LOBBYISTS 1, NEW ZEALAND 0: The Great Commerce Act Sell-Out – Monopoly Watch

Monopoly Watch New Zealand is demanding the Select Committee halt the progress of the Commerce (Promoting Competition and Other Matters) Amendment Bill and return it to MBIE. As it stands, this legislation is not a “reform”—it is a surrender.

After years of “market studies” that diagnosed a terminal lack of competition in our supermarkets, banks, and energy sectors, the Government had a chance to perform surgery. Instead, they have handed the patient a placebo while letting the lobbyists write the prescription.

1. The “Behavioural Remedy” Trap: A Monopolist’s Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

The most egregious “weakening” of our law is the introduction of behavioural undertakings for mergers.

For decades, New Zealand required structural remedies (selling off assets) to fix anti-competitive mergers. If a deal hurt competition, you had to break it up. This Bill changes the game. The Commission can now accept “promises” from big companies to “behave nicely” instead of forcing them to sell assets.

History shows these promises are impossible to monitor and easy to break. We don’t want “monopolists on their best behaviour”; we want a market where they have to compete to survive. This is a massive win for the Big Law firms and their clients, who can now “fudge” their way through mergers that should be dead on arrival.

2. The “Fast-Track” for Cartels: “No Objections” is No Protection

The new statutory notification regime allows businesses to engage in “collaborative conduct” (often just a polite word for cartel-lite behaviour) and proceed if the Commission doesn’t object within 45 days.

In a world where the Commerce Commission is chronically under-resourced, a 45-day “clock” is a gift to industry associations. It forces a “silence equals consent” model that will let complex, price-distorting collaborations slip through the net while the Commission is still reading the fine print.

4. The AI and Predatory Pricing Vacuum

Despite MBIE’s early promises, the version of the Bill before the Select Committee is toothless on the 21st-century’s biggest threats:

• AI-Driven Pricing: There is no robust framework to stop the “algorithmic collusion” now standard in retail and insurance.

4. Predatory pricing: Accountability Dies in Darkness

• The Bill fails  to introduce  any legislation which would protect challengers from competitors as predatory pricing definition is so weak and childish
• The Big Law firms confused the MBIE and pushed back on any meanginful reform on a critical issue here

The Monopoly Watch Verdict

This Bill is a waste of taxpayer resources. It tinkers with the plumbing of the Commerce Act while the house is on fire. The legal profession, draped in their Prada shoes and Birken handbags, may celebrate the “flexibility” and “certainty” this Bill provides their clients. But for the Kiwi family paying the highest grocery prices in the OECD, this Bill provides nothing but more of the same.

Select Committee: Do your job. Step up, work in a bi-partisan manner, and deliver legislation that creates price and quality competition. Stop the “tinkering” and start the “restructuring.”

Send it back.

Summary of “Weakening” Changes for your notes:

1. Shift from Structural to Behavioural Remedies: Moves from “sell it” to “promise to be good” (major win for incumbents).
2. Statutory Notification (45-day rule): Creates a “fast track” for anti-competitive collaboration that relies on the Commission’s inability to react in time.
3. Class Exemptions: Allows the Commission to exempt entire categories of conduct from the Act, creating permanent “safe harbours” for vested interests.
4. Watered-down AI oversight: Fails to address how dominant firms use data and algorithms to entrench market power.

Monopoly Watch will continue to engage with its “what it will take to fix “ checklist with Wellington officials