Page 4878 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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He is asked by Senator Bushby:
Is it consistent with the principles of the Trade Practices Act?
Mr Samuel responds:
Those recommendations would not be consistent with the principles of competition and opening up markets to competition.
I repeat: Mr Samuel, the head of the ACCC, says, “Those recommendations,” recommendations 6 and 8, “would not be consistent with the principles of competition and opening up markets to competition.” Senator Bushby asked him:
What about the recommendation that essentially would render a small business or a family business not having 10 years of experience running a supermarket ineligible to be allowed to operate a supermarket?
Mr Samuel says:
It would appear to be an artificial constraint that would not be supported by any of the principles of competition that we would be advocating.
That is a note of caution from Graeme Samuel. That is a note of caution that is worthy of consideration from the ACT government and the ACT Assembly.
It is worth us pausing and saying there are a lot of good things in this supermarket review. We want to see more competition. Mr Samuel says some of the recommendations may actually be anticompetitive. Do we want to allow a situation where in seeking to expand competition we artificially constrain it? I say no.
I say that what we want to see is actual structural reforms that do increase competition without artificial constraints. Why would we place artificial constraints on our local independent operators? We want to see them compete in the market. We want to see them grow. We want to see them compete on an equal footing as much as possible and we do not want to see Coles and Woolies dominating. We want to see that scaled back. We do want to see more competition in the market.
Why would you do that by artificially constraining the ability of IGAs to bid? And the ACCC has said some of these recommendations would artificially constrain. That is our concern. That is the concern of IGA operators and other independent operators, and they have been contacting us to make this very point.
There is no doubt that the intention behind this review is a good one. There is no doubt that there are a number of aspects in it that are worth supporting. But what we need to do now is make sure that we do not blindly accept all of the recommendations and therefore hurt small business in the ACT, hurt local independent operators, and artificially constrain competition so that we actually do not get the kind of results that we would want to see.
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