Drinking Water Amendment Bill

Kia ora, Madam Speaker. Kia ora tätou te Whare.

Access to clean, safe water should be a fundamental human right.

Because of that, the Maori Party supports the provisions of safe, wholesome drinking water for all of our communities, replacing voluntary standards with a mandatory scheme to ensure that as many citizens of Aotearoa as possible have access to safe drinking water, and the setting up of guidelines to ensure quality standards are being met.

I was interested to note that most of the submissions on this bill came from councils, whose major concern seemed to be about how smaller water suppliers might be forced out of business by the cost of trying to meet the standards and the wider implementation costs that might be passed on to ratepayers.

I note that most of the compliance and cost issues seem to have been dealt with through amendments to the bill, like having longer time frames for water suppliers to get their act together, having different categories for town and country, and having clearer interpretations and definitions of quality and assessment.

Those amendments seem to be at odds with the desire for national standards, but they will allow smaller towns and communities more time to bring their systems up to scratch.

However, the biggest concern of all still remains the fact that although water is a renewable resource, it is also finite, and learning to live in a sustainable way with our water resources is one of the key challenges for the 21st century.

So i would hope that sitting alongside the Government’s insistence that all New Zealanders, including those living in rural areas, need safe drinking water, we will see specific initiatives to address ongoing concerns about polluted water tables and failed septic systems. The other day I read a section in the Bay of Plenty Regional Policy Statement on fresh water, and I thought it useful to include it in this debate:

“On-site human effluent treatment and disposal can also adversely affect water quality. Within the region, there are a large number of small communities which rely on septic tanks of other on-site system for domestic waste disposal. Discharge from these systems can lead to cumulative effects on water quality, when insufficiently treated effluent reaches surface or groundwater.”

That is an issue of major concern to the community I live in, Waimanoni, because we are not on town water supply, and we all use septic tanks. We know that a number of rural communities like Waimanoni and others all around the country simply do not have access to drinking water of sufficient quality, while others receive drinking water that is either inadequately monitored of simply not monitored at all.

Members also need to bear in mind the submission to the select committee from the rural woman, who stated clearly that responsibility should fall on the Government, as the public health provider, to provide equitable access to safe water for all communities.

That is a bit of a worry, when we consider the report from the New Zealand Business Council for Sustainable Development, which last month found that two out of every three New Zealanders believe the public health system is inefficient and almost half believe the system has got worse over the past 5 years.

It is true that we must ensure that decent drinking water is available to meet the long-term needs of all the citizens of Aotearoa, but if the public health capacity within the ministry is being run down, as it is, we have to ask who will have the oversight to enforce the new standards and address the numerous sources of threats to clean drinking water.

I raise another key issue about water, which is how we manage the tension between water as a human right and the pressure from those who see water as an economic good for the creation of wealth.

Ngai Tahu chairman Mark Solomon said recently that,

“No matter what the Government is saying, it is moving towards water becoming tradable, which creates property rights. If that is the case, then iwi have a right under the treaty as tangata whenua.”

We know the growing bitterness and frustration for Maori about the Crown’s refusal to acknowledge iwi access and rights to water, and we know that for some time there has been dialogue between Tainui, Ngai Tahu, Tuwharetoa, Whanganui, and others over the ownership and management of the lakes and rivers of Aotearoa- the sources of much of the country’s drinking water.

We know too that the whole water ownership debate still remains to be had and cannot be side-lined by Government fudging and denials forever.

The Maori Party firmly believes that water to homes should be free and not charged for.

In my own electorate of Te Tai Tokerau I see that Metro Water makes a $62 million profit every year from water charges, and I wonder how much of that is reinvested into ensuring compliance with safe and wholesome drinking water from drinking water suppliers.

I also wonder about claims that user-pays water management models promote less water wastage when the amount of unaccounted-for-water—water lost of wasted by the water retailer- has actually increased under user-pays regimes.

There are many more issues around water and water ownership that, although not addressed by this bill, remain long-standing concerns for tangata whenua, such as the appropriate mechanisms to manage water supply.

As kaitiaki of water, hapü and iwi are of the view that water arrangements should be jointly managed with local authorities, and although we will support this bill at this third reading, we will not support any moves that threaten to exclude Maori from our rightful place in taking a lead decision-making role on water. Tena koe Madam Speaker, kia ora tätou katoa.