Pham LanLAN PHAM (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Speaker. I have to agree with my colleague: it is a sad day today. I want to acknowledge that we have got to today from a lot of unfortunate political failure and system failure. It's created these long-standing issues that will worsen as climate change and extreme weather events take hold and it's putting our ageing infrastructure under increasing pressure. We know that the financial burden of all of this is in the hundreds of billions so it's no small thing. I have to reflect that I'm disappointed that this ultimately is a bill of missed opportunities—and I have to agree with my colleague across the House on that. We know to solve these challenges that whatever the model for reform is it needs to be connecting our councils with communities. It needs to be taking a longer-term view. It needs to be incorporating mandatory considerations like climate change and needs to get out of this very siloed thinking where we're lumping the blame and the responsibility on councils and ratepayers who simply cannot meet that challenge alone. We are needing to be part of that and we've missed that opportunity with this bill.The first opportunity that I want to reflect on was how truncated the actual process was in the consultation—if you can call it a consultation—on this bill. It was hugely limited to the extent that not all councils even got to submit on this bill and actually have their say. That is a huge missed opportunity for actually getting to a place where we can address these very serious issues.I want to start as well—this is not about only our missed opportunity to address our infrastructure deficit but it's a missed opportunity to do so in a way that is actually comprehensive and fit for purpose for Aotearoa. I want to pick up on that specifically because it is a missed opportunity for co-governance. Some might call it co-governance others might more accurately call it governance and this is in upholding the rights of iwi and hapū in their exercise of rangatiratanga over water. It's completely missing from the bill. The Pou Taiao of Iwi Chairs Forum put it really succinctly when they said The bill's proposals lack any acknowledgment of the Government's Te Tiriti obligations to iwi and hapū and there is no reference at all to iwi and hapū participation in the delivery and decision making in respect of the mechanisms proposed." Now for this land and this place for our water here that is a glaring oversight and it's something that I'm hoping that this Government will take note of in the next bill which becomes more substantially about the guts of how this new reform system will work.I wanted to pick up particularly as well on the missed opportunity to prioritise the health of our people and the health of our water. It was really disappointing hearing the Minister of Local Government talk about the positive nature of getting rid of Te Mana o te Wai considerations when setting waste-water standards through Te Mana o te Wai. We find this as the Green Party to be completely inappropriate to be really short-sighted and introducing considerable complexity into this water system that we have where Te Mana o te Wai as was pointed out really clearly by a number of submitters was designed as a cohesive whole. It has a number of elements and to pick out just one in for Taumata Arowai in the setting of these waste-water standards is very short-sighted. Te Mana o te Wai was meant to be the driving force which actually improved the environmental outcomes and the health outcomes of our communities and actually resulted in appropriate levels of investment that would actually further New Zealand in those outcomes. Without it we risk locking in further underinvestment an issue that we've already been party to and we'll end up with substandard infrastructure and decision making which is ultimately detrimental to the health of our environment and our communities.I really want to pick up on that; the public health implications which have had such a light shone on them during the submission process. I want to pick up particularly on the submission of the Public Health Communication Centre. They talked about the removing of the hierarchy of obligations from Taumata Arowai's work meaning deprioritising the safety and quality of people's drinking water and increasing the risk of illness from polluted drinking water. They talked about given the human and financial costs of illness from water-borne disease and the typical high-cost effectiveness of reticulated and water sewage systems in urban settings—it holds that the safety of drinking water should have an extremely high priority. Now that should not be news to anyone yet we're still making laws and legislation that make it necessary for health professionals to point that out to us.What's really disappointing as well with this bill is that it has failed to listen to the voices of councils when actually setting the criteria and the framework for which they make these decisions about whether to join joint water service delivery to make the plans and to make the joint entities. You know we heard overwhelmingly from local councils and Local Government New Zealand and Taumata Arowai that they wanted 30-year minimum time frames for these water service development plans. They talked about how 10 years was completely insufficient when planning for resilient water infrastructure and water services particularly with climate impacts. They asked for things like a much more pragmatic 24-month time frame to actually allow them to have the conversations to make these water service delivery plans come into fruition and have the time to consult with iwi Māori on that. They also asked for much better integration with their existing planning processes their long-term plans their future development strategies and their infrastructure strategies. The fact that again this Government has overlooked those time frames means that it is not going to be integrated. It risks councils that simply don't have the resources available to them to meet these shorter-term time frames and will actually miss the boat altogether and risks what we heard so often during the submissions as them then resulting in "orphan" councils that aren't part of the bigger picture.The last aspect I wanted to pick up on was the huge missed opportunity in actually allowing regional council voices to be at the table when considering these joint water service delivery plans or entities. Now yes we add the Greater Wellington Regional Council but we missed all the other regional councils. The reason why we needed to have them as part of the conversation is we need to get beyond this "What's in it for me?" kind of thinking where we're taking these arbitrarily defined boundaries or areas. We know that our drinking water aquafers—they cross city and district boundaries. We know our waste water and stormwater flow across the landscape into our streams and our rivers. It ultimately all ends up in our shared ocean. We need a greater bigger picture to this and the voices of individual councils considering these things alone is not going to get us there. We actually need that broader view.I would really encourage the Government to consider all of these things as they go into the formation of the following bill to come because unless we are addressing these problems at scale the solutions will ultimately be patchy they'll be inadequate they'll be expensive and ultimately detrimental to the health of our communities and our environment. This bill has been a huge missed opportunity and the Greens will not be supporting it. Thank you."