Rurawhe AdrianADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare otirā tēnā tātou katoa. It is a pleasure to take a call on the Building (Pools) Amendment Bill. We cannot be too complacent about water safety and this bill is all about water safety. As a youngster I grew up in the small town of Taihape where not very many people had their own pools and so we all had to go down to the river or to the local swimming pool.Denis O'Rourke: That wasn't fenced either.ADRIAN RURAWHE: No they were not fenced at all. The barriers were not that great to get into the local swimming pool which the local kids did. I did not; I never did that of course—jumped over the fence. We cannot be too complacent about water safety. As has been pointed out by other speakers we are bringing in new regulations around pool safety and water safety because too many New Zealanders drown and too many of our children drown. Interestingly I was reading that the number of children who drown around Christmas-time is particularly bad and so I just wanted to note that. At the first reading which I spoke on Labour supported this bill to go to the Local Government and Environment Committee. We felt that there were some things in this bill that were very worthwhile. We felt that it could be better. Through the select committee stage I noted the select committee made some amendments that do in fact make the bill better. But at the second reading Jacinda Ardern on our side indicated that we would put up a Supplementary Order Paper to make the bill even better than it is now. Unfortunately that Supplementary Order Paper was not accepted. I do not believe that this bill is as good as it could be for the following reasons. It is really about the option for pool owners to have alarmed doors rather than automatically closing doors. With an automatically closing door there is a direct action and intervention in that when the door is opened there is a mechanical action or intervention that happens automatically. With an alarm the action or intervention relies on human intervention. That is not automatic because human intervention requires someone to hear the alarm and then respond to it. There is no guarantee that when an alarm is set off because the door to the pool is open someone is going to intervene and that is very worrying for our party and for a number of members here tonight. I think the potential harm from not having an intervention or action taken every time an alarm goes off on a door is particularly worrying. I link it to some research in the United Kingdom over smoke alarms because with smoke alarms you need a direct intervention as well—like get out of the place. The research took place in the UK and the problem was that smoke alarms installed in small homes and flats would obviously because of the size of the flat go off from the toast burning or cooking smoke that in larger homes would not set off the alarm. So the action that people living in those sorts of situations took was to turn the alarm off. That is also a problem with alarmed doors going out to swimming pools. This is because someone could intervene and turn the alarm off for a number of reasons—mainly because the alarms are annoying when they go off when you actually want to leave the door open. They are annoying just like a smoke alarm that goes off every time you have breakfast and have toast. So that is concerning—that is very concerning. I support the statement by Eugenie Sage when she said that she did not want at some stage to be the one to say I told you so."—none of us want that. None of us want even a single child to drown because no one responded to the alarm or one child to drown because someone was annoyed with the alarm and disconnected it. None of us want that. I would not even want to be the one to say "I told you so." either but nor do I want that on my conscience by voting for this. So I say to the House that we will not be supporting this bill. We acknowledge the good things that the Local Government and Environment Committee has done to make this bill better but as I said before it could be much better and I am very concerned about having alarmed doors rather than automatically self-closing doors as the preferred option. I think if we take into account the difference in the cost between having an automatically closing door and an alarm—and it was mentioned that we must support new technology well there must surely be an opportunity for new technology to come up with automatically closing doors that are closer in cost to merely putting an alarm on that door. So as I said we will not be supporting this bill and I think members should think really carefully about those two options that I spoke about. Kia ora."