Mark RonRON MARK (Deputy Leader—NZ First): I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to indicate that we will be supporting the passage of this bill. I think the points have been pretty well traversed at this point in time. It is always the case when you get one of the late speaking slots that most of the members have covered off the points but for the record I will state that New Zealand First does accept the logic behind the bill. I am going to digress just a tad. I do accept that there are some people who think that lowering the compliance costs for pool owners might well be aimed at one particular sector of the community—that is the people who are fortunate enough to have very flash homes and big flash swimming pools. I am just going to put on record in Hansard the admiration that I have for a gentleman who lives in Carterton who out of the kindness of his heart gave a family who are not what you would call a rich wealthy family a swimming pool for Christmas because they had done things over time to assist him and make his life better. One of the things that he thought he could do to help them was to provide some entertainment and a facility that their children had never been able to enjoy and probably one that the parents could never have afforded to pay for themselves—a swimming pool. Of course with that came the obligations of meeting the requirements of the Fencing of Swimming Pools Act. So the compliance issues around pool fencing are not compliance issues reserved for just the wealthy. These are compliance issues that affect ordinary everyday people—what some people might term a family in the low socio-economic group. I want to take my hat off to that gentleman. I will not name him in the House because he would just be embarrassed but he knows who he is. New Zealand First does not have a lot of problems with the issues that were traversed at the Local Government and Environment Committee and in fact we understand them. The six key changes that are being made to existing law lie around child-resistant covers which were deemed to be an adequate means of restricting access to spa pools and hot tubs. I acknowledge the Labour speaker who pointed out that spa pools and hot tubs were caught up in the legislation. As time has moved on the design of spa pools by the manufacturers has been such that they have provided a perfectly secure means of providing that protection and safety for children to stop them drowning in these pools which makes the legislation somewhat redundant as far as they are concerned. We particularly like the fact that retailers and manufacturers are now going to be required to inform buyers about their obligations under the Act when they buy these spa pools these hot tubs and these portable pools. We like the fact that they will be required to instruct the purchaser as to how to maintain and keep secure the pool that they have purchased and undertake to put on their property and that in doing so they undertake to accept the responsibilities that come with that—that is the responsibility of keeping that pool safe and particularly keeping children safe from any accident that might occur. Those seem to us to be perfectly sensible. The other thing that is perfectly sensible is getting some rationality consistency and standardisation in terms of how the territorial authorities exercise their duties and responsibilities in respect of inspecting and certifying residential pools. This has clearly been an area where territorial authorities all over New Zealand have either struggled simply not complied or been somewhat inconsistent across the board. It is interesting Mr Assistant Speaker Tisch—and you yourself being from rural New Zealand provincial New Zealand know full well that some ratepayers out there actually have their property in two territorial authorities. It is just a matter of luck as to where the swimming pool is placed as to whether you are subject to inspection from for example Tararua District Council or Masterton District Council or Vicky Verker down in Carterton and South Wairarapa. If you are a ratepayer who owns two properties—one might be in South Wairarapa and one might be in Carterton—you may well have portable pools in both locations and to find that you are subject to different inspection criteria and different compliances from two different councils can be somewhat frustrating if you are such an owner. I do not know that there would be many cases such as that but there will be some and it is nice to see that we are going to have some consistency applied across the board between territorial authorities due to the passage of this bill. The bill introduces a graduated enforcement regime with infringement notices as the preferred tool for compliance and court prosecutions only in serious breaches. It also allows for barriers other than fences to be used for restricting access to residential pools. It was an interesting conversation this one at the select committee. There was some debate as to whether a natural cliff provided adequate protection. Well I guess if you are a child who has been trained and schooled by the SAS and you know how to shimmy up a sheer face of a cliff and then having exercised those talents and skills you are then not able to swim in the pool that you might have fallen into when you got to the top of the cliff—we just do not quite see some of those things as being rational arguments. So if there is a sheer cliff it will now be considered to be a suitable barrier. New Zealand First will support this bill through. We will watch for the amendments from the Labour Party members and we will judge the legislation on the merit of the debate as we go but we will be supporting the bill.