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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (4 December) . . Page.. 4362 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

and he is still getting embarrassed. The fact is that there is one reason and one reason only why the Government is even contemplating these regulations, and that is that other shops in the town centres are going to be open and the Government is going to look like a pack of prize geese. If you go down to your town centre, you can shop at every shop in the town centre, and there is Woolworths or Coles boarded up because Mr Humphries and Mr De Domenico put through this ridiculous trading hours law. That is what this is about. It is about their embarrassment and trying to minimise it.

We know how embarrassed they are. On the weekend the Liberal Party convention was so embarrassed that they spent half the convention trying to figure out ways of extricating the Government from their embarrassment over this matter. Maybe they should set up an inquiry and try to find some facts and figures and see whether it is really working. Maybe they can find an excuse to get out of this legislation at some time before the next election, because they are really embarrassed about it. That is what the Liberal convention was saying on the weekend. That is what the president of the Liberal Party, Brian Nye, was saying on the radio the other day. Here is their lame explanation of why they are going to introduce this. It is okay to have the supermarkets closed down for nine months of the year, but over Christmas they do not think they should be closed down because that would cause the maximum embarrassment.

To illustrate how ridiculous the Government's position on this is, the Government's position is, "We are going to open the supermarkets because some other shops in the town centre want to trade". But, under their law, the other shops in the town centre can trade 24 hours a day, every single day of the year.

Mr De Domenico: Deregulated.

MR WHITECROSS: They are deregulated, as Mr De Domenico says. Why are we allowing only the supermarkets to trade for these few days? At the moment, they are the only few days that any other shops in the town centre want to trade; but, if next year they decide to start trading at other times, will the Government be back asking us for another exemption because Big W or some other stores are open and it is going to be embarrassed on another day of the year?

Mr Osborne is quite rightly highlighting with this legislation the stupidity of the Government's position, a position that goes against all the trends in supermarket trading hours regulation across Australia. We have seen their colleagues in Victoria take a different approach. We have seen their colleagues in the Northern Territory take a different approach. Everywhere in Australia, the pressure is towards deregulation of shopping hours; yet this Government has taken late-night trading of supermarkets, which the public overwhelmingly want, and has closed them down at 7 o'clock. They are completely out of line with national trends on this.

They are completely out of line with the lifestyles of the Canberra community. In fact, Mr Humphries had the temerity to add insult to injury by using the lifestyles argument to justify his exemptions, when he has consistently ignored the lifestyles argument in imposing these restrictions on shopping hours in the first place.

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