Ryall Tony: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
Ryall Tony: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — In Committee 
[Volume:609;Page:6845] 
Hon TONY RYALL (NZ National—Bay of Plenty) 
: There are a significant number of amendments to the commencement date of this bill and although I know Madam Chairperson that you are very quick to try to keep National and other Opposition members to the title I indulge your patience so that you can see the thread of my argument about why we need to change the dates. 
There are a number of amendments but I want to talk in particular about the amendment in the name of Lindsay Tisch. It says that the bill should not come into force in toto until section 81 comes into force on a date to be appointed by Order in Council. If we look at section 81 we see that it is the section covering fines. I would like to explain to members why there needs to be a delay in the commencement date to allow for a review of the fines. These fines have not been amended since 1986 and during that time the cost of living has risen 54 percent. The Government proposes to adjust those fines by 100 percent. 
 Now one can make an argument that the Government wants to send a signal to the judiciary that the fines currently being applied are inadequate. The Government proposes that the mechanism for that should be a doubling of the fines. I would draw the Minister’s attention to my amendment to insert new section 40A in a new clause 8A which would provide a principle in the bill that duplicates the principle in the Sentencing Act that says to judges that they must impose a penalty near the maximum prescribed for the offending that is near the most serious. That means that the current penalties could be sufficiently adequate but judges would be encouraged to use the full range of the penalties. 
The second argument I would make about why we need to defer implementation of the penalties is that there has not been a comprehensive review of the penalties regime applying to commercial law in this country for about 12 years. There are now several pieces of commercial legislation that have different levels of fines with no correlation to each other. So there are some bills where the maximum fine is $10000 for quite serious commercial breaches and now there is another bill where the maximum fine may be up to $200000 for comparatively less serious offences. 
Hon Judith Tizard 
: It is $100000 now. 
Hon TONY RYALL 
: Well it is $200000. 
Hon Judith Tizard 
: Yes but it is $100000 now. 
Hon TONY RYALL 
: That is right but I am telling the member that her proposal is $200000. I am saying that we should delay that until this Government has undertaken a full review of the various commercial legislation penalties regimes. In that way we would be saying to the commercial community that there is a consistency across the penalties regime. It is ridiculous that in some pieces of legislation quite serious criminal behaviour solicits a $10000 maximum fine but under this Government’s proposal one could get a $200000 fine for something that could be comparatively much less offensive. So we say let us defer the commencement date of this bill to provide for a review of the regime of penalties across commercial legislation. It is currently quite ad hoc and we think that we should provide for a review. I draw the Minister’s attention to my other amendment to clause 8 that would require her as Minister to provide for a review of the level of financial penalties in comparison with penalties included in other commercial legislation within 6 months of the assent of this bill so that we could do something about that. 
A further reason that we have other amendments to defer the commencement date is that we believe business needs to take legal advice on how to deal with the removal of the 3-year limitation period—because as Dr the Hon Lockwood Smith said 10 years down the track businesses might now find that they are subject to a fair trading action in respect of something that happened 10 years ago that they have no contingent liability in their system for. We think the dates should be deferred for that reason—to allow business to get appropriate legal advice on how they can deal with the removal of the 3-year limitation period from date of action. We do not support this amendment that says that it should be 3 years from discovery.