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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1365 ..

Ms Tucker: Social justice, fair trading.

MR BERRY: If you want to keep interjecting about social justice, I will go on with a few. It is this middle-class value that you get from people like Ms Tucker who mouth the words "social justice" all the time but who would impose upon people the obligation to go to a more expensive shopping site than would be the case otherwise. I do not really want to have anything to do with those middle-class ideas.

Ms McRae: Poor people have to have cars to get to Fyshwick to work, Ms Tucker. Poor people do have cars. Poor people work very inconvenient hours. You do not know what you are talking about.

Ms Tucker: Young people and people with a disability cannot own cars.

MR SPEAKER: Order, Ms McRae and Ms Tucker! If you want to argue, go outside.

MR BERRY: The working-class people in this city do not want to have anything to do with those ideas and cannot afford them. If you want to espouse middle-class values, that is fine; but do not impose them on working-class people who cannot afford them. That is the point I make in relation to the Greens' position.

So far as the Government is concerned, it came from a different position altogether. Mrs Carnell nailed her colours to the mast a long time ago. She made a submission to, I think, an Access Economics inquiry or an inquiry on shopping hours that was around the Assembly some time ago. She argued, of course, that there ought to be restricted trading to enhance the position of local shopping centres, principally because Mrs Carnell is the owner of a small shop in a local shopping centre. It is not hard to see why she did it. At that time she was not a member of the Assembly. She was tied up with the Pharmacy Guild. One can understand why that would occur.

But what I would have expected from somebody, who was elected by the people in the ACT in the first place, was that she would ditch those ideas because she no longer represented the Pharmacy Guild or her pharmacy interests when she was advocating a particular position in this place. But her view held sway over the rest of them, and we ended up with this situation where there was a campaign at the last election. I think it was the save our shops campaign. The Liberals attached themselves to it and then, of course, had to deliver or be seen to be delivering after the event.

What does all of this mean to local shops? I can tell you that what the Greens and the Liberals did to the local shop in Holt was far worse than what was occurring in the first place. What happened, when they forced the larger shops at Belconnen to close their doors, was that all the large chain did was that it moved into the group centre in my area, bought the shop, traded for longer hours and hurt the local shop even more. Do not give me this nonsense about being concerned about local shops. It was a poorly thought through policy that was ideologically driven and had nothing to do with the practicalities of shopping in the ACT.

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