Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. I rise in Opposition to this Commerce (Criminalisation of Cartels) Amendment Bill in its third reading. As the Minister's colleague Andrew Little has just spoken I would like to thank him actually for drawing upon quotes from previous National Ministers and National members of the Government caucus. Those quotes show quite clearly that we oppose the sort of cartel behaviour that places absolutely unnecessary burdens horrible burdens on consumers raises prices and actually creates a very very unfair environment for those consumers and other businesses to exist in. The difference between us in Government and the current Government is that we showed we were prepared to listen—to listen to people listen to submitters listen to businesses listen to officials and determine and decide that the criminalisation provisions were wrong and should be removed. So we did so but we enacted legislation that absolutely introduced harsh civil penalties for cartel behaviour. That is the law today and it is sufficient to deter that sort of behaviour. This Government instead has gone ahead with provisions that are not only unnecessary from a deterrent perspective but will add uncertainty and issues around the management of commerce in that area. They know this and we know this because their officials told them so. Treasury told them We're not in favour of criminalisation"—told them that. Their own officials overseeing the bill came to realise this through the process of this bill moving through its stages in the House and came to the Minister with Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 194 introduced in the committee of the whole House. The SOP acknowledged that the criminalisation provisions could and very possibly would lead to situations where activities that did not possess criminal intent would be captured by the criminalisation provisions and we'd have therefore fundamentally innocent business people being criminalised just because of the Government's desire their unceasing desire—they basically don't like business over there despite what they say. They see them as bad people with evil intent and they just want to take any option and opportunity to crush them. Their own officials told them that their bill would create very poor consequences and wouldn't deliver to the intent that they had expressed it should. So they had to introduce this SOP. So for the Minister now to tell us that it'll all be fine and people that shouldn't be captured by this won't be—I think he doesn't understand the kludge that was put together in the SOP in the committee of the whole House because in the detail of that SOP the officials acknowledged that none of the options they put forward were particularly elegant or wholly effective but basically their advice was "Of these bad options this is the least worst. So please do this one." which the Minister responsible for the bill elected to do clearly with that advice. We've got a bill going through its third reading which even officials acknowledge is sub-optimal but we'd argue more than that that the bill itself isn't required at all. The civil penalties that exist today for cartel behaviour are a sufficient deterrent to ensure that consumers and otherwise at-risk businesses in our commercial market have sufficient protection that the sort of cartel behaviour is less likely to happen than it was before the last National Government. This bill is just an illustration that this Government dislikes business and wants to beat them with a large hammer. We oppose the bill."