Sage EugenieBUILDING (POOLS) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingDebate resumed from 16 August.EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. The Green Party supported this bill the Building (Pools) Amendment Bill to the Local Government and Environment Committee in order to hear from the experts such as Water Safety New Zealand those concerned with children and from the public on what the real-world implications of the bill would be. Well we have heard from those submitters and now the Green Party is opposing the bill. We understand the Government's motivation behind the bill being to save money and reduce the compliance costs for pool owners and supposedly also for local authorities rather than the motivation being to reduce the risk of harm and injury and the number of swimming pool drownings. That is the motivation that the Green Party objects to. This bill repeals the very specific Fencing of Swimming Pools Act and leaves it then to the Building Act 2004 to deal with the issue. The need outlined in the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act for fencing of pools is being replaced with much more general provisions around the need to have physical barriers that restrict access by unsupervised children to pools rather than a specific requirement to fence. The reason the Government is giving for this is to strike a balance between reduced compliance costs for residential pool owners and territorial local authorities and maintaining child safety." In the Green Party's view the protection of children is much more important than reducing compliance costs for pool owners and local authorities. Toddlers far too often drown very quickly and silently in swimming pools. Each one of those deaths is a tragedy but the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act has been a major tool in reducing the number of child drownings. It was interesting to reflect on an article by the former Children's Commissioner who reminded the public of the genesis of the Act that we are now repealing and of how in New Zealand we had a truly awful rate of child drownings in the 1970s and 1980s. In the worst year 1981 17 children drowned in home pools. That led of course to a campaign that led to the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act in 1987. It has been the Act's specific focus on actually fencing pools that has helped lead to that major reduction in the number of drownings. That has reduced from an average of 10 a year to three. Of course each of those is tragic but there has been a major reduction. In submissions the Auckland Regional Public Health Service suggested that the lives of over 200 children had been saved and that there had been several thousand near-drownings that had been prevented by the original 1987 legislation. As the Paediatric Society said in its submission quoting from Government publications back in 1987 "[the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act] is a simple piece of public health legislation that sends a powerful message to the New Zealand public and pool-building industry. Toddlers have to be prevented from drowning in home swimming pools; the only scientifically proven prevention method is to fence the danger." What the Green Party is objecting to in this bill is that we are getting away from that very simple and clear focus with clear prescriptive standards in the existing Act that determine how high fences have to be what the clearance between the bottom of the fence and the ground has got to be—away from those very prescriptive standards to much more general performance-based standards in the Building Act and the fact that the bill allows pool owners to apply to local authorities for waivers and modifications to the pool barrier requirements. Our concern is that that will potentially lead to a lot less certainty and a lot less clarity around what is adequate fencing to protect children from drowning in these pools. That is the major reason we are opposing the bill."