Burns Brendon: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
Burns Brendon: Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill — Third Reading 
[Volume:660;Page:15602] 
BRENDON BURNS (Labour—Christchurch Central) 
: 
 The Local Government Act 2002 Amendment Bill represents blind ideology and outdated ideology at that which the rest of the world has in large part abandoned. It is based on an absolute belief that the market can and will get it right in privatising water supplies and with sinister intent this bill also removes public health oversight of the management of public water supplies. It is not the first such move. It has been accompanied by several other similar efforts by this Government and I note most particularly the Environment Canterbury bill that was passed under urgency in 30 hours in March of this year. It took away the role of councillors in the public oversight of the management of Canterbury’s water. There has been overwhelming public submission on this bill saying that New Zealanders do not want to see their councils putting water into private ownership by providing for a 35-year tenure effectively a generation. If it looks like privatisation if it smells like privatisation then indeed it is privatisation. 
New Zealanders know the risks of that. This morning I received an email from a woman known to me who 20 years ago was working in the United Kingdom. One of her tasks involved the clean-up in a metaphorical sense of the aftermath of the biggest water-poisoning incident ever seen in the UK at a place called Camelford under an organisation called South West Water which was one of the first water boards privatised by the Thatcher Government. A contractor to that company accidentally dumped 20 tonnes of aluminium sulphate into the wrong tank. It led into the water supply of communities that fed off the supply from South West Water and hundreds of people were made sick. But the interesting thing about this case was the cover-up. It took more than 20 years and a coronial inquiry before people were told the facts of what had happened. The reason for that was the Thatcher Government did not want to have this made public. It did not want any taint attached to the privatisation project it had under way for the water boards and schemes of Britain. The eventual result was simply that South West Water was prosecuted for the total sum of £10000. It was fined £10000 for an incident that caused hundreds of people to become sick. Some people suffered permanent injuries due to aluminium poisoning. Although 148 people were able to bring a case and get some very modest compensation they had to fight through the courts to get compensation for their ongoing health problems. 
As the email this morning said: “Having seen that and remembering what a terrible mistake it was” that woman hopes “it never happens in New Zealand.” She said “I see that the Government is saying it is not about privatisation but about management.” Yes believe it if you will. This is about the privatisation of our water supply and it is part of a concerted effort by this Government not involving just this particular bill. It extends I believe for instance to a contract awarded 3 or 4 months ago by Tony Ryall as the Minister of Health. The contract for the oversight of our nation’s drinking water is worth $2.25 million and is a job that used to be one of the core functions of the Ministry of Health. It had a team of five or six water engineers and other such experts who were there as part of the core public function of ensuring our water was safe to drink. But they have gone; there is only one staff member. Instead we are paying $2.25 million worth of public money to a consortium that includes American engineering consortium Parsons Brinckerhoff who are involved in water privatisation schemes all over the world. 
This is all very much part of the same approach—that the market will deliver—although the experience around the world has been that when it goes wrong it goes absolutely horribly wrong. It is rampant ideology at work. It is contracting out to the private sector what should be a core function of government. We can argue across this Parliament about what the core functions of government should be and I would be happy to take part in that debate but if members opposite want to argue that oversight of our drinking water is not a core function of the State then I would like to know what the heck is a core function of the State. I believe that drinking water is a basic human right and it is essential infrastructure. It deserves to be in public ownership overseen by officials who do not have any concerns other than making sure that water is safe to drink that the supplies are up to scratch and that targets do not have to be met in respect of providing returns to a private consortium. Yet here we have a bill paving the way for our water supplies to be put into 35-year ownership contracts. Those contracts will be put into private hands for a generation a lifetime of private ownership. 
An example comes from Britain in respect of what happened under one of the first privatised contracts. Hundreds of people were poisoned by the misapplication of chemicals. It took people 20 years to get justice. I argue very strongly that if that incident had involved a publicly owned entity there would have been answerability on that issue one would hope in a parliamentary democracy. Hundreds of people were made sick very very quickly and I hope that answerability have would have come irrespective of which party was in power. 
But there are other examples outside of that example in Britain. The Local Government and Environment Committee which considered this bill heard a submission from the Canterbury District Health Board. It was the most explicit submission I think I have ever heard from public officials. They said to the Government that removing sections 125 to 129 from the Local Government Act 2002 effectively removes the regulations about water and sanitary services and the oversight provided independently by the medical officer of health. So we have it happening on two levels. In the Canterbury District Health Board the medical officer of health’s role in terms of the oversight of the water schemes is obliterated by this bill. The private sector will be running and will be responsible for the monitoring and testing of the quality of the water that they are making their living from. 
So at the local level the oversight is gone. Meanwhile at the head office of the Ministry of Health the team that oversaw that has been decimated and replaced by a private consortium with the profit motive at the heart of it. Our chances of having anybody in public office being able to stand up and blow the whistle on schemes that are not working are gone are obliterated by those double acts of the Government both by this bill and by the non-announced move by the Minister of Health. The  
Press 
 newspaper and I publicised recently that the contract had gone to Allen and Clarke in concert with eight other parties including the American conglomerate Parsons Brinckerhoff. Here we have at two levels nationally and locally the oversight of the safety of our water going into private hands for 35 years. There will be no oversight. 
I commend the Canterbury District Health Board officials for their bravery in putting forward their submission on which we have not had a response from the Minister. I wonder why that is. I still invite members opposite in the time remaining—Canterbury members in particular or those like the chair of the Local Government and Environment Committee whose electorate might be going into a district health board with Canterbury—to stand up and take a call to defend the Government’s overriding of the concerns of people with no agenda with no axe to grind. Public health officials said in their submission to the committee that the role they have played in providing an oversight of drinking-water schemes will go with the passage of this bill and that we are putting the oversight of water standards into private ownership. 
The officials are extraordinarily explicit in saying that what this is doing is parallel to what happened in the community of Walkerton Ontario in 2000 after a Government came in with a big agenda to sweep away the red tape and regulations that were strangling the Ontario economy. And what happened? Walkerton went into a scheme without any oversight from public health officials and seven people died and about 100 people were made seriously sick. The cost to that community and to Ontario was estimated at $200 million. In fact in total 2500 people got sick from the outbreak of E. coli that happened in that community. That is a forerunner of the risks this Government is taking not only with putting our water supply into private ownership for 35 years with the potential for councils to pick that up which they will but also with the fact that we are taking away health oversight. I say that this Government is taking an extraordinary risk with public health for reasons of blind ideology. It does not make sense. New Zealand will end up paying a very high price for the pernicious legislation that this Government has put in front of us today.