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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (14 May) . . Page.. 1364 ..

Mr Whitecross: It is.

MS TUCKER: "It is", says Mr Whitecross; right. So you are not going to be able to catch a bus very easily either, particularly if it is a public holiday. You will not have a local shop; you will not have diversity in your shopping centres. It is interesting to note that Woolworths and Coles are bringing more and more into their shops. It is pharmaceuticals now. We are being lobbied by pharmacies about competition policy and about Woolworths taking over the pharmacies as well. We will not have a chemist; we will not have that choice. But Labor and Liberal say, "That is fine".

The most important choice for them is that people can shop at all hours, no matter what the consequences are in the long term. The consequences in the long term are that we will not have local shopping centres; we will not have diversity in our shopping centres. Retail figures show that already the major stores are doing well and the smaller stores are not; but none of this information is taken into account. The reason that is the case, Mr Moore, is economies of scale; prices are going down in the big stores. We will not have a petrol station on the corner, either.

Mr Moore: The Greens will force it.

MS TUCKER: Mr Moore says, "The Greens will force it". Mr Moore is obviously supporting the Liberal Government by saying, "No intervention in the market", although sometimes the Liberal Party say they will intervene in the market. Maybe it is something to do with what they analyse as the public benefit. I do not know what Mr Moore calls the public benefit. Mr Moore continues to say, "Do not intervene in the market; that is forcing people". Well, we will see the result of that.

I believe that, in the not too distant future, this place will be seen to have been like most other parliaments in Australia that have buckled to the big companies. They have not taken into account the consequences of this action. I am very supportive of what Ms Horodny has already said. She has clearly articulated these points. I am sorry I have to repeat them because it is obvious members of this place are not listening or have fundamentally missed throughout this whole discussion why we took the line we did.

The Liberal Party, of course, knew what our policy was on trading hours; for God's sake! As if it would be a mistake! They did not know the Greens would support it? We have been talking about it since the election campaign. It is a joke to say that the Liberal Party did not know what we were doing. It is just another stunt from Mr Moore. I am glad he has had fun at the expense of the Greens, but I have enjoyed having some fun at his expense.

MR BERRY (11.19): The first thing that I want to say is that I understand exactly where the Greens are coming from. They were caught really by what could be described as folkloristic ideology. The Greens would argue that everybody should be able to get to the source of their food supply on foot or by some other easy means. That is well understood. In their ideal world, a lot of people would enjoy that. The trouble is there are not a lot of people who want to live in that ideal world just now. But what they have done is attach themselves to a bandwagon that was born out of a different ideology.

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