Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): The ACT Party supports this bill at the first reading. This bill centralises regulation around drinking water and while ACT would usually be sceptical of policy that removed power from local communities and towards central government in this particular context of drinking water in New Zealand and the way it's been managed to date by both councils and local government there is in fact a strong case for a new approach. Now the context of this bill is very important because it highlights a major issue that's facing our country right now and we've heard it alluded to by other speakers and that is the infrastructure deficit. The bill came before this House as a response to the Havelock North inquiry and that tragic event underscored major costs that can be borne by our communities where there is a failure of infrastructure especially when it comes to a critical part of our daily lives like drinking water. The bill therefore seeks to provide just one part of a solution to ensure New Zealanders can feel safe when they turn on the tap by providing a regulatory framework around drinking water. It follows the recommendations of the Havelock North inquiry so for that reason ACT supports the bill.It also highlights the fact that this issue has occurred because of the infrastructure deficit and the duties and powers that it gives the new entity will be helpful. But in terms of waste water and stormwater there is a big gap. The monitoring regime this sets up is designed to monitor councils' compliance against their own consents and fundamentally that is still a major problem for water quality in New Zealand. This bill deals with one of the three waters effectively—drinking water; potable water—but does not give any teeth to this agency to go after the poor performance of local government in managing waste-water networks and waste-water discharges and I think that needs a lot more work. So we look forward to hearing from submitters at the select committee stage about how they might propose to improve the controls set out in this bill. The bill is only one part of the solution to address the way we manage our water quality and hopefully our infrastructure that will follow. There have been a generation of poor incentives and a lack of prioritising of that type of infrastructure. So further questions hard questions need to be asked about the management of that infrastructure and the investments required particularly when local government can give itself 25-year consents to pollute urban waterways beaches and harbours in places like Auckland and Wellington where we know that local government has a plan—it might be a 10-year plan or a 30-year plan—to repair that infrastructure. That is inadequate compared to the expectations of people in those urban communities. When families go to the beaches this summer they don't expect that that water quality will be unsafe for swimming. But it's more than likely in some of those places and particularly where I live in West Auckland which have longstanding water quality issues associated with failing infrastructure. They can have little confidence and this bill does nothing to address that in the short or medium term. We've also heard from people who've discussed the bill today and from my discussions with others in the professional community who contributed to putting this bill together that the infrastructure deficit is not starting with the $500 million to $700 million that we've heard about as an initial contribution. Potentially the infrastructure deficit for the waste-water networks on their own is somewhere in the region of $10 billion to $15 billion and that doesn't include all of the time factors and finance costs as well. So we're looking at about $4 billion to upgrade water treatment plants for waste water and maybe another $6 billion to $7 billion on pipes. Now you know once you add up service relocations land acquisition consenting and additional costs potentially we're talking of an infrastructure deficit of about $30 billion. That's a major constraint on housing supply. Councils can't finance this new infrastructure when they're up against their borrowing limits. So we need to consider what other mechanisms might be available to help close this deficit and to help fund this work that needs doing. The Government has suggested potentially three or five regional water entities to take over the management of the drinking-water the potable water infrastructure and what we know is those entities like Watercare in Auckland or Wellington Water in Wellington also have the additional function of managing the waste-water networks. So these entities are likely to have a multidisciplinary approach to managing three waters. And that needs to be taken into account potentially in amendments to this bill or in other legislation that we would hope would follow to address the infrastructure deficit.Now we understand the Government is proposing public sector ownership for these new three waters corporations which unfortunately seems to exclude any private sector investment in these types of assets and networks. And when you consider the deficit is potentially $30 billion—the amount of money that would need to be applied in as short a time frame as possible to address urban water quality issues—it seems like there's an opportunity there waiting to be taken. We know that organisations like the Accident Compensation Corporation and the New Zealand Superannuation Fund have expressed an interest to invest in infrastructure. So we believe that there's an opportunity for public-private partnerships to add to the amount of funding that's available to close the infrastructure deficit far more quickly than would otherwise be available through normal local government or central government borrowing. So on that note I'd like to conclude by confirming that ACT will support the bill to the first reading and we look forward to making a positive contribution to this discussion going forward. Thank you Madam Speaker.