Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Mr Assistant Speaker. It's an absolute pleasure to rise in support of the Gore District Council (Otama Rural Water Supply) Bill in this its second reading. I too want to acknowledge Mr Tom Affleck who has come up from Gore to witness this stage at least of the progression of the bill. I want to acknowledge the support that seems evident around the House for the bill today. I particularly do want to thank the members of the Governance and Administration Committee.We've actually made a bit of a habit in local bills of travelling around New Zealand so that the people affected by those local bills can have every opportunity to make submissions. We have travelled to Thames we have travelled to Richmond and we also did travel to Gore. The members of the committee were very obliging. I will note too that the hospitality of the people of Gore is not simply legendary it is in reality absolutely fantastic. Not only did we get an extremely warm welcome but the catering was just sublime. I made a point on our return of letting the Clerk of the House know that the bar has been lifted for catering of select committees. He watches these proceedings and I take this opportunity to remind him that the Office of the Clerk is scrutinised by our committee and at the estimates and annual review hearings he might see the judges hold up scorecards based on the quality of catering over the next few months in our select committee rooms. But I do definitely thank the people of Gore for welcoming us the way they did.Now it's a pretty simple decision to want to support this bill if for no other reason than the scheme itself has always been the responsibility of the scheme users. They built the thing; they've maintained it since they built it; they put in the capital expense and the work to upgrade it when it needed it; and they know as do the residents of Gore that if further work were required on it—whether it be water standard - based or indeed physical infrastructure - based—yet again it would be the scheme users that put their elbows to the grindstone and their own money and make that happen. So it's very easy to go to Gore and to stand here supporting the initiative to ensure that what they have built and maintained remains theirs.It was a quirk of history—a nature of the entity structure of the scheme—which meant that it couldn't be a legal owner of assets that saw those assets come under the legal ownership of the Gore District Council. It's a process which has left a number of scheme users feeling like their assets were expropriated from them—not maliciously but simply by that quirk of legal circumstance that what they had built and thought they owned was no longer theirs. So it's very simple to want to help them to get that back. Now we have absolute confidence that the law will demand that should the Three Waters Review result in some changes such as water quality standards and the like we know that the law will require the scheme users to comply with those and we have every confidence that they'll ensure that they do.I just want to take this moment to acknowledge the member from New Zealand First Mark Patterson who sponsored the bill and also particularly the local MP Hamish Walker who not only came with us to Gore but made sure that he sat in on the committee proceedings as it went through our committee as well. I think it's good to see. I believe the local residents will appreciate the close support they're getting from representatives. I also want to take this moment to acknowledge the Government members not just on the committee but what I anticipate is going to be their vote in a little while. They expressed concerns during the process that with the Three Waters Review they might have preferred that this bill be parked until it was complete. We took the chance to articulate some reasons why we didn't feel that was necessary and the Government members supported the bill's progression through the select committee on that basis and from what I can gather in the speeches to date it looks like they're going to follow that up with their voting support today as well. So I acknowledge them for doing that. I'm pleased to see that they agree with us; that is the right thing to do and I commend this bill to the House.