Chen NaisiNAISI CHEN (Labour): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'm proud to be able to take a call on this bill that my select committee the Governance and Administration Committee has now presented to back to the House. I do want to thank our chairperson Ian McKelvie for handling this process and for enabling us to have robust debates across—I think all parties almost were represented on that select committee during this process and able to hear the voices of submitters and of experts.I wanted to thank our independent advisor as well and of course all of the Government officials who have worked on this bill who had tirelessly been through all those discussions with us and advised us and debated against us—because I think that's the best decision making; we can have robust debates and discussions on details—and also to Parliamentary Counsel Office as well for really being able to put your expertise and your experience into the drafting of this bill.The Water Services Entities Amendment Bill is a bill where we've now gone through the initial process at the beginning of our term and landed in a place where we've listened to the voices of local councils we've listened to the voices of New Zealanders. As we went up and down the country when the Hon Kieran McAnulty became Minister of Local Government he knew that local councils wanted more representation and wanted more say on their local water services entity. We balance that want and that desire against balance sheet separation. We want to make sure that we still address the problem that we had to address here with all of our affordable water legislation which is to make sure that the Government using its balance sheet can actually go and fund the water infrastructures the pipes.I can say here probably on Hansard—I don't know if I'll be the first person—but it's not sexy funding the pipes. But we will make sure that the infrastructure under the ground actually gets it right: so making sure that when there is balance sheet separation when local government has actually hit their debt ceiling when they're no longer enabled to be able to fund them by themselves and also then to balance that against the benefits of economies of scale.I think nothing hits home more for me than when we had the discussion about the IT systems. Currently we have about 30 different IT systems governing our water entities throughout the country. So being able to go and procure a single system—we're only 5 million people here in New Zealand and having different sets of IT systems throughout our country seems almost ridiculous. If we were to compare ourselves to overseas—to the city of Sydney or even to a district in Shanghai—then we would be able to compare ourselves. Why would we have 30 or so different systems to govern our water services? So as we balance all of those things—so we balance the participation the control and the voice that we want our local governments to have in our water entities; as we balance the need for balance sheet separation and as we balance the need for economies of scale—we've landed it here with 10 entities.I also just wanted to touch on some of those details that we've discussed in the select committee process. One of them is to be able to give reassurance to our local government bodies when the establishment date is. So we've promised here in this legislation that it would be within six months of the commencement date—to give reassurance to the entities to council but also be able to give reassurance to the workforce as well. We do know that the water workforce is quite a specialised one and we have experts being in some of those existing councils and entities at the moment. We want to be able to hold them over so that they can continue to be in that space for the new entities as well because it is a really specialised workforce and I would call it even a community amongst themselves and they all know each other really well. We want to be able to retain that especially when we have a labour market shortage at this moment as well.We wanted to make sure that there were provisions and clear guidelines for mergers. We had explored whether or not we would allow mergers to happen before the establishment date and we had actually seriously contemplated all those different ones having heard from some mayors in particular who had that desire. But we landed on that we would give one just to make sure that there was one clear guideline and just to make sure that the legislation which we have now presented to the House is a tidy one. We made sure that there were consumer forms that there was a voice for consumers' voice to be heard—for them to be embedded in this. We also made sure that there were provisions for collective bargaining together as all of the workforce of the water entities that we honour and that we treasure so dearly knowing that they are the ones who will have to actually do the mahi.So this is a great bill. We've given it a lot of consideration term by term so that's why I commend this bill to the House.