Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. Great to be back. I would also like to acknowledge the Hon Nikki Kaye. It is really good to see Nikki looking so great and to hear her voice again in this place. Being a champion of women's health is something that we all need to be because so many women experience the scourge of breast cancer. Having lost many friends to it I am delighted to see you back here with us to help remind us that health is everybody's responsibility.Continuing on from the theme that my colleague Eugenie Sage just outlined the Prime Minister said today that the Government will continue to work on improving the quality of fresh water and will make progress on fair and equitable allocation systems for water and discharges. I have to say Is that it?" because it is tired rhetoric that has been recycled every time we have made a challenge about water.There is a simple message: people in this country want swimmable rivers. They want to be able to swim in their local river—not just the rich being able to drive to somewhere where there is nice clean water but where every child living in a community can walk down to their local creek and swim. That is no longer possible.I know this. I live in a region where children walk many kilometres—because their parents do not have cars—to find a place to swim. The place they come to is my river the Waiwhakaurunga the beautiful amazing river in the Kauaēranga Valley which I am privileged to live next to and which I jumped into every day that I could this summer because we were lucky and had a summer.It is about more than E. coli. The healthy ecosystem of a river means it is swimmable for people for tuna for insects for all kinds of macro-invertebrates—for life—and that is what a good river a swimmable river looks like. I jump into my river and I can feel the fresh energy of that clean water because upstream there is a whole lot of forest and not a whole lot of dairy farms not a whole lot of industrialisation and not a sewage plant. I know that I am living in luxury. What used to be everybody's reality has become a luxury and that is a deep shame on this Government. Our people are really really clear. Everywhere I go—everywhere everyone goes—we are talking about water quality because people know it is at risk of degrading and because they simply want their rivers to be places where they can swim and where they can gather food. Throwing that away because of the low value high volume production that has overtaken our agricultural system is a disaster.We have got some solutions. To start with change the national policy statement on fresh water. Get rid of the joke of "wadeable" water and let us start being serious about "swimmable". Set some decent standards for regional councils. Start looking at the fact that having 10 million cattle beasts on the land is stressing our waterways and producing far too many nutrients. Start looking at the numbers. Start retiring land next to waterways as they have at Taupō—very successfully because it works. Start looking at an immediate moratorium on dairy conversions—enough is enough of that. Start seriously fencing planting and looking after waterways. Make polluters pay a levy. Protect water sources and ensure that water quality rules are created that actually make regional councils bring some urgency to the situation. Waikato's river plan is great but it has got a time frame to being swimmable of 80 years—and then people are still moaning about it.We have got a lot of work to do. I have also been getting water alerts. This is my feed; I am going to read it out: "Today Horowhenua District Council is set to take another look at its treatment plant after it was closed this morning when too much mud fell into the local river." Honestly—too much mud fell into the river? This story is repeated all over the country. Sediment nutrients mud dairy effluent you name it—it is all in the rivers. People want rivers to be swimmable. They can be swimmable but people have to face up to the fact that this Government is not going to act. We are going to have to change the Government to get the action. A new Government with the Greens in a strong position would lead on this issue. It is simple: without clean water we are screwed. Thank you."