Walker Holly: South Taranaki District Council (Cold Creek Rural Water Supply) Bill — First Reading 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Walker Holly: South Taranaki District Council (Cold Creek Rural Water Supply) Bill — First Reading 
[Sitting date: 21 March 2012. Volume:678;Page:1188. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
HOLLY WALKER (Green) 
: 
 I am pleased to take a call on the South Taranaki District Council (Cold Creek Rural Water Supply) Bill on behalf of my colleague Eugenie Sage who is the Green Party spokesperson on local government and water. Like our colleagues in Labour the Green Party will be supporting this bill to go to the Local Government and Environment Committee but we do have serious concerns as well about this bill. I want it to be clearly noted that our support at this stage is conditional on those concerns being addressed at the select committee. I do want to thank Chester Borrows for the additional information he has provided about our concerns so far but it is fair to say they have not been completely allayed so I will be outlining those concerns and we think they are significant. First of all though I will just outline what we understand of the bill and what it does and why we are supporting it—at least to the select committee. 
 As we have heard the bill would allow the South Taranaki District Council to transfer ownership of a small-scale water supply scheme to the rural community that uses it. This is about 400 people and approximately 160 households. We understand that the scheme was built by local farmers and residents in the 1980s and it is currently operated and maintained by those residents. It was funded by a 50 percent subsidy from the Ministry of Works and Development partly by users and partly by bridging finance and loans from the former Egmont County Council. This financial support was conditional on the scheme being vested in the local authority. So following amalgamation it is now vested in the South Taranaki District Council. We understand that it has been mooted since the late 1990s to vest the scheme in its users and that this bill finally advances that. So we are prepared to conditionally support this bill’s referral to the select committee because we do see some logic. However we do have significant areas of concern which I will now outline. 
Fundamentally and first and foremost as we have heard from some of our colleagues water is vital and public ownership of water is crucial and moves that erode that concept are very concerning. I think it is a little bit flippant of my colleague Mr Auchinvole to dismiss concerns about ownership of water as paranoia. It is actually something that is fundamental to the concerns of many people and should be taken seriously. We are also concerned that the Local Government Act 2002 explicitly prevents local councils from disposing of water infrastructure and we think that there is a good reason for that. It may be on balance that this case is a worthy exception but we think the bar should be set very high for that and we will be concerned and interested to see during the select committee deliberation that significant scrutiny is put on the exact reasons why an exception needs to be made to that important principle in this case. We do see a risk of the bill creating a precedent for other water infrastructure to be sold or transferred into private ownership and that is a significant area of concern for the Green Party. We do not want this bill to create precedent for more privatisation or vesting of water infrastructure. We are interested in the extent to which the scheme’s operation has been subsidised by general rates because we think that if this is the case it raises issues as to whether there are arguments that it should stay in public ownership. 
Finally I think it is really important that the House addresses the significant concerns about the level of consultation with tangata whenua about this bill and the preservation of mauri and the life-supporting capacity of water. We understand that the local iwi Nga Ruahine Rangi believe that consultation over a number of years from the South Taranaki District Council has been less than satisfactory and that they feel that the member Chester Borrows who is in charge of this bill brought it to their attention quite late. We think that is very concerning. We think that proper consultation with iwi is vital. We do understand that the advice of two marae who are actually on the scheme is that they agree that ownership should be vested in the company but if this is not supported by the wider iwi and if it creates a significant new grievance then the Green Party will be unable to support this bill beyond the select committee’s consideration. We hope that these tangata whenua concerns will also be explored at the select committee because if it does transpire that a significant new grievance is created we will withdraw our support for this bill at future stages. So at this stage the Green Party supports this bill’s referral to the select committee. We thank the member for his work but we want our significant concerns to be noted.