Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): For about the last half of the hearing of submissions and the consideration of this bill I sat on the Local Government and Environment Committee. Can I thank the chair for his chairing of that committee; I thought he did a good job. I have to give a wee flick to officials here and I suspect my National Party colleagues agree with me on this: the officials were appalling in their description to submitters and in the commentary on the bill at explaining what was going down in the legislation. Indeed I think it took some input from the Opposition amongst others to point out the fact that they were not actually doing a very good sales job and as a consequence there were lots of people in civil society who had the wrong end of the stick as to what was going down in the legislation.The effect of the legislation is to codify under the Building Act as an acceptable solution the earlier practice under the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act. In broad terms that was the stated intention of the Government but it was not well described. There were also a couple of holes in the way in which they were codifying the old Fencing of Swimming Pools Act provisions into this new Building Act means of compliance which were not well understood. They came through from submissions from the submitters who appeared before the select committee and most of those things have been sorted out.One of the changes that was proposed was to make it clearer that there needed to be a consistent inspection regime across the country. As the chair of the select committee Scott Simpson has just said there are varying practices around the country. Some councils were inspecting every 5 years; some were inspecting every 3 years. Some councils in fact had very poor inspection regimes and were probably not doing a decent job at any time. So I think the Government is right to try to make that consistent across the country. The proposal for 5 years was pointed out to be flawed apart from anything else by some of the councils. The statistics that the Auckland Council provided us showed that after 3-yearly inspections 65 percent of the pools they were re-inspecting had become non-compliant. Imagine if you left that to 5 years—the level of non-compliance would be even worse and of course that would increase the number of drownings caused by swimming pools.There have been some critics of the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act saying that it added an unnecessary regulatory burden to people who own private swimming pools. I disagree with that and indeed the evidence that came to the select committee was that drownings from home swimming pools decreased in the 10 years following the passage of the original Act from around 100 drownings in the 10 years before the Act came into force to 30 drownings in the 10 years that followed. Every one of those was a tragedy but those statistics show that there was a 70 percent decrease in children drowning in swimming pools as a consequence of the passage of the original Act. Undoubtedly that Act has saved many lives.For those reasons the Labour Party was determined to try to make some improvements in the bill to get it as close to the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act as was possible and to make sure that any changes from it were justified. It was notable that during the period that elapsed from the original discussion document which had been put out by Shane Jones some 5 years earlier when he held the ministerial portfolio the language had changed in the discussion document which was initially withdrawn by the incoming National Government. Shane Jones' discussion document focused on child safety; the focus in the subsequent document that came out some 5 years later from Nick Smith placed a lot more emphasis on reducing compliance costs. So we were determined that we would put child safety first. Obviously compliance costs are relevant—you do not want to over-regulate things—but first and foremost this is about reducing drownings.As my colleague Jacinda Ardern mentioned in her contribution there is one remaining aspect that worries us and that is the change to the definition of four-sided fences. There are two parts to this; one part does not worry me the other part does. Presently in law it is arguable under the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act that a natural barrier like a cliff cannot act as a fence on one side of the pool. I actually think that it should. So long as the effect of that natural barrier is the same as a fence I do not think it matters that it is a natural barrier rather than a fence so I do not mind the law being clarified to say that natural barriers can be treated like fences.But the other part of the change does worry me and that is that instead of having a fence between a house and a pool you will now be able to have an alarmed door from a room in the house to the pool. That is a change that the Labour Party opposes because the evidence is that those alarm systems do not work as well as a fence. There are a number of reasons for that. We see it in human nature: people get tired of alarms going off and they disable them. We have had recent occurrences in Dunedin—quite tragic ones—where the fire alarms that are installed by landlords had been disabled by students because they do not like the fire alarm going off when the toast burns or whatever other reason there is that they are going off. That is human nature. The same thing will happen in respect of alarms on doors. People will get sick of the noise—there might be an alarm that jams or something—and some of them will be turned off.I think that the evidence of the Auckland Council that even after 3-yearly inspections 65 percent of the pools had become non-compliant in some way is evidence that if we introduce another option around alarmed doors we are going to see that be less effective than a fence around a swimming pool. So the Labour Party says that we are supporting this bill at this second reading but that we will be bringing forward a Supplementary Order Paper so that we actually go back to the old Fencing of Swimming Pools Act rule in that regard and require a fence between a house and a pool not merely an alarmed door. I would hope that this House would give consideration to that at the Committee stage so that we do not have alarms that people can disable.The other thing we know is that most of the drownings that do occur in respect of fenced swimming pools is when people are distracted. You know people can be distracted. It is another source of error that can occur when a parent is distracted and I fear that parents or grandparents or friends are going to be shocked when they realise in future years that if we proceed as is proposed in the bill in its current form to allow alarmed doors rather than a fence around a pool we are going to have a worse outcome. That said I agree with the select committee report that in all other aspects this legislation effectively codifies the old tests and for that reason I think that the Labour Party will support it if that other change is made.I want to very briefly say something about spa pools. Spa pools were caught within the definition of a pool" under the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act but it was never enforced. It was always a bit of a nonsense that they were caught up. It was not properly thought through at the time. We have clarified in this bill that a spa pool that has a lockable lid is not a "pool" for the purposes of this legislation and I think that is a practical step as well."