Page 2651 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 1994
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The environment of ACT retail and commercial leasings has always been highly idiosyncratic. Canberra's marketplace has always been a highly structured and highly regulated marketplace. To suggest, for example, that a tenant who is unhappy with the behaviour of a landlord can just go down the road and set up shop where the conditions might be better, as tenants might do in Sydney or Melbourne, is simply nonsense. The planning rules of Canberra have operated to, in effect, ration the places where business can be done.
If, for example, you want to sell fresh fish in Weston Creek, you could probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of places where you could actually do so. The major shopping centre there has only one or two designated places where that can take place, and in other shopping centres the opportunities for that kind of activity are very limited, in part because one does not expect to go to a small shopping centre to buy a product such as fresh fish. Similarly, if one wanted to sell plants and seeds in Belconnen, a very small number of possible outlets would be available. We will not talk about selling petrol. That is probably too hot a topic to get onto today.
The fact of life is, Madam Speaker, that you cannot consider Canberra as an environment in which the rules that might apply in other jurisdictions in this country apply. It therefore follows that we need to ensure that the side effects of Canberra's highly regulated marketplace do not impact adversely on those individuals who choose to trade either as landlords or as tenants in that marketplace. I regret to say that in the past it has been true, and today it is still true, that landlords in particular have taken advantage of their position to operate unfairly with respect to tenants who have leased premises from them. I believe that the situation is such that those tenants in particular deserve some protection from this Assembly by way of legislation and the code of practice which this legislation will underpin.
In an ideal world, as I said, we accept that legislation such as this is not necessary. As Liberals, we support the role of the market to determine trading factors in principle; but where the market is not operating in a fair and constructive manner, for the smaller players in particular, government has a responsibility to make some recourse available. The first port of call, we would always argue, should be the terms of a lease, and the second, where those terms fail the parties, should be negotiations voluntarily entered into between the parties.
Madam Speaker, it is worth saying that we should not see in this legislation a chance to set up mechanisms to move out into the trading community and stamp heavily on all sorts of individuals, businesses and so on on a day-to-day basis. That ought not to be the objective of this legislation, at least as I see it. The objective ought to be to encourage good management and in fact foster an environment in which recourse to the legislation would not have to be a frequent occurrence at all. If we can create that environment, if we can adjust the parameters of behaviour in our marketplace, then we have achieved a great deal of value.
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