Parker DavidHon DAVID PARKER (Labour): This bill came to the Local Government and Environment Committee after a first reading where the Government said that all it was doing was codifying into the Building Act the existing law with some very limited exceptions. It turned out at the select committee that it actually was not of that effect and it took quite a bit of work in the select committee for the select committee to get very close to the original law and get the bill back in order. There are a couple of points that I do agree with Minister Nick Smith on and there are a couple that I do not. I do agree with his comment about it being pointless having a fence at the top of the 20-metre cliff. You do not need a fence around a pool if it is at the top of the cliff. It makes absolutely no difference to the safety of the child so why would you regulate for it? I agree with that and we voted against amendments to the contrary because we thought that that was a sensible change. We also agree that spa pools and hot tubs ought not to be covered by the same rules. So long as they have got a reasonably high wall—I think from memory it is 400 millimetres is it or—Hon Dr Nick Smith: 800.Hon DAVID PARKER: —800 millimetres; thank you Minister—plus a lockable lid then it should not be within the pool regimes. I am sure the National Government members like me have been getting emails from interested members of the public who have been writing to us throughout this suggesting that it is stupid to call them small pools rather than hot tubs or spa pools. For those people who are writing incessantly about that they might actually care to read the bill because it says small pools such as a hot tub or a spa pool". Maybe it would have been better to say "spa pools and hot tubs and other small pools" but it does not seem to me to be a matter of great moment. The Labour Party also thinks that some good changes were made at the select committee where it does not refer just to the prevention of death but it actually refers to the prevention of injury because of course if a child is in a pool and suffers a loss of oxygen they can be brain-damaged but live and suffer serious injury to the detriment of all of their life and to the detriment of their family. So it is good that the objectives of the bill now or the purposes of the bill are to minimise death or injury. The sole matter that the National Government had to agree to in order to get us across the line was this other change in the code to permit alarmed doors rather than automatically locking doors. We wanted locked gates or doors around pools because we did not think that alarms were an adequate protection for children. We had been lobbied by child advocacy groups saying that there is substantial evidence that the rules that we do have suffer quite high levels of non-compliance as the Minister has acknowledged. I think it was Auckland City that found that even on a 3-yearly cycle of inspections at the end of that 3-year period approximately 50 percent of the pools were non-compliant in some way. If you have alarmed doors then it is likely that some of those alarmed doors are not going to be properly functioning at the end of that 3-year period. It is creating an additional area of risk to children that is not permitted under the existing code and therefore in that way this bill goes forward and is more permissive more lax than the existing code. Jacinda Ardern has spoken in earlier readings of this bill and made the point that it is pretty easy to ignore an alarm. At one level it is one of those things you hear and after a while you might stop hearing it. The advice that we had from the groups that are worried about the drowning of children was that this was an unnecessary change to the law that would increase the risk of children drowning. So having helped the Government fix this bill at select committee we had one very reasonable request which was that that change to the underlying code be fixed. The Government members have I think stubbornly and wrongly refused to agree to that amendment and they voted it down at select committee and accordingly they have lost us in the final vote. I think that is a bit of a shame because it was a pretty sensible suggestion that we were making. The other thing that the bill did as it went to select committee was to change the inspection period from 3 years to 5 years. The advice that the select committee received was that there are already so many pools that are non-compliant at the end of 3 years it would be worse if it were pushed out to 5 years. I do not have many other contributions to make. I do agree with the Minister that it makes no difference—so long as the rules are codified it does not matter whether that code sits in separate legislation or sits under the Building Act. I think that is a correct point that the Minister makes so I do not mind it sitting in the Building Act. I think that the select committee did a good job. Other than the point that I have raised about the relaxing of the code in respect of alarmed doors rather than lockable gates or doors I think this bill is otherwise unobjectionable. But because of that change that the Government members stubbornly refuse to make they are not getting our vote on the third reading of the bill."