Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): Well thank you Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of ACT in opposition to this Water Services Bill. It's a bill that is designed to put in place a set of standards for regulating water for drinking waste water and stormwater as they are used and the assets that support them are developed up and down New Zealand. That's what this bill is supposed to do.I should add before I go any further that I am deputising for Mark Cameron our rural issues spokesperson who was taken away from Parliament this afternoon. He was deputising for Simon Court our environment and infrastructure spokesman who is incarcerated in his house in Te Atatū under what they call alert level 3 in Auckland. It just goes to show the benefits of voting to get more ACT MPs in you never know when you might need a series of them to get a speech up on a bill like this. And it really matters what sort of regulations we have for three waters because we have problems real problems. We know about lead in Dunedin campylobacter in Havelock North sewage on the Auckland beaches where 50 to 100 days a year instead of cleaning the water the council puts out a sign saying No swimming today there's too much sewage on the beach."We have real difficulties with the way things work but also with developing three waters infrastructure. You talk to people who are developing property often building homes so the next generation has a pathway to a property-owning democracy. What do they tell you? Dealing with councils and developing that infrastructure is one of the most expensive and time-consuming things they have to do creating many delays. So we've got a lot of problems with our three waters infrastructure. The basic idea of a national regulator as legislated last year and a set of standards for water quality as set out in this Water Services Bill is a very good idea that the ACT Party has supported at its first reading and its second reading but we can't support it at the third. And why? Because when the Government was asked to do one vaguely sensible thing to make this bill work for New Zealand they couldn't. And what was that thing they were asked to do? Well Mark Cameron as I mentioned was up here giving speeches and I see that—hang on a second what's this? The member from Havelock North is furiously writing. She's been listening. She's thinking "I know something really funny I can say when I speak." Well look forward to a Berocca-laden speech coming up soon from Anna Lorck. I just want to warn people at home she may be out of camera shot but that's coming up now.Back to the topic at hand. They were asked to do one very simple thing and that was to exempt water systems with fewer than 30 end users. Madam Speaker when you go back to Waitaki in between studying up the Standing Orders you will know that there are many people in rural areas who don't get their water from a big system like Watercare or Wellington Water or even Havelock North or Dunedin. They might be a little bit like where I grew up in the outskirts of Whangārei—without town supply. Let me tell you Madam Speaker we and a couple of our neighbours we decided to drill a bore to see if we could get water and we went in together with a plan to share that water. Sadly there was a lot of iron content in the water. We couldn't use it. We got it tested and we decided not to drink it. We didn't need someone to come all the way from Wellington to tell us not to drink water with too much iron. We thought maybe we could use it for showering but then we consulted some chemistry and we knew what happened when iron oxidises and we thought if we washed our hair with this water we could end up looking like Chris Hipkins. So we didn't even use it for showering because we could make sensible decisions for ourselves. This was in 1994 by the way back in the olden days. We didn't need someone from Wellington to come and tell us that we needed special regulations. So they should have exempted people like that because a lot of people do strike good water and they do get together and share resources.This legislation—by putting extra regulatory burden that is completely unnecessary—will just stop people cooperating getting together and developing their resources for no benefit whatsoever. Because you can understand why you'd regulate Havelock North it's a town of thousands if not tens of thousands of people—Anna Lorck: Tens of thousands.DAVID SEYMOUR: —the people that are drinking the water don't know—and there's Anna Lorck she's saying "Tens of thousands." A little bit like when the Prime Minister said tens of thousands of people might die. There's often exaggeration coming from the Labour Party.But we know that in Havelock North the people drinking the water don't always know the people that are responsible for running the system and that's when it might be worthwhile having a regulator from Wellington coming along and saying "You're not doing that very well. You need to raise your game." In a city in a town—a town of tens of thousands perhaps. But in a small group of people with fewer than 30 users it makes no sense for someone from Wellington to go up to Ruawai where our rural spokesman Mark Cameron is from and say "You two neighbours can't share a bore or tank or a dam. We're going to tell you how to do it." because those people already have the incentive to get it right because it's them drinking the water.This is a wider problem in New Zealand. And I quote as I have a few times before Emeritus Professor Tim Hazledine from my alma mater at the University of Auckland. Professor Hazledine is an economist and he says one of the challenges with productivity in New Zealand is we spend less and less time on transformational activity: actually building dams and building tanks and drilling bores and processing and cleaning water. We're not spending time doing practical things. We spend far too much time doing transactional activity: getting permission being inspected filling out forms for people from Wellington. This is another example of that. We have a perfectly good system for people up and down rural New Zealand who are able to make their water work for themselves thank you very much. They don't need the incursion of a Wellington water regulator telling them what's good for them. That's why the ACT Party while we believe in a national water regulator for cities cannot support this legislation.At some point we have to actually stand up and say "There is too much regulation there is too much bureaucracy." Its benefits do not outweigh its costs and if we keep on doing this to ourselves we are simply going to make New Zealand a poorer country and we're going to be worse off because we spend all our time making work for the bureaucracy writing forms that we then have to fill out and not enough time providing for ourselves our families our neighbours and our friends to make tomorrow a better day than today was.Here's another couple of predictions: not only will it stop people getting together and cooperating; it will actually create huge ructions amongst people who are currently sharing water supplies. People are going to say "Actually with these new rules it doesn't make sense for us to keep sharing." So they're going to say "Sorry we're just not going to share that bit of water that we said we would in a friendly handshake agreement 20 years ago. We're just going to have to stop doing it." And you know what the other person is going to say? "Hang on you promised. It's a right. It's an easement now. Actually that bore kind of points under my property. I want some too." And then you're going to have even more transactional activity—what Professor Hazledine calls it—more fighting and more arguing more work for lawyers and less work for engineers. That is not a pathway to prosperity for any country and it's not a pathway for a united or cohesive society.This Government is passing hate speech laws to boost social cohesion and it's passing water laws that are actually going to lead to battles between neighbours. That's how crazy this Government is. That's how out of touch it is. But when you've got 27 union organisers and a dozen former civil servants—half of the Labour MPs are from the Wellington bureaucratic machine—don't be surprised if they feed the beast and make that machine bigger and more costly for New Zealanders trying to make a difference in their own lives especially rural New Zealand. And for that reason the ACT Party opposes this bill."