Page 4140 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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not be consistent with the principles of competition and opening up markets to competition. Former minister for finance Lindsay Tanner and current Labor minister Craig Emerson strongly urged the former ACT Chief Minister to reconsider the ACT government’s position. And we saw their intervention in a public way: they called on the ACT government, if it was serious about competition, to publicly release the competition analysis in support of the direct grant decisions that were announced. It did not do that, because it did not do the work.
This was always a policy about picking winners. That has been the problem. They have picked winners, and when you pick winners there are a lot of losers. In this case, small independent operators are the biggest losers as a result of this policy—make no mistake. When we tried to stand up for them in this place, the Labor Party and the Greens voted against the IGAs, against the small supermarket operators.
We cannot let this debate go on without highlighting that duplicity from the Greens on this issue. The government has been clear. The government has been clear about its position, which is wrong. Its position when it comes to supermarket policy is to pick winners. That picking of winners meant going against the ACCC. It meant excluding IGAs and other independents from coming in and bidding on sites. It meant picking individual winners. As I said, when you pick winners there are also losers, and that is what we are facing.
The substantial debate will happen tomorrow when we look at establishing this committee and why this committee should be established. This is a motion which is pre-emptive. It does not deal with the issues. It goes all over the place. I do not think it has been properly thought through. If we are going to have these debates in the Assembly, let us do them seriously.
That is why I am not really sure of the motivation for this motion today, other than the Greens pretending that they want to do something to protect small operators when everything they have done as the alliance partners of the Labor Party has been in the opposite direction. They have worked actively against these small businesses. They have voted in this place against them. They have endorsed publicly the government’s policy of locking them out. And now we are seeing the consequences.
When we look at the issue at Giralang, there are serious questions to be asked—serious questions for the government to answer. They will need to answer the question as to why they interfered in that process—why there was so much direct interference, to the extent that Neil Savery felt the need to publicly, or certainly in writing, put very clearly his concerns about the compromise of that process, about politics compromising that process, about the government compromising that process.
At the end of it all, we have an unsatisfactory supermarket policy. This motion, and putting in place a parallel process, will not assist things. It will not ensure that we get the better outcomes we need. Tomorrow’s debate on my motion to establish a committee will be useful. It is very important that we do establish a committee. Putting in place a parallel process, as is being asked for today, is misguided, and it is duplicitous given the Greens’ selling out of IGAs and small businesses on this issue over a period of years. The Greens have backed the government on this and they are
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