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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4359 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

explain to people in this place - people who have seen only the electoral advantage in canning this move towards protecting small centres, so they think, and therefore have failed to understand that this is about allowing the synchronisation of the supermarkets in the town centres with the trading going on elsewhere in the town centres.

Mr Osborne: It is an election winner, Gary.

Mr Berry: I can imagine the campaign material - "We cut trading hours in 1996".

MR HUMPHRIES: It is about saying that, if a town centre has its shops trading until 9 o'clock at night, you have your supermarket trading slightly beyond that to accommodate those particular needs.

Mr Berry: "You lost your job in 1996 because of us. Vote for us".

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, it is very noisy in here. I wonder whether you might turn a hose on some of the people on the other side of the chamber.

Granting an exemption is not an admission of a mistake. There has always been the capacity to grant an exemption and therefore, if there was ever an admission of a mistake, it would have been in the legislation in the first place. We are not removing all benefit from small business, and that is the key difference between what we have done with this exemption and what Mr Osborne's legislation does. Mr Osborne's legislation does remove all benefit to small business that the trading hours legislation has granted throughout the period from 9 December until 8 January, a period of an entire month. Mr Osborne's legislation seeks the repeal of the legislation every year for one month. That is what it amounts to. Mr Osborne would actually like to repeal it for the other 11 months as well; we know that. Mr Osborne would like to repeal it for the full 12 months, but he should at least be honest enough to admit that he is proposing the suspension of the legislation altogether for one whole month of the year. If there are benefits to the broader community throughout the year, and I believe that there are benefits, they ought to flow to some extent during this month as well, but not so as to prevent there being some access to supermarket trading in the town centres for extended hours during that period.

Let me turn to the issue Mr Moore has raised of amending Mr Osborne's Bill. Let me make it clear, first of all, that the Government has always made it clear that we would be considering exemptions at this time of year, and we prefer to use the regulations for a number of reasons - in fact, for four reasons. First of all, as Mr De Domenico indicated, regulation has always been the device used to create exemptions for the usual trading hours practices during this time of year. It has always been the regime. Secondly, regulation is inherently more flexible. We may have come to the conclusion that different centres should have different trading hours. We decided not to do it in this case, but we could have done so, and provided for particular cases for particular centres. To do that in legislation is obviously much more cumbersome.

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