Simmonds PennyPENNY SIMMONDS (National—Invercargill): Thank you Madam Speaker. Well first of all I want to start by thanking my colleague Barbara Kuriger for reading out that paragraph that was missed by the most transparent Government ever" when they read the Federated Farmers letter out last week. I also just want to clarify a fact because the Minister who spoke on this bill today is as equally numerically challenged as the Minister of Education is when he thinks 29 percent is a majority—can I just clarify that 96.7 percent of the population gets drinking water from a fully compliant supply. So that does not mean that many water supplies are non-compliant; 96.7 percent.Now I'm often asked when I'm out and about why Parliament is so adversarial. Why can't we work together to get the best outcome? And you know we really wanted to do that this time. We really wanted to support this bill. We agree that so much of this is the right thing to do. Taumata Arowai is going to mean that standards are set and are monitored and we really want to show our support for that. The problem is that 80 percent of this bill covers sensible restrictions and sensible requirements for large-scale water suppliers but there is a disproportionate and burdensome obligation on smaller water schemes. And now I have found that it's not only the 75000 to 100000 small rural water schemes that aren't registered but there's also a small group of registered water suppliers—very small water suppliers—around 500 of them and 200 of those are community owned.I was contacted by the Tukurua Water Supply Society Inc. up in Golden Bay and they are incredibly concerned about this bill going through because they understood that they were going to have five years to become compliant. They are a small incorporated society that thought they would have five years to become compliant. But what has happened—in the Supplementary Order Paper that came through the extension of time from five years to seven years for the unregistered ones has left out the 500 small registered ones and they are now going to be required to become compliant within a year.Now this is going to impact on a number of small suppliers in my region in the Southland region there's about 10 registered water supplies in Southland that are small. Most of them have a bore source three of them use a stream or river or lake source. No acceptable solution has been worked through yet for these small surface extraction suppliers and they have no idea what they are going to be able to put in place. Now you might say "Well the endpoint users UV system would be good for them" but currently they can't have that in place because the Health Act doesn't allow them to. So they have got to find an acceptable solution they've got to work through an acceptable solution within the space of a year. I don't think the Minister has looked at that very thoroughly.Also the Minister last time talked about how this is going to be incredibly cost effective for these smaller schemes whether they are registered or non-registered. Well in the regulatory impact statement when they thought that there were around 5000 small suppliers the range was between $154 million to $409 million for capital expenditure for those small suppliers and between $24 million and $110 million in annual operating expenditure. Now I'm not sure where the Minister got her cost effective data from but that doesn't sound terribly cost effective to me to small rural water schemes with a low number of users. So what we've got here now is an incredible mishmash of legislation trying to be applied one-size-fits-all across a whole range from big water suppliers through to small registered water suppliers through to thousands of small unregistered water suppliers. I'd have to say if I was Taumata Arowai I would be quaking in my boots as to how we're going to round up all these small schemes let alone monitor them and look at their reporting.So what we have again is this ideology of centralisation of us taking a sledgehammer to a walnut instead of taking a practical pragmatic and sensible approach to these smaller schemes. Had the Government been prepared to think about something that was more practical and more sensible we could have supported it. And as my colleague Barbara Kuriger said if we had been able to exempt these smaller suppliers for that seven-year time period developed the practical and pragmatic and sensible acceptable solutions then they would have been flocking to go into it. So why is the Government not confident enough that they will be able to show how wonderful these acceptable solutions are and therefore there will be no need to enforce it? The water schemes and their suppliers and the people that run it will be flocking to go into them. But my fear like the fear of many of my colleagues is that this legislation will develop a life of its own. I think Ian McKelvie may have said something about this earlier on last week when he said it could be like the health and safety legislation where it develops a life of its own.Now it's all very well for Ministers to stand in this House and say that we'll develop something that is fit for purpose and it won't be overly burdensome and it will be pragmatic and it will be practical. But these things leave the House and then bureaucrats run them and it does develop a life of its own. People will be finding that the solutions are not practical and they are not pragmatic and they are not sensible and they do not take account of the size of the schemes and what is appropriate for the size of those things.Now I just want to refer again to these handful of small suppliers who have already been registered. They feel that they have been completely left in the lurch with this the one from Golden Bay they wrote to the Minister back in August asking her to clarify why now they would only have one year to be compliant. They haven't heard from her. So they wrote to the Minister Damien O'Connor because he's supposedly going to look after the rural sector and they asked him if he could help them—to explain why and tell them what sort of practical and effective and fit for purpose solution would be put in place for them. He handed it on to the Minister Mahuta and again they've heard nothing more.So when the Government say that they have consulted with a number of small registered suppliers in actual fact there was only a handful of the registered suppliers that were able to have any input into the development of this bill. The rest of them—well some of them don't even know it's happening to be quite honest. And for the rest of them they're going to be scrambling to look at draft acceptable solutions that may come out in about February and then they're going to be rushing around to see if it's going to be workable for their scheme. So we have got a one-size-fits-all except it doesn't fit all. Thank you Madam Speaker."