Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill

I present a legislative statement on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Greg O’Connor): That legislative statement is published under the authority of the House and can be found on the Parliament website.

Hon SCOTT SIMPSON: I move, That the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee to consider the bill.

Competition matters for consumers, for businesses, and for the strength of our overall economy. When markets are working well, prices are fair, innovation thrives, and consumers have real choice.

Now, the current regime has served us well for many decades, but it is no longer fit for purpose. Some processes have become slow and costly, even for the conduct that is clearly in the public interest. Enforcement tools can be blunt, leaving markets damaged long after a breach. Furthermore, our merger rules do not currently respond to patterns of consolidation that can quietly erode competition over a period of time. When competition is weakened, New Zealanders end up paying the price.

This bill addressed those issues. It modernises the Commerce Act to ensure that our competition law keeps pace with today’s economy. It introduces five key reforms, a statutory notification regime for certain collaborative conduct, and a new class exemption power. It introduces strengthened merger oversight. It introduces a new court remedy, corrective action orders, to restore competition after a breach has occurred. Updated confidentiality protections, including a time-limited restriction on disclosure under the Official Information Act is included, and a clearer objective test for predatory pricing, as well. I’m going to go through those five in a little more detail.

First, the supporting of beneficial collaboration. The bill makes it easier for businesses to collaborate so that it benefits consumers. This could be, for instance, where small businesses negotiate together for better terms, or distributors work jointly to improve supply chains. Under the current law, even simple arrangements can require lengthy and expensive authorisations. This bill introduces a statutory notification regime that means firms can notify the Commerce Commission and proceed, unless the commission objects within 45 working days. The existing collaborative activity clearance process has been streamlined and will provide, now, a more straightforward process. The commission also gains a class exemption power for low-risk conduct. As secondary legislation, that will be subject to parliamentary oversight.

The second feature updates merger oversight. The bill contains provisions to improve oversight of business acquisitions. This prevents concentration of market power that significantly lessens competition and disadvantages consumers. The bill clarifies the test for a substantial lessening of competition—including creating, strengthening, or entrenching market powers—and we can better then capture killer acquisitions that remove emerging competitors before they can challenge big incumbents.

The bill also allows the commission to consider the cumulative effect of a series of smaller deals over a three-year period, addressing so-called creeping acquisitions that quietly consolidate market power. New targeted powers will enable the commission to pause a transaction for up to 40 working days and to call in a proposed merger for review where there are reasonable grounds for concern. These powers protect competition while the commission assesses the transaction being undertaken. The commission can then require the parties to keep assets separate and safeguard the businesses during the suspension period, rather than having to seek urgent court orders. It ensures that potentially harmful mergers can be examined before businesses are combined or operations are actually merged, reducing the risk of irreversible harm to competition.

The bill also introduces clear statutory time frames for merger reviews: 140 working days for clearances, and 160 days for authorisations. This gives businesses greater certainty and ensures the Commerce Commission has the time it needs for considering complex cases.

Further, the bill allows the commission to accept behavioural undertakings to enable a merger to proceed, in addition to structural remedies. This is a significant improvement that helps ensure benefits of mergers can be realised while also addressing competition concerns. In some cases, requiring a divestment of part of the business may not be practical or, indeed, proportionate. But conduct-based commitments around access, pricing, or non-discrimination can effectively address competition concerns. So, in this bill, we’re giving the commission flexibility to tailor solutions to the realities of modern markets, and including digital sectors where access to data or interoperability can be critical.

The third aspect of the bill focuses on corrective action orders. The bill adds a flexible new remedy: corrective action orders. If a company breaches the Act, the High Court will be able to require steps to remedy the effects of the breach, such as, for instance, providing access on fair terms or removing barriers that harm rivals. This is particularly relevant in the digital market space where dominant platforms can use their position to restrict access or impose unfair conditions.

