Harawira Hone: Commerce Amendment Bill — First Reading 
Harawira Hone: Commerce Amendment Bill — First Reading 
[Volume:646;Page:15168] 
HONE HARAWIRA (Maori Party—Te Tai Tokerau) 
: 
 Tena koe Madam Assistant Speaker. Any bill that needs an explanatory note of 48 pages is cause for concern particularly when it is slipped into the House just when everyone is gearing up for a long weekend so we had a good look at this one. 
The purpose of the Commerce Amendment Bill sounds good: protecting consumer interests by promoting competition incentives for investment and innovation sharing efficiency gains with consumers quality services etc. etc. and limiting excessive profits—yeah right! But to understand why we are in the position we are in at the moment one has to look back to the 1980s and 1990s and the obscene rush of successive Governments to flog off the nation’s assets when we got rolled by big business and transnationals swooping in buying up all the infrastructure cutting back on people and services and shipping all the profits back overseas. 
That continuing privatisation of State assets and trading activities was the focus of the Privatisation by Stealth conference held in Christchurch last week to highlight the attempts by transnationals to swoop on Auckland International Airport and the Lyttelton Port Co. and the continued push for privately owned toll roads road construction State housing projects rubbish collections—the list is endless. 
Emanuel Savas an adviser to both Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher said in his 2000 book  
Privatization and Public-Private Partnerships 
: “privatisation is like dismantling a bomb—it must be done very carefully for wrong decisions can have nasty consequences. There are obstacles to be overcome arguments to be rebutted proponents to be mobilised and opponents to be thwarted”. Yet we have allowed the very core sectors of our economy to be taken over by transnationals—our rail our power our transport infrastructure and even our banks—and the Government has been so hopeless at regulating those monopolies that we have been locked into price increases reduced service quality and infrastructure run-down. 
Electricity of course is the classic sector. There have been mergers and takeovers at grossly inflated prices; our electricity supply has been allowed to end up in the hands of transnational big business; and there are empty dams while everyone points his or her finger at everyone else instead of owning the problem and dealing with it. The big sweetener of course was supposed to be cheaper power but what we got were price hikes of 5 to 15 percent and the Government having to pass more legislation in 1999 to try to rein in those power companies. People were dying in 2007 because corporate profit was considered to be more important than people’s lives. 
Sue Kedgley 
: It went up 600 percent in 10 years in Wellington. 
HONE HARAWIRA 
: That makes me glad I live in Kaitaia. In  
Reclaiming the Future: New Zealand and the Global Economy 
 Jane Kelsey says that the electricity market model was supposed to be based on consumer control but what we got were power companies doing back-door deals to ensure their interests got higher priority than those of New Zealand’s own citizens. The ultimate example is an older one of course but it is the deal that Comalco got for cheap electricity for its aluminium smelter at Bluff. This was an arrangement where Comalco got a lock on cheaper electricity than any of us have seen for decades and exclusive access to nearly 17 percent of the nation’s total electricity output. People are allowed to die in South Auckland so multinationals can profit. That is what it was all about back then and that is still what it is all about now. That is why the key to our future lies in rolling back the nasty consequences of the nation’s privatisation programme. 
The Maori Party’s position on this bill is also determined by the fact that most of the privatisation of the nation’s infrastructure and corporatisation of the nation’s assets has impacted deeply on the Treaty of Waitangi settlements that many of our people are going through now. We welcome regulation that will open up markets to competition and promote greater choices and better prices for consumers but given the recent history of rampant transnationalism and inadequate parliamentary oversight we do not know that putting all the decision-making authority in the hands of a single Minister will lead to any more certainty transparency and predictability for consumers. We will be interested in hearing the views of beneficiary groups energy watchdogs the Child Poverty Action Group and other consumer bodies as to how they see this bill either helping or harming their constituents’ futures. 
In closing let me just remind the House that tomorrow is the International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination a day when our hearts and minds go back to 21 March 1960 when police killed 69 black people for daring to demonstrate against the hated apartheid “pass laws”. Yet today is the day we take steps of our own to help the poor black people of this country fight the discrimination of corporate greed. Kia ora.