Page 337 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 20 February 1990
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government of the day was unable to bring itself to implement the recommendations of the 1984 working party. However, in this case I believe that there is now a will to implement the recommendations of this report.
While I acknowledge that some groups will not agree with the committee's recommendations in total, I believe that it is now time to consider carefully these recommendations, thus commencing a process that will go a long way to reforming the relationship between the retail tenants and their landlords. The committee took evidence from all sectors of the industry and made a point of assuring tenants, who felt that they risked their livelihoods by appearing before the committee, that their identities would be protected, but I will speak on that later.
Before I proceed to my additional comments, I would like to comment briefly on the three recommendations of the report. The first is that the responsible Minister invite representatives from the principal industry associations to commence negotiations to establish a code of conduct as a means of self-regulation of this important landlord-tenant relationship. Clearly, such a code needs a dispute settling mechanism. Once again both parties should agree on this process as part of the code. Some may consider that this recommendation does not really acknowledge the extent of what they consider is a major problem for small business in Canberra. Unfortunately, while evidence was given of the problems between landlords and tenants, it was not sufficient to support the sort of prescriptive legislation proposed by the 1984 inquiry or as advocated by some who appeared before us.
If we are to have a code of practice how are we to ensure that the code, once developed, can be made to stick? In the ACT we do not have fair trading legislation, another legacy from a long period of neglect on the part of Federal Labor and Liberal governments which really saw the problems of Canberra as being important only when there was an election, not unlike what is happening at the moment. This report recommends that legislation now be drafted as quickly as possible to ensure that when the code is agreed to between the various groups involved it can be put into place quickly. This, then, is a legislative base for what is essentially a form of co-regulation. We must remember that both sectors in this debate consider that business is already over-regulated. The option that we have proposed allows for some control without excessive regulation.
The report holds out an olive branch to both main players in the industry - that is, those who control our commercial and retail tenancies and those who seek to operate a business in a marketplace, such as in town centres, group centres, local centres and other commercial centres like Fyshwick and Mitchell. However, the carrot that we have provided is balanced by a stick which we, as members of the Alliance Government, will ensure is used if a code of conduct cannot be agreed to within six months of today. If
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