O'Connor Damien; Webb Duncan; Brown SimeonHon DAMIEN O'CONNOR (Labour): Thank you very much Madam Chair.Hon Kieran McAnulty: Very good choice!Hon DAMIEN O'CONNOR: It's a wonderful choice. Thank you. Part 1 of the bill obviously covers the purposes and gives a basic outline of what they might be. One of the areas I'd like to question the Minister of Local Government about is to make transitional arrangements for local authorities' long-term plans". I'm wanting to get some clarity on what those transitional provisions are. It's all very well to leave the door open but if the purpose actually says "to make transitional arrangements" then I'm guessing that that is proactive assistance to the councils. But what I have heard from councils and from many is that it's still a bit unclear.If we go back to the purpose which the Minister said is to make things more affordable and to ease the pressure on ratepayers—which is an opinion rather than a fact I would suggest—then I think we and the wider public of New Zealand and ratepayers in particular need to know firstly what the transitional arrangements are that will actually assist the councils not just leaving the door open but actually proactively helping them. And can he guarantee that the purpose which we are told is to reduce the cost—which you know apparently was going to be huge under the Labour proposal; we'd already spent over a billion dollars and it was going to carry on! So we presume it's going to be cheaper under this coalition Government's proposals. How can the Minister guarantee that? Just a couple of questions I put to the Minister.Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Labour—Christchurch Central): Thank you Madam Chair. My question to the Minister of Local Government is really about the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Act. That Act is not very old; it was passed last year. My question is: why is it the purpose of this bill to repeal it? That piece of legislation stands quite apart from the three waters affordable water reform itself. In fact it is a critical part of the competition and consumer protection framework in respect of water generally. The whole idea there is to make sure that any provider of water has both incentives to innovate and to be efficient and to deliver water at an appropriate level of service.I'm interested to know in particular whether the Minister proposes to have no replacement for this legislation under the proposed new scheme or whether he's going to have fundamentally the same framework with the competition and consumer aspects of water delivery managed by the Commerce Commission. If it's the former I would say that that is a yet another gaping hole in our water system. But I suspect that the Minister and the Government appreciate the need for regulation of service delivery in what's effectively a situational monopoly framework.So with the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Act 2023 my question is: why is it that he's getting rid of it when we know that it will need to be replaced and essentially there'll be something very similar put in its place? I was fortunate enough to be the Minister who saw that through its final stages and I can accept that there will be some aspects of the Act which this Government will have a different view of from the last Government. It has made very clear for example its views on provisions dealing with Te Tiriti. Now we may not like it on this side of the House but we accept that the Government has a mandate to change provisions like that.But that does seem to me to be a huge waste of resources to have the framework for effective economic regulation and consumer protection there—that I must say was very usefully considered by the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee and the National members on that committee had some very useful input particularly around dispute resolution. There's a dispute resolution scheme in there as well which we absolutely need for consumers of water services. The National Party true to form was a good advocate for bringing developers into that dispute resolution scheme and it was tweaked accordingly so that developers could actually arbitrate or mediate where local bodies or water providers weren't able essentially to do connections to unlock development land.Now that's all really critical and it's going to be critical whatever framework—in terms of the entities the ownership model the financing model or whatever you have. And this particular piece of legislation is not embedded in it. It is not inextricably linked. So it just strikes me as really disappointing and a little confusing that the Minister has chosen to repeal this piece of legislation fundamentally a piece of legislation which increases effectiveness increases innovation and increases efficiency and increases quality—all things that I think both you and I Minister would agree are good things in respect of water. So why is it that this bill is headed for the trash can when in fact it's got to be a really important foundation for any water system going forward?And I do want to mention before I close that the consumer aspect is also really important—that one of the problems we have is that ratepayers pay for their water one way or another but they have almost no ability to take issue with the quality of the service they get whether it be the brown water that comes into the bathtub in Geraldine or the water that doesn't come at all in some parts of Gore or the water that spills all over the street in Wellington. There's no ability to complain about it.Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Local Government): I thank the members for their questions. In relation to Duncan Webb's question around why we're repealing the Water Services Economic Efficiency and Consumer Protection Act 2023 we're repealing that because that legislation was designed based on the 10-entity model. The Government is going to be developing an economic regulation regime that works for councils and we're progressing this later in the year."