Menéndez March RicardoRICARDO MENÉNDEZ MARCH (Green): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'd like to begin by—I won't even try to begin my speech by having some anecdotal account of shopping at the supermarket because the reality is it's not so much about our experience shopping that has led to this bill the Grocery Industry Competition Bill but many low-income communities who are struggling to put food on the table has created a conversation in Parliament and now legislative measures to ensure that there's better competition in the supermarket industry.We have supported this bill through the different stages of the House and I acknowledge the collegial nature of the select committee process to have a bill that would create better regulation and oversight around the behaviour of supermarkets also being able to have measures to address disputes where for example a grocery supplier or a wholesale consumer and a regular grocery retailer may be having issues. And all is well and fine because it will in the long term ensure that the smaller players are able to—should capitalism work as intended—provide cheaper goods and services for people.I know a lot of the conversation here has been around access to fresh kai and I acknowledge that supermarkets also serve as a point of sale for other types of products. But focusing on the food and fresh produce more specifically I do think that supermarkets as a concept where our communities access fresh food a relatively new construct. I think it's worth understanding that actually for many of our communities you don't have to go back that many generations ago to realise that the supply chains were not so controlled by a duopoly and one that despite all of the attempted green-washing efforts to work with food-rescue operations and what not ultimately is putting profit as paramount. That is what has led in my view beyond the inflationary pressures to supermarkets putting food prices up at the expense of people while people are facing a high cost of living.This is why particularly with this sort of profit-seeking behaviour at the expense of everything else it is important that we do have things like regulatory backstop tools that can be applied to start looking breaking up some of those bigger players and ensuring that they don't control such a big share of the market.But beyond that I think we need to ask—after the passage of this legislation—what comes next? Because it will take some time for the impacts of this bill to be seen in our communities but we also need to—and I acknowledge that no one here has said that this bill be some sort of panacea or silver bullet but we still as a country don't have a long-term food strategy. We don't have enough funding for even things like mahinga kai or urban food gardens or greater strategies around publicly-owned food markets where growers can take their produce directly to consumers.And so I guess in having support of the Government's measures of this bill I do want to leave my final contribution in this legislation as a point of encouragement for the Government to treat access to food as a fundamental human right and to invest in access to food beyond the control of supermarkets to ensure that this doesn't happen again.I guess I want to give a shout-out to well the previous Minister but the current one Duncan Webb specifically because I think we're going to have a conversation that I think will ultimately be so related to this bill and Duncan Webb's other member's bill Companies (Directors Duties) Amendment Bill and I look forward to having the conversation about whether we can force to company directors to look at things beyond profit because I think this will actually really marry up what we're trying to do in this bill to actually put forward those really really important questions.We support this bill we look forward to improving the regulations set out here and hopefully continue receiving feedback from consumers and our communities around the impacts of this bill when it comes to access to affordable food.