Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): If one looks through the history of public health initiatives in New Zealand one can see a quite clear pattern of change from what would have been traditional 19th century public health initiatives around the control of disease effectively keeping the public safe from those deadly diseases like chickenpox smallpox cholera and so on. And often the vectors for those diseases are water—either foul water or drinking water. Then in the 20th century we kind of moved away from that as the attention and the focus of public health largely because we had our sanitation systems and policies pretty much nailed down. So our attention turns to things like occupational health and environmental health. And in a 21st century context we are looking more at personal well-being—things like smoking cessation healthy diets and mental health.But the events of August 2016 in Havelock North shook us out of our complacency and back to a recognition that the core public health responsibilities of maintaining excellent sanitation clean drinking-water and preventing these communicable diseases was well and truly highlighted because 5000 of the 14000 residents of that town—an infection rate effectively of more than a third; between 35 percent and 40 percent of that population—were affected. And that's a very important marker of how quickly these communicable diseases can spread through the vector of water. As the Minister said in his first reading speech 100000 people have been affected by contaminated water in the last year or so.So it is really important—and I believe the previous Government acted extremely quickly as did the local council and clearly the inquiry into the Havelock North outbreak has many many recommendations which the previous Government had accepted and certainly the current Government is going to continue to oversee the implementation of but it is a wake-up call to ensure that we do have the right sanitary practices and water systems that prevent these types of diseases from breaking out.Now this bill is a very important first step—and the National Party will be supporting it—in a much broader body of work some of which is going to be controversial. If the reaction of the member for Ilam is anything to go by that is a reflection of some of the concern and anger that communities that have traditionally relied on pristine artesian water have to undertake what they see as a form of contamination of that pure water. Now that's going to be a difficult conversation for all members of this House to have because if there's one thing that the Minister of Health and I know it's that that issue doesn't run along party lines. So we're going to have to reconcile that because as he said in Mosgiel and also in other parts of the country there are beautiful beautiful spring waters and artesian waters that may not need this sort of treatment. As a former hospital manager I used the water treatment process the Minister referenced—the UV process—and as he said it is very expensive but when people are immunocompromised and weakened by their health conditions that require their admission to hospital it's absolutely vital that not only one system for prevention is in place but two or three layers of protection and prevention are in place.So this is a good start. This will tidy up some of those regulatory barriers to making changes more quickly and we support it. But in saying that I do also point out that we will be watching very closely the work that the Minister of Health is doing—and the Minister of Local Government the Hon Nanaia Mahuta—on a broader reform of three waters management and governance and oversight because we know that good governance is crucial to good management of the water supply and we look forward actually to the Government's announcements about their intentions in that regard.But in the meantime we look forward to seeing this at the Health Committee. We will support it. We look forward to the submissions and I commend it.