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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 1 Hansard (19 February) . . Page.. 91 ..

MR WHITECROSS (continuing):

for a $100 basket of goods, it cost $12 more to shop at a local store compared to a large town centre supermarket. This rise of 12 per cent in the grocery bill is simply exorbitant and is completely unjustified. Restricted trading hours forces people to shop at times of the Government's choosing, not of their own. It forces shoppers to suffer inconvenience and higher prices.

The Government has to face facts. Its trading hours policy reduces shopping hours at the very times that Canberrans prefer to do their shopping. The Canberra Business Council, the Australian Supermarkets Institute and the Australian Consumers Association all believe that this is an ill-considered policy which will not benefit those it is intended to benefit and only causes inconvenience to Canberra shoppers. In fact, the Canberra Business Council said of the policy that the policy will not meet the consumer demands nor will it guarantee ongoing business at local shopping centres. The Australian Supermarkets Institute reported in a survey that they had conducted on their behalf that 93 per cent of Canberra grocery shoppers were happy with the trading hours which operated prior to the Government's new policy. The majority of Canberra residents believe the community would be worse off if trading hours were reduced. In fact, 42,000 people signed a petition against restricted trading hours in just three days, and that is a pretty good measure of the animosity to this Government's trading hours policy.

Mr Speaker, while community opinion has been set so strongly against the Government's policy, what has the Government produced to justify it? The answer is nothing. The Government to this day has not produced any hard evidence in support of its policy. The Government has not established causal links between town centre trading hours and the declining fortunes of suburban supermarkets. It has provided no cost-benefit analysis of its policy. The Government has been unable to demonstrate that the policy is in the public interest and that it is better than other forms of government assistance or intervention to assist local suburban supermarkets. The Government has not provided any analysis of the changing role of suburban shopping centres in the face of changing demographics, employment patterns or lifestyles. These represent structural and inexorable changes which have affected people's shopping patterns. These changes will not be turned back by the adjustment of shopping hours in large town centre supermarkets.

The ACT president of the Liberal Party even said on ACT radio last year that the Government needs to seek community opinion and facts and figures to back its case. That is how confident he was in the policy. Others, however, have been able to produce information and to demonstrate the costs of the policy. The Supermarkets Institute, for example, commissioned an independent report by Price Waterhouse on the policy. The report concluded that there would be "minimal impact on small business in suburban shopping locations and that it was a poor policy option". The report detailed the downside of the legislation in terms of jobs lost, loss of payroll tax revenue to the ACT Government, and increased congestion at town centres and group centres during peak trading times. Artificial protection of small business in suburban shopping centres does not ensure profit and does not guarantee the future viability of inefficient stores which are not meeting the market, regardless of their size.

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