Robertson GrantGRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): I do want to say at the outset of my contribution that the Labour Party when this bill was introduced was of a mind to support it. We support a robust and fair regime when it comes to the rules around anti-dumping and countervailing duties and historically there has been widespread support pretty much across Parliament for measures that create that fair regime. That regime is about making sure that New Zealand producers and New Zealand businesses are not the victims of large-scale products coming into New Zealand and being sold for a price that is much lower than the price the product would be sold for in that country's domestic market—that is the classic form of dumping that people will be familiar with—or indeed whether the product benefits from a big subsidy in the country where it is produced. There are World Trade Organization rules and then rules that have found their way into New Zealand law that create a robust and a fair environment so a piece of legislation that made the claim that it was going to make that environment work better was one that we were interested in supporting.I was not on the Commerce Committee but the consistent feedback our members were giving us when they came back was that little by little their concerns increased in terms of the substance of the new public interest test—which I am going to talk about in a moment—but also because of the feedback from the business community. It is probably not a great surprise to members that Catherine Beard is somebody whom I do not always agree with when she puts out her statements and makes her comments on behalf of Business New Zealand and Export New Zealand but we certainly agree with her here. Then we began to hear from companies like New Zealand Steel and Wattie's which were saying that this has the potential to be very damaging for New Zealand companies. Of all the people New Zealand Steel is the company that I think of here. I have to be a little careful with how I choose my words here but there is the current situation we have got with accusations about Chinese steel being dumped in New Zealand.One of the issues raised by submitters was about what this legislation would mean for how other countries would view New Zealand's anti-dumping regime. It reduces the certainty and the clarity of our regime and puts in its place a subjective—a highly subjective—test that could be exploited. In the way in which these things work a lot of it is around the signals that you send and the way that companies operate internationally with confidence and that is what is being undermined here. This is not Opposition parties playing politics; this was a consistent theme of the submissions that came to the committee and that is why Labour New Zealand First and the Greens are jointly opposing this bill. The more information that came to light the more concerned we got about it.Other colleagues have covered some of these overall concerns but I have got some questions for the Minister in the chair Jacqui Dean. There are the high-level concerns that we have around whether this framework can actually work but when you get to the public interest test itself the criteria are vague. The factors to be considered are not ranked in any order so a Minister who is presented with this exercise does not have guidance as to what factors matter more than others. I would ask the Minister in the chair to take a call and explain to this Committee how she as a Minister who might be responsible for this one day will deal with a set of criteria that are not ranked. There is no weighting there is no prioritisation there is not even any formula to be followed by a Minister when making an evaluation of these factors. That is introducing an unacceptable level of uncertainty to a process that businesses need to be certain about.Time and again submitters were saying that in the absence of any certainty about how this public interest is going to be applied businesses will lose the confidence to invest. We all know that when businesses are making those decisions it is about their confidence about rate of return their confidence about whether or not they will be able to compete well and fairly and the Government has gone and introduced a piece of legislation that undermines that. The Minister needs to be able to get up in this Committee and give us her view of how that prioritisation process will work. I am sorry to say that in the absence of that in the law—even the Minister's answers are going to make that interesting but at least they might enlighten the Committee a little as to how the Government actually plans on this taking place.Our members of the committee asked consistently for examples of how this would work and there was an absence of those. In the end affected businesses made the call that you would make in these circumstances which is that they do not have confidence in a regime that is so vague. From the point of view of members of this House it is then our responsibility I believe to say this is not good enough. A piece of legislation that normally would get widespread support across the House has found its way back here not supported by at least three parties in the House. I think the Minister owes it to those exporters owes it those businesses and owes it to those companies to stand up and tell us how those criteria will work in some specific detail.I just want to cover a couple of other quick matters. One of those is the time that will be added to the process by the public interest test. As proposed the bill would add 90 days to the time frame. From the point of view again of a number of submitters New Zealand manufacturers looked at that and said: This really is going to make our lives extremely difficult." There is a lack of clarity about what those businesses will do in terms of remedies if they are concerned about how the system is working. Ultimately the end result of this may well be some manufacturing businesses deciding to move offshore. That cannot—and I will give this to the Government—have been the Government's intention in promoting the bill but now is the time for the Government to acknowledge that it has got it wrong. Opposition members of the committee as Barry Coates said had very specific ideas which could be amendments that would at least make the system more robust. Unfortunately Government members of the select committee were not prepared to consider those matters.I am not going to unduly delay the Committee on this; I know other colleagues have got comments they want to make. I will just finish on the point of what the Government did claim was the motivation around putting this bill in place and that was around concerns about the cost of building materials entering into New Zealand. What we saw in the wake of the Canterbury earthquakes was that when it is necessary for there to be something outside of the norms—when we need to do something that moves quickly in response to a crisis—we can do it. We can do it under the existing regime we have rather than creating a regime of uncertainty for that kind of purpose. I think that if that was the Government's motivation actually the response in Canterbury ensured that New Zealanders could have confidence that the system was already flexible enough.I think we have here a classic situation of a proposal that on paper might have looked all right. It looked like more choice. It looked like more flexibility. But then in reality—and under the scrutiny of a parliamentary select committee which is an important part of our democratic process—it has been exposed for what it is: a vague set of criteria for a public interest test that is entirely subjective that will lead to huge uncertainty and that is opposed by the very companies these rules are designed to protect. If that is not enough for the Minister and the Government to understand that they should think again I am not sure what is."