Kuriger BarbaraBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki-King Country): Thank you Mr Speaker. The problem with this piece of legislation and a number of other pieces that we're doing is that they're being done in a piecemeal way. It's really short-sighted in terms of climate adaptation and the lack of a climate adaptation bill to be putting in piecemeal pieces of legislation that deal in water pipes and not think broader than that. I was listening to the Hon Eugenie Sage before about the sponge city approach and I know we've been going through in the Environment Committee looking at other pieces of legislation—as the cyclones have been happening—thinking about how our stormwater does disappear. I feel like this is being pushed in a way that's not given each of our councils a chance to think about how they might do that but aggregates them all in such a way that they're going to be pushed together—thinking about pipes thinking about dividing things up thinking about putting things together and not thinking about the landscape as it currently sits—in terms of solving this problem.Labour doesn't like to use the term three waters" because they know it's become so toxic so they now call it "affordable water reforms". On this side of the House we don't believe it's either affordable—or it's neither affordable or it is not a real change to the reforms that were being proposed. It's still the same three waters and Kiwis know that it's the same three waters.We hear a lot about smaller councils missing out. When you look at a place like Taranaki where you've got three councils around the maunga and you've got the Taranaki Regional Council it's a nice compact region. One can see how those councils have been so willing to work together—already do; don't need to be pushed together; know how to do it in a way that's constructive. But when you actually look at an entity like the Waikato Regional Council and you look everywhere from the Coromandel which is extremely broken at the moment from severe cyclone after cyclone after cyclone—and not only are their roads broken but their water system a lot of the infrastructure is broken. Take that all the way down through Hamilton City and down to the bottom end of the Waikato Regional Council to a place called Mōkau—it's very hard to imagine how each of those councils including the small regional councils are even going to get any thought I guess around what might be needed locally in any particular given water situation because everything is so vast and so different.That's why we on this side of the House believe that councils should have the right to be able to aggregate in a way that they believe if they wish to because they know where the natural landscape fits they know where the natural resourcing is around the communities and they have a vision on the ground of how it all fits together—not something that's arbitrarily drawn on a map by central government.There is one thing that really worries me about this and it talks about mixed-use rural water supplies: "Water service entities must prepare in consultation with farmers and other interested parties a rural supply plan for each mixed-use rural water supply in its service area." And then it says that that entity must review the water supply plans at least every three years. Someone on the other side might explain to me how they're going to get through that even in a three-year process because rural supply plans are so mixed and varied. One of the things we can see is that those who are supplying houses that perhaps aren't connected with farming businesses are just as likely to pick up the pipes and go "Well if I'm going to be responsible for all of this extra bureaucracy" and they're going to actually cut the houses off. The councils will then have to go and find another way and another responsibility to supply those houses with water.So we on this side of the House are very sceptical. Again by the time we get this bill—we get the two Resource Management Act bills that were passed last week we get the climate adaptation bill which we don't yet have this bill and local government reform. We're scratching our heads as to how it will all fit together. It's not good legislation. Thank you Mr Speaker."