauses 1 and 2.

Thank you, Mr Chair. Clauses 1 and 2 are fairly discrete but fairly important, none the less. I want to talk to clause 2 firstly, which is the commencement clause, which will, basically, indicate when this bill, if passed, will come into effect.

Now, I have Amendment Paper 342, which would seek to amend clause 2—specifically, clause 2(1)—to replace “the day after Royal assent” with “1 January 2027”. The effect of that would be to give councils and local territorial authorities more time to undertake the expectations and to discharge the obligations that this bill would require of them. I don’t think that that is unreasonable. The Labour Party, obviously, is not supportive of this bill. However, if it is going to work for communities, communities need more time to consider what it is they need to do and to be able to give effect to that.

Already around the country, we are seeing examples of councils that are needing to rush around in order to meet the Government’s—

Ryan Hamilton: They’ve had three years.

TANGI UTIKERE: Sorry?

Ryan Hamilton: They’ve had years.

TANGI UTIKERE: “They’ve had years.”—well, there we go. He’s said that it’s three years that they’ve had—Mr Hamilton himself has a background in local government—but what’s really important here, though, is that communities are able to implement something that, quite frankly, will not work. It will not work.

The premise behind extending the commencement date in that specific subclause there is around giving councils more time to outline what their expectations are. Now, as this 3 September deadline draws closer—it’s only a matter of days away—councils are being forced into a situation where they are needing to comply with certain things.

Ryan Hamilton: But it’s optional.

TANGI UTIKERE: “It’s optional.”—oh, that’s interesting. So, as we move to clause 2(2), this proposed change is about replacing the year “2026” with “2027”, because this is not optional. This is a bill that is going to, effectively, require expectations—

Arena Williams: Didn’t he say it was optional?

TANGI UTIKERE: Well, the Government member did say that this was optional. Now, I don’t think that there are options. Where in this hefty bill is the option component? Well, I don’t think there is one, because this is an expectation that will be required of communities all around the country. So my question to the Minister is around the commencement clause and what that looks like.

The other tabled amendment in my name is around clause 1. This is the title, and often we hear in this House about the need to, basically, call a bill—or what’s about to be an Act—exactly what it is. We hear from this Government time and time again about how their water reforms are going to make a huge difference. They are going to make a huge difference—they’re going to make a huge difference in the amount of money that households are going to actually have to pay in order to meet the water infrastructure needs of their community. That’s the difference and that’s what it’s going to be about. My final point is on my amendment, which seeks to replace the words “(Water Services)” so that this bill would simply be known as the “Local Government (Local Water Done Badly) Act 2024”.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I absolutely share my colleague’s concerns around the commencement date. When we heard from councils as part of the select committee process, all of them were concerned about the time frames. Now, everyone agreed that we want to be getting on with big changes when it comes to water reform, but not, particularly, in this way and not, particularly, in this rushed way where councils are scrambling to meet these deadlines. I really support my colleague Tangi Utikere’s Amendment Paper 342 there.

Now, I want to come, as well, to the title, and I want to emphasise how important it was in terms of this opportunity that the Government did have to actually get this bill right. When it comes to an appropriate title for the bill, I don’t think simply saying “Local Government (Water Services)” is actually capturing what this bill is about, and I want to touch on a few aspects of why. The primary one is that we’ve had several proposed amendments throughout the course of this committee of the whole House stage where we would actually centre the environment and, particularly, the adverse effects on the environment, but we know, now, in the objectives of this bill, that that has been removed.

We also tried to put in place some very basic changes to the purpose. This was really to ensure there were things like environmental sustainability and equitable access to water services—things that are absolutely missing. The concern with all of that is that it all adds up to provisions later in the bill, when it comes to, particularly, this single set of stormwater and waste-water provisions—which, again, we’ve heard have very significant implications for allowing when consents come up for renewal or when consents are granted for new waste-water or stormwater treatment plants—that they can meet these single sets of standards that are often many, many, many, many times more than what is currently in place. That all adds up to the fact that the impacts on the environment could be and will be, in certain circumstances, significant, and that is just entirely inappropriate.

The other aspect that is really significant with this bill, particularly on those stormwater and waste-water standards, is the preclusion of either limited notification or public notification when it comes to actually involving the community in these decisions. We know that these standards will override very significant democratic legislative processes and the legislation itself, and that cuts across national policy statements; it cuts across national environment standards; and it cuts across regional policy statements, plans, and district plans—and these are the core of how our democratic processes work in this country in setting standards that should have teeth. This bill is completely overriding that.

My proposal to adequately capture what this bill is doing is in my tabled amendment to change clause 1, where we would call this bill the “Local Government (Perpetually Deprioritising Community and Ecosystem Health Water Services) Bill”. That’s exactly what we’re seeing here. The opportunity has not been taken up to prioritise community health and ecosystem health, and we absolutely do not support that, and we’re really disappointed that the Government have not made amendments to actually make sure that our people and our environment were central to all of this.

Thank you, Mr Chair. I’d like to speak to those two amendments that have just been discussed in the previous two contributions by Tangi Utikere and Lan Pham. They both make exceptionally good points.

Going first to my colleague Tangi Utikere. His amendment is for the title to be the “Local Government (Water Services Done Badly) Bill”. That’s what his amendment is. I was thinking, during his contribution, that probably it would be more accurate, in fact, if the title of the bill was “Local Government (Water Services Done Badly and More Expensively) Bill”.

