Woodhouse MichaelHon MICHAEL WOODHOUSE (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. Four years and four months since the Havelock North water contamination issues. That's quite a long time and I make the point not to criticise the Government for the slowness to act but the complexity of the solutions. The royal commission report into the water contamination outbreak made a number of very very substantive changes both to organisational structures responsibilities and standards and then the big thing that we haven't even got to which Simon Court the member from ACT who has just resumed his seat talked about is the massive infrastructure challenge both in term of structure and cost. But this is a milestone and the National Party will support it with some caveats. The one that I'm particularly concerned about is that I think the population of Havelock North is about 14000 or 15000 and one would expect living in a town of that size that water contamination issues and the standards for cleanliness of our drinking water should be high but we are a quite large and geographically dispersed country with a large number of small hamlets townships villages and so on. We've already heard from the Central Otago District Council who have publicly stated that there are at least 27 communities that would struggle enormously to meet the standards that are set out in this bill when it's passed. Now that is not to say that people should be unnecessarily put at risk—and I need to reinforce that point. But in for example the township of Hampden I think it is in North Otago in the boundary between the Dunedin and Waitaki electorates there is an issue that the community have responded to with treatment processes that would not meet this standard as far as I can tell and there are a higher number of boil-water notices during a year than other communities might find acceptable if they lived in large metropolitan areas. That is the cost of living in little paradises right around the country and to impose a single standard across all of those communities is going to be costly difficult and arguably very highly bureaucratic. Now the bill doesn't actually do that. It does provide an exemption framework at clause 56. So firstly that's been delegated to the chief executive. I think we need to hear from submitters about whether or not the primary legislation or even secondary legislation should set out the circumstances more prescriptively wherein exemptions would be appropriate and I have no doubt that geographical isolation and the number of people who are connected to the water supply are two key determinants of that exemption framework. It's not clear to me—and the committee will have a look at this—about the duration the longevity of the exemption. So we have at clause 57 on residual disinfection—which I think speaks to a temporary contamination or problem with the water supply. But I hope that whoever has the final say—this Parliament or the chief executive—the exemptions can be longstanding because those communities are prepared to live in places where there may be extra steps that need to be taken in order to keep water of a high quality. The examples used in the bill don't talk about townships like Hampden or the 27 communities in Central Otago; they talk about backcountry huts" "isolated campsites" "marae" "farm buildings on a bore water supply"—all important exemptions. But I would suggest that they're not comprehensive enough and that they should go further than that to enable communities to make conscious decisions about the source the transmission of the supply and what needs to be done in order to make sure that the water is safe to drink because it's not those communities—it's not an event in a small community—that we are responding to. This was a town of 14000 people and I hope that we are not imposing a very high urban standard on very remote rural areas and the costs that go with it. But with those caveats obviously I'm sure the Health Committee will look at those in some detail. I'll be looking forward to what they hear."