Sage Eugenie; Parker DavidHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. Another water question. Subpart 7 which is at the end of Part 2A deals with the establishment and role of the Freshwater Working Group—clause 30ZZI page 117 of the bill and following. That group has got to be established and has got to report back under the bill to the Minister not later than 31 October 2024. The Government established the Kāhui Wai Māori group to work on fresh water in 2018 to initiate a wider conversation with Māori. How does the Freshwater Working Group differ from Kāhui Wai Māori or will it build on the work of Kāhui Wai Māori group and has the Minister and the Government done any work to actually establish the Freshwater Working Group already? There's been a lot of work that's been done before the bill passes in terms of the National Planning Framework and I just wondered in terms of the quite compressed time frame to have that conversation on freshwater allocation with iwi and hapū at the regional and local level what work has been done already to get that group established going and how it relates to Kāhui Wai Māori?Hon DAVID PARKER (Minister for the Environment): Kāhui Wai Māori was largely dealing with water quality issues that were landed during the last Parliament through the changes to the National Policy Statement on Freshwater Management the new national environmental standard and some regulations that were passed at the same time as well as some amendments to the Resource Management Act which changed the process for the creation of water plans. So that group is if you like functus officio—doesn't do anything now; it's finished its job largely.This grouping here again there are viewpoints of some within Māoridom that this should be only freshwater iwi and hapū. It seems to me that that's a pretty narrow view of the interests that have to be considered. I think if you were coming up with a fair allocation methodology for water you would have to consider the interests of the likes of Māori land owner groups. There hasn't been much preparatory work gone into the creation of this group; although I intend in the next little while to write to people and say Look can you start forming this advisory group." It is a working group. It doesn't have determinative powers but it does set up a process that obliges the Government to actually deal with these long outstanding issues and try and bring them some time to a conclusion. It has a number of stages in the process and in the end subject to there being no national direction to the contrary—and by that time a future Government of whatever persuasion might have some further national direction on the issue—but in the absence of that additional national direction the decision would be left to the regional planning committee or a subcommittee of that regional planning committee to make the final determination as to what the plan would change. What the effect of this is to actually knock over "first in first served" as being essentially the way in which water is allocated. That was good historically. I know people are critical of "first in first served". When water was ample and there was more than enough to go around who did you serve it up to but the person who asked and which order did you serve it up? You gave it to the person who asked first because there's no competition for the water. That's "first in first served"; it just no longer works and has economically inefficient outcomes to the detriment of the New Zealand economy as well as unfair outcomes to the detriment of people who haven't got those historic water entitlements and perhaps didn't have the ability to use water because they lacked a capital base to develop their land. We need to work those issues through in the future as a country. This isn't the end of that process but it does create a process that will come to an end."