SpeechDAMIEN SMITH (ACT): Competition is an amazing thing. As we've seen tonight with Air New Zealand the charade has cost each member of the team of 5 million a thousand bucks each. It should be going into their hands not the Minister of Finance. So I just wanted to expose the highs and lows of competition and that this has been a gift from the Labour Party to the rich at the expense of the working class. Well done to Labour. You can see why sometimes we get frustrated on this side of the House.On 14 December 2021 the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee recommended this bill with certain amendments around the effects of competition and market power; intellectual property rights and leveraging and safe haven aspects of those; and increasing the realities of anti-competitive mergers and cartel behaviour. For most of this part we're not going to stand in the way of that as a bill. But we would like to point out that from an intellectual property rights point of view it does have the potential to mirror some of the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act problems that we've experienced—in the sense that we should be encouraging businesses to be innovative to commercialise to actually leverage the strength that they've thought about through their teams through their companies and through their capital investment in making and bringing a product to the market. The impact of this is now likely to make owners reticent sometimes even getting to the point where we may suffer in New Zealand in terms of product development because they'll think the size of our market isn't worth it isn't worth the investment and are we going to get challenged by the Commerce Commission as somebody who wants to grow market share or who has market share and actually wants to manage that.So the merit of this bill is to increase competition but it is also to take a look at one very simple aspect: does it grow the economy of New Zealand? At the moment there's only two cases that have come up where sort of the elements of this law have been applied. It makes me think that the Commerce Commission in its empire-building status would like to create more case law which obviously the lawyers will love to actually justify this. But I'm predicting now that in the area of intellectual property rights we will have competition issues where lots of challenges and money will be expended in an unregulated market.We are all for competition and minimum regulation in the ACT Party. But we also respect the philosophy of the bill which is behavioural in terms of making sure that the competitive playing-field is standard size between Australia and New Zealand. It is likely to follow that the Australian benchmark has application here. But also other applications could be received from the United Kingdom and other various countries. So the majority of coverage on the bill has focused on the market powers section and there is a fine balance here between market power competition law and intellectual property rights. If people companies and organisations especially in the era of new technology are afraid to innovate in this country because of a Government department then we have a serious a problem.So we've been asking to reinstate the safe harbour intellectual property (IP) section and give business confidence that they can invest in their IP and license their IP. If you take an example in the horticultural industry you could have packaging equipment that would work for avocados it could work for apples but they are two different markets and you can't get transfer knowledge or IP. So with regards to the Minister's bill there will be an impact we feel—ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Order! Order! With apologies to the member could the members on my left if they're going to have a conversation could it not be for the benefit of the House. So just if you could keep your voices down it would be appreciated.DAMIEN SMITH: Thank you very much. The point we make is that competition and intellectual property right leverage is a mixed area and we do not have the confidence that this has been fully thought through that there's enough case law yet. So we would recommend that the Government takes a view on reviewing this bill as that case law comes through.So ACT will be supporting this bill but we wanted to point out the inherent weaknesses around intellectual property right leverage and that some of the Supplementary Order Papers did cover this off and should have been passed to add value to this bill.Thank you very much.