Wong Pansy: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
Wong Pansy: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
[Volume:609;Page:6917] 
PANSY WONG (NZ National) 
: It is a pleasure to take a call in the third reading of the Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3). I am grateful that today this bill has received about 4 hours of debate. We spent about 2½ hours on the Committee stage and about 1¼ hours on the second reading and with the diligent contributions particularly from the National Party at least we all now understand why we support this bill. We did not have a contribution from the Minister. We have had not one single syllable from all those back-bench Labour Party members and if nobody from the National Party had contributed they probably would not know what bill we were debating or why the Labour Government supports the bill. 
However there still remains a question to be answered. As my colleague John Key has pointed out this bill was introduced into the House in December 2001 and referred to the Commerce Committee on 2 May 2002. We supported the bill at the first reading and we supported its referral to the select committee mainly because of the amendment to toughen up the penalty against pyramid selling—an issue we believe is an issue worth the House’s consideration. But I guess members like myself did not expect that the select committee would only bother to spend half an hour listening to submissions and take 55 minutes to deliberate. It might be something to do with the chairman Mr Mark Peck. He might believe that the time taken in a select committee has to be in proportion to his size. I notice that the Assistant Speaker in the chair is a member of the select committee. He might appreciate why the National Party believes that in such a rushed process some provisions will require amendments. My colleagues have been working very hard. We support the legislation mainly because it addresses pyramid-selling schemes. However we also believe that it needs some amendments in order to make it an even better bill—a bill that will not lead to additional compliance costs with no corresponding benefits. 
Let me just touch on the four areas that National has promised to fix when we become the Government in 2005. The first one is that whenever legislation is introduced there should be a transitional period. It is not fair to the business community or to organisations that have to implement the legislation when there is no transitional period. I commented briefly on this at the select committee because even some technical changes or amendments would lead to the business community not being sure how the implementation would work and how the courts might interpret those changes. It is important that a transitional period exists so that educational sessions can be conducted. So the first amendment we would make would be to ensure that no bills are enacted without having a very fair transitional period. 
The second area that we believe needs to be looked at again is the power given to the Commerce Commission. For example the Commerce Commission has the power to demand any documentation to be produced by any entity if the commission is investigating that entity. It is fair that the Commerce Commission should receive cooperation but if it happened that it was wanting documentation that is not produced as part of that entity’s financial statement etc. the Commerce Commission’s power should be restricted. A lot of people might think that with computers it is easy to produce documentation. But if the documentation is not part of the company’s system it will lead to substantial compliance costs. That leads me to another point. This bill contains no compliance cost statement. 
Sitting suspended from midnight to 9 a.m. (Thursday)