The fourth feature of the bill addresses confidentiality protections. The bill improves confidentiality protections, with effective enforcement, depending upon opening communication with the Commerce Commission. Currently, some parties refuse to provide information because they fear that that information, in turn, could be released under the Official Information Act potentially to competitors or to customers. The bill addresses this by providing a time restriction on the commission publishing or disclosing confidential information supplied to them in confidence. These protections are modelled on frameworks already used for other financial regulators, such as the Reserve Bank of New Zealand.

Fifthly, predatory pricing. The bill tackles predatory pricing. That’s a tactic used by powerful firms to drive new competitors out of the market. This practice reduces competition over the longer term, leading ultimately to higher prices, less choice, and lower quality for consumers. The bill will set a clear objective test so that the sustained, below-cost pricing by a firm with a substantial market power is treated as misuse of market power. Short-term promotions and genuine discounts remain, of course, outside the scope of this prohibition.

What next steps? Well, the bill reflects extensive consultation that has already occurred, public submissions having been received earlier this year, and the Commerce Commission has, of course, been closely involved in preparation of the bill. The confidentiality provisions were consulted on extensively with the Ministry of Justice and the Office of the Ombudsman to ensure transparency and proportionality. Advice on consistency with the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act has been provided to the Attorney-General, and will be available to the House.

The select committee process will allow a detailed scrutiny, and this is an opportunity to test how the bill will operate in practice and ensure it actually achieves the objectives without creating any unintended consequences. Public input will be vital. Finally, I encourage businesses, consumers, and practitioners to have their say on this important new piece of legislation.

As I said at the beginning, competition is important for businesses, consumers, and our economy. It’s the cornerstone of a fair and dynamic economy. This bill ensures our law will be fit for purpose, supporting collaboration where it helps, stopping consolidation where it harms, and giving the commission tools it needs to act swiftly and effectively.

The question is that the motion be agreed to.

Thank you, Mr Speaker, for a chance to speak on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. This is a good bill, and there is much to be very enthusiastic about the way the Commerce Commission and the Minister have engaged, and what will be an important set of reforms from this Government. It builds on the work of the commission over many years and the changes that were brought in in 2022 to one of the major and most used parts of the Commerce Act—the misuse of market power provisions at section 36, which Labour began its reforms of then, when the former Minister, the Hon Dr Duncan Webb, was in charge.

This is an important continuation of that work—and worth just stepping through exactly what this means, because this is legislation that is on the side of the consumers. It’s on the side of the small-business owners. It’s on the side of those people in Aotearoa’s economy who are paying too much when we compare the deals that they are getting at the checkout or the deals on their energy bills compared to, say, our cousins over the Ditch in Australia or in other market economies that have been able to maintain more openness and have not become as highly concentrated as ours.

There’s been findings over many years of the Commerce Commission highlighting just how mergers and acquisitions in our market have affected the prices that we are paying—findings like, in the grocery sector, of the duopoly making more than $1 million in excess profits per day that New Zealanders cannot stomach and will not continue to stomach. It’s right that both major parties are lined up here today saying enough’s enough, and we have to tool up the Commerce Commission to deal with this across party lines and for the long term—because it’s not only those prices that consumers pay today; it’s also our productivity in the long term, which is hurting because of this.

Parties all around the world of red and blue stripes are interested in these issues now, because when people go to the checkout and they are paying more and more every week, or when people get their power bills and it’s winter time and they are paying more than they did the year before and the year before and the year before, it’s not only those large companies that they start to lose faith in; it’s the people who are elected who set the rules which govern them. It’s their democracy and it’s their institutions, and those things are fundamental to people’s faith in an economy which is open and fair. They need to believe that they can get ahead and that they can get a fair deal and that the rules govern them in the same way as the big guys. In New Zealand, we cannot say that’s the case.

That is why this is an incredibly important bill. I’m going to tell you a couple of the things that I think are very, very good, and I want the Minister to hear that we are nothing but enthusiastic about them. In fact, he should go hundies—go as hard as he can—on those things. Then there are a few things which we have a genuine disagreement over, and I look forward to submissions on those issues.

