Nick Xenophon (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. I will keep my remarks fairly brief. Yesterday, the Senate Economics References Committee tabled its report on the terms of reference that I put to the Senate on the need for a national approach to retail leasing arrangements. The report process was—as usual by the Senate economics committee—extremely comprehensive. I am incredibly grateful to the iconic Dr Kathleen Dermody, who did such a terrific job with her secretariat in the depth of material provided to the committee and the way that the inquiry was run, and to my colleagues for the way that they participated fulsomely in this report. But I am disappointed with the majority report, the bipartisan report. It simply does not address the issue, in my view, that there ought to be a national approach to leasing, that the Commonwealth government has a key role in respect of this and that there are too many commercial retail tenants in this country in a difficult position because they do not have the safeguards of a national approach in respect of leasing.

I will just cover a few of those, but before I do I want to acknowledge Stirling Griff, who happened to be my running mate at the last federal election and hopefully will be running again at the next federal election, whenever that may be, whether it is in three months, six months or 18 months.