Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): The ACT Party has engaged constructively with officials with the Government with the water sector and with councils right through the process of the three waters reform. ACT agrees there's a problem to solve when it comes to delivering infrastructure in an affordable way to enable land for housing and business to be developed in an affordable way. Because the whole purpose of three waters infrastructure is not so that engineers have some fun stuff to do pouring concrete and laying pipes. I mean it is a whole lot of fun watching guys drive diggers—and girls; in fact it doesn't really matter what gender they are—and build infrastructure. But that's not why we do it. It's to deliver social and economic benefits to communities. It's to deliver land that can be built on for housing or business.Unfortunately this bill while it attempts to create an economic regulator to work out what's the right amount of money to invest in infrastructure it fails the mark on a number of points. That's because it gets confused by Labour's confused and incoherent policy agenda around three waters. Imagine if Labour had said We need to find out what the condition of council's pipe network is. We've heard it's really bad. There's drinking water running down the street in Wellington." In fact about 30 percent of the drinking water that's treated and supplied runs down the street and never gets into a home or into a tap or a glass of water. You can go to places like West Auckland where I live—there's regular waste-water overflows from the waste-water network there—and of course North Shore beaches and other places metros and the regions around New Zealand.Now if Labour had wanted to find out how bad things were and how much money to spend on the networks or whether smaller councils actually do need direct financial support or grants or whether in fact you could share some of the enormous amount of money that central government collects from building houses in New Zealand. About $2.5 billion a year is collected by the Government; that's the GST on the invoices that builders send when they build a house—$2.5 billion a year. What ACT says is that a Government should return half of that to local government to build infrastructure.So the Government could have said "We need to find out more about the problem and we need to provide some revenue from what we take from the building sector. All of that building and housing that imposes costs on local government we should share some of central government's revenue back with them." But they didn't do that. Instead they came up with an incredibly complex unjustified co-governance proposal that's turned into one of the most divisive political proposals ever laid on New Zealand by an ideological Government that got itself so bent out of shape and tied itself into a pretzel trying to explain the rationale behind co-governance in three waters. Hon Peeni Henare: Don't get salty.SIMON COURT: So bent out of shape the Hon Peeni Henare. I'll tell you what because if there was a case for iwi Māori to have their rights and interests in freshwater assessed by a Government or a court this Government would have done that. But this Government doesn't care about property rights. It doesn't really care whether iwi Māori hapū marae have property rights in water because if they did they would have said "Hey. Let's explore that." But they're too gutless—they're way too gutless to have that conversation. Instead what they did was come up with—Hon Peeni Henare: ACT supported the Waikato River settlement.SIMON COURT: The Hon Peeni Henare raises a good point about the Waikato River: a Treaty settlement identifies rights and interests and allocates them. What this Government has done instead is try to say that water infrastructure sewerage pipes drinking water plants all of that stuff built after 1840 somehow should be subjected to co-governance because there are rights and interests that iwi Māori have in these assets that are of greater weight than normal or other New Zealanders.When I asked the Hon Nanaia Mahuta about that she replied "No". They do not have rights and interests above anyone else any other ratepayer in their community. In reply to a written question that is what the Hon Nanaia Mahuta said. At that point the tied up pretzel that Labour had got itself in should have been binned. But no they persisted with their co-governance agenda. That is one of reasons why Labour will lose the next election.Now I want to come to the member Anna Lorck who made a comment. Anna Lorck along with other members of the Finance and Expenditure Committee travelled to Hawke's Bay and we heard from councils and submitters.Anna Lorck: I didn't need to travel; I live there.SIMON COURT: Oh the member certainly did travel with the Finance and Expenditure Committee even though it might have been just down the road from her house. What they told Anna Lorck is that "We reject your co-governance agenda. We reject your centralisation agenda." The Hawke's Bay councils including the regional council central Hawke's Bay Napier Hastings what they said Anna Lorck was "We've already solved the problem that the Havelock North inquiry told us that we needed to solve. We formed a voluntary regional alliance where we're pooling our resources and we're getting on with the business of funding financing and fixing our three waters infrastructure." That is why they said: "We don't need these water reforms Anna Lorck."Now I don't know what Anna Lorck went back and told her caucus but whatever it was it wasn't enough to convince the Hon Nanaia Mahuta the Hon Kieran McAnulty or whoever the Prime Minister was at the time. Because the same confused pretzel policy appears here in the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill. As a result Anna Lorck and a whole lot of Labour MPs are going to lose their seats in about seven weeks' time. What would ACT do? Because that's what New Zealanders want to know. What would an alternative Government have done with three waters? Well this is what ACT says. DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well no. The rest of the people might want to know. The House wants to know what is in the bill and everything relates to the bill.SIMON COURT: Well let's come to the role of the Commerce Commission. The Commerce Commission is going to carry out a discovery process over three to four years to find out what the actual asset condition is of all of these pipes in the ground. Now imagine that. They could literally ring up the councils and say "Could you send us your information?" They'd get it the next day. But it's going to take three or four years. If there are gaps in information how do you close those gaps? You send out all of the CCTV and jetting trucks to CCTV your pipe networks. In about a year you could have a complete up-to-date asset management database for all of the three waters infrastructure in New Zealand. It might cost a few tens or even $100 million to do it across the country. You could do that in a year. No. In two to three years the Commerce Commission is going to faff around and work out how to do it.Now if the Government was serious about working out how much money should be spent on building three waters infrastructure there's a test for that. Currently councils plan where people could live—it's called spatial planning or urban planning district planning regional planning. It shows where the people are going to live and how many are coming. In Auckland where I live in the north and west another 250000 people are projected to come and live there between now and 2050. Therefore we know we need to provide 250000 peoples' worth of water infrastructure. Work it back from 2050. I'm a civil engineer. I reckon I could ring up a few firms and ask them to give us a ballpark price. That's how easy it is to work out how much money should be spent on infrastructure.Then you say "How much to maintain it?" Well you work out how many trucks how many people how many visits they're going to do a week. You work back from there. No. The Commerce Commission's going to spend another three years after they get the information. We're talking nearly 2030. If this Government was serious about fixing three waters infrastructure they could have gone back to 2020 when they came up with the original concept for the reforms and they could have issued an instruction to councils: "Update your asset management system. If you can't afford it come to us we'll find a way to pay for it." If you can't afford growth to fund growth guess what? A sensible Government would have taken advice from economists and said "We're prepared to share some of the revenue central government gets from building and construction just like ACT would have"—$1.2 billion a year to cash flow the borrowing.Now I've heard from Hon Kieran McAnulty: "$1.2 billion that's not enough. This is an infrastructure deficit of $120 billion." Well guess what Labour; guess what? $1.2 billion a year leveraged at the same rate as this reform would allow for somewhere between four and six times revenue delivers you somewhere between four and six times $1.2 billion. Somewhere around $6 billion or $7 billion a year in additional borrowing if local government had access to the revenue that ACT says they should keep. All of these problems are able to be solved.And that's before we get to telling a Commerce Commission that they need to somehow work out whether a water service entity is upholding the Treaty of Waitangi enforcing tikanga and somehow working out whether they are spending enough money and time on guaranteeing that the spiritual life force or mauri of the water is sufficient. ACT will repeal this legislation the rest of the three waters reforms and replace it with our own. It's on our website: ACT.org.nz."