One thing that I really welcome from him and thank him for his leadership on, and the Minister before him, Andrew Bayly, is private equity roll-ups or mergers—killer mergers and mergers by stealth, where the end result is that you have one large player in the market gobbling up all the wee little regional players, and all of a sudden they’ve got a market share that is the size of a large market player. They didn’t go through any market clearances for that. That was a result of market dynamics over a period of 10 years. This affects our healthcare system. Overseas, it affects pharmaceuticals. Overseas, it affects chemists and people’s access to the fundamental basics that they need to live a dignified life—and so we should care about those things, as politicians.

This does not go as far as Australia’s reforms. The federal Minister Andrew Leigh has set out a playbook that we could adopt in New Zealand, and I will be asking not only officials but the Minister himself why we haven’t adopted some of those stronger measures that we’re seeing being adopted now in Australia to complement already stronger State-level provisions around resisting that kind of private equity roll-up, which has a stranglehold on many of our regional economic centres, where people are paying too much for the basics.

I’ll also be asking some questions around the predatory pricing regime. The Minister knows I have an issue with this. He’s picked the only pricing intervention where it’ll be illegal under National to put prices down. Last time I checked, consumers quite enjoyed the market impact of a third player coming into the market and prices plummeting for a period where that third player got established. It’s important that our commerce law doesn’t unnecessarily raise the moats that duopolies and monopolies have created around themselves in the New Zealand market. We’ll be asking questions about that.

I’ll also be asking him questions, particularly around his choices for the collaboration and notification regimes. My colleague Helen White has done some work on just how dangerous collaboration can be when firms team up to argue with workers and set conditions around wages and other factors like that. We’ll have a lot to say at the select committee.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. We too are supporting the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. There are quite a few things to like in this bill. I agree with the previous speakers that there’s also a range of components that we look to scrutinise and receive public feedback on during the select committee stage.

The previous speaker, Arena Williams, funnily enough, touched on one of the areas that I think we would really welcome public submissions and further evaluation on, which is in relation to the elements around enabling greater collaboration. Those are found in clause 19 of the bill, and those ones I think are particularly important for me. I know some other MPs have worked with groups like Fired Up Stilettos, and I mention that group—a collective of adult entertainment workers—because they were specifically quoted in the regulatory impact statement (RIS) of this bill.

If you’ll allow me to read a little, knowing your comments on the previous bill, on page 16 of the RIS, the RIS talks about how the current framework also affects smaller groups seeking to coordinate for practical reasons rather than to reduce competition. This is where Fired Up Stilettos, a group that I’ve been closely working with, was quoted: “They sought to work together to negotiate more transparent and consistent terms with the venue. While their conduct likely breached the Commerce Act’s prohibition on cartel behaviour, the collaboration was not aimed at distorting the market or excluding rivals, but rather improving transparency and predictability in their working arrangements.” Then they noted, in the RIS, that authorisation was technically available, but there was a steep cost that they would meet—almost $40,000—in the application fee.

I think this is a really important part where public submissions will allow us to identify whether the changes do as intended. We have seen how we’ve got contractors who are often in precarious working conditions trying to band together, but their behaviour would be deemed as cartel. But the previous speaker noted that there are also downfalls to how these settings could be put in place.

The other components of this bill that we want to also scrutinise are in relation to the Official Information Act exemptions. I think those deserve a bit of additional scrutiny, particularly around preventing information being released for a period of 10 years. That does seem like quite a lengthy amount of time and we do look forward to submitters challenging or justifying those components of the bill. I think the argument that would often be made is around the commercially sensitive information and smaller players do often find themselves at a disadvantage in terms of the use of the Official Information Act and the uses of it, but there’s also the important component of making sure the public can also access some of this information and that there’s a level of accountability around it.

If I go back to the collaboration component, in the analysis on this bill, it’s interesting that there’s also public sector agencies being noted around it, and I think this also deserves a bit of additional scrutiny. For example, one of the agencies that was noted was ACC collaborating with other health agencies on commissioning contracting and whether these could end up being deemed as cartel behaviour. I think that’s going to be another interesting part for us to adequately debate.

