Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Tonight will probably be the night where I say as little as I ever will about trade practices issues—especially section 46 of the Trade Practices Act—by reason that, although I am passionately involved in it, I have just got off a plane and have not had the day to prepare as I should like.

The first issue with the Trade Practices Legislation Amendment Bill 2008 is that the Labor Party is intending to take the fog of inconsistency back to the Trade Practices Act in areas such as the definition of market power. Let us first of all understand what market power means. If someone is driving you out of business not to enhance competition but to destroy it by a mechanism that you have no hope of competing against—that is, they are selling below cost and basically running you out of money to run you out of business—at the end of the day the consumer loses because the market centralises and that brings exploitation, inflation, higher interest rates and, ultimately, a move towards dysfunctionality in the economy.

There are wider implications. It is not the parochial protection of Mary McGillicuddy’s corner store; it is a statement about keeping the dynamics and dynamism in the market in such a way to give the Australian consumer the best deal at the end of the day through the range of choice. Market power means that, if someone is attacking you, before you can get access to the courts to prosecute that case you have to first of all prove that they had the capacity to put up prices without losing customers. Who on earth has the capacity to do that? This was one of the outcomes of the Boral decision back in 2006. Who has that capacity? No-one—not even a monopoly. You would have to be a government sponsored monopoly to have that sort of position in the market. So it became a piece of dead-letter law, so much so that, since the Boral decision—I might have got the date wrong—