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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 6 Hansard (25 May) . . Page.. 1895 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

jurisdictions. I doubt that there is any place in Australia where you still have regulation of milk vending to people's homes in the way that it occurs here in the ACT. That is long gone.

Mr Osborne: Is that a bad thing?

MR HUMPHRIES: Perhaps not. I will come to Mr Osborne's question in a moment, but the point is that it is not as if we are an island crazily pursuing an obsessive agenda with competition because we think it is a good idea to do that here. It is because it is a national policy, underpinned by a national agreement, with national payments by the national government, and we are meeting our obligations under that process. The proof of that is that every other jurisdiction is going down much the same path. In the near future New South Wales will deregulate the farm gate prices. A similar decision has been made in Victoria in recent days. So deregulation of the milk industry is inevitable and it is happening.

Mr Osborne asked a moment ago, "Is that a good thing?" I have to put on the record quite bluntly that I am not sure whether it is a good thing or it is not. The fact is that the ACT has had a highly advantageous position in the past-

Mr Hargreaves: You would have to be blind to think it is.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, I did not interrupt what Mr Hargreaves had to say. I would ask for a little bit more-

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER: I would not have thought Mr Hargreaves was interrupting you, Mr Minister. If he is, it is highly disorderly.

MR HUMPHRIES: There are a lot of questions about the milk deregulation process. The ACT has been in a very good position in the past because it has had the advantage of being able to buy surplus milk from New South Wales and Victoria at discounted prices. Milk came to the ACT on a discounted basis because of the structure of farm gate regulation in New South Wales and Victoria. With the ending of that regulation, the impact on ACT milk prices will no doubt be unfavourable.

There has also been a very traumatic period of change in the home vending milk market in the ACT. There is no doubt about that. I have no doubt that, in many suburbs in this city, the changes will not be good changes for those concerned-certainly for some of the vendors and probably also for many of the consumers of their products, although a great deal of that depends on how milk consumers adapt to new circumstances and how they demand from the vendors changed provision of services.

The overwhelming fact we need to understand about home milk vending in the ACT is that the industry has experienced problems not because of any particular decision governments have made in the last few years but because the changing lifestyles of Canberrans have made home milk purchasing much less popular than it was a few years ago. I do not recall the figures-I know they will be provided for me later on-but there has been a precipitous decline in the popularity of home milk purchases in this territory in the last five or six years. There are a number of factors in that, but standing out starkly against the others is the fact that lifestyles have changed and people do not buy milk

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