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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (27 June) . . Page.. 2419 ..
Mrs Carnell: They cannot if they are running their own businesses. How do they go? Do they close the doors?
MR MOORE: We hear Mrs Carnell saying exactly the same thing. She says, "Oh, they cannot". When I need to meet with small business people all over Canberra and they consider the issue important enough they, perhaps not easily, can and do make the time and do find ways to cover for a short while. This simply was not considered to be serious enough. The reason it was not considered to be serious enough is that they can see through it. They know about - - -
Mr Stefaniak: Have you not ever heard of the silent majority? The silent majority do not attend protests.
MR MOORE: Mr Stefaniak talks about the silent majority. In three or four days, certainly in less than a week, 40,000 signatures were put on a petition - and Mr Stefaniak talks about the silent majority!
Mr Osborne: It must be a very silent majority, Bill!
MR MOORE: It must be a very silent majority if that is the case! Mr Speaker, the reality is that there are significant costs and there are no benefits. If the Government were doing this properly and closing the big supermarkets and all those supermarkets of over 400 square metres right across the city at the proposed restricted times, then you could still see the costs, severe costs, but at least you would be able to measure some benefits. In this case there are costs and no benefits whatsoever, and it is highly unlikely that there will be any benefits. In other words, on a cost-benefit analysis, this is just a sham. The interesting thing is that the Liberals actually know that. In their heart of hearts, they know that. The Greens, on the other hand, actually believe that it will make a difference. Ms Horodny stood up here and gave us a series of non sequiturs as to what might happen and what might not happen, trying to wrestle with this cost-benefit analysis - I think it was a reasonable attempt to wrestle with the cost-benefit analysis - but really coming to the conclusion that actually there are not going to be any benefits from this. Therefore, she tried to justify this legislation by pointing to all the baddies.
Who are the baddies? The baddies are big business. All big businesses must be bad because they are big businesses. That is why they are bad. We heard about big businesses in Canberra that operate Australia-wide. We heard reference to national business, corporate giants and all this sort of very hard left-wing talk that we used to expect from the Trotskyites in the Labor movement. It would appear that the reason Labor members have smiles on their faces is that these people have moved over to the Green movement. That argument implies that people should not want the cheap food they can buy from these big conglomerates, these incredible corporate giants, and therefore should avoid it. Of course that is not going to be the case. If ordinary people in Canberra could clearly see a benefit coming out of this for the small shops and so on, then they might actually consider it a reasonable method, but they know there is no benefit. They can see, although for some reason you cannot see.
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