Bayly Andrew; McKelvie Ian; Clark DavidANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Mr Chair. I'm appreciative that the Minister has responded to those questions I put to him late last night. I think it's important if the courts are looking for direction it's clear what the intent of the bill is and the intent of the committee and the Minister. So that's very useful background. I suppose just carrying on obviously these additional powers that the Minister's put through under Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 174 deal with the immediate issue of monitoring of these arrangements. First of all there's a resourcing issue and I take the Minister's comment saying that the Commerce Commission will devote sufficient resources; hopefully not to the detriment of other important parts of the Commerce Commission. But I suppose it gives rise to what is the future position because these measures that were proposed by the committee is a short-term stopgap because I think the intent—and the Minister has certainly talked about this previously—is that ultimately there will be a grocery regulator.So for the committee one of the biggest issues in dealing with this new sections 28A and 28B is the issue about what might be the role of the grocery regulator and whether in fact that grocery regulator may actually take over the powers that are covered under section 174 or whether the Minister has the intent of retaining that within the Commerce Commission which is probably more an area where you'd rightfully normally find these types of powers. But obviously we don't know what the grocery retailer obligations or arrangements might be. I understand the Minister's going to be introducing them. So again it'd be useful for the Minister to talk about when he might be introducing that legislation around the grocery retailer; what might be the scope of the grocery retailer; whether in fact they might take on some of these roles that we've passed in 174 or propose to; and just generally the structure of the interplay between the grocery regulator and the Commerce Commission in the future.CHAIRPERSON (Ian McKelvie): I call Michael Wood. Oh the Hon David Clark—apologies.Hon Dr DAVID CLARK (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Ha ha! I'm not sure who you've offended more. Indeed it is the Government's expressed intention to establish a retail grocery regulator to oversee and monitor the retail grocery sector and that was something that we highlighted in our response to the commission's recommendations. I've indicated that I'll be bringing a bill to this House later in the year to give effect to the Government's intention to put in place measures that respond to those recommendations from the commission. If we put out the lay of the land obviously we have a situation where there's global inflation and Kiwis are not exempt from that. So Kiwis are feeling the pinch here at home. You know it's why we have the cost of living package in the Budget. But also it's clear right now that the grocery retailers have been making these extraordinary profits over many years documented in the Commerce Commission's report of what were considered excess profits of conservatively estimated at a million dollars a day every day of the year out of Kiwis' pockets. That is something we can tackle as a Government to help ease the burden on families at this time when cost of living is making many Kiwi families do it tough. So we're determined to do that and we responded to the Commerce Commission's recommendations by accepting the majority but rejecting two because we wanted to go further and faster. That included reviewing sooner and we'll have an expectation that the regulator when they're appointed will review the sector with an annual report rather than a three-yearly review. Also we also were not comfortable with just having a wholesale access regime on good-faith terms. I've signalled a mandatory backstop to ensure that there is a regime in place if we don't see the outcomes we would expect from a good-faith access regime in the wholesale sector. So the Government has gone obviously further than the Commerce Commission was ready to recommend but we make no apology for that because we want to see Kiwis get a fair deal at the supermarket.Those other recommendations we've accepted and where we've gone further we will be making very clear when we bring legislation to the House. Of course we're wanting to go through that detail very carefully to make sure that there are no loopholes that we are getting things right so that Kiwis really do get a better deal in a more competitive market as the year progresses. But I would note already and I would say as a result of the market study we're seeing significant change in the market. We've seen the duopoly welcome a code of conduct for the first time and participate in helping it get developed. We've seen the duopoly welcome a regulator come in. We've seen these remarkable in my view acceptances that it's a good idea to get rid of covenants that have been in place for years and years and years blocking competition in this sector. The supermarkets have said Well we can see that that's no longer acceptable and we are going to change."We've seen price freezes put in place. They're temporary. We want to attack the long-term structural issues here. But they are promising signs. We are seeing also the supermarkets the duopoly signalling they want to open up wholesale. So we're seeing some promising responses right now but we want to make sure that over the longer term we've got the structural issues right so that we see competition longer term in the sector that benefits Kiwi consumers."