15 February 2011

Labor big brains against Supermarket "Picking Winners"

| johnboy
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Liberal Leader Zed Seselja is, with some glee, announcing the thoughts of Lindsay Tanner and Craig Emerson, the two leading Labor economic thinkers of their generation, on Jon Stanhope’s weird supermarket site selection policy:

The letter was obtained by the Canberra Liberals through a Freedom of Information request on Jon Stanhope’s much criticised supermarket policy.

The Federal Labor Ministers criticise Jon Stanhope for his supermarket policy and say the outcomes of this policy could include customers not getting a better deal and lower supermarket site prices than through a competitive tender process.

They also concluded that if the ACT government was serious about competition Jon Stanhope would;

‘Publically release the competition analyses in support of the decisions (direct grants) you
announced’.

“This is Federal Labor saying Jon Stanhope has got his supermarket policy wrong,” Zed said.

“We have been particularly critical of the policy of excluding local and interstate independent supermarket operators from bidding for sites. There is no justification for this.

“Mr Stanhope has to explain why even his Federal Labor colleagues are so critical of his supermarket policy,” Zed said.

Even if there has been no corruption in the awarding of these sites (and we have no evidence that it has) the fear remains that the door has been opened through this process.

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Zed in turn seems to have released part of one sentence from the letter.

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