Patterson MarkMARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Thank you Madam Chair. It is a great honour actually to for the first time be the member in the chair here for a bill a local bill which I have had the honour of bringing forward on behalf of the Gore District Council. Of course my interest in this bill actually goes back quite some way. I was at the public meeting in May of 2017 at the Ōtama hall a packed meeting of about 200 people with the intention of thrashing out at a local level what the process might be to transfer the Otama Rural Water Supply scheme into the ownership of the local farmers and householders who had built and paid for the scheme. There had been a historical dispute regarding the ownership of this scheme. The scheme was conceived in the late 1960s. It went into the ground in the early 1970s over three stages finishing in 1976. The original scheme was put in by the farmers. It was paid for mostly by the farmers but also from a loan from the now defunct Southland County Council. The farmers then paid that loan off within a year or two so they contended that they owned the scheme. They'd paid for it and some of it in actual sweat equity—they were required to put in 90 hours of their own labour. So they contended that they owned it. The Gore District Council contended on the other hand that they owned it and they had inherited it in the Local Government Act 1974 redistribution of 1989. So it had been a long-running dispute but it came to a head when the farmers wanted to explore other providers of maintenance services from the private sector and maybe not continue on with the Gore District Council providing those services as had been done to that date. So that's where it came to a head. There was no agreement but the council in their wisdom decided to put it up for a referendum and trust the people to make the decision and of course these people are the people with the most skin in the game. Not only had they paid for it initially but they are the consumers of the water and of the potable water as well. I note there are 253 connections mainly household connections and of course there is stock water on farms covering 73000 hectares and there are two schools and a marae. So no one was more incentivised than those people in that hall in their combined wisdom to understand who would be best to run that scheme. The farmers had been concerned about the cost escalating in running it so they took matters into their own hands. There was a referendum held and there was a strong endorsement from 75 percent of the respondents to essentially bring the water under the ownership of a new entity Otama Rural Water Ltd. To do that we needed to override section 131(2) of the Local Government Act 2002 because this scheme had a threshold of over 200 suppliers which meant the council was unable to transfer that ownership without an Act of Parliament. So whilst this legislation may not be described by the Prime Minister as this generation's nuclear-free moment it is actually at a local level really important to these people. It means a lot to them. They have invested a lot of not only their money but their own time and they've taken a great deal of pride and in over 40 years they have shown a huge degree of competence in running this scheme. They have also demonstrated as we will see a willingness to comply with whatever regulations they have needed to. They have already put chlorination in to make sure that their drinking water is compliant with any current regulations and they have indicated—as we will see in Supplementary Order Paper 206 later on—that there is an intent to comply with all pending regulations. So just in terms of the purpose I think I'll leave it there and give some others some time. But I look forward to debating the points shortly.