Jason Falinski (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I apologise for not being present in the House for my allocated time. However, the fact that the member for Fenner only took 15 minutes to give a 30-minute speech is a demonstration of how special this particular piece of legislation, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Motor Vehicle Service and Repair Information Sharing Scheme) Bill 2021, is.

The member for Kingsford Smith makes fun of my mechanical capabilities. I'm reminded of the Seinfeld episode where, he says, every time a car breaks down they open the hood to look for the big on/off switch. I very much relate to that, and I'm sure the member for Kingsford Smith does too. I also agree with the member for Kingsford Smith that the member for Fenner has been consistent and ensured that this issue was brought to the fore of the public policy debate. Much of the credit for this piece of legislation goes to him due to his tenacity on this matter.

It is, however, a matter of shame that what we have here, as the member for Kingsford Smith has pointed out, is market failure. We have asymmetric information and third line forcing occurring, where large overseas car manufacturers are simply denying independent Australian small businesses being able to provide goods and services to Australian customers. They denied them the capacity to do so by ensuring they were not able to download the data available in their cars that would enable those repairers to do that work. That is illegal.

Not only does this bill make sure that that is unlawful and that it stops now; a question this parliament should be asking itself is, 'Why is this law necessary?' The ACCC has all the powers it could possibly want to pursue overseas manufacturers who behave like this and who cause damage to Australian businesses and Australian consumers. I cannot see, looking at the competition act, how this is not a textbook definition of third line forcing. I cannot understand why it is that the ACCC will pursue newsagents, builders and all sorts of Australian companies who, in some cases, have inadvertently transgressed laws they didn't even know existed, and fine them millions of dollars for doing so, but will not lift a finger to enforce the laws they have. This parliament now finds itself in the ludicrous position of having to pass a new piece of legislation to ensure the ACCC does what it was always meant to do—that is, protect the interests of Australian consumers.

If not for the efforts of the member for Fenner, this probably would never have come to our attention. I for one know that I would have sat on this side of the House and believed that the ACCC had this under control. After all, it has in its toolbox the very laws to enforce that enable it to ensure consumers are protected in this country. This is a clear case of market failure. This is a clear case of denial of information and of asymmetric information being imposed on the Australian public—not as a design flaw, not as a simple and obvious outcome of the transaction, but because overseas producers of these cars have simply imposed asymmetric information on the Australian public and on the Australian economy. They have damaged businesses. Frankly, this law probably doesn't go far enough. Frankly, this law probably should be retrospective and ask those manufacturers overseas to compensate the independent workshops and the small businesses in country towns, in suburbs and in cities that have been unable to do work, have been unable to provide goods and services that they lawfully undertake—and are, in many cases, better qualified to undertake—because these overseas firms, these large companies, have ensured that they have dictated to Australian consumers who they can use and which companies they can go to to get the goods and services they require.

Not only do I thank the member for Fenner for his efforts on these matters and the member for Kingsford Smith for pointing out my mechanical prowess; I also thank the many independent small businesses that did so much through all of these years to bring this to the attention of members of parliament, and all of us, to ensure that we understood the pain and deprivation they had gone through. We are talking about overseas manufacturers that deliberately got involved in designing software that was designed to trick government regulators and environmental agencies in terms of what their carbon output was in diesel cars. They're the people we're talking about. They're the people that basically said to Australians: 'You will use our repairers, our service people and no-one else. We will make sure that happens by denying you access to your own data, to the data that you own in your own car.'

I go back to how I started this speech, by questioning what it is that our regulatory agencies were doing through this whole process. They're very good at coming in after the fact. They were very good after the North Americans found out that a particular motoring company, Volkswagen, had designed a piece of software to trick environmental protection agencies worldwide; when that discovery was made in North America, the ACCC was all over it. They'd actually done nothing up to that point to uncover the fraud perpetrated on this country through that trickery and that fraudulent software. They can't say that they didn't have the powers to enforce this. They can't say that they didn't know about this. This has been made apparent to literally every single person in this chamber, in this House, over many, many years. Still, those at the ACCC chose to pursue newsagents instead of pursuing the real economic damage that was being done to small businesses not only in places like the Northern Beaches of Sydney but right across this country—as well as the damage that was being done to Australian consumers, who were unable to have the choice, which they so rightly deserve, of where they got their cars repaired. Why? Because those manufacturers decided that they, not the people who bought their cars, owned the data.

This is a significant and real issue for this economy as we move forward. Who does own our data? The ACCC was very happy to attack Google, Facebook and those high-profile companies, but they didn't want to take on the car manufacturers and they didn't want to stand up for Australians and Australian businesses.

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