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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2506 ..

the suburbs that community pharmacy currently delivers. My bet would be that the answer to that is also no.

The other advantage is that pharmacists are genuine small business people. Forty-six owners of pharmacies are Canberra residents. They live here, reinvest here, spend here and the profits they make stay here. The profits stay in the community, they come back to the ACT government, they come back to the people of the ACT. That would not happen if pharmacies were allowed to operate in supermarkets, because the profits from the large supermarket chains go out of the ACT. Let’s face it, they go straight out the door. I do not see why we should hand over those profits to the chains as well as lose a community asset, the community glue that pharmacy is.

It is important to make the point that we are not against supermarkets and we are not against chains per se. What we are in fact in favour of is building up local community shops so that they can service their communities. That is why we will be supporting the intent of this bill today, subject to amendments being made to achieve its objectives.

I think it is very important in this day and age that we spread into the community as much as we can the ability to deliver services at all levels across all socioeconomic groups, against all price points. But if we lose things like newsagencies and pharmacies from our local shopping centres—and a number of them have gone—our shopping centres will become unviable and there will be a cost to government. Government will either have to renew shopping centres and do their best to keep them afloat, even through refurbishments or community-based programs, or actually knock down shopping centres that have died, in which case these facilities will be lost entirely to the community.

The community makes a decision. Sometimes the community votes with their feet. They go down to the local supermarket, to a regional centre or to a bigger centre. That is the community’s intention; that is the community’s choice. But I think we ought to be saying that we will do our best to keep local shopping centres alive for as long as we can by ensuring that they have the components that people are attracted to. That is why we will vote for the intention of this bill.

My concern is that we will have a number of Rivett shops. Rivett is now coming back but it has taken about 10 years for it to do so. However, the whole nature of the shopping centre has changed. It still does not have a chemist. The problem is that once these services are lost they often do not come back.

If we are concerned, for instance, about competition policy, we should be mindful that there are 46 family-owned, individually owned, pharmacy businesses in the ACT. That is real and genuine competition. These businesses are organised into a couple of different buying groups. That is real and genuine competition. I think what we ought to do is look beyond that competition issue. The Prime Minister has already said that if he receives a letter from jurisdictions, he is not going to force it; he is not interested at all in extending it to supermarkets.

How do we bolster the delivery of services into the communities? One of the ways of keeping our communities viable is to provide what I have called the community glue. I think the best way we can do that is ensure that the supermarkets do not gobble up pharmacies as they have done so many other things.

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