Coates BarryBARRY COATES (Green): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai. Is it really too much to ask for a New Zealand business to call for a level playing field so that it can compete internationally so that our businesses that invest their time their capital their skills often their houses—everything they have—in their businesses are able to succeed in competition with international competitors? That should be the basis of our support for business—the fact that we will make sure that they have the opportunities to compete at least on a level playing field. However in this world some companies compete unfairly. We have international competitors that dump their goods in New Zealand markets at below the market price in their home countries and below their costs. When they do that they adversely affect our New Zealand companies. That is why we have anti-dumping laws.However today we are considering a bill that is not about protecting New Zealand companies; it is actually about saying: Let's not apply these anti-dumping rules if we come up with some arcane public interest test that says we shouldn't support New Zealand companies." This bill removes that protection of New Zealand companies from predatory dumping by foreign competitors and exposes them to greater uncertainty higher costs and extremely long delays in order to get any remedies when they are being driven out of business by unfair competition.The bill has three steps. Firstly a company has 180 days—6 months—for its claim of anti-dumping to be processed. It has to provide a huge amount of information which is a real burden on small to medium sized enterprises (SMEs). Secondly then there will be a determination of whether it has a case and what the anti-dumping duty should be that is applied on the imports. What this bill does is it adds a third stage. After that it says: "Well the Minister is then going to apply a test and that test will say: 'Should we completely disregard this whole analysis and should we just feed our local companies to the wolves? Should we just allow them to be predated and forced out of business by foreign competition?' ".So what did the submitters say about this? Well Business New Zealand is strongly against it. So is the Manufacturers and Exporters Association so are the wood processors so is Horticulture New Zealand the Flower Growers Association and virtually every other business group. They do not like this bill and neither do we. It is a bad bill. The New Zealand Flower Growers Association says it rejects that there is a "need to tilt the playing field" in favour of dumped and subsidised goods from overseas against local business. What is this? We are tilting the playing field not in favour of our small business but against it. What kind of support is that from the Government for small business?So what happens if you create a bill like this? If you say to foreign companies "You can dump your products and then actually if you're able to stay there for a while the Government may well then allow you to continue without duties." what kind of incentives does that create for foreign companies? They will come into this market in their droves. They will dump their goods they will drive the local company out of business and then what will they do? They will raise their prices again. And you cannot just turn around and recreate a company.As the peach-growers association says you cannot just turn the supply of peaches on and off. It takes 6 or 7 years to grow a proper peach crop. Their case the Hawke's Bay producers was that they lost $15 million when Greek imports of peaches were dumped. They made the point that this is not just something that affects the peach growers; this affects the whole community. It affects the whole supplier base the whole economy and the whole community. This is what we are losing by leaving our local companies at the mercy of foreign predation.We could also be talking to New Zealand Steel. The dumping by Chinese steel exporters has been proven in the United States and the European Union. They came here and New Zealand Steel says the price dropped by 82 percent on the New Zealand market. What is New Zealand Steel to do? It makes a complaint on anti-dumping. Now we have a law to say: "Well you know that's OK. The consumers are actually benefiting from lower steel prices." And what does that mean? It means that another New Zealand company may be driven to the wall if we apply a public interest test and we say that they should not be protected from unfair competition from overseas.So in order to try to correct some of the worst aspects of this bill which by the way we voted against we put down some amendments. In one of the amendments we said: "OK if you're going to do this you need not only to look at the short term; you need to look at the long term. What does it mean in terms of a dynamic economy?". You cannot just take a snapshot in time. Actually you have to understand the dynamics over many years—over the full life cycle of firms that may go bust and then a whole supply chain falls over because there are interconnections between different industries through the supply chain. We said you have to look at that. You have to look at employment you have to look at skills and you have to look at a whole lot of factors that the Government is not looking at in its supposedly independent view of a public interest test. Our amendments on this bill were rejected as were the recommendations in all of the submissions.We are seeing a decline in manufacturing in New Zealand. This is not a short-term issue; it is a long-term issue. We are seeing a decline in productivity. We are falling down the rankings in the OECD on productivity. We are seeing a drop in exports as a proportion of GDP. The apparent success of our economy is built on services on tax havens on real estate on speculation and on the financialisation of our economy. We are seeing a hollowing out of the productive economy in New Zealand we are seeing a productivity growth that is one of the worst in the OECD and what are our young people going to do? Instead of going into high-skill high-value manufacturing jobs which are being hollowed out they are going to have to flip hamburgers. This is the kind of economy that you have when you do not support the New Zealand manufacturing businesses and when you allow things like this bill to predate our local companies.So we need to support our local business and SMEs. At the moment what they are facing is not only this bill; they are facing a lack of protection against foreign companies and foreign multinationals that do not pay tax in New Zealand or anywhere else around the world which have an inbuilt advantage. They are facing online products being sold by Amazon and others that do not have 15 percent GST and now Amazon is setting up in Sydney. What is that going to do to New Zealand companies? It is going to wreck more New Zealand companies. And we are seeing trade agreements that do not look after small and medium sized producers and we are looking at procurement rules that are tilted against small companies.In each of these ways this Government is failing small business. It is failing the productive economy. It is time that this Government actually started to realise that this is not the way to build a New Zealand economy of the future. It is a short-term reckless speculative economy and it is time that this Government left. We will do better when we are in Government on 23 September."