SpeechHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. Thank you. Pleased to take a call on the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Bill. This is the last in four major bills making major changes to drinking water waste water and stormwater. Though the Green Party has opposed some of those bills I do acknowledge the huge amount of work which Minister Nanaia Mahuta and then Kieran McAnulty and officials have put into this big tranche of legislation which creates substantial change in the way our drinking water waste water and stormwater is to be managed.The previous speaker Simon Court did not mention anything in this bill. This bill is important because the big thrust of the reforms is to move to these 10 entities. They are natural monopolies. Councils have a very limited ability to influence the entities' performance the way they carry out their responsibilities or require any changes to the entities' operational documents—things like their asset management plan their funding and pricing plan their infrastructure strategy. And given that you've got limited ability of councils to influence a natural monopoly delivering an essential service there needs to be economic regulation and consumer protection particularly as they're not—well they are publicly owned; they're not directly accountable to shareholders and they're not operating in a market and they don't have to pay a dividend to their shareholders.But I was a bit puzzled by National's contribution because Mr Bayly was talking about competition in the committee of the whole House as if more competition would be desirable. So that makes me question what National's changes would be to the water services regime and whether they are really interested in privatisation and will take this corporate structure and then privatise it. So we do need economic regulation so that the services that the entities deliver to consumers are cost-effective and that we have transparency and accountability in the way they deliver those services.So the bill is intended to ensure that the objectives of the reform are delivered: increasing infrastructure investment and ensuring that the pricing practices for those services are efficient. So the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment's view as the department advising the Finance and Expenditure Committee was that this bill would promote the long-term benefit of consumers. There was also a note that there is of course a trade-off between regulation the cost of implementing that regulation and its benefits. This will cost about $10 million we were told over two years to develop the information base on which any regulations would be based and then cost $7 million to $10 million annually to implement. And recognising too there's quite a lot of flexibility in what the Commerce Commission can do because the entities are differently sized have different circumstances so the bill does provide for that.It enables the commission to issue guidance input methodologies and determinations around how the water services entities would implement the charging principles and any regulations made under the Water Services Legislation Act now. It is similar in terms of the way the Commerce Commission regulates fibre gas telcos and it does have this provision for a specialist Water Services Commissioner and also for a dispute resolution tribunal for any disputes around pricing for example between consumers and the entity.So it's not the job of the Commerce Commission to regulate drinking-water quality—that's the job of Taumata Arowai—but the two entities will work together. We do need this consumer protection and we need an economic regulator of the entities so the Green Party is supporting the bill.