Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Mr Speaker. Well I had the privilege of being on the Health Committee and working through the Water Services Bill and also the privilege of listening to numerous submissions on it—heartfelt submissions in many cases. It is always a privilege to listen to people who have taken the time to submit on a bill. This bill of course is wanting to ensure that there is safe drinking water for consumers and we would all want to see that. It has a number of obligations and duties for those that supply water including registering the supply preparing a safety plan preparing a risk management plan and establishing a complaints process. As we worked through the bill and listened to the submissions I think we worked very collaboratively and very positively in getting a number of changes. We were certainly hampered at the point around the smaller rural water schemes.We can't support the bill because of the onerous and overly onerous obligations on some of those smaller rural water supply schemes but also a number of the marae came with the same issues and so we feel there's some synergies between those. So the things that we were most concerned about was the disproportionate and burdensome bureaucracy and compliance on these rural water supplies. At one stage I asked if the select committee members would come out and have a look at some of these supply schemes and talk to some of the people involved in them because—Hon Member: What? Come out of Wellington? I don't know!PENNY SIMMONDS: Well to me that's what you do. You get your feet on the ground and you talk to the people and you find out what the issues are. So I couldn't convince the select committee to do that but instead I took my 2020 colleagues from our National caucus and we went to Alexandra because I knew that there are a lot of these water schemes in Alexandra. I'd had a look at them and I knew that we would get a really good feel for them. We went and listened to a gentleman there an incredibly capable gentleman who talked to us about the examples—took us up and showed us some of the examples. He is a fourth-generation farmer in that area. He's also a qualified engineer and had put in water schemes in Ireland and also in New Zealand and was responsible for two schemes in that Alexandra area.Now I'd have to say that gentleman probably knew more about water schemes than the whole of our Health Committee would ever know about water schemes so why we refused to go and listen to someone like that is beyond me because it was the best possible education we could have got on this. He was able to tell us that there was somewhere between 70000 and 75000 of these small rural water schemes across the country and you know they range. They range from a farm that has a scheme that supplies the main farm house and a worker's cottage or the shearers' quarters through to schemes that might have a number of small lifestyle blocks attached to them and a main farm. Some of the schemes provide water for irrigation and for stock feed as well as drinking water. And in those instances the end users take the responsibility of putting in place an end-point user filter such as the UV light filters that you can get. A lot of these schemes are collectives are unincorporated societies. They're groups of farmers that have got together and they pay a small amount and they look after them together. They are practical sensible people who find solutions for drinking water for livestock water for irrigation water on a small scale right across the country. They've been doing it for decades and they continue to do it in a safe and sensible and pragmatic way.I found it incredibly insulting to this intelligent capable practical person who was running these schemes and who said the only consequence of this legislation on those schemes in Alexandra will be more administration more bureaucracy more monitoring and no better water supply. In fact the unintended consequences of it may well be a worse water supply because there will be some suppliers who will say This is all too much. I'm not going to allow the water from my bore on my farm to be used by neighbours or by the farm worker's cottage. They can go back and rely on rainwater roof water and in fact end up with a worse water supply than they were getting at the moment." And I'd have to tell you that in Alexandra some of the water coming into those supplies was the purest water you will find anywhere in New Zealand. So if you went on to a rainwater supply in Alex—well you probably wouldn't be able to because it's one of the driest places in New Zealand—you would end up collecting dust and grime and dirt off the roof rather than this pristine water supply.So those unintended consequences have not been thought through and the burden of—Hon Member: Yes they have. They have been talked through.PENNY SIMMONDS: —having to put together—well if they have been thought of then they haven't been taken any notice of. They are putting in place things like auditing and reporting that just don't need to be there. At the very least they are going to add considerable cost to these small water suppliers. At worst they are going to make people throw in the towel and decide not to be part of it. What hasn't been mentioned here is that if people do walk away from these schemes then under the last man or the last person standing requirement within this bill the local authority will have to pick up the responsibility for that water supply.Now people might wonder why a movement like Groundswell came about. It came about because time after time after time these sorts of pieces of legislation and regulations are being thrown at our rural sector. Our rural sector aren't against change but they want it to be sensible and practical and to make a real difference not have perverse outcomes. So Groundswell is a movement that's come about because our rural people have been having to deal with bills like this: freshwater regulations slope rules pugging rules sowing winter crop rules—all of these things thrown at them when they are trying to deal with a labour shortage forestry being planted from overseas owners on to beautiful farmland that should be growing food. They are sick of these regulations and bills that don't make sense. They want to work with things that are going to make a difference that are going to really make things better; they do not want to be working with bills that only add bureaucracy and cost and administration and make nothing better.I'm also really interested to know how 75000 suppliers are going to be able to be registered even if it is an extended time frame. How are Taumata Arowai going to cope with that avalanche of suppliers being registered? How are they going to cope with that avalanche of plans to be looked at of audits to be undertaken of reports on those audits to be looked at? It simply isn't administratively possible to do that unless of course Labour are thinking of putting in another 10000 bureaucrats at another billion dollars' cost a year which possibly you are thinking of that. So you're going to have to have something in place to be able to cope with the administration of it.So I would just say to the Minister: please don't put something in place that won't work for the rural schemes small rural schemes but neither will it work for those that are trying to administer it. Thank you Mr Speaker."