Page 2462 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 7 August 1990
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MR BERRY (8.46): The most important issue which emerges in relation to this matter is the small businessmen's position in terms of power in the areas in which they operate. I particularly would like to direct members' attention to small businesses in the retail trade. My experience in these matters goes back to when the Belconnen Mall was sold by the Federal Labor Government. That was a matter of great shame, which was opposed by members of the ALP in the ACT and the trade union movement.
The difficulty that I experienced in trying to mount a campaign against that closure in respect of the tenants was the fear of the tenants to be outspoken on the issue. They were frightened because there was no legislation to protect them, in terms of their leases and the arrangements under which they were forced to work in the larger shopping centres, or indeed in not so large shopping centres. In my view, that campaign would have been a great deal more successful had the retail tenants been in a better position in terms of power within the areas in which they operated, but they were not. They were frightened to be outspoken, and the campaign ultimately failed.
It has been proposed that the way to fix all of this is by self-regulation. Self-regulation seems to me to be proposed by people who want to turn back the clock, because private enterprise never provided adequate protection for people who were less powerful than others; it was only public enterprise and public regulation which provided the protection that was necessary. Now people want to take us back a century or so to the era of private regulation. It does not work because the element of greed comes into the equation, and the less powerful lose. That has been the experience in the trade union movement as well as amongst small business people.
One of the most telling paragraphs in the report is the first one on page 13. It mentions the Residents Rally's survey of about 30 tenants out of the 2,790 individual business premises in the ACT, and rejected the notion that that survey had any relevance. One recognises the doubtfulness of anything that the Residents Rally has ever done, but what worries me mostly is the fact that the committee refused to accept that there was a problem amongst tenants with their lessors. There is a problem, but people do not come forward, and they will not come forward until there is adequate regulation to protect them.
These people opposite, who pretend that they in some way represent the interests of small business, say that they ought to work out all these problems themselves. They are condemning small business to be manipulated by the more powerful people in this Territory while ever they are able to produce a dollar. Mr Acting Speaker, that is the big flaw in this whole exercise. There has been no recognition that big business is more powerful. I can understand that from members of the Liberal Party because, after all, they do represent big business and have proved in recent times
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