Page 4197 - Week 14 - Tuesday, 29 November 1994
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It does not matter what size business you are in, whether it is a little family size business or a large one, you expect to grow. You like your business to expand a bit. In the case of the family business there is a limit, of course, and that is the limit that the family can cope with. They can work only so many hours; they can do only so much business. In the case of the bigger businesses, potentially the expansion could be infinite. As long as they can continue to attract financial resources they could continue to grow. I do not think anybody is going to stand up and say, "We do not want business growth". We all want business to grow - including the people that are out there, the small businesses and the big ones.
In connection with the Tuggeranong situation, which is the issue today, let us examine a few of the facts. It is not so long ago that the Tuggeranong Hyperdome opened. Those of us who were around at the time remember the struggle that the small retailers had when they first moved in there. There was an argument that it had been opened too soon, that there was too much retail space elsewhere. People, we were told, were in the habit of going to Woden to do their shopping. They had not got into the habit of going to Tuggeranong to do their shopping. So, the people down there struggled. They started to get off their knees, and along came the recession that we had to have, and that knocked a lot of them for a six. Those people, after all those years, are just now getting up off their knees - for the first time in five or six years, some of them. Surely the Government has a responsibility, when a proposal is put forward that would immediately jeopardise the economic viability and security of those families that run those small businesses, to have a good look at it. That is what the Liberal Party is saying.
We are not saying that the Tuggeranong Hyperdome should not grow. It must and it will. We are not saying that suburban shopping centres should not be provided. They must be provided, and they will be provided. Nobody is arguing with Mr Wood that some sorts of shopping facilities are not already needed in Gordon, Banks and Conder. There are a lot of people down there. Dad takes the car to work, mum is home with the kids, as has been the case in new suburbs ever since Canberra began, and mum has trouble doing the shopping during the day because she has to get onto a bus and drag them all the way over to the Hyperdome. Of course they need shops. We support them; but we have to consider the overall benefit of the community, because it is no good to the community to drive small businesses into bankruptcy, to the point where their small shopping centre closes or half the shops in the Hyperdome close. We have to make some conscious decisions about what we believe is acceptable and right. The Government does not seem to want to intervene in this. I think they have to. They have proven that they can do it. They have done it before, and I think they are going to have to do it again.
Mr Wood referred to a couple of matters. He seemed to question the notion that there is an oversupply of retail space. If you go and look in any shopping centre in Canberra you will find out how much surplus space there is. There are shops empty and closed in every shopping centre in Canberra. Mr Wood said that Tuggeranong does not have as much unused space as the other shopping centres. I do not see the logic of that. If that means merely that the other major shopping centres around Canberra are worse off than the Tuggeranong Hyperdome in terms of empty space, where is the sense of it? Is that a good thing? I do not see it as being a good thing. I do not think it is good at all.
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