Leary IngridINGRID LEARY (Labour—Taieri): This is a great piece of legislation because it's consumers who will benefit. So it's another really good law that's been brought to the House by my good friend and colleague the Hon Dr David Clark who—like me—represents the best part of New Zealand: Dunedin. And I wanted to commend him for having the best interests of consumers at heart. He has brought in a suite of laws that really look at relevelling the playing field and making sure it's as competitive as it can be. Last year it was an amendment to the Fair Trading Act; we've had the recent review into consumer credit laws and I believe that there are some more likely to come; there's been the review into the supermarket duopoly—I'm looking forward to his responses to that; and now we have this Commerce Amendment Bill which is about protecting consumers.And to get a bit geeky on it I just want to sort of do a little forensic on section 36 in clause 14 because it's such an interesting part of this bill. Section 36 is basically New Zealand's anti-monopolisation provision and it has four elements which need to be established. First one needs a relevant market. Secondly there must be substantial market power in that relevant market. The firm in question must have taken advantage of that substantial power. And fourthly is around motivation or acting with one of the prescribed purposes—and over on the other side of the House they referred to it as mens rea although that's actually more attributable to the criminal legal system.What's been interesting with this is that there's been a hypothetical test rather than an actual test and the question becomes whether the defendant has engaged in a particular activity in a hypothetical market—which is a really difficult question. The problem is that it fails to capture categories of conduct which deserve condemnation. An example might be where an importer of a particular product prevents other importers of that product from say having access to the ports. So one can see the disadvantage they'd be placed at and yet the way that section 36 stands it currently would not capture that anti-competitive behaviour. So what this amendment does is it introduces the effects test and it makes it an exercise about looking at actual intention and an actual market—which to my mind is a much more sensible way to proceed when looking at competition law.The arguments levelled by Damien Smith and David Bennett about unintended consequences and being anti-competitive don't really stand because—as Glen Bennett said tonight my colleague—this law is not about protecting individual businesses. It's not going to stifle competition by deterring firms with market power from lowering their prices or innovating. Competition law is aimed at protecting the competitive process not individual competitors. So it's all about becoming more efficient introducing better products lowering prices—and they are all legitimate and pro-competitive practices.I would note that Australia has already introduced a similar law. And given the proximity of our markets and the way that our markets operate sometimes as effectively one market it just makes sense to align our legislation with the Australian legislation so that we don't need to rely on the courts to reach the same conclusion—which is much more expensive and onerous for everybody.The other thing I guess is just noting that the New Zealand market is made of mainly small and medium businesses. In that environment small firms arguably do need more protections. Therefore it stands to reason that we would see a section 36 change like this to afford that extra protection from market dominance by the big players.So it's great to see the enthusiasm from across the way. I think we've dispelled the notion that there are risks to anti-competitive behaviour because clearly this is about the process of competition not individual companies and the impact it would have on individual companies. It sends the right signals to the market and I'm really proud that it has reached the third reading and I look forward to the next piece of legislation that my good friend the Hon Dr David Clark might have to make sure that consumers are getting the best deal that they can. I commend it to the House.