Bayly Andrew; Webb DuncanANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thanks Madam Chair. Those were very good comments from my colleague Simon Watts there; I'm looking forward to the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs' answers.The big question apart from the issue of whether or not these regulations are going to work for wholesaling is the vexed question of whether in fact the wholesaling arrangement should apply to the grocery retailers' own brands. The bill states that it doesn't. There's an exclusion as I understand it. Of course the reality in the market is that when you go to a supermarket there will be a lot of products in the name of the supplier and there will be significant numbers of products under the category of home brand. If you look at trends going forward in places like Europe home brands now account for two-thirds of many of the product offerings as I understand it. So they've increasingly over time become very significant. The interesting thing is that many of those home brands are exactly the same product that had been produced by the supplier but are just produced in a different carton and delivered to the supermarket.So the issue is: why did the Minister believe that own-brand pricing arrangements for wholesale arrangements should be excluded? Again there's many people concerned that the supermarkets can leverage their scale to drive down the cost of home-brand products but new competition such as Costco or ALDI or whoever we envisage might be going to come in can't access those; they can only access the wholesale price that the supplier receives not what it receives from the own brand product. So I'd be interested to understand from the Minister why the home-brand pricing arrangements that are often cheaper are not included in the bill.Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Thank you Madam Chair. Thank you Mr Bayly. I understand that in fact the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee did address that problem and recognised it in that there's no material differentiation between own brand or home brand—whatever you want to call it—and other products in the bill.In respect of Mr Watts I want to make it clear that the regulations he's referring to are backstop regulations. They are regulations which will only be put in place where there is essentially market misbehaviour. You can have a read. You referred me to clause 18; if you'd read the whole section you'd see that. So when you talk about Will it go down and get down into the minutia?" it's highly unlikely that that will be necessary because the fact that that backstop is there will in fact create market discipline. But if there is market behaviour I would expect the Commerce Commission to use it as a confident and responsible enforcer.In respect of the cost do you know what the cost is? The cost is between $350 million and $500 million a year and the people who are bearing it at the moment are the consumer. That's the real cost of not doing this before. So yes this does impose some costs on the retail duopoly and that cost can be drawn from the super-profits that they've been making to date because they've been taking out of the pockets of ordinary New Zealanders."