Page 4886 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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government to seek the ACCC’s views on the recommendations contained in the review of ACT supermarkets and report to the Assembly before the recommendations are implemented. But if you were to believe Mr Stanhope’s press release spin and believe Mr Stanhope in the chamber today, it is as if the whole word is going to come to an end. When you really delve down into what he said, there was a high level of agreement between what Mr Seselja said and what Mr Stanhope said but it was cast over with a thin veneer of outrage that anyone could occupy the same space as he.
There are a few issues that you have to raise here. Why is it that there seems to be, in the ACT, with the Chief Minister, some abhorrence of the IGA chain of supermarkets? IGA has been part of the Canberra landscape for as long as I have lived here, in its current form and in its previous form. The supermarket operators who operate those supermarkets in my electorate and elsewhere, the people who have spoken to me, are upright members of the community that provide an essential service. The Supa IGA in Hawker, the IGA that I use on a regular basis at Florey, the IGAs across the community, across my electorate, are strong supporters of the community and are strong supporters in the community.
We can look at places like the IGA at Melba. A few years ago that Melba shopping centre was derelict but the people who run the IGA at Melba contributed to the turning around of that shopping centre from a burnt-out hulk to the vibrant shopping centre it is today. They have made a substantial contribution to the life and the community in the suburb of Melba, which is a somewhat disadvantaged suburb. In Evatt, Fraser, Holt, Kaleen—a substantial supermarket again—and Nicholls, the IGA people make a substantial contribution to my electorate.
There seems to be a problem between Mr Stanhope and the IGA chain, and it is time that Mr Stanhope either got over it or got around it. He is there saying he wants genuine independent people in the supermarket business. We have those genuine independent people. By his own admission today, Metcash does not run any of these supermarkets. But at the same time he is putting impediments in their way or it appears from recommendations 6 and 8 of the Martin report that there are impediments in the way of these people.
What we need from the Chief Minister today is for him to get off his high horse and recognise that we should all be on the one page on this. We want good interaction and good development of supermarkets in our communities. We do not want a preponderance of the big players in our supermarkets. We do not want to perpetuate the thing which is already wrong with the supermarket industry in the ACT, which is the preponderance and the domination of Woolworths and Coles. You can travel overseas and talk to people about supermarkets. It is interesting in that I was recently briefly in the UK and people complained to me about Tesco. They all ended up saying, “You don’t want to have Tesco come to Australia; it’s terrible.” Tesco may have problems, and people may have problems with it, but it does not occupy as much space in the retail supermarket business in the UK as Woolworths and Coles do here.
We in the ACT, and across the country, are held captive by that. And instead of the Chief Minister embracing competition and real independence, we have this—I do not know what we had today. You made the point before, Mr Speaker, that he obviously
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