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Legislative
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| Mike Elliott Leader Australian Democrats Member of the Legislative Council |
Parliament Index |
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Legislative
Council |
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| Mike Elliott Leader Australian Democrats Member of the Legislative Council |
Parliament Index |
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Adjourned debate on second reading.
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: I will speak briefly in this debate. This bill is nothing but dishonest, and the arguments that seek to support it are dishonest. The minister may care to correct me but, on my understanding, only five shops on Jetty Road cannot currently open on Sundays. They are the two supermarkets, the Reject Shop, Cunningham's and Cheap as Chips, and they cannot open on the basis of floor area. Every other shop along Jetty Road at Glenelg can open. It may be true for some of the shops which have been illegally opening for some time and which have been getting a lot of trade, but to argue that this is a tourist precinct issue and that tourists are coming from all over the world to Glenelg so they can go to the Reject Shop and Woolworths is an absolute nonsense. The minister insults his own intelligence before he insults the rest of us by putting up those sorts of arguments-or he is simply dishonest and is being dishonest on behalf of the government. The suggestion is made, `Give the shoppers a chance,' but the fact is that shoppers can get into all but five of those shops under the current legislation, and can get into several others because the government has never bothered to enforce the legislation.
If you are serious about the people who go there on Sundays and do the tourist bit, anyone who knows Glenelg knows that if there is one problem there it is parking. The best place to park on a Sunday is in the supermarket car parks. Those are the two largest parking areas you can find.
An honourable member interjecting:
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: No, they are not closed; in fact, they provide the parking that allows Glenelg to really buzz. So, by opening the supermarkets on Sundays, people who do their supermarket shopping on other days of the week will be there at the supermarkets and the car parks will be full. Coles and Woolworths will love it, but every other trader along Jetty Road will be denied people who normally walk past their shops. People will give up because they cannot get a car park. As an individual I have stopped going to Glenelg because car parking is just about impossible. After you have driven three laps around you say you would rather go to Henley Beach anyway.
With all the development work in Glenelg at the moment, a lot of parking is currently not available, anyway. So, come this summer, with a lot of car parking already denied and with the two supermarket car parks now being taken up by customers of the supermarkets, genuine tourism along Jetty Road will be decreased by this legislation. Only five businesses want this, and those five are very easily identified. This government bends over backwards for the big supermarkets and, unfortunately, for reasons that are pretty obvious, the Labor Party also tends to bend over in relation to what Coles and Woolworths want.
The Hon. T.G. Cameron interjecting:
The Hon. M.J. ELLIOTT: This is an act of dishonesty. If the government wants to expand trading hours, why cannot it at least be honest and seek to do it that way? It is going down exactly the same path as I recall when we had Sunday trading in hotels and bottle shops in tourist precincts. We all knew that when that happened every other hotel would complain-and they did-and it expanded. I am not arguing the rights or wrongs of Sunday trading in this case: I am arguing about the blatant dishonesty of this sort of approach.
