Curran ClareTUESDAY 6 NOVEMBER 2018(continued on Wednesday 7 November 2018)TELECOMMUNICATIONS (NEW REGULATORY FRAMEWORK) AMENDMENT BILLThird ReadingDebate resumed.Hon CLARE CURRAN (Labour—Dunedin South): Thank you Madam Assistant Speaker. It's a real pleasure to stand and take a call in the third and final reading of the Telecommunications (New Regulatory Framework) Amendment Bill. While many of my colleagues across the House and perhaps some people listening out there—their eyes may glaze over when one talks about telecommunications regulation but actually I feel quite passionate about it. I want to give a little bit of a brief history of the bill which goes back to 2012 when the ultra-fast broadband network was getting well under way and when it became pretty clear that there needed to be a regulatory framework post-2020 when the contractual arrangements for the delivery of this new highway of the future were actually complete.Extensive consultation was entered into particularly between 2015 and 2017 and this work this bill before us today is the result of that extensive consultation. It has also included the work of seven Ministers in this House going back to Steven Joyce Amy Adams Simon Bridges myself and now Kris Faafoi who's shepherding it through the House. I just want to acknowledge all of those Ministers for the work that's been done and also the telecommunications industry generally which can be a fairly fraught environment. It's very competitive. It's had its issues over the years in terms of monopoly players but what we've had and what this bill signifies is major disruption that has occurred in a sector with the replacement of one technology by another—that being fast fibre ultimately replacing our copper network system—in a way that has the industry largely not completely but largely on side and has involved two major parties working cooperatively. Of course the Economic Development Science and Innovation Committee have done a lot of the grunt work on hearing the submissions. I also want to acknowledge the Ministry of Business Innovation and Employment (MBIE) officials and particularly Osmond and Tim who did an awful lot of work to get this to the point that it is at today. I think it's something that New Zealand can actually be proud of.While the eyes may glaze over when one thinks about regulatory frameworks they are the underpinning of our system working well. This is a utility framework such as electricity or water. If you were playing Monopoly you'd be landing on the utilities square and you'd be thinking that we've got the fibre regulatory system pretty much right for the future. I think that we should be pretty proud of that. There's still more work to do obviously. There's more disruption coming in the 5G space and there's more work to be done to ensure that fast fibre gets out as far into our country as possible and that we sort out our rural broadband situation so that we don't have a two-tier system in the country where people living outside the urban areas are basically struggling to function in the modern world because they can't get fast fibre.I want to spend a couple of minutes just talking about three or four of the main parts of this bill where work included in Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) 118—which is the work that was done post coming out of select committee—tried to tweak this bill to be the best bill it possibly could be. The first matter is around the anchor pricing. That is the base price at which fibre post-2020 will be. That ended up being sorted in a contractual arrangement rather than through a legislative instrument. So I think actually that's good law not to put an actual legislated price into the legislation. Instead a contractual arrangement was entered into with Chorus particularly to make the base figure $46.That means that the consumer out there will not be faced with price shocks which would then disrupt the industry. While it is not quite as low as some would have liked it actually does provide a certainty I think for all: for the whole of the industry for the retailers that can then offer the services above that anchor price but also and most importantly for the consumers where their monthly bill which is usually now a bundled bill that includes fibre phone and Wi-Fi all of those services—going forward they will know that they aren't going to face price shocks. So I think that was a pretty good outcome.The other one is the line of business provisions which again sounds pretty boring but actually is pretty important. What that does is it ensures protections against ending up with a vertically integrated monopoly in New Zealand again such as we used to have under Telecom. So that means that Chorus has to provide the wholesale service rather than being able to get back into being that vertically integrated monopoly. But you can go too far in these things and you can restrict business services so much that it actually means that the company has nowhere to go. So the SOP actually provides for some tweaking of that to ensure that some innovation can occur around the edges because disruption and technological change is happening so fast that every technology company every provider of services is morphing into something else before our very eyes. So there are provisions in this SOP for the Commerce Commission as the regulator to approve some line of business service changes around the edges.The third thing I want to mention is around the definition of telecommunications" and while I don't think anyone's mentioned this yet this is actually pretty important. On the face of it it doesn't seem that important but what it does is it brings "broadcasting transmission" within the definition of "telecommunications". What that means is that the regulator the Commerce Commission can actually have some powers in that area. We won't see the impact of that for a while but it means that broadcasting transmission is no longer in an unregulated space which was a ridiculous anomaly in our system.Finally the 111 service being available to consumers who are on fibre when power cuts happen and they don't have a mobile phone—particularly elderly people. I really want to acknowledge New Zealand First's Tracey Martin for the work she did on that to ensure that this bill had provision for them. Protecting older people vulnerable people—that's what a good coalition Government that cares about people does and I'm pretty proud of it. Overall I'm pretty proud of this bill."