Page 2900 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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The ACCC has put in place some pretty solid guidelines about when the big players in particular should be excluded, and I think that is not bad guidance material. But this government has said, “That is fine; we can talk about when Woolworths and Coles will be excluded, but there are other people we want to exclude; we want to exclude IGA; we want to exclude Franklins,” for no rationale other than the vague possibility that we might eventually see an extra wholesale business. How is that plan going? I do not think that that is progressing very well. And we are now seeing this policy fall apart.
Mr Barr has to come in and say that it is now really good that Woolworths is coming in. It is now government policy that it is good for Woolworths to come and compete with Costco, whereas until now not only has it not been good for Woolworths to come in and compete, it has not been good for IGA or Franklins or any of the other supermarkets to come in and compete. That is the pick-the-winners policy that we have had from this government.
That brings with it problems. That brings with it market distortions. And they are not positive. That is why Craig Emerson, their Labor mate, has been so critical of the policy. That is why the ACCC have been so critical—the ACCC who, according to the previous Chief Minister, must have had an axe to grind and must have had a particular agenda. You can criticise the ACCC all you like, but generally they tend to favour competition. The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission as a general rule have been in favour of competition. So I would expect that they are not coming at it from an anti-competitive perspective and that when they criticise the ACT government’s supermarket policy it is not because of a political agenda. Perhaps it is because they actually think the policy does not work.
Now we are seeing even key players who have been potential beneficiaries of the policy saying publicly that they believe it is a dud. There is your endorsement right there: whether it is Craig Emerson, whether it is the ACCC, whether it is Supabarn, they are now saying that this policy is a dud.
In conclusion, I come back to the government office building because it is so comprehensively failing at so many levels and it will fail taxpayers at so many levels. It fails the test from a financial perspective. The savings simply do not add up. When you have to go back and forth with different types of savings thrown together on an A4 piece of paper, which do not match the last savings or the savings after that, you have got a problem.
When you are spending far more per square metre than comparable buildings that have been delivered in the ACT in recent years, then you are spending far too much. When you are spending $11 million on just the ministerial wing, then you are being far too extravagant. When you are spending $2 million on the sky bridge, you are being far too extravagant. When you are not taking account of the massive vacancy rates we have in the ACT, then you are being economically irresponsible as well. When you are choosing to centralise everyone in Civic, you are not taking account of the needs of Gungahlin, the needs of Tuggeranong and the needs of the outer suburbs.
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