Craig LizDr LIZ CRAIG (Labour): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. As the previous speakers alluded to we have just had over the last century massive improvements in our public health infrastructure. As a country we've started to take our drinking water and our waste-water systems for granted and so it's not until things go wrong and when things go horribly wrong that we actually start to pay attention. With the case of Havelock North things did go horribly wrong because in August 2016 we had that outbreak of campylobacter and it affected about 5500 of the 14000 residents in that town. That is a massive public health outbreak by any standards. That would have kept the public health unit busy for a very very long time. What they saw was about 45 people admitted to hospital and maybe four cases where the outbreak may have contributed to deaths so it was a very very significant public health event. So it wasn't surprising that the Government of the time very quickly instituted an inquiry into what was happening. What they did was they instituted that in two stages. In the first stage they actually looked at what immediately had happened in that situation and what were the actions of those who were responsible for providing safe drinking-water. As has been discussed what they found was that agricultural runoff which was contaminated by sheep faeces after a rain event had entered an aquifer and that had got taken into the bore that had entered the water supply of the town. So there were multiple system failures there. But what they also found was that there were multiple system failures for those who were then responsible for ensuring a safe drinking supply. They then looked at stage two and stage two of that inquiry looked at that broader regulatory framework but also at what you would need to do to ensure that this wouldn't happen again. What that inquiry found was that this wasn't isolated to Havelock North but that this was happening all around the country and we needed a bigger systems approach to think about how we address safe drinking-water. So what this bill does is it puts in place some immediate changes to Part 2A of the Health Act to actually allow for urgent changes to happen to protect public safety. But it's only actually a holding pattern in a way because what we're looking at is that broader Three Waters Review because we've got ongoing infrastructure issues all around the country. So three waters—for those not familiar—is our drinking water our stormwater and our waste water. Where I live in Invercargill we've got big issues not so much with our drinking water but we've got an ageing system in terms of our other water infrastructure. So what happens is that we've got common trenches that have ageing old cracked pipes and if you're running a stormwater system at the same time as your sewerage system—what happens if you get big events or overflows? One can run into the other. So what we often have after rain events is raw sewage in our stormwater which is going out into our estuary and many of our local whānau like to use the estuary for kai moana or access it to go floundering. The problem we've got is that we've got significant water quality issues but the infrastructure costs are so significant that we are going to have that broader conversation about where we go in that three waters space and that's going to involve significant changes and significant public investment. But getting back to this bill this bill just puts in place some immediate changes so that we can improve our drinking-water quality and ensure those immediate public safety issues—as the Minister mentioned many have already been put in place. But what this bill does is it shortens the time period quite significantly that the Minister and the ministry need to consult before they make measures to improve drinking-water standards. At the moment the current Act requires the Minister to be satisfied that adequate consultation has happened over three years before changes can be made and so what this bill does is it still says you have to have adequate consultation but it just removes that three-year requirement. Then the other thing is that currently most drinking-water standards have to be published in the Gazette for at least two years before they can come into force. So what this bill does is it reduces the requirement down to 28 days of notification in the Gazette. So potentially the five long years before we could move to improve our drinking-water standards is now reduced down quite considerably which allows us to be much more nimble in terms of moving on how we improve our drinking-water quality.Some other minor changes that happened: one of the things identified in those inquiries is that some of those agencies responsible for looking after our drinking-water quality—there were compliance issues in terms of complying with those regulatory frameworks. What this requires is that those who have drinking-water suppliers who have got water safety plans in place which they are required to do must take all reasonable steps to ensure that they comply with the timetables of those plans. It means they've got to get on and act in a timely manner.Another issue that was identified in the inquiry was the way that drinking-water assessors were enforcing things. What this bill does is it streamlines the processes for the appointment of drinking-water assessors. It means we can get more assessors in place in a timely manner because at the moment there are quite a lot of workforce issues that need to be sorted out and we need to be able to get more of that workforce out there making sure that we've got decent water quality.So just summing up I think the Havelock North inquiry raised significant concerns about the way our drinking-water systems are managed around the country and a lot of those changes that we really need to grapple with are going to need to await that Three Waters Review. This bill puts in place some immediate measures. It makes sure that drinking-water standards can be improved in a timely manner; it makes sure water suppliers implement their water safety plans in accordance with the time lines that they've agreed to; and it makes sure that we can streamline the recruitment of drinking-water assessors so that we've got that workforce in place right now when we need it. So I therefore commend this bill to the House.