I agree with the previous speakers around the predatory pricing components of the bill, because I think what we do not want to see—and I echo the sentiments—is preventing a third player entering, for example, the supermarket market and having low prices and that being seen as predatory pricing. If anything, I think what we need to really encapsulate what happens afterwards is better tools to prevent price gouging. That’s what we don’t want to see: effectively, having a third player entering the market, having lower prices, and then, effectively, lifting those prices up to a level that consumers will find out of reach as a way to simply just enter the market. I think that’s going to be important.

Again, we really welcome submissions on this issue because this bill is quite a substantive bill. It’s got quite a few causes and a few moving pieces. Without public submission, it’ll make it harder for legislators to rely on simply official advice to make a good judgment of whether we can continue supporting this bill. But for now, the Green Party welcomes the Minister’s work in this area and we look forward to engaging with the select committee.

Thank you, Mr Speaker. I’m taking this call on behalf of the ACT Party to support the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. The core purpose of this bill is to bring fairness for both consumers and for businesses. We believe that it is the role of the Government to ensure that our markets are healthy and our markets are operating in a way that is promoting competition because if there is competition in the market, then consumers gain, because if there is competition, then, obviously, all the players in the market will do their best to innovate to provide best value for their product.

We also know that the cost of living is a big issue. We have been working really hard to tackle the cost of living. Tackling the cost of living cannot be resolved by just working on one solution; it needs a multi-pronged approach. This is one of the approaches where we know that, indirectly, it will have an impact on the cost of living as well.

We know that there can be some powerful or some influential players in the market, those who might have the interest of just taking over the whole market, to dominate the whole market. In that situation, what will happen is they will be taking away the opportunity from small businesses to offer what they can offer and also the opportunity for new entrants because they will know that there is one dominant player and they won’t bother coming into the market. We want to see that new entrants should be able to come in as well, offer what they have to offer, and it should be based on merit rather than based on dominance in the market.

We know that when companies advertise their products or bring any product into the marketplace, as I said before, of course they advertise; they can use other tactics as well. There could be some ways of differentiating their products to promote to customers. There can be other ways, just like maybe working on packaging and things, but predatory pricing, as we heard before from the Minister in charge of the bill, the Hon Scott Simpson, can be an issue and that’s what we want to make sure doesn’t happen and that the Commerce Commission gets the tools, the powers, to tackle this kind of behaviour, if it exists and if it is identified.

The second issue I want to talk about is mergers. Yes, the big mergers, when they happen, they become quite obvious—we all know about them—but when mergers happen in small steps, if there are series of small takeovers, sometimes they are not that obvious. The Commerce Commission needs more powers to deal with those kinds of mergers because currently we know there is a gap. It can go to the extent where the damage happens to the extent where it cannot be reversed. We want to see that the Commerce Commission gets the instruments to intervene within the specified time period in the bill, to ensure that those kind of mergers can be stopped.

Now, we also know that not all collaborative business activity is anti-competitive. There are some things that do not obstruct competition. Those kind of things should be allowed to happen without much interference from any regulation, Government body, or independent Crown entity. That’s why we are saying that, at the moment, some collaborative activity where it requires authentication from the Commerce Commission can be a time-consuming exercise and can be an expensive exercise as well. In that case, we can lower the requirement of the process for businesses by reducing it to strategy notification so that it can happen faster and the cost on businesses is also lower. So it’s about bringing that balance in our markets and making sure that businesses are able to operate in a fair manner, and also that consumers are getting the deals they deserve to get in a fair and healthy market. We want to see that the Commerce Commission is bringing that balanced approach and the gaps that have been identified are being addressed through this bill.

