Newman Muriel: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Newman Muriel: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6855] 
Dr MURIEL NEWMAN (ACT NZ) 
: I am pleased to take a call on this bill on behalf of the ACT party. The ACT party will vote against this bill and when members look at Part 2 they will see why we will vote against it. The drafting of this legislation is fuzzy. We know for sure that it will have to be tested in the courts and the people who will have to pay for that of course will be small businesses. This is basically a bill that increases yet again the compliance costs on small business. This anti-business Government just wants to penalise small business as much as it possibly can and now it is doing so through the Fair Trading Act. 
When the Government is hostile to business we end up with law that is not good law. Referring to clause 5 in particular I very much support the amendment put forward by the National Party to make sure that that clause does not disadvantage franchise owners. I worry that new section 24(2)(a)(ii) inserted by clause 5 reads: “that to many participants in the scheme constitutes primarily an opportunity to buy or sell an investment opportunity whether personally or through an agent rather than an opportunity to buy or supply goods or services;”. So it refers to an investment opportunity rather than to goods and services. 
I would like the Minister in the chair the Hon Judith Tizard just to reassure members of the Committee on the question of whether that clause will trap people for example who sell Amway products. No I suppose it will not because that is actually a good or service. But Amway of New Zealand recruits other people into the business. What happens when it recruits people into the business and things do not work out as well as they thought they would? Will this bill disadvantage those people? Should the people who are in that Amway of New Zealand business be worried about that? What about timeshares? When people buy into timeshares they are actually buying into an opportunity to have a nice holiday and so on and sometimes they have to try to sell those off. But investments in timeshares are not actually a good or a service. It is sort of like a holiday or a dream. 
Can the Minister take a call just to reassure us that legitimate business will not be trapped by the provisions of clause 5? The point is that when one reads that clause one does not know what it means and that means a poor unsuspecting person who is involved in investment opportunities will find himself or herself caught by it. Labour as the prime party in the Government has a responsibility to make sure that the law is clear: that the law means what it states and that when lay people read it they can understand whether they could be caught by it. I would like to make mention of the fact that—because this bill is a bit fuzzy—what will happen is that an unsuspecting small business will get caught by the Commerce Commission taking a case against it. 
I worked in a company a number of years ago when the Fair Trading Act was first passed through Parliament. The Commerce Commission decided to pick on the company I worked for as a test case. I can tell the Minister in the chair that an enormous amount of stress and pressure was caused for that small business because the Commerce Commission itself did not understand the law. It was using that company in order to have the law interpreted for it. That was a huge burden of stress worry and cost for the small business that I worked for. At the end of the day it turned out that the Commerce Commission was totally wrong. It had got the wrong end of the stick altogether but we were the poor victims who had to help to have the law clarified. 
Because this bill is so badly drafted I know that in the future many small businesses in New Zealand will suffer because of the law that this Labour Government has forced on them. What is even worse is that new section 41(6) inserted by clause 10 states that the Commerce Commission does not have to pay damages if it has got things wrong. I can tell the Minister that many members of this Parliament know what happened to a poor couple when the Occupational Safety and Health Service decided to take a case against them—the Berrymans. Some members will have had the Berrymans attend their select committee to ask for compensation. What happened there was that the Occupational Safety and Health Service was taking a case against them to test the law and that just about destroyed their lives. The Labour Government should not be responsible for that.