Seymour DavidDAVID SEYMOUR (Leader—ACT): I rise on behalf of ACT in support of the second reading of the Health (Fluoridation of Drinking Water) Amendment Bill. A number of thoughts come to mind as I reflect on this bill's rather long and difficult passage. First of all it has to be said that the benefits of fluoridation to oral health in my view and understanding are completely beyond question. If you were going to be born in one of two identical towns in the world and the only difference was one had fluoridation and the other didn't then odds on you'd be much better to be born in the one that had fluoridation because the benefits to your dental health are considerable.But this particular bill—to describe it as a mess I think would be a little bit too generous. Let me count the ways. The first issue is that the bill intends to give DHBs the decision-making power over and above local authorities and that leads to a number of difficulties. Perhaps the most obvious one is that the Government has taken the position that DHBs are fairly hopeless and will soon be replaced. So to have an initiative to give them more power would seem to be an error. It's trying to remedy that with a Supplementary Order Paper that would effectively make Ashley Bloomfield responsible. These are the people who were for instance responsible for distributing personal protective equipment during the lockdown last year have been responsible for the vaccine roll-out of measles last year the COVID-19 vaccine this year and have subsequently been responsible for the Government's testing regime. I'm not sure that they're the people that should be given more power to make more decisions; nevertheless that is what is proposed.The idea of putting the power with the Director-General of Health who Elizabeth Kerekere recently referred to as an it"—and I'd just like to stress the importance of getting people's pronouns right. As I understand it Dr Ashley Bloomfield is a he/him and would be horrified to learn that he's actually been neutered by Elizabeth Kerekere in Parliament. But nevertheless putting that small matter aside Dr Bloomfield would be in charge of deciding whether local authorities should have to fluoridate their water. One of the challenges that that presents is that we actually don't know what the capability or the local conditions faced at a practical level by the local authority might be. So they look at the costs they look at their equipment and they look at the natural water conditions that they face. These are all considerations to do with the practical operation of the water utility where it would seem that the local authority might be better placed to make judgments than a distant Ministry of Health. Nevertheless if we can tidy away and assume away that problem there are other difficulties not least of all is the fact that I'm not sure that we're necessarily confronting the true problem that we face with dental hygiene. I was on a train several years ago and I was horrified to see a couple of young parents feeding a toddler Coca-Cola through one of those baby bottles with the latex teat. Now I just can't imagine what that would do to a child and their teeth. I'm pleased to say that the train was in Australia where that and other types of criminal activity are part of the national story. But if we're honest with ourselves we have very similar problems here in New Zealand. There are a lot of enormous difficulties placed on children by a lack of parental responsibility and so another criticism that people might put on to this initiative is that unless it's allied with a serious effort to get better parenting then it's not going to solve some of the worst dental hygiene and health problems that we have here in New Zealand.Another issue is that there's something fundamentally undemocratic about the Government's move. The Government is taking away the rights of local authorities to vote on their water treatment and whether or not they have fluoridation specifically basically because they've been voting for the wrong result. Now I happen to agree that fluoridation is a good thing but there is something not quite right about taking away democracy because higher-ups don't like the outcome. It's not dissimilar to what the Government rushed through under urgency earlier—certainly in this Parliament if not this year when the rights of citizens in local authorities to petition their local authority and hold a referendum about whether or not there should be Māori wards in a local authority were taken away and extinguished by this Parliament. Why? Well because people have had the opportunity to vote and they've been voting the wrong way. And I think this is the start of a trend that we should be a bit cautious on. If we believe in subsidiarity if we believe in people making local decisions that people closest to their community and environment know best what is good for them then I think we should be prepared to take seriously the idea that if they vote a certain way that actually is their decision and it's not for us to say that they got it wrong and take it away from them. So that's another great difficulty with this particular piece of legislation.In conclusion this legislation is something that will get us to what I believe and ACT believes is the right place—that fundamentally if you have a choice between being born into a place where water is fluoridated or a place where water is not fluoridated you're much better off to be born somewhere where fluoridation is a reality. On the other hand the way of getting it here making the decision making remote from the practical operation of the water reticulation of taking away democracy because people made the wrong decision and of putting in place a fix which I don't know is the most important thing the Government can be doing right now—when anecdotally at least one of the biggest problems that we have is people who simply are not giving their children the kind of care and dental hygiene and diet that all children really should have a right to access. And that may be the major challenge and if we don't tackle that and we're still going to have kids admitted for surgery to have the rotten stumps of what were their teeth removed under general anaesthetic—something that happens too often in this country—then it's not clear that we are really serious about solving the problems of dental health. Nevertheless the initiative of sending this bill back to committee where it can have some more democratic consideration is the right thing to do. Fluoridation in my view is the right way for things to be and therefore it's worth supporting.I just end by saying I guess there's been a philosophical argument that some people like to make about why fluoridation is somehow in opposition to individual freedom. I've had many people make this argument over the years. And as someone who spends a bit of time thinking about individual freedom and the politics of classical liberalism I think it's worth addressing. A water reticulation system is practically and by definition a collective good. The value in it is that it connects at least two if not many more points together. The value in it is the same water flows throughout the whole system. Now if you're going to have one type of water in an entire system then by logic it has to be a collective decision. There has to be some sort of collective decision about what the nature of that water flowing within the pipes is. And so there's no way that each person can have their own choice about the type of water. People are going to have to accept probably the majority decision or that of the owner of the reticulation system.So that is why it's not a freedom issue because it's the practicality of water. To say otherwise would be like saying that you want your electricity delivered to your house at 60 hertz and 110 volts. Well that's how they reticulate it in the United States; here it's 50 hertz and 230 volts—it's just the way it is. We cannot change physics.So we support the bill with quite a number of reservations as you would have seen and we hope that the select committee does its work well. Thank you Madam Speaker."