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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (22 May) . . Page.. 1579 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

There is clearly not much demand, or a reducing demand, for the individual, small suburban shopping centre. They are the ones that are feeling the pinch. We have seen it happen over a number of years in Hackett and Rivett. Now Gowrie seems to be under some threat.

Mr De Domenico: No; they are fine. We rang them this morning, and they are fine.

MR KAINE: In that case, I assume that Ms Horodny is wrong. That does not surprise me. But we have certainly seen some of the smaller shopping centres go by the board. If you walk around a lot of those small shopping centres today, it is obvious that they are under stress. There are not a lot of customers there, and the small businessmen there are concerned about their future.

It is my view that perhaps we should be doing away with this three-tier shopping notion; have the town centres and the group centres; and, in those areas that are then no longer served by a small suburban shopping centre, you reintroduce the corner stores so that at least in every suburb there is a corner store or two or three - the old general store where you could buy your bread, your groceries, maybe a few greengroceries, a few non-prescription pharmaceutical goods and the like. If you need an aspirin on a Friday night, you can get one at the corner store - and the bottle of milk and the loaf of bread.

I would remind Ms Horodny that that facility is not entirely lacking in Canberra even today. Try any service station in any suburb. She will find, I am sure, that they are operating as small general stores. You can buy a loaf of bread, a packet of cigarettes, or a meat pie in the warmer if you want one. They are quite diversified in what they do. Maybe the days of the small suburban shopping centre are past. Maybe they are an anachronism in Canberra. If that is the case, then the Government should do something positive to encourage those small traders to concentrate themselves in the bigger shopping centres - the town centres and the group centres - but change the planning laws to allow small corner stores. That is my view. I presume that it is just as legitimate as Ms Horodny's.

What is Ms Horodny's solution to this problem? Put the dead hand of government on the whole caboodle for five years. What purpose does that serve? It protects nobody's interests, because the small stores in the local suburban shopping centres are going to go out of business anyway if people do not choose to shop there, whether or not the dead hand of government is on it. I submit that Ms Horodny has not seriously thought through this proposition. I do not see it as having any merit at all, although I agree that the circumstances are such that some reconsideration by government is needed of what it can legitimately do in the competitive workplace out there to assist the community - and I do not mean assist big business - to have available to them the shopping facilities that they require; not what the big business people require; not what the members sitting around this room think is needed; but what the community needs.

It is clear that the community need has changed, and some small businessmen are feeling the consequences of that. Maybe they have to adjust to this new world of the 1990s as well. That may mean some relocation for them, some dislocation of their business. I know that people will say, "They are just keeping their head above water now.

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