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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 14 Hansard (11 December) . . Page.. 4733 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

No-one is going to come and build for the Government, even on a site like Manuka, I suspect, and even if they were given the site on a very concessional basis, a car park for the sake of providing more car parking spaces at Manuka. In places like Woden and Civic that concept works because there is such intensive use by a large number of shoppers. You can profitably build a supermarket and gain enough fees from the use of the car park to justify the cost of building it in the first place. But that is not going to work, for the most part, at Manuka, and it also does not solve a number of other problems at Manuka - for example, generating the capital works revenue necessary to replace things like Palmerston Lane or to upgrade Palmerston Lane. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, that is also a myth that the Government wants to debunk today.

Another is that supermarkets will not want to compete with the Woolworths supermarket across the road, on the other side of Flinders Way. I would have thought it is obvious to anybody that, if there is a brand-new supermarket across the way on section 41, which is, for argument's sake, twice the size of the Woolworths supermarket, which has car parking underneath it or on top of it, or certainly juxtaposed to it, and it is possible to get in and out quickly because there is access, say, off Captain Cook Crescent, and there is parcel pick-up and so on within the car park structure, whoever has the car park across the road from Woolworths is going to have a much more satisfactory outlook and a much greater opportunity to foresee their survival than the people who are running the Woolworths supermarket. So it is quite ridiculous to say, as Ms Horodny suggested, that no-one other than Woolworths will want to bid for that site because they will be stymied by the existence of Woolworths across the way. That is nonsense.

Debate interrupted.

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Wood): Order! It being 5.00 pm, I propose the question:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

Mr Humphries: I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.

Question resolved in the negative.

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