Wood MichaelMICHAEL WOOD (Labour—Mt Roskill): Thank you for the opportunity to speak on the Commerce (Cartels and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. In my comments this afternoon I want to reaffirm Labour's support for this bill. I want to talk through some of the reasons for that but there is a real clamour arising in this House and I think on the streets of the country to hear about section 36 of the principal Act and to hear about Clayton Cosgrove's Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 408. So in my comments a little bit later I want to touch on that because I think it was one of the real missed opportunities of this bill to make sure that we have law in this country that is really fit for purpose that is not there just for the big guys and that gives the little guy a fair crack of the whip.Labour's basic position on this bill is that our starting point here in New Zealand is that we have very very weak competition law—very very weak law. It needs to be substantially improved to give consumers the protection that they need from over-mighty monopolies and oligopolies and from people who play fast and loose with the rules with the significant market power. It also needs to be made fairer for the small businesses—the men and women of our country who form a significant part of our economy who are employers of large numbers of people but are often really up against it. One of the ways in which they are often up against it is that they have got these big guys operating in their sectors that have such significant market power.So what Labour says about this bill is that it helps. It moves us in the right direction. It puts in place some clearer and better rules. But we could have done so much better. My colleague Simon O'Connor who just spoke on the bill went through some of the key aspects of the bill and these are things that Labour does support. We have got some clearer rules around the definitions of cartels. We have got some clearer rules around some of their practices that we do want to ensure are not encouraged and are in fact discouraged—practices such as restricting outputs so they are controlling the supply and therefore the price of goods potentially in the market place. That is one of the ways in which big companies can have the biggest impact on consumers and on small businesses.One of the things that the Labour Party also wants to comment on in respect of this bill is that I mean we have really seen some sheer athleticism and speed from the Government benches on this one. I have been sitting here and it is like Usain Bolt has been running through the Chamber. The Government started this one back in 2012 when it received a report from a select committee on this issue—at the request of the Minister at the time I might add. It has taken 5 years to progress the bill through the process to the stage where we are with what 4 sitting days to go. We might actually get this bill over the line depending on how the speeches go tonight and depending on how long they go on for.I guess this does speak to a broader concern that we have got that this whole area—my colleague Mr Cosgrove in his earlier speeches in respect of this bill actually spoke about this. Often this Government does seem to have really downplayed the importance of commerce legislation. It is kind of seen as maybe a bit technical and wonky but actually it has very real-world impacts in terms of consumers in terms of small businesses and in terms of the confidence that people have to invest in the business sector and in our market places. So we think it could have done a much better job of that.I will give the Government this though: it has moved far quicker on this one than it has moved on matters like multinational tax than it has moved on the housing crisis than it has moved on properly funding health and education—things that the next Labour Government will really rip right into.One of the areas that the bill seeks to address—and this was one of the starting points—is ensuring that we have some rational rules in respect of the shipping and civil aviation sectors bringing them into the Commerce Act regime. One of the things that we in the Labour Party do support is having reasonably consistent rules across different sectors of the economy. We support that from the point of view of legal fairness. We support that from the point of view of simplicity. We support that from the point of view that if you are a consumer or you are a business and you feel that a wrong has been done against you there is a relatively simple process and a consistent set of rules sitting up there in the legislative framework that you can go to to get some relief. So we think that does make some sense.What the bill does do is make some differentiation between what is termed pro-competitive collaborative behaviour and hard-core cartels. That is obviously quite a fine distinction but it is an important one because it does recognise I think in a reasonably pragmatic way that companies do not always exist in splendid isolation and that there sometimes are market conditions where it can be appropriate for there to be a degree of cooperation between companies that does not necessarily lurch over into monopolistic oligopolistic or cartel-like behaviour. That distinction between the hard-core cartels where you have got real cartel-like behaviour and real collusion on things like price and sensible pragmatic collaboration that does not go into that area is very important.I might note on that one that of course we have seen over the last month or so some really concerning signs coming through about what might be happening with our major petrol suppliers in New Zealand where there is significant evidence from the investigation that Minister Collins launched that there may be a degree of cartel-like behaviour between some of those companies in the mechanism that they use to set prices. What the Labour Party has said is that instead of just pushing that out to the back of beyond which is what this Government has done there should be an immediate Commerce Commission inquiry into that because that is a very good example of the way in which cartel-like behaviour can potentially have a huge impact on consumers. Now we need to wait for the full facts of that one to come out but we say: let us get an investigation going into that as soon as we possibly can.I want to turn to proposed new section 36 as I know that people out there have been waiting for this one. This was from a very important SOP which we really regret was not picked up earlier on in the legislative process from Clayton Cosgrove who of course was previously a very very effective Labour spokesperson for commerce. I want to acknowledge him in the House. He gave his valedictory speech in the House last night and he is extremely experienced in this area and has done some great work. What new section 36 would have done would have been quite important because what we have got at the moment is that you have to prove intent. If you are looking to prove whether or not cartel behaviour has occurred you have got to prove intent—the mens rea in the law. Were they actually thinking and planning up here that they would collude? Of course that is actually notoriously difficult to prove. It is notoriously difficult to get inside the minds of people who might be making these decisions.So what Clayton Cosgrove's SOP 408 would have done which we would have liked to see in the bill and which would have significantly strengthened protections for consumers and small businesses was say that well it is not just the intent that matters; actually it is the impact—actually it is the impact. If we can see that there has been behaviour that is in the nature of collusion and we can see that it has done damage downstream whether it is in the form of elevated prices for consumers or whether it has been smaller competitors knocked out of the market—that impact if we can conclusively prove it should actually be enough. We should not have to go through the legal hoops of trying to make a window into the souls of men as Elizabeth I said of trying to prove some sort mental process that went on inside the heads of people in boardrooms when decisions to collude may have been made. So we regret that that was not picked up by the Government and that is something that the next Labour Government would be keen to look at.The final quick comment I want to make is that the other thing that we regret in this bill is that the Government through Minister Goldsmith intervened in the process to remove the criminalisation of cartel behaviour. We strongly strongly regret that because we say that if this issue was important enough to put up from the Government benches to spend 5 years making our way through it—if it is that important to our economy if it is that important to our small businesses if it is that important to our consumers and if we have potentially got big businesses that are taking advantage of their market power to line their own pockets quite frankly and to make unreasonable profits at the expense of others then that to me is behaviour that should have criminal sanction. We on this side of the House stand on the side of the small guy of the small-business owner and of the consumer and if they are getting ripped off by people who are engaging in collusive practices then we do not see why that should not be criminal behaviour. It just stinks a little bit that sometimes the kind of white-collar activities do not get the same kind of sanction that people at the other end of our society consistently face if they break the rules. So we thought that was a real shame.I did note in some of the papers that that change by Minister Goldsmith was welcomed by the ACT Party and that of course is entirely consistent with its position in respect of always looking out for the big guy—we had it in the House the other day when we spoke about Uber and other companies who are not paying their fair share of taxes in New Zealand and that outraged Mr Seymour. Well this is exactly the same thing. It is letting the big guys get away with it. When they do wrong they do not face the same sanctions that other people might.So in winding up my comments at this particular time I would like to say that the Labour Party does support the general intent of this bill. It is an improvement on where we were but we could have done so much better and we look forward to doing that after 24 September. Thank you.