Lorck AnnaANNA LORCK (Labour—Tukituki): I rise to speak on the Commerce Amendment Bill and as I do so I'd like to talk as a business owner. We've talked a lot today about the impact on business and how business will respond to competition but I can speak from the heart. I can speak as a business owner for over 25 years and I can tell the people of this House that competition is the best thing we can do to grow business. Without competition we don't keep being innovative we don't enable ourselves to grow and we don't include the number eight wire thinking that comes with being good Kiwis in business. But I do agree with a member of the other side of the House: because we are a small country we can see the creation of duopolies cartels emerging and the consolidation of market power and we have firms of great size and how they behave and the purchasing of those products. But it does go across all of the community and across the economy and we must make sure that when we do look at this bill that we don't get caught up in what the other side of the House seem to think we will do. But I can assure you as a business owner with this in mind I don't think we'll see that bogged down in legislation. This is about free markets. This is about growing a greater way of doing business. Now the people that spoke before me talked at length about many of the things that are going to change under section 36. When I looked at what I could talk about at this late stage in the debate in the first reading I thought about talking about some of the things that were technical and small things that talked about loopholes because as we know people will find loopholes if we leave them there. So I looked at one that talks about closing a loophole that was inadvertently created in 2017 by extending the prohibition against cartels which deprive consumers of fair deals to covenants that create or implement a cartel as well as contracts that do so. So I started to look through quite a bit of the information that was given to me on what I could speak about here and when it came to the cartels and what covenants are I thought I'd give people a little bit more information about it as a couple of examples. Now the Act defines covenants as relating to land. A covenant on land generally restricts the way in which the land can be used. For example as we are looking for examples a supermarket may place a covenant on land of its surplus land to prevent the land from being used for a competing supermarket. Now I can tell you in Napier we have two Countdown supermarkets side by side. Why are they side by side? Because it breeds competition and—Hon David Bennett: No it's the council rules around where you can build them. ANNA LORCK: No it breeds competition Mr Bennett. How about you come and shop in Napier and check out the two Countdowns? Then not far away from that Countdown is also another supermarket a Pak 'N Save supermarket and we start to see how competition builds competition and business and growth. So what happens when we go into another area of business and we look at where the central business district is? Businesses go together because it breeds business. It's because I'm in business that I can actually talk about this type of stuff Mr Bennett.Now I would like to talk about another part of this clause 24. In 2017 when the Act's price-fixing prohibitions were repealed and replaced with new cartel prohibitions covenants were inadvertently excluded from the new prohibitions. This was an oversight rather than any change in policy position. So it's good that we're coming back and we're working through these minor minor details. But loopholes—people find them and people use them to their advantage. We're going to get through those by doing really good submissions through select committee. We're going to encourage as many people as possible to make submissions because this is how we create better laws and better bills. I believe that it's because of this side of the House and how we conduct our business that this is how we will get better bills happening. Now I just wanted to refer to a couple of things about the very reason for this bill: effective competition between firms tends to stimulate productivity innovation better-quality goods and services for consumers and better prices. We've talked a lot about consumers our customers. We are all customers of different businesses. We want to do business with those businesses who do play fair. But let's not confuse fairness with competition and driving hard to be better at what we do ensuring that we do keep growing and innovating with that number eight wire thinking—that's what makes Kiwis good at what we do. On the whole the Act does this effectively and is well regarded internationally. However the scope of some such prohibitions is unclear difficult to enforce or insufficient to deter certain anti-competitive conduct. The bill seeks to address this and takes other opportunities to improve the functioning of the Commerce Act. Now it is so important when we are creating these bills especially for business—and I can understand some of the struggles that businesses have with compliance. I can understand those things. That's why we need to make sure that bills and law are fit for purpose. We have to have a seamless way of working through things. Now I'd also just like to talk about why it's so important that we ensure the communication of how we do these bills works through the system. That's why I'm really calling on businesses to make submissions and be part of this. We need to be able to adapt and respond to our competitive market. We need to make sure we do introduce bills that are beneficial to growing business and we need to make sure as well that we do protect and are a safe harbour for those matters. Now this is also really important when we talk about how good we can be and I am confident—I am more confident than any of those members on the other side of the House—about how good we will do this bill. I know that it's in my heart and it's in business owners' hearts and it's in the right hearts of consumers to do what's right for business. Business does better when there is competition in the market. Let's not stifle competition. Let's make sure we have the best competitive open market we can in this country and lead by example. That's what I hope we do through the entire process of this bill and I would like to commend it to the House.