Key John: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
Key John: Fair Trading Amendment Bill (No 3) — Third Reading 
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JOHN KEY (NZ National—Helensville) 
: Obviously members in the Labour Party are paid by the word. I do not think that even my cat could give a speech more quickly than that and I still have not managed to teach it to speak English! National will support this legislation because on balance there are more good parts in it than there are bad parts. But I have to say that it is not great legislation. Let me start by waving some red flags for the House so that members can see where there are some risks. 
Richard Worth 
: Blue flags. 
JOHN KEY 
: Blue flags! Here we are at a quarter to twelve at night in urgency whipping through legislation that was introduced 2 years ago. It was introduced 2 years ago yet here we are in urgency whipping through mediocre legislation that has some good bits and some bad bits in it. I will discuss the bad bits at length but I will start with the good bits. 
We have spent hours discussing the bill in the House and giving it some rigorous debate. That is not what the Commerce Committee did. It did not take hours to hear evidence; it took 30 minutes. An episode of  
Coronation Street 
 runs for 30 minutes and that is a programme that has been going for about 30 years. The select committee listened to evidence for 30 minutes. There were six submissions and the committee bothered to listen to only one of them. I hope the reason was that the other five submitters did not want a hearing. That is all I want to know because the committee heard only one submission and it took 30 minutes to do it. 
John Carter 
: Who from? 
JOHN KEY 
: I do not know. It was Business New Zealand I think. It took the committee 55 minutes to deliberate on the bill. So this legislation which was introduced 2 years ago is now being discussed under urgency after having had the wonderful time of 1 hour and 25 minutes in the select committee process. The Labour member who spoke before me with such passion uttered four words. He is on the select committee I think. 
John Carter 
: He’s the chairman. 
JOHN KEY 
: He is the chairman of the select committee! It is no wonder that the legislation that goes through this House is hopeless. 
Hon Member 
: This bill is hopeless. 
JOHN KEY 
: Absolutely hopeless! He had four words to say about legislation that has been around Parliament for 2 years. Well members should not worry; the cavalry is here in the form of the National Party and it will give it some rigorous debate. We will tell members why we are supporting it because there are some good bits— 
John Carter 
: Are we sure? 
JOHN KEY 
: We are but we should not get too excited about it because it is mediocre— 
Richard Worth 
: This is a good speech. It should be heard in silence. 
JOHN KEY 
: Yes I would prefer fewer interjections but generally they come from the opposite side of the House and not from my own team. We are supporting the legislation because of what it is attempting to do in the area of pyramid selling. Pyramid schemes as anyone will know are very unfair and very unethical. They are schemes that are designed with the intention not of doing a real transaction but of defrauding the people who invest in them. One of the reasons that they are so dangerous and that so many New Zealanders have been caught by them is illustrated by doing the numbers very quickly in our heads—for example: a person sells the scheme to five people who sell it to another five people who then sell it to five more people and so on. The Labour Party might need a calculator to do that but on this side of the House we can do the numbers in our head. In a country of 4 million people we do not have to go down many layers to realise that all of New Zealand could be sucked into a pyramid-selling scheme. Only last night on television we saw evidence of a disastrous pyramid scheme that young New Zealanders were being sent via the Internet. It used very graphic pieces of information and very graphic photographs— 
John Carter 
: That’s very serious. 
JOHN KEY 
: It is very serious and the very graphic information was quite alarming and quite concerning. We are supporting this legislation because we do not want to see that sort of muck being sent on the Internet. We do not want to see New Zealanders being sucked into those schemes. The Internet is a very powerful medium by which to send pyramid schemes. 
I also want to point out to members that the good news of this legislation is that it aligns our position with that of Australia. It aligns us with the position outlined by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission in Australia. If this legislation had been in place some years earlier—for instance if it had been put in place much faster than the 2 years it took from when it was introduced into the House—then a number of schemes that have operated since its introduction into this House would have been closed down. That is one of the reasons we are supporting the bill. 
The second point I want to move on to is the issue of the criminal limitation period. It is late into the night and we do not need notes— 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: This is not one of the member’s better speeches. 
JOHN KEY 
: It could be. It is not over yet. Like a whole lot of things it is not over. I tell that member that it is a helluva lot better than the contribution from the member on his side of the House which comprised four words—that stunning performance from the chairman of the Commerce Committee that heard 30 minutes of submissions and took 55 minutes to write up its deliberations. I ask the Minister to answer this question for me: why does it take 55 minutes to write up the committee’s deliberations on something it took only 30 minutes to hear? 
Hon Trevor Mallard 
: Because you’ve got slow Tories on the Commerce Committee. 
JOHN KEY 
: No no. There are no slow Tories on that committee. There is no such thing as a slow Tory. 
Let us move back to the 3-year criminal limitation period. The legislation will change the period from 3 years of the discovery of the breach or when a party should have discovered the breach as opposed to 3 years since the product was developed—and there is very good reason for that. If we move to something like the investment products that are covered by this legislation members will know about long-term guaranteed products. 
 For instance one of the major financial institutions in New Zealand is currently marketing a product that has a capital guarantee out for 12 years with a minimum return of 40 percent on an investor’s money if it is invested for those 12 years. It is impossible under the Fair Trading Act to understand whether that guarantee will be lived up to within 3 years. So it is very logical that this legislation will cover that. It is doing it and that is one of the reasons that National is supporting the bill. The situation is similar in respect of insurance and long-term warranties and guaranteed offers. Those are the reasons we are supporting the bill. They are very important sensible reasons for supporting it. 
I do want to talk about the bad bits of the bill. Had the chairman of the Commerce Committee allowed the committee to take more time on the bill rather than despatch it in such a despicable way within 55 minutes—and with four words—he would have addressed this issue. It is the issue of exempting the Commerce Commission from an undertaking for damages. That means that the commission can go out there like a big bully and take an injunction against a company and if it is wrong and puts that company through living hell it is not liable for damages. I say that is wrong. That is big bully stuff. It is just plain wrong. The second thing it can do is to require the production of information and documents that do not even exist. It can ask to see a computer report for something that does not even exist. That is heavy-handedness and it is— 
Rt Hon Winston Peters 
: Is that true? 
JOHN KEY 
: I say to Mr Peters that that is absolutely true. That is sloppy. It is one of the reasons we had to wrestle with in terms of whether we would support this legislation—that and the way it was so poorly treated by the chair of the select committee with those 30 minutes of deliberations. It just was not good enough. But in the end we have decided to support the legislation because of what it is doing in the areas of pyramid selling and the criminal limitation period. I am sure the bill will pass into law and in due course when National is back in Government in 2005 we will address those issues that I have outlined.