Court SimonSIMON COURT (ACT): Mr Speaker thank you. The ACT Party offered to work constructively with the previous Labour Government on developing a sustainable three waters reform model but what the previous Government did—and why we're repealing this three waters legislation today—was ignore offers to collaborate with councils and with all of those participants in the supply chain in terms of developing a reform structure that would be durable. Instead they proceeded to introduce legislation that they hadn't campaigned on and that the public knew nothing about which introduced concepts of co-governance over publicly owned water assets. This concept of Te Mana o te Wai which is an anti-scientific concept that was going to be embedded in the legislation—when I've spoken to councils around New Zealand what they've told me is that under that previous legislation the legislation that's going to be repealed today even if we treated the waste water to drinking-water standards under Te Mana o te Wai that flawed concept we wouldn't be allowed to discharge treated waste water into lakes or rivers. Now this Government has a different approach. We believe in science. We believe that by making good investments in infrastructure councils can deliver clean drinking water and deal with waste water and stormwater effectively. Now it's true that some councils haven't done that but when presented with the glaring problem such as all the water leaking out of the pipes in Wellington even a Green Mayor of Wellington has had to accept that councils have a responsibility to invest in underground assets like three waters assets. Mark Cameron: Plumbing—piping. SIMON COURT: Plumbing—you could call it the city plumbing. Instead of going after all of these other Green dreams like walking and cycle projects councils will now be getting back to business and focusing on what's important which is managing assets well. Steve Abel: Where's the money coming from? SIMON COURT: Oh this member here—Mr Abel—asks where the money is coming from. Well guess what? Who pays for water? The consumers of water could pay. Some councils say that their ratepayers should pay. Under the previous Government's three waters model who knew who was going to pay? But what's important is that if you're receiving an infrastructure service like water to your home or business if you're flushing or you're sending stuff down the trade waste pipe it's pretty clear that the user should be the one who pays and that is why even some of those who have been almost religiously opposed to water meters in the past have had to accept that metering water is one of the ways of actually working out how to reduce use how to manage down leaks and wastage and how to link who uses it with who pays. Now that makes perfect sense to most New Zealanders—if you use the water you get a bill and you pay—but it's been an absolute revelation to the anti-business anti-capitalist members of the Green Party who sit here in Parliament. So if we think about who's going to pay for water infrastructure going forward one of the problems that this Government intends to solve is that with this massive deficit this under-investment in existing infrastructure and in maintenance and renewals combined with the need to provide water infrastructure to enable growth in our largest cities and in our new fast-growing metros like Tauranga the money needs to be raised to pay for these long-term assets but they are long-term assets. These are assets that have 50- 100- 200-year lives. It makes no sense at all to force ratepayers of today to pay over a period of three or 10 or 15 years for an asset that has a very long life. So for one of the problems that this Government intends to solve one of the ways to do it is by establishing council-controlled organisations who can make these long-term investment decisions raise long-term debt and make sure that the cost of those assets is spread over a fair amount—Steve Abel: Privatisation. SIMON COURT: —of time and not lumped on current users Mr Abel. Mr Abel talks about privatisation. Well what's been very clear in the commitments made by this coalition Government is that water assets will not be privatised. But if this member wasn't aware of it the contractors who turn up to fix the water pipes are typically private sector contractors. They're subcontractors to councils or to larger firms. If you're going to insist that this drinking water and all of these water services don't cost anything then you've got it dead wrong. The users will end up paying whether they're ratepayers or whether they're getting a bill based on their water meter. What New Zealanders will have is much better water services as a result.