Simpson ScottHon SCOTT SIMPSON (National—Coromandel): Thank you Mr Speaker—is this a split call?SPEAKER: Yeah—five-minute call.Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: Thank you Mr Speaker. Look competition enterprise free trade and commerce are the very foundation stones of our economic wealth in this country and are to be lauded and commended.I didn't have an opportunity to sit on the select committee that heard submissions from I think not very many submitters actually at all—30 submissions in total and oral evidence heard from just 11. But actually this piece of legislation as speakers on this side of the House have already indicated is quite important because it seeks to change some pretty fundamental things about competition law in New Zealand.Now I listened carefully to the contributions of my colleagues the Hon Todd McClay and Stuart Smith and then more recently the member for Epsom on this side of the House about the impacts of the change in this legislation in this bill of likely effect" in section 36 of the principal Act the Commerce Act. Why is this a problem? Well it is a particular problem because it goes to the very meaning of business and commerce and the ability for enterprises and businesses to do business in a way that allows them to be creative to be imaginative and to be energetic in a small market place like New Zealand.Now one of the challenges that we have in our small market place is that it is by world standards international standards a very very small intimate little market place. For goodness' sake we are a market that is in fact smaller than metropolitan Sydney. So what that means is that by definition businesses that command a significant percentage of market share in a particular sector are going to be very careful—and if not careful they are going to come across the impacts of the creeping growth of the Commerce Commission that the member for Epsom raised in his contribution because they will be chilled by the effect of this legislation. The trick that needs to be adopted here by the Government is that the balance needs to be right. The balance needs to be about not stifling enterprise and entrepreneurism and the growth of businesses whilst at the same time not allowing for anti-competitive behaviour. Most of my working life before coming into this place was running New Zealand divisions of Australian-owned businesses. It became very clear to me over a long number of years that much of what happens in New Zealand enterprise is actually dominated and decided not by businesses and business decision-makers here in New Zealand; much of it actually occurs in Australia. That's just the nature of the geography and our closeness as nations together but also of our economic and commercial environments on both sides of the Tasman. So what occurs in Australia does have an impact here. The impact of the "likely effect" definition in this legislation means that those decisions will be made with a lens that is a trans-Tasman lens and that is always going to be something that is a reality of our small market place.To think that we stand alone isolated glorious and immune from the currents of international markets and trans-Tasman markets is to just really deceive ourselves. What we want to be doing as a small eager keen and enthusiastic economy is to encourage enterprise and competition. But we want to do it on the basis of a level playing field. Now the thing that concerns me most about this legislation—and we will also be moving Supplementary Order Papers at the committee of the whole House stage—is the likely potential for judicial activism on interpretation of what the term "likely effect" will mean. I would much prefer as a member of this Parliament that it was us as legislators that made definitions about what was going to be good competition law and what was going to be bad competition law than leaving it to an activist judiciary. My fear and concern is that in terms of the definition that has come from the select committee reported back by the majority—which was the Labour Government's majority on that select committee—they don't quite understand the potential impacts or the potential for judicial activism that will cause perverse outcomes.We support this bill but with reservation. SPEAKER: This debate is interrupted and set down for resumption next sitting day. The House stands adjourned until 2 p.m. today.Debate interrupted.The House adjourned at 12.59 p.m. (Wednesday)"