Abel Steve; Russell Deborah; Brown SimeonSTEVE ABEL (Green): Thank you Madam Chair. I'm pleased to be speaking to this for the first time and I'll begin with Part 1 also. Given Minister that this legislation is replacing the Water Services Entities Act—or is the beginning of replacing that Act—one question I've got is to understand the decisions to exclude certain key things in the purpose of the bill. The purpose of the Water Services Entities Act was to enable long-term sustainable improvements in the safety quality resilience accessibility affordability efficiency and performance of water services and water services infrastructure.Now there are some very pertinent and important terms captured by that purpose things that most New Zealanders think would be a good thing to expect of our water service providers. So my question is why you would remove so many of those things such as the obvious one being safety of water or quality of water in your purpose of the bill which simply states The purpose of this Act is to establish a framework for local government to manage and deliver water services."—no reference to safety to quality to resilience to accessibility affordability. That's my first question. The second question is that glaringly absent from the purpose is any mention of Te Tiriti o Waitangi which was of course in the Water Services Entities Act in its purpose requiring those entities to give effect to the principles of Te Tiriti o Waitangi the Treaty of Waitangi and Te Mana o te Wai.Now I understand we will speak about Te Mana o te Wai later but Te Tiriti o Waitangi is glaringly absent from this legislation. It was one of the points that was raised in submissions by the Pou Taiao Iwi Chairs Forum: "The bill's proposals lack any acknowledgment of the Government's Te Tiriti obligations to iwi and hapū despite this Government maintaining that it continues to hold the position articulated in the affidavit of the Rt Hon Bill English which acknowledged that Māori have rights and interests in water and geothermal resources and there is no reference at all to iwi and hapū participation in the delivery and decision making in respect of the mechanisms proposed."It is quite an extraordinary thing to remove any reference to Te Tiriti given the very significant importance of water of wai to tangata whenua Māori. I would like the Minister to explain why that has been removed entirely from the purpose of the bill.Further down we see other purposes providing for monitoring and oversight arrangements. We have to understand in the context and I will speak to this later of the disaster that happened in the Hawke's Bay with contamination there ensuring water services infrastructure is retained in public ownership—I wonder if the Minister can give us an assurance that water services infrastructure will be retained in public ownership and why that would not be kept or included as a purpose of this new bill ensuring that water services infrastructure is not operated for the purpose of generating profit for shareholders. That seems to be a thing that most New Zealanders given that water is a human right would agree with. I wonder if the Minister can please give an answer as to why he would not keep that as a purpose in this new piece of legislation. Thank you.Hon Dr DEBORAH RUSSELL (Labour): Thank you Madam Chair. I want to follow on from my colleague Rachel Brooking's previous contribution where she had a good look at some of the definitions and some of the quite detailed clauses in Part 1. There's one particular phrase that has caught my eye and I've looked for a definition of it and I can't find it but it's sitting there in Part 1 in the purpose cause. So I want to direct the Minister's attention to clause 3(2)(c). The particular phrase that I'm interested in there is "specified foundational information".Now "specified" is possibly neither here nor there. It's the sort of phrase I would expect to be defined because it's kind of meaningless in itself. So we don't quite know what "foundational" is and that's the word that's doing the work there so what is this foundational information?Typically in order to work that out we'd just sort of pop through to the definition section of the bill. Sitting in clause 5 is the interpretation and so I looked for the two obvious phrases "specified foundational information" and that's not there. So I looked for "foundational information" and that's not there either so there's a little bit of a mystery as to what that phrase means.Now looking further through because again the obvious thing to do is to look for some definition further through in the bill and without foreshadowing the debate on Part 2 Subpart 3 of Part 2 does talk about foundational information so I scanned through there to see if I could find some sort of definition there. It may well be that by the time someone has worked all the way through the bill and has gotten to that particular part they understand what foundational information means. But here it is sitting right up in the preliminary provisions of the bill where we would expect at least some signalling as to where that foundational information is defined as to what it is.So that's I guess quite a technical little point but it goes to exactly what my colleague the Hon Rachel Brooking was talking about in terms of information sitting there for the benefit of lawyers for the benefit of law students so it is sitting there in the Hansard so that people coming to this bill actually understand what it is trying to achieve and understand the technical detail of it without having to go as I've just had to do trying to track down little bits and pieces like that.Of course my particular background is in tax law and there's a lot of definitional work that goes on there and I know where to find stuff. Typically we can find our way through bills but I could not find that particular definition. I suspect it's easily fixed. It might just be that I've just missed it because I couldn't find where it's defined but even then I would expect to see it where that phrase which is a little bit unusual first pops up. Again I think it's the word "foundational" that's doing the work there. If it was just "specified information" I'd go "Oh yeah whatever." but it's that particular little word "foundational".So I think if we could have some advice from the Minister or even just saying "Actually maybe we'd better fix this up and we'll just find a wee bit of a way of signalling where we're saying what that foundational information is." so that right up the front we can understand the structure of this bill and what it is trying to achieve. So I'll look forward to hearing that from the Minister or perhaps his officials. It is a somewhat simple question but hopefully there is a simple answer to it.Hon SIMEON BROWN (Minister of Local Government): Thank you Madam Chair and I thank the members for their questions. In relation to the member Steve Abel's questions there was a range of things which he highlighted as to signalling why they are not in there. In relation to water quality water safety there is significant water regulation that Taumata Arowai is responsible for in terms of drinking-water standards. Those provisions which are under obviously separate legislation continue to apply to water service providers and so those don't change.There are questions in relation to the Treaty of Waitangi. Ultimately councils will still be required to meet any specified obligations that they have under the local government legislation. This doesn't change any of this. This bill is about a framework for councils to determine how they wish to deliver water services in their communities and they'll continue to operate within existing obligations during that process.In relation to the question around foundational information I found that five minutes of my time leaving me very quickly but I would just point the member to potentially a dictionary for the word "foundational" and another one a dictionary for the word "information" but also there is a Part 2. Again I'd point the member to Part 2. It goes into a lot more detail around that particular issue and so I'm happy to have further discussion around that question at that point."