Finally, one thing that I want to highlight, and this is about the protection mechanisms for whistleblowers. I’ve heard from members before that it could be commercially sensitive information. Yes, it could be commercially sensitive information when it comes to the Official Information Act because, in this bill, what it does is it creates an exemption from the Official Information Act 1982 for confidential information supplied to the commission, aligning with frameworks used by the Reserve Bank and the Financial Markets Authority, but then, for whistleblowers, we also know that they also fear retaliation. So that kind of protection will ensure transparency and trust in the system. That’s why I think it is a really good clause in this bill. I look forward to seeing what submitters will say in the select committee process for this bill. Thank you.

The time has come for me to leave the Chair for the meal break. The House will resume at 7.30 p.m.

Sitting suspended from 5.55 p.m. to 7.30 p.m.

The House is resumed. When we broke for the dinner break, we were on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill and we’re at call No. 5—Dr David Wilson.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak to the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I’m pleased I’ve got my five minutes. We thought we had enough time before, but dinner called. I will try and get through this.

Free markets, as many of us know, have a tendency to move towards monopoly and oligopoly, left unattended. This is why we need regulation, why we need balance, and why we need fairness.

Hon Phil Twyford: Oh my God! The voice of reason.

Dr DAVID WILSON: We can’t have that, can we! Very good. All right. Now, I think all our guys on this side are going to agree with us on this bill, so I’ll just keep going, shall I?

We need to protect consumers and small businesses. We need to do this through competition, but we also need to empower the Commerce Commission to put these rules and regulations into force. We need action on this stuff. We are a small trading nation at the bottom of the world. We also have a small domestic market. This, unfortunately, leaves us prone to market dominance. Just think: building duopoly, banks oligopoly, supermarket duopoly, energy and electricity. There’s too much control in the power of corporates, and we need this balance, so we are very pleased with this bill.

We also need to collaborate as we are a small trading nation. It’s very, very important for us to figure out how we can gain expertise and how we can work together to compete with the rest of the world. But there is a difference between collaborative advantage and cartels that collude. We don’t want that either. You can see there’s balance and reason, and we need good authority and regulation to balance these things for us. We’ll also address the predatory pricing that kills competitors or new entrants. My friend from the Green Party started to talk about price gouging, but I can tell you, if we have a whole lot of predatory pricing, that actually leads to price gouging, so we’ve got to be very careful there as well.

Speaking of mergers and acquisitions, I remember one of the previous Ministers talked about the fact that if we had this legislation a decade ago, maybe we might have stopped the National Bank being gobbled up by ANZ, but that one’s already happened. We can’t turn that back. We can’t turn that clock back. Barriers to entry, supply contracts, vertical integration that captures a market, cartel behaviour, and protective licensing—all of these things are getting in front of consumers getting a fair deal, and we’ve got to address it.

Lastly, I’d just like to speak a little bit about the fact that this bill also puts in place protection for whistle-blowers. That’s actually really important. This shifts the balance of power for someone that is seeing something happening that’s not right within an organisation and then going against that organisation. This power to the Commerce Commission enables those people to honestly front up to what’s going on in terms of monopolistic behaviour and the like. This bill upholds what we all want in an economy: fair business practices that promote healthy competition, support for small businesses without overburdening them with regulation, and to ensure that the Commerce Commission has the powers it needs to protect New Zealanders. We commend this bill to the House, and I look forward to addressing it in select committee. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill, the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill, is an excellent bill, as demonstrated by such support around the House. I look forward to seeing it coming through the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee. I commend the bill to the House.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I’m standing slightly sooner than I thought, because that previous offering was so short, but I am standing to take a call on the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill. I am standing to support the bill, but, unlike the other member, Dr Vanessa Weenink, who could support it in a very succinct 10 to 15 seconds, I’ll take a little longer to explain not only why I’m supporting it but also some of the reservations that we have on this side of the House about some of the things in this bill—because, right now, New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living, and they’re also struggling with a Government who promised to fix it and who have, instead, made it worse. We see this just today in the results that have come through that show us that housing costs are going up, power bills are going up, and food prices are going up.

