Kuriger Barbara; Tolley AnneBARBARA KURIGER (National—Taranaki - King Country): Thank you Madam Deputy Speaker. It's interesting over this side of the House tonight when we've got the Government—a mix of Government—trying to solve a problem when they haven't really described where the evidence of a problem is. We're looking for the evidence of a problem and we heard Gareth Hughes the last speaker talking about the OECD. We heard him talking about Japan and we heard him talking about the EU. That followed on from a speech before by Fletcher Tabuteau who talked about the challenge for New Zealand. In all of this there is a challenge for New Zealand because we don't have the population of many of those countries. In fact we don't have the problem of most of those countries. That is a challenge and Fletcher Tabuteau alluded to it before: we are small and we need to collaborate. So we in this country under this piece of legislation are going to have businesses walking an absolute tightrope. I can see that the legal fraternity is going to be making a fortune out of this because where do we draw the balance between companies wanting to collaborate? We're a trading nation and we know that. We don't sit around selling stuff to each other. There's going to be a lot of collaboration that needs to go on for us to be on the world stage. We've been doing trade agreements—we've even got this current Government pulling together and doing trade agreements—and we actually need to be very careful that we're not sending the wrong signals here. So there is a lack of evidence of a problem and the suggestions from the arguments that came forward before were that the current penalties are currently effective. They consider that criminalisation would offer little benefit" but what it would do is it would impose "substantial costs on businesses". So there we go again. We're starting to put in extra substantial costs so everyone that wants to collaborate to make a difference in this country is going to have to have compliance books and red tape to the limits—which is just typical of what we hear from the other side of the House—to solve a problem about which no one's given us any evidence that it exists. It's going to be a real deterrent for people actually getting up getting in and working together and helping us have the opportunity to take on the world. Another concern that the submitters raised was that there will be "mid-level managers and senior managers [who] may already"—and I'm reading this from the regulatory impact statement—"be reluctant to engage in pro-competitive efficiency enhancing conduct with competitors because of the risk" of what might be in the breach. Tonight I've heard people talking about existing exceptions. So how do you get a fairness around that? Mr Tabuteau talked before about good and agreed rules. So how do you get good and agreed rules that actually it's OK to have some existing exceptions so that it's OK for some people to collaborate and the activity is OK as long as the Government says so because the Government seems to need to control everything around here? It will be a field day for lawyers. There are already things in place to deal with criminal activity and there have been a number of people who have gone through the court system and have been convicted of behaviour that is clearly anti-competitive but the fine line is going to be really really difficult to draw on establishing intent. I would like some real good explanations from people on the other side of the House as to how clear they see that line because for me that line is not black and white. There are always people I will admit that whatever the law is will try and find a way around it. So even if this happens there will be some criminal intent but I want someone from over the other side of the House to explain to us here that line—tell me what's on one side and tell me what's on the other side. We've heard about collaboration and then we've heard about the evil nastiness of cartels that get together. Now we all know what's criminal but I think that this is going to put a great onus on lots of businesses in this country. It's going to constrain—and I could see Gareth Hughes over there talking about facilitating all these ideas about technology and working together and all this big buzz in his head about all these things that could be created if we put this law in place. I'd like to contend that it's going to have the opposite effect. Thank you.DEPUTY SPEAKER: The next call is a split call—five minutes each."