Turei MetiriaMETIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green): I just wanted to respond just in brief to the comments from the Hon David Parker. I accept that my Supplementary Order Paper 213 does take the bill backwards a step and that the bill is deliberate in removing the requirement for four-sided fencing and instead replacing that very clear and simple requirement with more of a performance-based standard. I would just reiterate that for example Water Safety New Zealand which has spent decades trying to improve water safety for all New Zealanders and particularly children was strongly opposed to the removal of the fencing requirement and replacing it instead with some performance-based standard. It said that there was no public policy rationale for making that change except for that already described by the officials which was to reduce compliance costs for pool owners and for the councils. But from the point of view of child safety it is a retrograde step to replace a simple and clear conception of what fencing around a pool is—what it actually is in people's own minds and in the normal daily conversation about that—with a performance-based standard that says you can have all sorts of different kinds of things as long as they have the same effect. Given that we know that there was already very poor monitoring of pool fencing by councils and across the country there is this disparity between councils about whether or not they know where the pools are whether they are undertaking regular inspections and whether they are applying the rules properly or not and given that we know that many of the drownings that have occurred have been as a result of degraded fencing infrastructure—so degraded latches degraded fencing and failure to comply with the very simple legislation that is already in place—this bill now allows more and more options for pool owners to use that may well not meet any kind of performance-based standard. That might not provide any degree of real protection for children at all and the councils are relying then on their own interpretation of the law—and the law is softened to give them lots more options—and on the enforcement procedures of local councils which we know are already unable to enforce the current law as simple and clear as it is. So why then would we put in place legislation that actually entrenches in the law the very risks that failure to comply with the previous law has created in terms of the risk for children of drowning? There really is no rationale for that—I mean there is no explanation for why this is a better system. The only excuse I heard from National during the select committee process was that people with infinity pools did not like the way fences looked. That is not a justification for putting more and more children at risk. So I get that there will be members of this Parliament who do not want to support my Supplementary Order Paper because it actually puts in place—re-establishes—the clear fencing rules that this bill has been designed to remove but there is no rationale for that policy change and there certainly is no evidence to show that a performance-based approach is going to provide the same degree of safety that the current fencing rules provide let alone a greater degree of safety. If we have a choice surely providing the greater safety is the choice we should make. Thank you.