Page 4410 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 14 October 2009
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In terms of the things we are disappointed about, it would mainly be around the accessibility issues, the non-competition issues of supermarkets. Supermarkets are where people have to do their day-to-day shopping and they are the cornerstone of local shops. So they are very important parts of the community. It is very important that they are accessible. It is all very well if you have good, competitive prices in the group centres and the town centres, but for the people who find it difficult to get to the group centres and town centres, that is not a total solution. Competition is important but accessibility for all people to the competitive shops is also very important.
These are the issues which were missed out by the Martin review, because they were not really part of the terms of reference, which did just focus on competition. They did not focus on the role of shops in the community and how people related to their shops in ways apart from just price competition.
As we would all acknowledge, in Canberra, and in fact in the whole of Australia, we have a situation where the largest supermarket chains dominate. They have managed to compete so heavily with the small speciality shops that many of these are no longer viable—the bakeries, the greengrocers, the chemists. So a lot of the market share is moving to one-stop supermarkets, who tend to get their goods at a bulk low-cost price. Small family-owned shops have gone out of business to quite an extent over the last two decades. People are seeing that, as Canberra grows, so do the bigger, non locally owned businesses. Sadly, this is often at the expense of pioneering, locally owned businesses. If nothing happens then clearly this trend is going to continue.
The Greens are concerned about this. We are also concerned about the issues that Mr Seselja talked about, and the issue of an appropriate role when looking at wholesale competition. That is probably the most innovative part of John Martin’s report—trying to do something about wholesale competition. I note that if it is successful it will be useful for the whole of south-east Australia.
I quite sympathise or agree with Mr Seselja’s comments about it not being totally clear what the criteria are, and that it is not appropriate to rule out small locally owned businesses simply because their only wholesale option right now is Metcash. As I see it, that is basically the problem that Mr Martin is trying to address—that their only option is Metcash. It would seem totally inappropriate to rule out these businesses because they have been victims of the situation. I also agree with Mr Seselja’s comments about needing to be careful that we do not end up with the situation of simply supporting foreign-owned businesses because they are not Woolworths and Coles.
As with all of these things, the issue is probably not so much the policy but the implementation. In saying that, I note that in briefings we had with the government they indicated this would come back to the Assembly in December for a more full debate. I think that would be very useful because by December it should be clarified as to how this will actually work as far as Metcash is concerned. The small local supermarkets, the IGAs, will have been able to work out what this would mean for them as businesses. We will have more intelligence than just what was on the front page of the Canberra Times today as to how we think this is really going to work. I think it would be very useful to talk about this again in more detail. Clearly, things
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