Stuart Smith: Don’t be negative. Be positive.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: And there are calls from the other side of the House to be positive, when the only positivity they are delivering New Zealanders at Christmas is positive increases to the price of the basic staples that are required that make up the cost of living. Under this Government, it continues to climb.

Andy Foster: Remember 12.3 percent under Labour?

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Another member on that side of the House proclaims loudly about the prices of things. Well, I’ll give you the prices of things: milk is up 16 percent, and bread 53 percent. As colleagues in the House pointed out today—

Tom Rutherford: What part?

DEPUTY SPEAKER: If the members expect the member who’s speaking to stick to the bill, you keep feeding him with interjections, which keeps requiring him to respond if he wishes.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Thank you, Madam Speaker, for making it so clear why I have not yet been able to get to the substantive content of the bill, which I really did want to address in my speech tonight. And so, despite the constant interjections from the other side of the House, who obviously want me to take the full five minutes, I will be able to move towards some of what this bill sets out to do—conscious of the limited time I now have left to do that, I’ll do my best to get through it.

Hon Phil Twyford: Because there are so many objections.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: There are so many objections, as the colleague on my left has just pointed out—there have been so many objections.

DEPUTY SPEAKER: And now that stops, so the member can come back to the bill.

REUBEN DAVIDSON: Thank you, Madam Speaker, and I fully intend to—I fully intend to, halfway through the time allowed. Terrible.

What this legislation does is it strengthens systems, tools, and institutional capability. It does not directly lower the prices of those items that I spoke about at the beginning of this offering, and which are obviously a sore point for the other side of the House. It does not lower grocery prices. It does not lower fuel prices. It does not lower bank fees. As we know, the other side of the House’s solution to bank fees is to simply spread them out across everywhere so that people don’t notice what they’re being charged. It does not lower building supply costs. It does not prohibit excessive pricing or mandate structural separation in concentrated markets.

There are a lot of things this bill does not do. And the week before Christmas—this is the week before Christmas—New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living. Christopher Luxon promised to address the cost of living, but, instead, he has become, the week before Christmas, the bad Santa that delivers this bill—which does something, but nowhere near enough to address the very, very real challenges that New Zealanders face.

Now, some of the cautions that we have from this side of the House around this bill are around the new predatory pricing provision. We know that predatory pricing is unusual in competition law, because it is the only pricing intervention where the law restricts prices from going down rather than up. At a time when all New Zealanders would like to see the cost of living going down, we’re talking about a predatory pricing provision that, in fact, explicitly prohibits that from happening. That means it always carries a risk of chilling legitimate price competition, particularly where firms are discounting aggressively to win customers rather than to exclude rivals.

In the very limited remaining time that I have—and, really, I’m just regretful of how many interjections prohibited me from addressing some of my other concerns about this bill further—all I would say is that New Zealanders are struggling with the cost of living as we head towards Christmas. That Government promised to fix it, and, instead, they’re making it worse.

Well, that was a good general debate speech from one “Mr Grinch”. But back to the bill—this Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill—that we’re here for. Can I just say that competition isn’t an end in itself; competition is all about lower prices. Adam Smith said it best in 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, “The price of monopoly is upon every occasion the highest which can be got. The natural price, or the price of free competition, on the contrary, is the lowest which can be taken,”. With that, I commend this bill to the House.

Tēnā rawa atu koe, e te Māngai o te Whare. Heoi anō rā, tēnā tātou katoa i tēnei pō. E tū ana awau ki te tautoko i tēnei pire, te Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

Heoi anō rā, i mua i taku kauhau, tēnei te mihi ki tērā o tātou. E te pāpā, e Taina Ngārimu kua wehe atu ki te pō, tēnei te mihi aroha ki a koe. Ko koe tētahi e hāpai ana i ā mātou tikanga, tō mātou reo, me te haka hoki. Nō reira e te pāpā, haere, haere, haere rawa atu ki te pō, e kore koe e warewaretia. Tēnei te tangi aroha ki te whānau.

