Goodhew Jo: Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Goodhew Jo: Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:642;Page:11941] 
JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 Gosh it will be fun to respond to the comments made by the Minister in the chair Harry Duynhoven. His is an interesting attitude. It really comes down to this fact—and I will read to the Committee from the Local Government New Zealand submission which states: “The local government sector is on the whole supportive of the outcomes that the bill is trying to achieve but has a number of concerns.” Its biggest concern is money. There are other concerns which I will touch on in a moment. 
One of the things that concerned local government—and we had submissions from a number of the councils—was that the Local Government Act 2002 requires local authorities to consider the social cultural economic and environmental well-being of their communities in their decision making. They also have to consult of course. The local authorities are already doing that. It then comes down to particular councils and what their ratepayers think are the highest priorities. They have to uphold a number of Acts—for example the Health Act and the Building Act. They also have other priorities—solid waste and human waste disposal road safety recreation facilities etc. 
But what we have here is drinking water being singled out as a priority above all of the other issues. That was of considerable concern to Local Government New Zealand. The Kaipara District Council made this comment: “The proposed legislation overrides the community engagement principles of the Local Government Act 2002 and disenfranchises our people.” Local government in my own electorate in the form of the Timaru District Council commented to me that it has prioritised the treatment of waste over many of the other responsibilities of the council—it has spent millions and millions of dollars on it. The Prime Minister herself has said that the rest of New Zealand’s councils should follow the Timaru District Council’s example when it comes to waste disposal. It has spent an awful lot of money on waste disposal because that is what the ratepayers wanted even at considerable expense. But all of a sudden councils are now given this other priority that supersedes all else and ratepayers are told that whether or not they think they need it it should be got on with. 
It is of considerable importance that we realise local authorities are 20 percent of the suppliers but—and this is the important bit—they supply 70 percent of the water. So an awful lot of suppliers are not local authorities. An awful lot of suppliers will not be able to supply their own water under this bill because they cannot afford to improve the water supply. 
I will make another couple of comments. It would be interesting for the Minister to respond and tell us if clean drinking-water is so important—and the National Party certainly believes that it is—why we still have some self-suppliers such as schools and some hospitals failing to meet the standards or having poor monitoring. Because it is not covered by this bill. This legislation by any stretch will not solve all of the problems. There are 624 schools and early childhood centres that are not connected to council water supplies—in other words they are self suppliers—and 537 will not have to comply even though they either fail the standards or have poor monitoring. 
It was interesting to hear the Minister talk about grace and favour of water suppliers towards their neighbours. It is interesting that that is what we will have to rely on and that there was common sense before. 
 Let us talk about common sense. Common sense would indicate that we would pay for solving a problem. But then we get back to the point that we have not defined the problem. In fact in the case of the Rangitikei District Council Bob Buchanan was telling us that he found that the statistics were horribly horribly wrong. The Institute of Environmental Science and Research does not have a good way of collecting these statistics and therefore the whole science behind this bill is questionable—we have said it over and over again. In fact we have councils saying: “Show us the numbers. Show us that campylobacter is caused by water rather than by chicken.” when we know that largely the response to campylobacter is to clean up the act when it comes to the selling of poultry. We know that most of the notifications about campylobacter are not related to water.