PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS

Mr HAWKE (Mitchell) (11:39): I thank the member for Banks for bringing forward this motion. He makes some good points about the regulation of unfair trading practices, manipulation and deception in competition. It's a good area of law for us to make sure that we have set the law to prevent bad businesses and unethical behaviour in relation to deceptive conduct.

The member for Banks, of course, is wholly wrong when he speaks about government grants to compete. He fundamentally misunderstands, like a lot of Labor members do, the nature of real competition and what competition is a function of. It's a function of effective markets and private businesses and corporations, not a function of government.

For a government grant to compete, we've already acknowledged a massive failure within the economy. Those were the words out of his own mouth, 'a government grant to compete'. I want to note that the RBA in its most chilling analysis, which was not highlighted enough, said that there will be no price deflation in the foreseeable future.

That's what the RBA says. There will be no price deflation in the foreseeable—that's quite a long thing for the RBA—future. That means the price of every good and service is going to continue to rise.

It's no different in the supermarket area. In the past under coalition governments we had food and supermarket deflation. Prices came down.

They went up; they also went down. But the RBA is now telling us that there will be no price deflation—a terrible situation. But what is the response we need?

What we need is real competition in this economy. What we need is deregulation of the oppressive government regime in industrial relations and in overregulation that burdens Australian businesses in particular and that means there is zero productivity in our economy. They are unable to compete.

Now the government seems to be obsessed with shrinkflation, saying that any attempt by a business to make the same good for a cheap price will also be something they find illegal or be something they're concerned about. At the same time as much of the Left is spending all of its obsession and its time on an obesity crisis, which we do have within our country, they are also bemoaning shrinkflation, which is an attempt by productivity to produce something at a cheaper price.

Why is that there? It's because you cannot compete or have productivity in other areas of the economy. I want to say to the member for the Banks that I think this debate that he's brought forward about the ACCC is very naive, because the competition issues in our country are serious.

They are there to be actually addressed by government. Let's look at the example of Drakes in South Australia. In January just this year, Drakes Supermarkets, which has been operating in South Australia for 50 years with 60 stores—it's a great example of an Australian business competing against Woolies, Coles and the big guys; members opposite are familiar with it—bemoaned the fact that, under leasing arrangements, a store that had been there 20 years, had invested millions of dollars and employed people was kicked out by Woolies and the lessor for no valid reason.

In fact, Drakes was unable to negotiate. They were told for two years: 'Well, don't worry about it. We'll get on to it.' Of course, they were shut down and kicked out for Woolworths.

Here's what the ACCC has said about it. Here's the scandal that the government should be addressing. Until Drakes appeared on TV, all of their complaints were held with silence until two minutes after the national TV interview.

Here's what the ACCC concluded about this matter. The ACCC concluded late last year that there was a 'low risk' of a substantial lessening of competition, noting Woolworths would be constrained by Coles, Aldi and other stores in the area. How is an Australian business competing against the biggest corporations in Australia supposed to compete effectively when they can't get through lease arrangements?

We all understand our country and we understand our planning system and overregulated market. That grocery can't go and open up somewhere else. They can't reopen this.

There is no opportunity for them to do so. These leasing arrangements are critical and critically manipulative. For the ACCC to adopt a view of 'there will be no lessening of competition by the closure of these Australian competitive grocers' is nonsense.

Where's the minister? Where's the government on critical questions like this? Well, they don't understand the economy.

Instead, the Labor Party wants to regulate price. I say this to the government: you'll never successfully lower the price of goods and services through government regulation of the price. It's failed.

We don't talk about the Soviet Union anymore. But, when we see the Greens proposing, every day, government run supermarkets—even the mayor of New York is proposing government operated supermarkets—we should all understand that the government will never lower the price of a good and service by regulating that price or price controls. It has failed everywhere.

It will fail here, and we should resist all of this push to open government run grocers. That will push up the price of goods more than we've seen in any other way or by any other measure.