Edmonds BarbaraHon BARBARA EDMONDS (Labour—Mana): Thank you Madam Speaker for the ability to take the call on this repeal bill. Before I start I hope to indulge the House for a moment. It has been a year since Craig Stevens and Dave van Zwanenburg from Muriwai fire brigade passed away due to the events of Cyclone Gabrielle so I want to acknowledge them and their families and the fire and emergency crews across New Zealand who are having their flags at half-mast today.Though we are here today and it feels very much like déjà vu on this side of the House and also some déjà vu from when we were on that side of the House that again we are going through another repeal bill again another urgency and again nothing no solutions from the other side of the House. The Minister of Local Government earlier today said there is a pressing need to move on these water reforms and yet the bill that is tabled by the other side of the House is just the repeal of the previous Government's bill of the previous Government's work. There has been no solution tabled today. So if there was such a pressing need why was the Government who are now in force—why were they not working on something beforehand? Why all of a sudden is it that they say that we've been doing nothing for six years?Well actually we've been doing a lot and if you look at the Department of Internal Affairs website you will see that there was a royal commission of inquiry into the Havelock North affair which started in mid-2017. That needed to run its course. Then there were a number of officials' papers and discussion documents and consultation that happened in that six years. The Hon Kelvin Davis who is no longer a member of this House said if things were easy then everybody would do it. Unfortunately the problem with water reform: it has been kicked down the road for so long that it came down to the point where a Government the previous Labour Government had to take a stand and had to say we need to change this. We cannot have the situation where our children cannot swim in the beaches in the rivers. We cannot have the situation where people are dying because of water. We need to ensure that our councils have the support in order for them to be able to invest in the infrastructure because they all couldn't afford it. They've got three council authorities who are within my area of Mana and they are all in very different situations as to what they can afford. But the three waters reform project affordable water basically allowed the ability for there to be balance sheet separation and in the end it's the money that counts. There's a Jerry Maguire movie where he says Show me the money." There is no money in this bill.I do remember the other instance of déjà vu I had was while sitting on that side of the House watching the Hon Matt Doocey on this side saying "When we become Government we're going to co-invest."—that is on Hansard—and yet there is nothing in this bill. There has been no commitment since the election that that Government is going to co-invest with councils. Instead they're passing the blame now on to councils and we saw that in question time today where the Minister said "We're going to give it back to councils." and basically if the rates are going to go up—Dr Tracey McLellan: Not their problem.Hon BARBARA EDMONDS: Not their problem because they've given the responsibilities back to councils. That was the whole reason why we did those water reforms to help ratepayers not see the large increases that they were going to see.Standard & Poor's have basically said that you need to have balance sheet separation in order for councils to be able to borrow more. If the Government's going to go ahead with their current reforms which again is at the moment just repealing a bill Standard & Poor's says the devil will be in the detail. There is insufficient detail here for any devil to be able to have a look at and so it's going to be really interesting to see how this Government comes up with a plan to save ratepayers' moneys because the Minister today said that rates are not going to go up—nevertheless that Far North District Council's looking at 33 percent rate increases the West Coast council's at 30 percent Hamilton at 25.5 percent and the Mayor of Porirua just said today 18 percent. These are increases that are going on to ratepayers that this Government has done none of the work on in order to be able to provide that pressing need that pressing solution except for removing an actual policy solution that has Standard & Poor's stated approval which allows a balance sheet separation so that those entities can borrow more to bring down the cost of that infrastructure project across the time so that it's cheaper for our ratepayers.So again we are here in a situation of déjà vu: no solutions repealing a bill and again in a situation where there were broken promises where they said they would co-invest but the Government has not committed to it."