Sage Eugenie; Tolley AnneHon EUGENIE SAGE (Minister of Conservation): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker thank you very much. I'm puzzled by the Opposition's apparent lack of interest in the Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill and their very short comments on the bill because it is a really significant issue and because the Havelock North incident happened on their watch even though it was fundamentally the problem of the local district council.This bill is important because as the Minister the Hon David Clark has said this is the legislative groundwork and really the first steps in improving the safety of the drinking water in New Zealand. While many speakers have of course referred to Havelock North and the 5000 or more people that were badly affected by gastroenteritis there as a result of sheep faeces getting into the drinking-water supply this is not a new incident for New Zealand. In fact the Ministry for the Environment has noted that we have got one of the highest rates of gastroenteritis in the developed world and that water-borne diseases cost our country $25 million annually. Of course drinking water is one of the key routes by which people are exposed to micro-organisms that cause diseases like campylobacteriosis and gastroenteritis.So certainly the Havelock North event was the largest recorded incident of drinking-water contamination in our country but it is not isolated. In Queenstown in 1984 an estimated 3500 people became ill. A drinking-water source at the Cardrona ski field in July 2006 caused another 120 cases of illness—again because it was drinking water. There have been significant cases of gastroenteritis in Springston. One of the worst public meetings that I have been at was in 2008 when the Springston community came together because the community medical officer of health for Canterbury had noted that there was an increasing incidence of gastroenteritis and that a lot of the cases were from Springston. When you heard mothers talk about being scared of washing their children in tap water because of the risk of getting sick that highlighted to me the absolutely critical importance not just for what we drink but for how we use water in the home and the major concern it can cause communities if they cannot trust what comes out of their tap. In New Zealand we have tended to take it for granted that what comes out of the tap is safe.So this bill—and I commend Dr Liz Craig for the very detailed explanation that she gave of the precise changes that it makes—makes it much easier for the standards to be improved more rapidly because it dates back to about 2008 when the standards were put in place. The ability to amend them to take account of the increased agricultural intensification which puts drinking-water supplies at risk is really important. This bill is the first step to safeguarding drinking-water sources in New Zealand and drinking-water supplies. It's part of a much larger chunk of work that the Government has undertaken—Minister Nanaia Mahuta is leading that with the Three Waters work with the commitment to putting in place a drinking-water regulator to focus attention on ensuring that drinking-water supplies are of an appropriate standard.We also need to significantly invest in the infrastructure around drinking water and also stormwater and waste water but most importantly we need to safeguard the sources of drinking-water supplies. The announcements that the Minister for the Environment the Hon David Parker made today are a critical part of doing that because unless the sources of supply are safeguarded it means councils and communities are subject to very high costs of doing increased water treatment. We have seen that with Auckland's high water demand and Watercare having to invest in very expensive osmosis plants to ensure that the water that is taken out of the Waikato River is of an appropriate standard for potable use. Similarly it is ensuring that regional councils are able to implement the national policy statement and the stronger provisions that there will be in that document through their regional plans to control land uses and safeguard drinking-water sources. So that work that the Hon David Parker is leading in the sustainable land and water space in significantly overhauling the Resource Management Act rather than just the tinkering that the former Government implemented to make the Act much longer more complicated and not as effective as it needs to be—that work in ensuring that land management protects drinking-water sources is a critical partner to this work which the Hon David Clark has put through in this bill because we cannot have it where people have to buy water in bottles to ensure that they have got a safe supply. People need to be able to rely on what comes out of the tap. We need to have councils maintaining their drinking-water supplies investing in the infrastructure and ensuring that water quality is regularly monitored and tested to keep communities safe in order to avoid a repeat of the Havelock North the Springston the Queenstown and the Cardrona incidents and also other incidents like in Darfield in 2012 when 137 people there became sick because the water supply again was contaminated and then was not chlorinated in that incident. We've also seen too many incidents of boil-water notices in smaller communities. Kieran McAnulty: That's right—like Martinborough. Hon EUGENIE SAGE: Martinborough in the Wairarapa was one of the most recent. So again protecting the source of the supply and preventing it from being contaminated by animals is really important and again that's where this Government with its investment in ensuring that there will be stock fenced out of waterways and excluded from waterways and in ensuring much stronger standards for sustainable land and water management is looking at the bigger picture to ensure that we safeguard those supplies not just for current generations but also for future generations. So it's a big integrated package. This small bill by allowing standards to be improved more nimbly is a part of that but it is a much wider chunk of work that the Government is engaged with to dramatically improve the security of drinking-water supplies to safeguard and improve water quality throughout Aotearoa and to protect that for present and future generations. So I commend this bill to the House for being a step along that way. DEPUTY SPEAKER: I call the Hon Tim Macindoe. This should be a split call.