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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 06 Hansard (Wednesday, 23 June 2004) . . Page.. 2508 ..

MR CORBELL (Minister for Health and Minister for Planning) (3.29): Mr Speaker, the government will not be supporting this legislation. It will not be doing so because the legislation does not do what it tries to do.

We have just heard a warm and cuddly speech from Mr Smyth about how great pharmacists are. We agree: pharmacists perform an important service in our community, as do many other professions, and pharmacists deliver important services in a range of ways that everyone in the community values. But there is a big difference between making the motherhood statement that pharmacists deliver important services and then saying, “And that’s why we are going to support this bill,” without critically looking at this bill and making a judgement about whether the bill actually sets out the intent of what it is claimed it is trying to achieve.

The stated purpose of this bill is to ensure that pharmacists in the ACT operate out of their own premises and not as sub-lessees of supermarkets. Mrs Cross believes that the bill will strengthen the pharmacy legislation that stipulates that pharmacies must be owned and operated by registered pharmacists, by prohibiting pharmacists operating a pharmacy as a sub-lessee.

The explanatory statement accompanying her bill states: “This bill will not affect any pharmacist currently operating in the ACT, including those operating in shopping centres and town centres”. This statement is not correct. It is not correct particularly in relation to pharmacies operating in the larger corporate-owned and operated shopping centres where the centre’s owner and/or operator holds the crown lease for the land on which the centre is built. In fact, the majority of the pharmacies in the ACT would be seriously and adversely affected by Mrs Cross’s proposal.

And this is why: in the ACT, land is held by lessees under a crown lease. These leases are granted under the land act and they are currently granted for a set term—typically, 99 years. Mrs Cross’s bill requires that “A registered pharmacist must not carry on a pharmacy business as owner at premises unless the pharmacist is the lessee of the crown lease for the premises; and the crown lease is registered under the Land Titles Act”.

The owner/operators of large shopping centres such as those at our town centres—Woden, Tuggeranong, Belconnen and Civic—hold crown leases. However, the pharmacies in these centres do not. Pharmacies in these centres have sub-leases for their shop space rather than a separate crown lease. Therefore, the Cross bill would have the effect of placing the owners of any pharmacy that did not have a crown lease in breach of the law. They would, quite simply, be trading illegally. It would also have a secondary effect of making it difficult for the owners of such a pharmacy to sell the pharmacy business, as the intending purchaser would also be at the risk of being in breach of the law unless they were able to obtain a crown lease for the business.

The mechanism that Mrs Cross proposes in this legislation to achieve the outcome she is looking for is so fundamentally flawed that it would result in every single pharmacy in the ACT which rents its premises, either in a small centre or in a large shopping centre, being held in breach of the law and trading illegally.

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