Page 4889 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 11 November 2009
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I thank the Liberals very much for bringing this motion on because supermarket policy is really important. It is one of the things that the Greens have been talking about with the government for quite some time. We were very pleased when the government announced the John Martin review and then the report because John Martin has considerable experience in supermarket issues and I thought it was really useful to have the involvement of someone with that sort of experience.
The thing he probably did not have experience in as far as supermarkets go is the role of shops in local communities and in larger communities. I thank John Martin very much for incorporating part of our submission in the report which talked about the role of local shops and the importance of ensuring that they continue. We suggested, and I think John Martin foreshadowed the possibility of, some planning changes to make currently unviable local shops or marginally viable local shops more viable.
However, these are not the major issues that are dealt with in Mr Seselja’s motion. I have a number of comments to make on Mr Seselja’s motion. First, it possibly is premature because I understand the government is still doing consultation on this issue that will not be finished until 20 November. However, I think it is quite reasonable that Mr Seselja would not be aware that the government was doing consultation; I only worked it out yesterday because the North Canberra Community Council sent around an email alerting people. Consultation clearly does not work if people in general are not aware of it.
Like Mr Seselja, I have had a procession of IGA operators come and see me. They have all been very concerned that the upshot of this review could be a considerable problem for their business. I am really unsure what is going to happen in this regard. I heard John Martin’s comments about Metcash control. They do seem to be very interesting comments. We are madly working on some amendments to Mr Seselja’s motion. The main thing we are going to call on the government to do is to clarify what is actually meant by an “independent supermarket”. I think that is the nub of the question. All three sides are probably in furious agreement on the concept that we want more competition in supermarkets and we want to make sure that independent operators, particularly locally based independent operators, are encouraged rather than discouraged.
If the Martin report has ended up discouraging them then I am sure that is a result that none of us wants. But John Martin had some very persuasive arguments about control and independence, and the roles of wholesaling. I think that we need to call upon the government to clarify the situation in this regard. I think we are all in agreement as to the eventual aims. The government just needs to clarify what the situation is as far as this goes. That is what I have got in paragraph (2) of my proposed amendment, which calls on the government to clarify the definition of “controlled by a major wholesaler” as outlined in the eligibility criteria for assessing candidates for new entry facilitation.
In terms of Mr Seselja’s motion, the other thing I want to do is to delete the paragraph which states “report to the Legislative Assembly on the process used to allocate each new supermarket site in the ACT to supermarket operators”. The ACT has put together, after considerable time and angst, a process for the direct sale of sites. We have already talked today about the phrase “getting politics out of planning”. If we agreed to this suggestion in Mr Seselja’s motion, we would be putting politics back
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