Page 4139 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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are facing the situation we face, why we now see a situation where small operators feel particularly vulnerable.
The Greens have been massive supporters of this policy right through. They said they were being tardy, and they pushed for it. Then we brought to the Assembly concerns about this. We brought concerns to the Assembly in 2009. As I noted in my press release of 12 November 2009, ACT Labor and the Greens voted against a Canberra Liberals motion which went in to bat for local independent supermarket operators. The motion called on the government to have a competitive and transparent process that did not exclude independent operators in the allocation of new supermarket sites in the ACT. ACT Labor and the Greens refused to support this motion. They hung out the independent operators. On the one hand, they told them to start a petition, but when it came to a vote in the Assembly they backed the Labor Party; they backed the policy.
That is at the heart of why we have a problem today. This could have been stopped a lot earlier. This is a flawed policy. I will go into some of the reasons why it is a flawed policy in just a moment.
We have heard some mixed views from Giralang residents. There have been frustrations from Giralang residents at the games that have been played at Giralang shops. There is no doubt that the government’s interference—the interference which was raised by Neil Savery in relation to the Giralang process—undermines our planning system. There is no doubt about that. It undermines our planning system because we had a government trying to come in over the top of a development application. There is a proper way to do that; the call-in was the only proper way to do that. That was where the minister in the end had no choice, because that process had become so compromised by the political interference of the Labor government in that process that Neil Savery said that there was no choice but to call that in. That is a very poor reflection on the government, and in our debate tomorrow we will get to discuss why it is important that we have a committee inquiry to look at a number of these issues around the supermarket policy, around the application of that supermarket policy.
Make no mistake: this supermarket policy, as applied, allowed this outcome. If you doubt that, have a look at what John Martin had to say about it when he was asked about it. John Martin said that this supermarket in Giralang did not offend against the supermarket policy. And, as we suggested at the time, this was going to have all sorts of unintended consequences, not least of which was picking winners.
I will go into some of the concerns that were raised at the time—immediately—on competition grounds. This is a policy that was apparently about providing more competition, but at the same time as doing that it used highly anticompetitive processes in its implementation. Hence the ACCC raised serious concerns about it. We had the former ACCC chairman, Graeme Samuel, at the Senate estimates hearing saying that the supermarket policy recommendations “would not be consistent with the principles of competition and opening up markets to competition”.
We have got a policy that is apparently about opening up competition, but the body in Australia tasked with promoting competition says it goes the other way—that it would
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