Patterson MarkMARK PATTERSON (NZ First): Madam Deputy Speaker thank you and it is a pleasure to sum up this first reading. I would like to thank the House for their indication of support for this bill. I will seek to overlook the very poor attempts to roll the Rs and I'm sure there'll be some southern MPs myself included that will be needing to douse down some local offence as of course everyone is watching with bated breath down there—it is an important local issue. I think actually Jacqui Dean referred to the Cold Creek farmers and their appearance before the select committee and I can tell you know that the Ōtama water users—farmers—will be here as well and in some numbers because this matters to them. This absolutely means something to them. They put this scheme in themselves. They drove this scheme they put it in—the 90 hours of labour that they required to put in to get this scheme up and running and in the ground. And isn't that a bygone era? In some ways I just reflect on that—that we've come as a society almost backwards in some point where we've had to wrap everything up in cotton wool and today we wouldn't be able to do what we did. There would be too many health and safety concerns. So I commend the House for focusing on what is the core issue here. It is enabling local people to make local decisions based on local reasons—and demonstrably so with that 76 percent decision in favour of progressing this bill from the local people. I'd also like to thank the House for well referencing—not seeking to broaden this debate out into the wider issue of water quality. We know we have this Havelock situation that was incredibly unfortunate. We know this is part of a wider debate. Public policy will have to be looked at in this sense and it is being looked at but the House as a whole has focused on the core issue here. And of course as also referenced we are sitting on rock-solid precedent with the South Taranaki District Council (Cold Creek Rural Water Supply) Act of 2013. The Otama Rural Water Supply Committee themselves have to be absolutely commended on the way they have researched and resourced bringing this bill forward. They have left absolutely no stone unturned. They've bought the best legal advice that money can buy and they know they're on rock-solid ground. That's ultimately why this House is swinging in behind.Of course as Mr McKelvie and others mentioned the delivery of water is an absolutely fundamental service—not only the potable water the drinking water that's obviously for households to be able to survive but the stock water and what that does for productivity. These schemes coming in allowed subdivision—paddocks to be divided up—on appropriate areas as opposed to having make fence lines around the contour where they could capture some water. So this is a really important tenet of farming to be able to subdivide those paddocks. The productivity gains that will have come from this scheme will have been enormous back in the time. I'm always really proud of this statistic and I mention it often in the House and I know others do too from the South but Southland produces 14 percent of this nation's GDP from 1.5 percent of the population. This is an incredibly incredibly productive and contributing area to our country as a whole and most of that I might add is through small rural areas just like Ōtama and the surrounds—the surrounds that are covered by the bill that we are debating here.So on behalf of the good people of Ōtama on behalf of the Gore District Council I do thank the House for swinging in behind and supporting this bill in such an overwhelming and complimentary manner. It is with this that I take great pleasure in commending this bill to the House.Bill read a first time. Bill referred to the Governance and Administration Committee.