Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker and it's a pleasure to stand here and to speak on this bill tonight. In doing so I would like to commend my colleague Christopher Luxon who's done a huge amount of work on this bill. As well as sitting on the committee and going through the process he's been working tirelessly—and we've joined forces on it—during the lockdown period in terms of we were going to be speaking on this on the first Wednesday we were back after the recess which didn't eventuate because as we know the country went into lockdown. We wish all those people that are currently with COVID and recovering from it all the best.So Chris was unable to be here tonight because he comes from Auckland but I can assure you we've done a huge amount of work on this. We've done some live streaming. We've done lots of talking to various people and we've managed over the course of that time to collect almost 15000 signatures on a petition. The reason people were signing that petition is because there are over 70000 small suppliers who will be affected by this. We all want clean water. We support Taumata Arowai but we're thinking about the amount of regulation that's coming down on to our communities at the moment.What's been really good about this is that we've had a lot of discussion recently about the amount of legislation regulation rules—some of them work some of them don't—that have been coming down on our rural community. Just for an example there are freshwater regulations there are slope rules there are labour workforce shortages to be dealing with with immigration foreign exemptions for land purchases for forestry purposes—and that's carbon forestry—failure to provide forestry consent rules to council climate commission are wanting to cut livestock farming high-country tenure review ending live exports pressuring agriculture into the emissions trading scheme and of course the bill before this that we just discussed with the ute tax.So we're asking ourselves: what problem are we trying to solve here? Yes we want clean water. Yes we support Taumata Arowai but actually rather than the number eight wired country that we used to be we're becoming a nation that is strangling people in red tape. What we're really concerned about is by going down to the level that this bill intends to do—and of course Christopher Luxon has a Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) which proposes 30 end-point users. By going down to the level of every single end point where a person is supplying somebody else with water it's going to become a huge administrative nightmare.What's been really good about this bill—and I want to thank the Minister for putting up at least one SOP which is around extending the time frames because this is not going to be an easy thing for Taumata Arowai to be able to get to this level of compliance and have all the administrators all the systems all the inspectors having the conversation. It's not going to be an easy deal to solve. So I thank the Minister for putting the SOP up that looks to buy some extra time. However as much as we would like to support this bill we fairly and squarely believe that by not just keeping this above people who are supplying above 30 people it's going to create a huge administrative nightmare.Why I've enjoyed working with Chris so much on this is many of the other issues I mentioned before around all of the things that are coming down at farmers—is that we've been able to have an issue with this one. So if I supply water to myself in my house that's fine. If I supply it to a farm worker or there's somebody out in rural New Zealand that I supply it to then I get caught up in this regime. People might go Oh well you know that's just farmers pushing back again." But we actually then talked about marae where this could be an issue on some of the smaller marae.We talked about the bach owners. So there's people with baches in various holiday camps. I'm not talking about necessarily people with big flash baches. There's lots of beach baches and lots of little huts that people have bought themselves over the years that they take the family to to go on holiday in the summer. So that's fine if they're supplying themselves with water but if they're supplying the next bach or two or three baches beside it as people in rural New Zealand often do—they find one source of water and they share it around—all of those people are actually going to have to comply with this regulation. So first of all they have to do the administration and then who are the people that are going to come out and check up? Especially if you think about a situation like bach owners they're not there all the time. Who's going to check it up? How's it going to work?What I would really like to know is you know apart from clean water which we all want what is the problem that we're setting out to solve here? Because we're going to create a huge administrative nightmare and if I could understand—and I wasn't part of the select committee process. How many of these little suppliers are actually causing massive problems in the water situation in New Zealand?So look we're strongly supportive as I said of Taumata Arowai but we can't overlook the massive burden that this bill is going to create. So we would actually ask the Minister—and I would strongly urge the Minister tonight when we get to the committee stage. Christopher Luxon has produced an amendment SOP 61 to be debated at that stage and Mr Luxon's SOP is suggesting we exempt from the bill small water suppliers like rural water schemes that supply fewer than 30 end-point users. National won't be able to support this bill until we get to that point but if there was a change of heart—and we could make some ground on that front if our SOP is supported and adopted—then National may revisit our stance for the bill's third reading.So I think the weight that comes behind this is the fact that our petition has attracted almost 15000 signatures. There's a strong feeling around this that it's going to be quite difficult to achieve the administrative side of it. Nobody's arguing that they want their water to be clean or that there aren't special filters or there aren't things that they could do and it would be really great if we could look at some other way of incorporating those smaller suppliers where this administrative burden wasn't so onerous because if you add another 70000—perhaps up to 100000 I'm hearing—people into the system it's all got to be managed it's all got to be monitored and it's really just tying people up in red tape. It's going to take a long time I believe for this Government or any Government to develop a system which is going to be able to be extremely efficient at managing right down to that level.So I guess there's probably not a lot to add really just that we would like to support it and we really do urge and ask the Government if they really would—and particularly Minister Mahuta if we could ask for some real consideration around SOP 61. If we can get to that point then we would be able to support this piece of legislation. Thank you."