Jamie Briggs (Mayo, Liberal Party, Chairman of the Scrutiny of Government Waste Committee) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to raise very grave concerns about this motion on trading hours in Adelaide. I do say at the beginning that one of the problems with the Australian Labor Party's leadership at the moment, and the reason we are seeing a lot of conversations around the building this week and stories in the newspaper and so forth, is that members realise that the current leadership does not actually believe in anything in their soul. The same cannot be said for the member for Wakefield. He does; there is no question he does. People should know that he has very strong beliefs, and I think that is admirable. He understands that I have the same views. There is no doubt that this motion comes from a genuine belief in what he is doing. However, the problem with the belief—and where it is flawed, sadly—is that it is a belief that puts the insiders above the outsiders in our society.

The member for Wakefield likes to talk about families and the family time and so forth and about appropriate pay levels. He forgets to tell people that you still currently get payed penalty rates on those occasions in most of these professions he talks about. Anyway, putting aside the facts, he talks about families. The worst thing you can do to a family is visit unemployment upon them. What this motion will do, undoubtedly, is make it harder for younger people in particular is to get access to a job in the first place. There is a cost with all of this. Business is not without a limit on their resources. We know that people who work on Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve in retail, hospitality and in other industries are generally young people, who are getting a chance at a job and a chance to earn some money to make more of themselves, whether at university or whatever it may be. For instance, New Year's Eve is one of the biggest trading nights of the year, as is Christmas Eve, and if you apply an additional burden on an employer that evening, while you might be able to say to those already employed, 'We've got you more,' what you say to those who are not employed is, 'We've got you less.' That is the truth about the motion and what the ridiculous piece of legislation in South Australia is going to do.

The fact that Peter Vaughan signed up to it should say enough—that it is a bad piece of legislation in the first place. I should know; I worked for Peter Vaughan at one point in time, so I should know better than most how bad it has been for South Australian business. It has been appalling. As I said to the member for Wakefield's very good friend and future candidate for somewhere, Peter Malinauskas, at the Kangaroo Island races, 'You only get one Peter Vaughan in your lifetime.' I will not repeat what the head of the shop trading association said following that comment. But it is true: this is an absurd deal for South Australian business. Unsurprisingly, it put Peter Vaughan's interests above those he was meant to be representing.

John Chapman, on the other hand, who is a terrific man—a very good constituent—has made some very important points about this bill. He said:

Many small operators will simply close down on the new half day public holidays, as they cannot afford the additional costs, and that would be bad for consumers across the entire state.

That is what is at stake with this change. It pretends that there is a magic pudding which people can reach into without cost, that we can have more people employed and that we will pay them more at the same time.

We know that at the moment the retail industry in South Australia and across the country is going through challenging and difficult environments. I am sure the member for Wakefield and the member for Kingston are getting the same feedback from their small businesses and retailers that I am getting. They are now competing in a global marketplace. For the first time ever, retail is trade exposed. People can very easily access goods from overseas retailers at much less cost than they can in Australia, and that is putting great pressure on retailers. At such a point in history, when great structural change is happening in this industry, why would you make it harder for them to compete, all on the basis of the airy-fairy notion that Premier Wetherall is becoming more and more attached to that there is no cost to these decisions? There is great cost. There is great cost to families who will not get the chance for a second job and families who will miss out on opportunities because of this. You just have to ask the aged-care industry what this is going to do to them. This has great cost. It is a bad piece of state legislation and proves how incompetent the state government is. I condemn the member for Wakefield for moving this motion. (Time expired)

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