Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): ACT opposes this bill ACT opposes this three waters reform and should we be part of a future Government we will act to repeal it. This current system is not up to scratch but there is nothing in the Government's reform agenda which will fix it. Taking control of assets away from councils is wrong. Centralising assets and new bureaucracies only adds complexity and won't get water services fixed.This bill says nothing about who will pay for the infrastructure and how it will be funded. Now the role of a Minister bringing a bill to the House is to explain how this legislation will actually solve a problem. The Minister has failed on all accounts. The Minister claims all communities in New Zealand will benefit by receiving better water-quality services while paying less than they would without reform. That is farcical; the evidence put up by the Minister is not credible. How can a system with four new corporate headquarters hundreds of iwi Māori and council representatives multiple representative groups—it's going to be like a Parliament of three waters. There's going to be multiple councils all across the country representative organisations—how could that possibly be cheaper than if local councils simply delivered the work and fixed the pipes? The Minister's claims about cost savings are nonsense; the Minister does herself and the water industry no favours by continuing to peddle this nonsense.Now the worst aspects of these reforms are the divisive co-governance proposals which give iwi Māori organisations and their nominees a seat at the table just because of who their ancestors were. All New Zealanders want clean and safe drinking water not just iwi and Māori. There is no rationale for continuing with the co-governance nonsense. Nanaia Mahuta the Minister has herself admitted that Māori have not expressed rights and interests in three waters assets above those of ratepayers in their respective communities of interest. There it is Minister; you have no justification for pursuing co-governance as part of this reform.That should have meant the end of it but it hasn't. Now when I was a university student and I sat in my engineering class I can't imagine another student sitting there thinking Because of my grandparents who they were and my great-grandparents or my cultural ethnicity I somehow know something more about how to manage water quality than the student sitting next to me." It's a nonsense Minister; it's demeaning to tens of thousands of New Zealanders who work in the water and environmental space.But the Minister's doubled down on it. There's now two layers of iwi Māori and local government co-governance before you get to the actual water services entity's board. If this was a satirical TV show three layers of governance to fix three waters it might be funny but this is Labour Government policy and New Zealanders will be expected to pay for it if it passes—I doubt it will pass at this point in time.Now I just want to define what three waters are—the problem and how ACT would solve it for the House for the Minister and for those people who might be watching and wondering at home. Firstly the drinking water the waste-water and the stormwater systems that support our local communities have been paid for over decades by ratepayers through their rates and through things like DCs or development contributions. There are problems with the three waters system that we currently have. There's been an under-investment in maintenance and renewal and we've all seen images on the television or in our newspaper of broken pipes geysers of freshwater in the air big holes in the road being fixed again—there is a problem.There's also a second problem which is that the cost of providing three waters infrastructure for new housing developments is excessive and that cost has fallen exclusively on local councils. They don't have enough money to pay for this so they react in a perfectly rational way. For example with Auckland Council there's a new development proposed by a private sector developer to build 70000 homes a new township around the size of Napier in Drury in South Auckland. Auckland Council have said they're going to appeal the consents that that developer has just attained because they can't afford the billion dollars of infrastructure costs to connect that development to the rest of the network. Now it's mad that we've got councils actively opposing developers who want to deliver 70000 new homes because the infrastructure funding and financing model is broken. This legislation this bill will not fix that.But the hand-break behaviour that causes councils to behave in that way actually comes from the incentives in the legislation established by central government. And this is what ACT would do to fix it. Firstly the drinking-water problem doesn't need to be solved by this bill because it's already being solved by a previous piece of legislation which set up the drinking water regulator Taumata Arowai. Now we know that because the newly appointed chief executive of Taumata Arowai went on Newstalk ZB and he told Mike Hosking on 4 April that actually his agency Taumata Arowai already has the power to make people change the way they treat drinking water to manage infrastructure and even powers to prosecute those organisations which don't do it properly.Bill Bayfield said that the investment in drinking water has nearly doubled in three years—council investment has nearly doubled in three years—and that councils are on track to meet their drinking-water obligations. So Minister you can take drinking water out of the equation; that is not a justification for this legislation.ACT's alternative water infrastructure plan which we have proposed to the 67 territorial authorities local councils and the 12 regional councils—many of whom replied back saying "Thank you ACT. We appreciate your constructive proposals. We support much of what you proposed."—would do the following. We would provide for councils to enter voluntary shared services agreements between councils local councils and regional councils to achieve the benefits of scale while retaining local ownership and control. Councils like Auckland and Waikato District Council already do this. They share a geographic boundary and they also share water infrastructure. It makes sense for them to enter into voluntary shared services agreements. This legislation doesn't do that.ACT would establish long-term central government and regional government partnerships. That means that the regions would identify where they need to build stuff. Central government would agree and then those upgrades would be tailored to actually deliver new services to unlock land for housing. That model is working right now for transport alliances in Northland between central government and local government roading bodies. It's working in Auckland with the Auckland Transport Alignment Project (ATAP) between central government and local government to deliver busways and suchlike. This is a model that works Minister.We would also fund infrastructure by sharing 50 percent of the GST that central government collects on new building with local councils to cash flow and fund the water infrastructure that unlocks new land for housing. Our deputy leader Brooke van Velden housing spokesperson has a member's bill which proposes to do just that. There's legislation available right now that the Government could pick up which would solve part of the infrastructure funding and financing problem.ACT would also establish additional public-private partnerships through our proposed nation-building agency. That's right: a nation-building agency focused on delivering infrastructure. Now in the year before COVID-19 struck over $300 billion was invested internationally by the private sector by superannuation funds by KiwiSaver funds funds similar to ACC and potentially even iwi investment funds would be interested in investing in infrastructure that actually delivers water services to communities.For rural water users ACT would extend the exemption on domestic suppliers so that up to 30 endpoint users would be exempt from the regulations which currently stop rural communities supplying water to themselves. That water is primarily used for rural use and that's why these rural users should be given an exemption.Now ACT opposes this three waters bill. If we have the opportunity to be part of a future Government we will repeal it."