Smith DamienDAMIEN SMITH (ACT): Thank you very much Mr Speaker. The duopoly as it's called has had its rewards from the Government's COVID-19 response because you couldn't go anywhere else and—[Hon Eugenie Sage trips]—the super-profits that are proposed—Stuart Smith: The Greens are slipping! DAMIEN SMITH: Sorry? Stuart Smith: The Greens are slipping—fell out of the poll! DAMIEN SMITH: Yeah the Greens are slipping in the poll or on the floor sorry. The super-profit that Mr Clark talks about is 20c per person per head of population and that has been the main rationale for driving this change. Now in the ACT Party we believe in freeing up covenants that are believed to have been reducing competitive behaviour but this has been a long-held practice. People do their demographics. I worked as an example for a time in the multiplex industry. You do your numbers and you look at where people will drive to your cinema chain and then you take the commercial risk of investing in that site going through the planning process. Then you open it and you hope they will come. What we found in that industry was that if you had one multiplex in an area you had a certain amount of business. If you put two in that area the business grew three times. The supermarkets know that it's a highly competitive market place that they operate in and they have themselves at a margin level been totally shocked by the rise of inflation in this country. Inflation in this country is what's driving this behavioural change.ACT would repeal the Resource Management Act to fast track any supermarket chain that wants to come here. We believe that this bill should have had a clause in it that said the Overseas Investment Office would make national grocery retailing a strategic and significant area of national interest. That would allow people to fast track coming here and it would have given them the certainty that they need. I'm not sure by the time the next election comes that there will be many more supermarkets built. It's a question that no one has answered. It's a question that the journalists haven't asked the Ministers. Tonight we sit here and we have a building block here but we don't have the full solution.Getting access to the wholesale market here is absolutely essential for a new entrant coming here. They can't bring all their products on ships. They have to operate within the environment here. They may have points of differences in terms of what they sell but effectively it's not a me too" situation. If you're trying to build a point of difference as an ALDI or as a Costco or a Warehouse as an example versus the incumbents you need to have some point of difference. Is that price? Is that value? Is that competition on the types of products that you supply? What is happening is down the line at the farm gate and at the grower gate and at the wine gate. That leads me on to the fact that if you come here to make a supermarket successful you need to have a grocery strategy that includes alcoholic beverages as well.I do commend the bill and the ACT Party will be supporting the bill. But this should have been captured in something that was more holistic and with the legal ramifications of unwinding some of these covenants the lawyers will have a field day. Then the lawyers will have a field day when a new entrant comes in so it's good money for them. If you look at the provisions that the Commerce Commission have under new section 28C in clause 4 the understanding of these is not clear. The reference to the Fair Trading Act is not clear in how this all meshes together.We will be supporting the bill tonight but looking closely at the ramifications of how this actually works in the market place. We still reinforce the fact that the most important thing for the supermarkets and the people in New Zealand in a pandemic or in a normal situation as we know is to have the right products on the right shelves at the right time so people aren't living in fear. They're living in fear for two reasons: inflation and not the fact that the supermarket isn't there just that when they go there they know there's no alternative choices or not the same choices that used to be. We would actually recommend to the Government that this isn't a quick fix. There needs to be another bill very quickly to level the playing field in terms of those other areas. This alone will not solve the problem but it goes a short step towards doing that. We would like people to finally understand that if supermarkets do set up in Pukekohe or in Wellington here they do take commercial risk. It's not an insignificant investment. The shareholders of those businesses do act in the best interest of the customers. It's not super-profits like the Government has said for the sake of it. I believe—doing my numbers—that that has been driven by the COVID lockdown and that was the only place you could go. So let's take a sensible and pragmatic approach to planning this out let's invite new entrants in and let's get the Overseas Investment Office activated to actually allow this facilitation. Thank you."