Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2400 ..

Mr Berry: Read this paragraph here.

MR HUMPHRIES: Thank you very much. Do not call us; we will call you. Mr Berry, you can have it back now. I have read all that I need to. Mr Speaker, if the Tobacco Institute commissioned Price Waterhouse to do a study of the effect on the Canberra economy of tobacco sales, who here would believe the results of that report? Nobody. Why should we believe the report because it has been commissioned by the Australian Supermarket Institute? Mr Speaker, I do not believe a thing that the Australian Supermarket Institute has said in this - - -

Mr Moore: I rise on a point of order, Mr Speaker. On the one hand, we have Mr Humphries showing that he is trying to, supposedly, protect business. The next minute, he is naming a particular business and saying that it is biased and has not done an independent survey, because it has been commissioned by somebody else.

MR SPEAKER: Mr Moore, there is no point of order.

MR HUMPHRIES: Thank you, for that diversion. Mr Speaker, the fact is that jobs have already been lost in this city through the neglect by previous governments of the problems of small business, particularly in local centres. They have been allowed, systemically, to die. We know that, in the last year or so, 12 local centres have, effectively, died because their supermarket has closed and we know that a further 20 such centres are under immediate and severe threat. What are those opposite in this debate - who say to us, "Do not touch trading hours" - going to do about that? What is their solution to that problem? How will they act to help those businesses? Mr Speaker, those people do not have a solution; they do not care; they do not intend to act; and they do not really know what they are talking about. Because we are honest about this, I do not pretend that we are absolutely certain about everything that we put forward in this place and can profess it to be the absolute answer to all of the problems that we might be trying to address. We do not pretend that. But we do believe that it is time the Government made a serious attempt to address the problem for those small businesses, and we have taken that step for the first time.

Mr Speaker, as I said before, there has been tremendous nonsense spoken by those who oppose the legislation. The statement that 300 jobs are going to be lost is the biggest furphy of all. There is simply no evidence to suggest that job losses of that magnitude, or anything like that magnitude, will be sustained as a result of this policy. The suggestion that shelf stackers and other workers associated with the businesses will go out of business is just absolute nonsense. Take nightwatchmen. Why should it become any less necessary for a shop to be secured at night because it has closed at 7 o'clock than if it had closed at 10 o'clock? Why are there fewer people needed to look after that store? I would have thought that, if it closed at 7 o'clock rather than 10 o'clock, the nightwatchmen would get more work, because they would be out there from 7 o'clock onwards rather than from 10 o'clock onwards. It is a complete nonsense.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .