Bayly Andrew; Webb DuncanANDREW BAYLY (National—Port Waikato): Thank you Minister. I think that sort of partially answered the question but I suppose my nuance is that there are times when ministerial oversight should be involved in these types of decisions and there are also other times when it shouldn't be. For instance the Overseas Investment Office decision-making around investment coming into New Zealand has been a vexed issue in terms of whether in fact it's best undertaken by politicians—Ministers—or whether in fact it should lie with officials. So I suppose my question is more that there will be times when it should come to Ministers but in this case this particular bill requires a lot of ministerial oversight and approval and that was the question that I was aiming at. The second thing I just wanted to move on to is this definition in clause 11(3) about when a business should be designated a regulated grocery retailer. Clearly there's one test which is the turnover test—an absolute test—which says that if in a financial period the turnover of that business is more than $750 million then automatically a grocery operator would become regulated. But then there are these other ones in clause 11(3)(b)(ii): the designation of A as a regulated grocery retailer would be likely to promote competitive neutrality". So I'd quite like to hear what the Minister understands "promote competitive neutrality" to be. It does use the term "a level playing field" in the bill but what does that mean? Does that mean actually now that you have a level playing field by the mere threat of for instance Costco coming in? Would it promote competitive neutrality? It doesn't actually achieve it yet and it may not but what is that term and when is competitive neutrality achieved—at what point does that occur? It goes on to say "otherwise promote competition" but I'll let the Minister just deal with that one and then I've got a couple more on that same point. But what do you mean by that Minister? Hon Dr DUNCAN WEBB (Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affairs): Thank you Madam Chair. Obviously it's important and I imagine that the brightline of $750 million in turnover would be far and away the most likely way in which a grocery retailer would be designated. However there is a scenario in which someone is operating in a way which is undermining competition even though they might not hit that threshold and whilst we may not immediately be able to imagine what that is the possibility is there. The idea of competitive neutrality as I understand it is simply that if you try to avoid the kind of pure economics of perfect competition—because we know that that's an impossibility in a real market—competitive neutrality is where we approach that in the real world and where there's no particular intervention which will improve competition. So where we have equal players players of roughly equal force competing equally we're going to have a competitively neutral—it's not an anti-competitive market; it's neutrally competitive. Any step—and this is the whole thesis of this bill—is to move towards a situation where we have a market where no one has particular market power over another party."