Abel SteveSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Mr Speaker. I'd like to speak to the Local Government (Water Services Preliminary Arrangements) Bill at its third reading. This is the bumper sticker of this Government. It's a bumper-sticker law that they speak so much about and it involves kicking the can of contaminated drinking water broken old pipes and sewage on beaches down the road. It is my prediction that there will be two obvious consequences from this legislation. Your drinking water will become lower quality—this is the members' not yours personally Mr Speaker but yours too possibly. The public's water will become lower quality. Rivers will become more polluted and sewage will keep contaminating our oceans and our beaches. That is the first thing that is likely to happen as a consequence of this legislation.The alternative to that is that conscientious councils will invest to fix the water infrastructure that is so desperately lacking in investment and the rates will go up as my other colleague on this side of the House Kieran McAnulty pointed out. The rates will go up and those councils who've done the right thing will be punished by their electorate and blamed for the failure of central government to take responsibility for fixing the long-term infrastructure of our water. And that silly slogan Stop three waters"—as if it's a good idea to stop drinking water and stop waste water and stop stormwater but that's essentially what this bill will have some effect on doing. It will stop the proper investment in that fundamental infrastructure.That slogan was closely associated with another slogan during the election campaign: "Stop co-governance" which the previous speaker Tākuta Ferris was speaking to directly. And that was the classic anti-iwi anti-Māori race-baiting fear-mongering basis on which this Government won its way into Parliament and it's a scurrilous undermining of our fundamental obligations as a nation to uphold the rights of iwi and hapū to the exercise of their rangatiratanga including in regard to fresh water.Now it is rare for there to be a visionary insight to come into the formulation of our legislation and our law but one of those visionary insights was Te Mana o Te Wai. Te Mana o Te Wai is a concept from te ao Māori which grapples with how we approach the hierarchy of obligations in regard to water and it recognises the primordial truth that water is the source of life. Water is where life began. I remember my colleague opposite Ryan Hamilton when I mentioned that I'd take it back to the beginning and he said "What Genesis?". And I said "Yes let's talk about Genesis because you'll remember in the second verse of Genesis that exquisite language about the spirit of God moving across the face of the deep." Before even there was the creation of light there was the interaction of the Creator with water. Life began in water—this is where science and religion agree. Life began in water.So it turns out that perhaps the most sensible way to deal with what we prioritise in water is to put the hierarchy of prioritising the health and the wellbeing of the water itself first. And out of that prioritisation of water itself you will find also drinking water will be better off. And then you will find also the other uses our society wants to make of water will be better met.Te Mana o Te Wai has a primordial genius to it and this Government doesn't like anything that is wise or deep or thoughtful or has foresight that's going to soothe the interests of the future. There is wisdom in it and that's the sort of thing that we would like to see in a legislative framework. You can in a sense judge a society by the way it treats its freshwater and this Government is sending our freshwater into a worse place with this legislation because it fails to actually take care of that fundamental necessity of life not just for us as humans but life for all things—the thing where indeed life began.We will be opposing this bill. We expect to see drinking water getting worse. As my colleague also pointed out this whole concept of dealing with a new structure for water came out of the sickness and death that occurred in the Hawke's Bay around water contamination. I expect sadly that over the coming years as a result of this Government we're going to see more of that."