Goodhew Jo: Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Goodhew Jo: Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill — In Committee 
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JO GOODHEW (National—Aoraki) 
: 
 I rise to take another call because there were a number of matters I did not canvass in my previous address. I wanted to look at elements of this part of the Health (Drinking Water) Amendment Bill in order to add some clarity to the process that the Health Committee went through. The timetable for drinking-water supplies to comply was of enormous concern as has been mentioned by other members. Local Government New Zealand and individual councils all made the case that they needed to be able to fit in any necessary compliance with this bill with their long-term council community plans. That is all part of their planning process. Therefore it was extremely necessary that the bill had dates that would allow for the alignment of its time frames with the Local Government Act 2002 planning cycle and with the Drinking-water Assistance Programme as well. So amendments were made that have made the bill significantly better. 
Another issue of significant concern to my electorate and to many other rural electorates was rural agricultural drinking-water supplies. Again as has been mentioned by other speakers the concern was that we would have an awful lot of water that would be of a very high quality—and expensive as well—and that we would be feeding it to a lot of stock. In the course of the select committee process we managed to get around that by adding this definition: “ ‘rural agricultural drinking-water supply’ means a large medium minor small or neighbourhood drinking-water supply from which 75 percent or more of the water supplied—(i) is used for the purposes of commercial agriculture; …”. I just say for the record that this issue is still causing some concern in my electorate because the fact that it is actually for commercial agriculture causes concern for suppliers who have a lot of what we would call lifestyle blocks where they are not always making money out of the stock but they are feeding that stock an awful lot of drinking water which has become of quite a high quality and very expensive. 
So that part of the bill still causes some concern in rural New Zealand. I hope that concern is proven to be unfounded. Time will tell I expect. 
A number of councils noted their concern about the definition of “reasonable steps”. In fact new section 69G which is to be inserted in the Health Act by clause 7 does not define “reasonable steps” because a decision was made that defining the term could limit the steps that could be taken and apparently there is other legislation where the term “reasonable steps” is utilised. So we are hoping that that will become clearer to the people who are supplying the water as time goes on. 
We also put some extra clauses in to define “all practicable steps” because it was very very important for affordability to become a factor there. Once again the Health Committee worked hard to get that sorted out so that it was presented in an acceptable way and so that cost would become an acceptable factor in this bill. 
I just want to talk about two other things in relation to the bill with the first being the public health risk-management plans which are now a requirement. Public health risk-management plans are pretty scary sorts of things I think for someone who is new to putting them together and smaller suppliers are wondering what they are and whether this is a huge amount of bureaucracy. Again I hope this will be seen for the benefit it will bring in terms of assessing risk and mitigating its effects wherever possible. Again we would look then at “all practicable steps” and affordability would come into that assessment. 
One of the issues raised in the select committee was around the drinking-water assessors. I read in one of today’s newspapers that environmental health officers are in very short supply and this issue was canvassed during the select committee process. I am assuming that these people are in fact environmental health officers and perhaps the Minister would like to take a call on that.