Page 4877 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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A number of other stakeholders have raised concerns. We have seen the Shopping Centre Council of Australia say:
Supermarket chains such as Franklins, Supabarn and Aldi will no doubt be pleased with this free kick through the ACT’s planning system but it shouldn’t be described as enhancing competition for consumers.
As we said at the outset, there are a number of things that are good in this review and I said that to John Martin when we met with him and had a briefing on this issue. We should be looking particularly to find ways of encouraging competition in our group centres. The only note of caution there is we do need to do that in a phased way. If we were to turn around tomorrow and try and introduce competition into all of our group centres there would potentially be some other centres that would suffer significantly.
So that will have to be handled carefully. But, on the face of it, expanding competition in places particularly like Dickson is a good thing. There is the demand there for it and we want to ensure that there are not monopolies in some of these areas and that we do see genuine competition in the supermarket sector.
But the fundamental question is, in seeking to enhance competition and expand competition in the grocery sector in the ACT, do we want to exclude a bunch of local operators, a bunch of local business men and women who are contributing to our ACT economy and who have strong roots here in the ACT? Do we want to say to them, “Well, no, you can’t bid”? What is the rationale for that? That is the concern here and that is at the heart of this motion. Preventing our local independent operators from being able to bid for some of these sites does not enhance competition.
We do see the example of the Supa IGAs around the region. We have seen the example in Karabar. In fact, Karabar is an instructive one because what we had there was the ACCC reasonably concluding that Woolworths should not be able to bid. We do not have a problem with that. The ACCC found that it would be against competition for Woolworths to be allowed to bid for that site because there would be too much market concentration. That is a good thing.
But then what happened was we actually had a competitive process and Supa IGA won that and is providing a supermarket there in Karabar. We know there is a Supa IGA in Hawker. Why would we want to restrict Supa IGA from expanding, from bidding for sites as we go forward with certain tender processes? We do not want to see that.
We, unlike the government, believe that IGAs should be able to contribute, should not be artificially restricted, and that is a concern. And it is not just the opposition. The ACCC, which has been doing extensive work in relation to competition in the grocery market, in the supermarket sector, has had something to say about this. We saw in Senate estimates recently these particular recommendations in the supermarket review put to Graeme Samuel. He said, in relation to two of the recommendations, recommendations 6 and 8:
How do I put this in as tactful a way as possible? They are recommendations that would not appear to be consistent with the findings of the ACCC in its grocery inquiry report of 2008.
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