Page 4138 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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suppliers to supermarkets, including, in particular, local suppliers. I commend the motion to the Assembly.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (10.32): I would have expected that the government would want to respond to this, but in order to stop the motion from dying before we debate it, I will get up.
MR SPEAKER: Thank you.
MR SESELJA: The Liberal Party will not be supporting this motion today, for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we will be having a substantive debate tomorrow with my motion to establish a select committee. I think that having a parallel process has not been thought through by the Greens. This motion is all over the place; it would have been better if we had just had a sensible debate tomorrow about establishing a committee rather than rushing this motion through, which is what the Greens appear to have done.
There is no doubt that the supermarket policy is a problem. We have identified that from a very early stage in this process. This is a policy that was about picking winners. This is a policy that we said from day one would hurt small operators. We said that IGAs and other small operators in Canberra would suffer as a result of this policy, and there is no doubt that that is the case. I think, though, that we have to take with a grain of salt the claims by the Greens and the new-found support of the Greens for small supermarket operators, given their cheerleading of the government on this issue.
I do not think that we can allow this kind of duplicity to go unremarked. The Greens have been duplicitous on this question. On the one hand, they claim to support small business, but at every opportunity that they have had—we have had motions in this place where they have had the opportunity to improve this policy or to protect small business—they have voted with the government and they have sided with the government. That is one of the most unfortunate things about this debate.
We never would have been in this situation if the Greens had not given the green light to their coalition partners to pursue this flawed supermarket policy. We are where we are because of this government—this coalition government. That should not go unremarked. Ms Le Couteur comes here today and somehow pretends to be the friend of small business. We have had votes in this Assembly to protect IGAs. We voted for it. The Labor Party and the Greens voted against it. When Ms Hunter, as leader of the Greens, had put to her on radio the question of whether she supports the locking out of IGAs, she said that yes, she does. I will get to the detail of that.
It was not that long ago that the Greens were encouraging IGA operators to start a petition against the ACT government’s supermarket policy, yet at the same time—this was in June last year—Ms Hunter confirmed that the Greens agreed with the ACT Labor government’s policy on locking in local operators through direct grants to selected operators. In an interview on ABC 666, when asked whether the Greens supported the exclusion of some local operators from supermarket sites, Ms Hunter very clearly said, “We support the government’s strategy.” That was on 18 June 2010. So let us get some facts on the table. Let us get some facts on the table as to why we
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