Hague Kevin: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Hague Kevin: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:15552] 
KEVIN HAGUE (Green) 
: 
 I take a call to talk about some other aspects of Part 1 of the Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill that have not received much discussion so far. I draw on the Canterbury District Health Board’s submission on the bill in which it talked about some of the inadvertent consequences of exactly this type of approach to water in the town of Walkerton in Ontario Canada. 
In the town of Walkerton in 2000 an outbreak of gastrointestinal disease occurred through contamination of the water supply. In that outbreak seven people died and half the town of 5000 people became ill. The committee of inquiry into the Walkerton outbreak of disease found that “the Government of Ontario had made commitments to cut Government barriers to job creation investment and economic growth.”—it sounds familiar does it not? The committee’s report went on to state: “It had also made a commitment to reduce the size of Government and to provide the people of Ontario with better for less. In carrying out these commitments the new Government elected in 1985 promised to eliminate red tape and to reduce the regulatory burden for businesses and institutions.” 
The Canterbury District Health Board has made the point that that is precisely the justification that this Government has given for this bill in which the objectives are to remove unnecessary barriers to water infrastructure development and to provide councils with an increased range of options for the provision and management of water services. The district health board has pointed out that under new section 136 of the principal Act which is inserted by clause 31 the bill will remove some of the important safeguards in relation to water contracts from the existing legislation in terms of the requirements that currently pertain to local bodies and will introduce some unnecessary lack of clarity. The district health board has said we need to ensure that elements such as public consultation quality control reporting auditing performance review and evaluation are included. It has made the point that the bill is unclear about who will have the legal responsibility for that because the term “water supplier” that is used is unclear. 
The district health board has also drawn attention to the amendment to section 125 in clause 28 of the bill and the repeal of sections 126 to 129 in clause 29. It has made the point that those sections repeal the prescribed process for undertaking assessments of water and sanitary services. That provision removes the requirement to consult and consider the comments of the medical officer of health. That will compromise the ability of the medical officer of health an independent statutory officer to effectively assess and review local authority activities in regard to water and sanitary services. The district health board has said that is precisely what occurred in Walkerton. In Walkerton the Government of Ontario set out to create a looser regulatory regime to ease the costs of business to cut out red tape and to do all of the things that National and ACT in this debate over this bill have been saying are precisely the kinds of things that local government requires. But the district health board has made the point that some of this red tape is in place exactly to ensure public safety and to ensure that when we consume drinking water we are consuming a product that we know to be of high quality and to be safe. 
The role of the medical officer of health is crucial in that area. The district health board has said that role is particularly important for protecting public health when a local authority may be driven solely or in part by fiscal or political concerns which is precisely the case that we believe will be in place if this bill goes ahead unamended. The district health board has made the point that the medical officer of health can be utilised as an independent expert and trusted source of information with proven value in communicating issues associated with public health risks to communities. But that requirement is being removed by this bill by the repeal of those sections. In the Government’s headlong rush to free up the regulations that apply to local government in relation to water to facilitate this process—