Watts SimonSIMON WATTS (National—North Shore): Thank you very much Minister for those responses. Just following on from my colleague Chris Penk in regards to the implications of categorisation of some of the homes in my local electorate of the North Shore—and particularly Milford located on the back of the Milford stream which was one of the significant outflows following the Auckland floods. The responsibility for categorisation of the impacted homes is on local government—in particular Auckland Council—and yet some six months on my community and many communities surrounding that are still waiting for that categorisation process to be completed. That obviously has a significant implication in regards to the pressure that falls upon those families and individuals that continue to live with their properties backing on to that stream and the continuing concerns around a large number of individuals: I think about the Parklane retirement home that is in Sunnynook and Forrest Hill areas of my community of which nearly 40 homes within that—and this is a retirement village—those homes are completely uninhabitable and the residents are still not able to go into their homes nearly six months later. Yet the responsibility around categorisation does fall upon local government. The irony here is that when we've got a funding model—and acknowledging that the Auckland funding model isn't public but if you use the precedent of the agreement of 50:50 funding that has been reached in other jurisdictions outside of Auckland then when council has responsibility to actually categorise and the categorisation leads to a fiscal consequence on them as a council surely you can see the logic that there is a conflict of interest in regards to that decision-making process that adversely will impact residents within the local community. So as Minister of Local Government I am seeking clarity and assurance around why this process is taking so long. Christchurch took about 120 days for that categorisation process to be undertaken on a scale which was significant and acknowledging this is broad but the number of homes is known—the number and the location of those—and yet we have not seen any significant tangible progress on that nor actually clarity in regards to a timeline of when that will occur. So acknowledging the current state is people still don't know the answer they don't even have the certainty of when that question will be answered and that obviously is completely unacceptable and many of those within my community continue to worry about when the next heavy rain will come because no tangible feedback has been received from local government in regards to the lessons learnt from that flood. What did the reviews find as a result of what caused the implications and as a result of the findings of those reviews by local government? What actions if any have been taken to mitigate this from happening again? Those are all questions six months on that remain unanswered and I do see it as the role of the Minister of Local Government to be ensuring that we have got a process of transparency in that regard and I'll be interested in the Minister's comments in regards to that.I want to go back to the three waters legislation. I note that the Minister said that my question around consultancy expenditure was out of scope; well I challenge that. I do see that during the period in which we are discussing today there is a large number of consultancy expenditure that has been incurred within the period; to say that that is not relevant is an interesting opinion but not one that I share. The questions I have in regards to the aspects of the three waters legislation are around the Te Mana o te Wai statements and this is a principle that has been in place for a long time. The Minister has been on record to say that actually the Te Mana o te Wai statements—which is a new construct under the water services legislation which basically provides requirements for the regional representative groups that must take into account feedback within those statements—still remains. And while the community priority statements have been brought into play in regards to mitigating some of this issue the community priority statements have been embedded to potentially provide another basis for other stakeholders to input into that process. The consideration around those priority statements is that they may" be considered versus "must" and there is obviously a key point of difference there. And I'm interested in the Minister's comments in regards to the difference between the Mana o te Wai principle and then the subsequent construct of the Te Mana o te Wai statement which did not exist prior to this Government's three waters legislation and it is the basis of a large amount of question and concern by members of this community.I'm also interested in the Minister providing comment in regards to when the Hon Nanaia Mahuta the prior Minister of Local Government called that the three waters reform was an arrangement that was "co-governance" and then subsequently the Prime Minister Chris Hipkins was quoted as saying "co-governance" never existed in any of Labour's three waters reform. Well there's a slight conflict around views there. I'm interested in whether the Minister stands by the Prime Minister in regards to saying "co-governance" never existed in Labour's three waters reforms or the Hon Nanaia Mahuta who was very clear that those labels were "co-governance". And let's just remind those considering around that: the regional representative groups still have a dedicated number of seats within those governance entities or those entities that are dedicated only for iwi Māori and a number of seats that are only allocated to territorial authorities—and actually an equal weighting and that's why it's referred to as "50:50 co-governance" so I'm interested in what the Minister's comments—CHAIRPERSON (Greg O'Connor): Mr Watts you will show us the context of this."