Sage EugenieHon EUGENIE SAGE (Green): Tēnā koe Madam Speaker. Thank you. It is a major step forward to have a national regulator for drinking water and I really congratulate Minister Mahuta and officials in the Department of Internal Affairs particularly Michael Petherick and Francesca Algie and others for taking the recommendations of the Havelock North inquiry for working with councils with iwi and others in developing the legislation last year to establish Taumata Arowai seeing it formally established in March this year as a new Crown entity and this bill putting in place the regulatory framework that Taumata Arowai will administer and operate.So it is bringing all drinking-water supplies except domestic self-supplies like those that depend on a rainwater tank within the framework. It means that all drinking-water supplies must provide water that is safe that meets drinking-water standards and it obliges suppliers to act when drinking water fails to meet those standards or there are risks to public health. So there are certainly increased responsibilities and duties on drinking-water suppliers. They do have to register with Taumata Arowai. They have to have a source water risk management plan. They have to have and implement a drinking water safety plan with a multi-barrier approach to protection and they have to review that regularly. There are also duties of due diligence similar to those in the health and safety at work legislation.Really importantly too Taumata Arowai has more tools and a much more comprehensive compliance monitoring and enforcement regime. It's got the ability to issue compliance orders the ability to have infringement offences and also a requirement to do much more comprehensive monitoring. The Havelock North inquiry was damning about the previous system for regulating drinking water. It found that district health boards had taken no formal enforcement action over 11 years between 2007 and 2018. That's why it's really disappointing that the National Party having established the inquiry into the Havelock North contamination is not supporting this bill because we need an effective regulator and we need one which has got adequate compliance monitoring and enforcement powers.Certainly acknowledge in the Green Party the concerns of some of the community and rural water suppliers about the administrative costs of this legislation and its impacts on them given that they provide a lot of time energy and expertise on a voluntary basis. There will be costs of registering with Taumata Arowai. There may be some costs of having consultants in to develop things like a drinking water safety plan. But the Greens really support small suppliers being under this law because the Havelock North inquiry found that many small communities have drinking water which doesn't comply with drinking-water standards because there's no regulatory oversight of them. It found that there had been no marked improvement in the number of suppliers providing safe drinking water since 2009 and non-compliance with the drinking-water standards was entrenched amongst those small suppliers. In fact in the Ministry of Health's 2018-2019 report on compliance with drinking-water standards only 28 percent of the community drinking-water suppliers which were supplying between 100 and 500 users complied with the drinking-water standards. That is not acceptable.The Government has committed $30 million in the Budget last year to help drinking-water suppliers the smaller ones get up to standard. There has been a real commitment both in the legislation and practically by Taumata Arowai to develop these acceptable solutions or safe harbour arrangements which provide a pathway to comply with the law. If you have a look on the website not only is there an acceptable solution for agricultural supplies but there is also one for spring and bore water drinking-water supplies. So I think Taumata Arowai has recognised the importance of really developing these practical safe harbour standards which are fit for purpose for the different types of small suppliers. It may well be that they need an off-the-shelf cartridge filter or a UV treatment which can be provided at the end of point.So the National member Penny Simmonds' claim that the legislation was a one-size-fits-all—I totally reject that because the bill has never had that one-size-fits-all approach. It's really got a strong ethos of being proportionate to the scale complexity and risk profile of the drinking-water supply. In fact there were further changes made in select committee to give Taumata Arowai more flexibility here particularly around the review of the drinking water safety plans. So it is proportionate.But one thing I would really like to encourage the Government to do is in relation to Part 4. Now clauses 191 and 192 of the bill enable the Government to set regulations which provide for Taumata Arowai to recover all of its costs in performing its functions duties and responsibilities from drinking-water suppliers waste-water and stormwater network operators through fees and levies. Some policy work is under way I understand on this but that the Government hasn't yet made decisions on the cost recovery component of Taumata Arowai's funding.We want the suppliers to focus on improving infrastructure and improving service delivery. It would be a false economy if those in Treasury thought to impose a really high cost recovery regime which meant that Taumata Arowai was setting high fees for suppliers to comply with the responsibilities in the Act. It will create resentment. It will undermine the cooperative relationships which need to develop and it will undermine the process of developing trust in the sector. It's in our national interest that this new regulatory framework works well. It will benefit both human health and the environment. So central government needs to invest adequate Crown funding in Taumata Arowai to avoid the lumpy funding which a cost recovery regime can create and then the lumpy resourcing and staffing that can result from that.Just in the remaining time the three waters changes that Government is proposing relate to this bill. We've got a new regulatory agency. Because of the number of suppliers it's going to take a lot of work to ensure that those are all registered and meeting the Act's requirement and yet we have this major reform in three waters. The Green Party recognises that the status quo isn't adequate. We need more investment in three waters infrastructure and we need more scale to achieve that. Yet only yesterday the Christchurch City Council unanimously decided to opt out. Other councils like Waimakariri are doing the same. Canterbury mayors have called for a pause on three waters to enable the Government to explore more options for how governance works in the new system how funding and service delivery works. You've got former Labour Ministers—the mayors of Christchurch and Auckland—calling for more work here. Yet Minister Mahuta in her responses in the House today was indicating that there's no opportunity for a pause.This reform is too important to get wrong. There needs to be more work to ensure that there is a direct role for councils in the governance of the assets that communities have developed over decades. There needs to be a real conversation around how central government can help better fund this infrastructure. Certainly there has been an additional funding proposed so that no local councils are worse off through the changes but we need to ensure that council ideas—because it's councils that know how these systems operate in practice. There is an opportunity for other options than this complicated regional group which decides on the nominations for the boards of the new entities that there's more direct and community involvement because these are community services and community infrastructure.So I really congratulate the Government on getting this bill to this point but it needs to listen to councils in terms of the three waters reform and allow a greater opportunity for that dialogue and genuine consultation with the public which hasn't happened to date. Kia ora.