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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1371 ..

MR WHITECROSS: People say they do not like the range and do not like the price in small supermarkets. There is a place for small shops in the marketplace, and I want to see them survive. To survive they have to offer something the customers actually want. We do not solve the problem of small shopping centres by closing everything else and saying, "You have to go there". We do not solve the problem by some sort of system of drawing lots for who is going to get to do their weekly shopping at the local shopping centre so that we can keep it viable. This is not how life works. We have to ensure that local shopping centres offer something that the customers want. We have continuously advocated positive assistance to local shopping centres and local traders to tailor their business to meet the market ever since this issue has been on the agenda. That is the solution - making shopping at local shopping centres something which is an attractive possibility because, if you can attract shoppers back to those local centres by offering them things they want, they will go there.

Mr Speaker, the Greens do not seem to understand that people can be multidimensional. Lots of people might be concerned, for instance, about the domination of the ACT retail market by major national chains. Lots of people might have some ambivalence about that. Nevertheless, when it comes to their weekly shopping, they still want a good range; they still want a good price. If the only way they are going to get that is by going to a major national chain, then they will. That is life. People can have an opinion about the level of competition for the large supermarkets in the ACT market but still choose to shop there. Not everybody is going to shop in a shop with a limited range and which charges 12 per cent more for their groceries, just to satisfy some ideological fixation on competition in the marketplace.

Mr Speaker, a lot of naive talk is made about how we need local shops because older people like to shop at local shops. Older people patronise local shops less than anybody else. They use cars to get to the shops more than anybody else. There are probably two good reasons for that. One is, of course, they cannot carry their weekly groceries home from the shops anyway; and the other is they are very concerned about price. So, they go where the prices are cheap. Mr Speaker, I am all for choice in the marketplace, but you have to have choices that people want to choose between, not choices that people do not want to choose between. Mr Speaker, that is what we want. We want to see choices in the marketplace, but we want to see choices that people actually want to make.

We believe that policies which aim at assisting local shops and local supermarkets, for that matter, to offer to the community an attractive package which encourages people to shop there is the way forward, whether it is through Labor's initiative of renewing shopping precincts to make them attractive places to go to; whether it has to do with the kinds of helpShop initiatives that the Government has been involved in, which we have supported, which are designed to encourage local shopping centres to provide the right thing; or whether it is changes to lease purposes to allow a wider mix of shopping in local shopping centres which will make them more attractive than the older style shopping mix which is no longer favoured by consumers.

Mr Speaker, they are initiatives that we should be looking at, not arbitrarily telling people where they can shop and when they can shop. That is simply not practical. The Government backed down on this because - - -

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