[Thank you very much, Madam Speaker. Indeed, greetings to us all this evening. I stand in support of this bill, the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill.

However, before my speech, I hereby acknowledge one of us in particular: Uncle Taina Ngārimu, who has departed into the darkness. I hereby compassionately acknowledge you. You are one who upholds our traditional practices, our language, and traditional performing arts, also. Therefore, uncle, pass on, pass into the night; you will not be forgotten. I hereby grieve with the family.]

DEPUTY SPEAKER: Kia ora.

CUSHLA TANGAERE-MANUEL: Thank you for the indulgence of the House, Madam Speaker. Before we get started on that side, remember we are supporting this bill. [Interruption] I should just prepare two paragraphs, and you guys can say the rest of the speech.

Minister Scott Simpson noted that where there is less competition, consumers pay the price. That is the true story of rural life. If this bill is going to bring down prices for consumers, bring it on. In hindsight, we were doing all right in the Waipū Valley when I was a kid. We had the Waipū Farmers, which sold your stores, your gas, tools, and haberdashery—for those of you who know what this is; there’s a few. And then we had the dairy—the Tikitiki dairy—which was run by the Kururangis, and that’s where you got your other extra groceries, fish and chips, and your mixed lollies.

Mike Butterick: Post office.

CUSHLA TANGAERE-MANUEL: We had a post office—yes, we did—which doubled as a bit of a florist, but for bigger shops you travelled the 20-something-odd kilometres in either direction to Te Araroa or what was then known as the Hikurangi food market.

For Tangaere family shops, you went to Gisborne, to Pak ’N Save, because there was competition. We were a huge family, and, yes, there were better prices because you could choose Pak ’N Save, you could choose Woolworths, or you could choose Four Square. That did still, however, mean a full tank of gas.

The pinch of higher prices is nothing new for small, rural places, as some of my colleagues in the House tonight can attest to. While Labour supports this bill, I think there needs to be far more consideration into how this has any material impact on rural areas. Bringing another big player into the supermarket game, for example, will have little effect on our most isolated whānau, unless, of course, you’re considering building a Woolworths in Tikitiki.

On that note, I want to acknowledge the many businesses who do run stores and other companies in small, rural areas, often for generations, and often in communities where sustaining one business is hard enough, let alone sustaining many. I think this is an opportunity to talk about other opportunities other than reinforcing my statement that a lot more thought has to be put into how this is going to have a material impact on small communities like the many scattered through Ikaroa-Rāwhiti.

One is to consider another view of what competition might look like. I appreciate the acknowledgment of Māori being the first traders in Aotearoa and what that looked like. I spoke to someone from Wairarapa today, and they talked about how, back in their day, the currency was the eel. You know, we’ve all got our wind—what’s our energy? What’s our venison? What’s our milk? I think an opportunity we could be talking about is to grow those rural communities. How do we make it easier for the big businesses or even the smaller businesses to stock what comes from that community? You should be able to go to Tahu restaurant in Gisborne and get steak from Tairāwhiti, not from Australia. That’s the opportunity that we can grow on with this bill. I once again want to thank the House for indulging me in farewelling our wonderful taonga, Taina Ngarimu, and we do commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s a privilege to be able to rise on the first reading of this bill to promote increased competition. I want to acknowledge other parties around the House for their support of this, as well. We all know that increased competition leads to better outcomes for New Zealanders. It increases productivity and innovation and leads to a number of other benefits. This bill makes a number of key changes around stopping unfair practices; clearer merger rules; a stronger and better-structured Commerce Commission, meaning faster and more transparent decisions; a streamlined approvals process; and allowing businesses to take voluntary undertakings to limit market power as part of merger applications. Other members have touched upon other aspects of this bill, but I just wanted to highlight those key aspects and say that I commend this bill to the House.

Motion agreed to.

Bill read a first time.

The question is, That the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill be considered by the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.

Motion agreed to.

Bill referred to the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee.