Source: New Zealand Parliament – Hansard
ARENA WILLIAMS (Labour—Manurewa): Mr Speaker, thank you. I was enjoying that speech and I was enjoying the Minister of Commerce and Consumer Affair’s ambition for New Zealand’s economy. This is a good bill, and it helps him to achieve that purpose of increasing New Zealand’s productivity and improving the way that consumers experience their lives. It’s about getting Kiwis a better deal. That’s why successive Labour Ministers have shepherded through this work, and it’s great to see that the Minister has picked this up and prioritised it on his work programme.
I’m really, really proud of this piece of work. I want to add to the Minister’s comments about how this bill will actually work for consumers. So when you think about banks and electricity retailers and other companies that hold data about our spending, I think it’s only fair that consumers have access to the same information that they do. It’s about making sure that the businesses which hold our data, which gather data about our personal spending habits, about the way that we interact in their stores, about our behaviour online—that consumers would also be able to access their information.
The Minister gave a great example of someone trawling through their bills to make sure that they can understand their electricity consumption and work out what is the best use of their family’s budget—which is always going to be limited—about how to spend that and how to get the most out of their electricity. There are countless examples about how consumers will be able to access this in future. It will be a really powerful tool to not only drive competition in those sectors that have otherwise not been largely competitive in New Zealand’s economy—and I’ll get to that in a second—but also so that consumers actually understand how their money can go further, about the spending in our daily lives, like electricity particularly but also our banking and financial services products.
This bill, which began its life as a Labour bill, would create rights for data holders to safely and securely share their data with third parties following the consent of that customer. That’s important because, as the Minister has said, that’s something that the Privacy Commissioner actually supports, and there need to be safeguards on how we are sharing this kind of data.
It’s interesting, and something that we will need to tease out at the Economic Development, Science and Innovation Committee, those services that have operated in New Zealand’s environment for, say, 10 years and that use scraping services with no major security incident—where those might need further regulation or whether we would say that actually there has been no security incident there, there seems to be appropriate security in place, so those things are working OK. To give consumers more choice is the point here, not to introduce further restrictions dressed up in protection of data, when, actually, the data is being used in our market in a way that is acceptable for consumers.
These regulations are good, though. In general, they let New Zealand consumers share data with things like fintech companies. I would love to see the Acts that the Minister has talked about taking off in New Zealand. They’re the kinds of tools that let consumers instantly see and compare—due to their usage of, say, their electricity in their home, or due to the kind of products that they have; for instance, their mortgage, their car loan, and their insurance on their home—the kinds of products that are available to you and the kinds of prices that you would expect to pay not only at your own provider, where you might not be on the most competitive product for you, but also within other providers within the market. That’ll be a really good thing.
This is something that’s available to not only UK consumers but also Australian consumers since 2019. Our legislation here is based on that legislation. It brings us in line with those markets, where these apps are already operating and where there is already—you know, our market providers, realistically, in New Zealand are also operating in the Australian market. So to be able to make the change, to be able to provide those same services to Kiwi consumers who are, basically, buying the same product for the same reasons, is a really useful thing for us to do.
When I talked, though, about New Zealand’s economy, this is a really important step in driving that competition. I talk about the ambition of this Minister to be able to do that, because we need to keep that pressure up on large corporates in the New Zealand market place, who over three decades have increased their proportion of rents that you would otherwise be able to calculate that are above and beyond their capital investment. A large proportion of New Zealand’s GDP is actually represented by these firms that are charging over and above what you would otherwise expect, based on their capital investment—that’s things like plants, materials, machines—and into what you might say are intangibles or are into what you might say is just pure corporate profit.
The second largest industry for this is the financial services industry, where, you know, they’re getting up to a larger and larger proportion of their profits going offshore. So to be able to drive competition in the New Zealand market is incredibly important. We have a system now, which represents five stable competitors in a market, where we would like to see those fintechs and those smaller companies being able to compete with the larger banks. This is one tool that can do that—but there are more. We want to see this Minister out there, being able to take Commerce Commission cases where there is unfair competition, and driving that competition as much as he can.
SPEAKER: Before I call the member, the enthusiasm that has been generated around this bill has clearly got me quite captivated. As a consequence of both my captivation by the Hon Andrew Bayly and then anticipation of Arena Williams, I neglected to say that the question is that the motion be agreed to.