Tangi Utikere: That’s right.

Hon RACHEL BROOKING: Thank you, Mr Utikere. Because that is the point: this is going to put more money on ratepayers, and that is a decision of this Government. Shame on them.

Then we go to Lan Pham’s suggestion, which was—I didn’t catch it all—“Again Deprioritising the Community and Ecosystem Health”. This is a very good point because what this bill does—and it’s not in the title at all, we can’t see it; we just see “water services” and “local government”; there is nothing about the Resource Management Act (RMA) and the further degradation of the environment that this Government seems intent on doing with every bill that seems to come in front of this House.

In the Part 5 discussion of this bill, we found that standards are being imported into the RMA and there was no comfort provided by the Minister that those standards would meet the purpose of the Resource Management Act, which is sustainable management. He said that they are there to improve water services, but it was unclear that they were going to improve the receiving environment: our rivers and coastlines.

So I think that Lan Pham’s suggestion is a very good one, going to our ecosystem health but also to our community health. This relates back to my suggested amendment to Tangi Utikere’s amendment that this is going to put more expense on our ratepayers and some of our most vulnerable community members.

That is why the name of the bill needs to change. My preference is “Local Government (Water Services Done Badly and More Expensively with Worse Environmental Outcomes) Bill”.

Steve Abel: Mr Chair?

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Steve Abel.

Madam Chair, sorry—I see the Chair’s changed. Thank you, Madam Chair, very much. Look, it’s useful for us to reflect, as my colleagues have previously done, that this is a bill about water. The Secretary-General of the United Nations 24 years ago said that “Access to safe water is a fundamental human need and, therefore, a basic human right. Contaminated water jeopardizes both the physical and social health of all people. It is an affront to human dignity.”

So in speaking to the title of this bill and speaking to the failure of this bill to address the fundamental challenges we have in terms of local communities’ access to safe and uncontaminated drinking water, I want to acknowledge that the Minister refused the option for an amendment that ensured an equality of access to water. That has fundamentally disadvantaged our rural people more than any, because most New Zealanders, 80 percent of New Zealanders, have access to drinking water that is about 1 or lower milligrams per litre of nitrate—and that’s a safe level of nitrate to be in water. But 800,000 New Zealanders are exposed to potentially hazardous levels of nitrate in their drinking water, and they are mostly in rural New Zealand. The community in Gore right now, the 8,000 people who were unable to drink their water a couple of weeks ago—they’re now allowed to drink it, but it’s still exceedingly elevated for nitrate. That is an example of where our rural communities are being failed by this legislation, because it does not allow the proper care of water services.

I’ll make a final point before I propose a new title for the bill based on this point.

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): I was waiting for the title and commencement piece to come.

STEVE ABEL: I will give you a title, I promise you.

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Thank you.

STEVE ABEL: I’m giving you the context for the title. Of those 800,000 New Zealanders who are most exposed to hazardous levels of nitrate, many of them are on household bore supplies, supplies of water for under 25 people—this bill does not deal with those people. And those people are the ones that are most likely to be subject to the hundred cases of new bowel cancer every year and 40 deaths every year attributable to nitrate in drinking water in this country, New Zealand.

Last night we had a bill which I proposed the title should be the “Consenting to Cancer-causing Contamination and Other Systems Bill”. It was another water-related bill. This bill currently has the title of the Local Government (Water Services) Bill. But to sharpen the focus of the community and the Government on the fact that this bill is not addressing that critical problem of nitrate contamination, which predominantly comes from the dairy industry, I propose that this bill be called the “Local Government (Funeral Services) Bill”, because there will be people who fall ill as a result of the weakness of the water systems.

Tom Rutherford: Must be serious!

STEVE ABEL: It is absolutely serious. There are an exceedingly high number of cases of E-coli that lead to serious illness and, in certain instances, death, and there are people who are dying from bowel cancer as a result of nitrate contamination. That’s why I suggested we call it the Local Government (Funeral Services) Bill”. Thank you.

Point of order, Madam Chair. I just seek your guidance here, Madam Chair. There were some fairly outrageous claims made within the naming of that clause. There’s more nitrates in vegetables than there are in water. So that’s by far the way that people ingest nitrates in this country. So to draw a cause and effect—

Steve Abel: Vegetables aren’t killing people.

Hon MARK PATTERSON: —and essentially say this bill’s—well, if you’re talking about nitrates—

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): This is a point of order, not a debate.

Hon MARK PATTERSON: Yeah. So I think to draw the conclusion about the cause and effect, that the bill that the Minister is proposing is somehow going to kill people, I think that is—

CHAIRPERSON (Barbara Kuriger): Look, I take the member’s point of order, but there is literature and conversation out there about the points that Mr Abel raised. So I’m going to leave that there as part of the bill.

I move, That debate on this question now close.

Lan Pham’s tabled amendment to clause 1 is out of order as not being an objective description of the bill.

Tangi Utikere’s tabled amendment to clause 1 is out of order as not being an objective description of the bill.

The question is that the Minister’s amendments to clause 2 set out on Amendment Paper 346 be agreed to.

The question is that Tangi Utikere’s amendments to clause 2 set out on Amendment Paper 342 be agreed to.