Page 3730 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 24 August 2011
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forward for not supporting this bill today are largely those arguments that the minister herself has made—that we need national consistency. She has argued strongly for national consistency. I will quote from the speech she just made. She said:
… it is crazy to have eight different systems … operating across Australia.
She also said that it makes no sense to create jurisdiction-specific point-of-sale legislation.
I think they are valid points. The reason, ultimately, that we disagree is this. We had the same arguments—the minister and I—about our concerns with this piece of legislation. The difference is that the minister is going to support it anyway, regardless of the consequences for business and regardless of the fact that we will end up with a position where we have jurisdiction-specific legislation. She is going to support it because she wants to send a message. In my view, we do not need to have a piece of legislation to send a message. She is the health minister. She can send a very strong message and she can make a very strong point—as she has done, as the Greens have done and indeed as I have done—that we need to tackle the obesity crisis and that we need to make sure that, where appropriate, we have the right sort of labelling on our foods, be that in supermarkets or at point of sale in fast-food outlets.
We do not need a piece of legislation in this place that is going to have consequences down the track for a bunch of small businesses out there, that is going to have negative consequences that the minister herself has highlighted. She can make that point. She can make it very strongly. She can put out a press release. She can put something on her blog. She can tweet it in one of her Twitter cabinets. What she does not need to do is support a piece of legislation that is going to have potentially some quite significant negative consequences for businesses here in the ACT.
I will go further and read from a letter that the minister wrote to Ms Bresnan regarding this. She said:
The Bill will affect the community at large and I remain concerned that the legislation has not been the subject of appropriate public engagement.
But she is still going to support it. She said:
I have also been advised that the NSW government has established a working party to finalise the impact on supermarkets in NSW under their legislation which I have been advised will not report until December 2011. I think it is important that any future ACT legislation should be able to adopt the outcomes of these discussions so that we are not requiring supermarkets to have a different regime in the ACT, to that of NSW. I think it would be sensible to look at the results of the NSW prior to finalising the ACT scheme.
Hear, hear! She said:
As you would be aware, I would prefer for the ACT to be able to adopt the national principles to guide point of sale information. I think it makes sense to have point of sale information which is consistent in all jurisdictions. Whilst I
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