Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party, Deputy Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed so, the minister interjects. Markets play a pivotal role in the allocation of resources and they ensure that resources are allocated efficiently. The Trade Practices Act has an important role in assisting competition policy to get the sorts of competitive outcomes that are going to benefit industry and benefit consumers. Alan Greenspan, in his book The Age of Turbulence, had a look at the issue of the relative performance of a controlled economy and a market based economy. That opportunity was provided with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Economists had been speculating on the relative prosperity of the market based West Germany and the controlled East Germany, but the fall of the wall gave the opportunity for an experiment, if you like, to examine the relative prosperity of the two approaches. Economists were very surprised by the fact that the controlled economy was only able to achieve about 30 per cent of the GDP of the market based economy.

Germany certainly has a great deal of control in its market economy—it is not a purely a market based economy; there is a great degree of government intervention in that economy—but it was interesting to note that markets had provided great wealth and prosperity to the West Germans that the East Germans could only hope to aspire to in many years to come. So we see that our markets in this country have an important role to play, as do markets around the world. And our Trade Practices Act has an important role to play in ensuring that markets operate efficiently and effectively.

The objectives of this bill are to minimise delays in decision making under the National Access Regime. The National Access Regime provides a mechanism for business operators to be granted access to privately held infrastructure which cannot be reasonably duplicated by a competitor. The regime provides a mechanism for access to privately held, nationally significant infrastructure where two parties cannot reach an agreement on its use. The regime was introduced by the Keating Labor government in 1995 and was implemented by part IIIA of the Trade Practices Act.

In 2006, under the Howard government, COAG agreed to the Competition and Infrastructure Reform Agreement, or CIRA, which committed the Commonwealth to reform part IIIA. COAG agreed to introduce the requirement that regulators will be bound to make regulatory decisions within six months and that, where a merits review is provided for, reviews are to be limited to the information submitted to the original decision maker.

This bill gives effect to the amendments agreed to by COAG. Under the new laws, the National Competition Council must make recommendations on applications within an expected period of 180 days. The minister must then make a decision on the NCC recommendation within 60 days from receiving the recommendation. Where the minister does not make a decision within this time, it is assumed that he or she agrees with the recommendations made by the National Competition Council. Decisions by the ACCC on access undertakings, industry codes and arbitrations of access disputes must be made within an expected period of 180 days, and decisions by the ACCC on competitive tender processes must be made within 90 days.

The measures will support more efficient infrastructure investments where this investment by the private sector is dependent upon access to competitors’ infrastructure and a decision by the minister to grant the access. The bill will also help encourage investment where a company is concerned about delays in gaining access to infrastructure. The regime will enhance competition in industries where access to infrastructure is a necessity for companies to compete.

Competition benefits all Australians because it delivers better services, lower prices and more efficient markets. Unfortunately, this government does not always understand the needs of smaller businesses and the importance of their ability to compete in the market. We have seen the release of the report of the Senate inquiry into the government’s failed GROCERYchoice website. Many independent retailers gave evidence to that inquiry conducted by the Senate Economics References Committee that the website would have placed them at a significant disadvantage in the market. When designing the site, the government failed to take into account issues such as lack of competition in remote areas and the high costs of delivery to smaller retailers. Master Grocers Australia told the committee:

Smaller retailers certainly have less scale than a large, 3,000 square metre supermarket.

Or even larger supermarkets. They went on:

There are different costs associated with running those different businesses, whether it be labour, overheads, rent, wage percentages and so forth.

The committee made the following recommendation:

… both the Government and the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission note that the operation of the GROCERYchoice website was prejudicial and unfair to independent retailers.

The committee concluded that GROCERYchoice would have been anticompetitive and hurt smaller retailers in their attempts to compete against the majors. The government has a history of promising big and delivering small. GROCERYchoice was nothing more than a fraudulent scheme aimed to get the Prime Minister off the hook with respect to his promises on the cost of living.

During Senate estimates hearings, the ACCC advised that $6.6 million had been spent on the GROCERYchoice scheme. The final cost is expected to be in the order of $8 million-plus. The Senate report into the farce also said the initiative was characterised by ‘waste and mismanagement’ and designed to fulfil a ‘hollow election commitment’ by Labor to bring downward pressure on grocery prices. The website was a mere stunt to convince the public that the government was acting on a promise, when in fact it was doing nothing at all and in the process wasting over $8 million.

The legal sector have expressed concerns in relation to the bill before the House by suggesting that the government’s amendments to infrastructure access will be illusory. The law firm Mallesons Stephen Jaques writes that the reduction in time spent examining applications may result in a ‘compromise in the quality of key regulatory decisions, especially where the review body has insufficient information to make a fully informed decision’. Given the government’s track record of rushing into economic policy and policies such as GROCERYchoice and FuelWatch without considering the nature of the market, the criticism from the legal sector would have to be taken very seriously indeed. To address procedural concerns, the bill contains a number of ‘clock stoppers,’ which extend the time limit for procedural reasons. These clock stoppers will apply to only the National Competition Commission and ACCC and tribunal decisions.

With regard to NCC recommendations and ACCC and tribunal decisions, the clock will be stopped when making requests for information and when the regulator agrees to stop the clock for a certain period on the agreement of relevant parties to the decision. There are three additional clock stoppers for ACCC decisions, including a time allowance for periods of public consultation. There are no clock stoppers for where a decision is being made by a designated minister. Therefore, a compromise of quality in decision making will not occur if the agencies use clock stoppers to perform their duties carefully. In the absence of legislative clock stoppers, the parliament must bring the minister to account where he or she has not made a decision and he or she has had reasonable time to do so.

The amendments to infrastructure access are welcomed by the coalition. If they function as intended, they will encourage competition in all sectors requiring access to privately held infrastructure of national significance. These are amendments originally agreed to by the Howard government through COAG. The coalition in principle supports the bill, which will result in a more effective and efficient market arrangement.

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