Franks Stephen: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Franks Stephen: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6848] 
STEPHEN FRANKS (ACT NZ) 
: I rise to support the National Party’s amendments to the commencement clause. This bill has been sitting around for more than a year and it has been given virtually no attention at all. The Commerce Committee record is 30 minutes’ hearing of evidence and 55 minutes’ consideration which was probably mainly consumed in considering the spelling and typos in its report. 
Hon Tony Ryall 
: And here we are in urgency. 
STEPHEN FRANKS 
: And here we are in urgency trying to pass a bill that will take effect the moment it gets the royal assent and it is a bill that takes away existing rights. It is a bill that extends the power of the State. It is a bill that has some vagueness in it which the committee blithely told us would not matter because most people would not be affected by the odd definition of pyramid-selling schemes as most franchise schemes are not unfair to many participants. So we have a bill that will actually require franchise organisations to go out and advise their agents. 
There is a principle of law that says that nobody should be convicted on the basis of law that they have not had an opportunity to know about. There is a principle of course that one is deemed to know the law but how will people who are subject to this legislation know the law when it becomes effective the moment it has royal assent and when this Government has allowed the system for publishing bills to fall into such disarray that no one will be able to get this law until well after the time it has had the royal assent? Of course they could be like us and beg. The very helpful staff of this institution give us a green assent copy so that we can know what the law is. But how many citizens out there will be able to find out exactly what the law is the moment the royal assent is given? Therefore it is high-handed legislation. It set out mainly to be cosmetic in an attempt to attack the ACT party and others. Of course it backfired and we are hearing silence. 
There is no commentary coming from the other side during the Committee stage despite this commencement clause which states: “This Act will come into force on the day after the date on which it receives the Royal assent.” We do not hear anyone from the other side trying to explain this bill now. The noisiest member when the thing was introduced the Hon John Tamihere does not really want to talk about scams these days. He does not want to get back into the rhetoric he recorded in May last year. So the Government wants to rush this bill through and bring it into force before anyone has had much of a chance to know about it because what was supposed to be a triumph has become an embarrassment. 
The amendment proposed by the National Party is perfectly reasonable. It defers commencement by only a couple of months but that couple of months is vital in terms of principle. No law should tell people from now on that the Commerce Commission can seek injunction proceedings against them and be totally unreasonable and not have any sanction by way of compensating the person if the commission were wrong. No such law should come into force on the day that the royal assent is given. This is a law that purports to be tough on offenders but in fact will quite possibly be tough on ordinary business people and ordinary franchise operators because it has been so badly drafted. 
This law had only 30 minutes’ consideration of the evidence that people had laboured long and hard to bring forward. This law had a lot of technical evidence in writing despite the cursory 30 minutes that the Commerce Committee—I think chaired by Mr Mark Peck—gave it. [ 
Interruption 
] He was obviously under instructions but he lost the role of course. Perhaps it was some kind of judgment on not having used this bill as the opportunity it was supposed to be to drag people out and investigate pyramid selling. But we do have a very sensible deferral of some 2 months until 1 August brought forward by the National Party which for reasons I cannot fathom says that it will in the end vote the bill. Nevertheless that party has brought forward a sensible amendment and it would be proper for all parties in this Parliament to support a change of that kind in the interests of fairness and in the interests of standing up for the principle that people should not be adversely affected by law that they can have no chance of knowing about.