Shopping hours riddle needs an answer

When Mark McGowan took over from Eric Ripper as WA Labor leader in 2012, he came out swinging on an issue he felt his party needed to shake off in order to move forward.

In fact, he told reporters at his first press conference as leader that he made ending the tortuous debate around Sunday trading a strict condition of accepting the job.

“I made it very clear to my colleagues that the Sunday trading issue has dragged on for too long and needs to be resolved,” he said at the time. “It’s a mess, it’s confusing, it’s bad for tourism, it’s uncertain for consumers.”

Shop union to fight extended hours push

Premier Mark McGowan blasted over shopping hours ‘about face’

And so Labor put one of its union backers — the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association — out in the cold and supported Barnett government legislation for a new Sunday trading regime that would allow all stores to open from 11am to 5pm.

When debating the legislation in the Lower House of Parliament, McGowan vented his frustration at the years of bickering and bogus arguments about the pros and cons of extending retail trading.

“I do not understand why there has been such a fixation on it,” he said.

“I personally believe there are far bigger issues confronting Western Australia, but there has been a fixation and it has been difficult for us in the political process to get past it.”

Then the self-confessed “free trader” turned his guns on the media’s coverage of the seemingly endless Sunday shopping hours saga.

“Frankly, it is getting a little boring, to be honest with members,” he said. “If the media want to cover this debate in the way they do, that is the matter for them.

“I personally get sick of reading about it. We would like to get this issue over and done with so we can talk about other things.”

But here we are six years later, and because our politicians failed to remove all the anomalies around Sunday trading hours, we are still talking about it.

We are still asking why Bunnings can open from 7am seven days a week, while other hardware stores, or most other stores for that matter, cannot?

It remains a riddle wrapped in a mystery that the justification for the retail chain colossus having those special trading hours is that its warehouses do not stock whitegoods, for example.

Then there is the ad hoc approach to extended Christmas trading hours in WA.

Last year, Commerce Minister Bill Johnston issued a pre-Christmas media release headlined “Extra trading hours to give retailers a Christmas boost” which outlined 49 extra shopping hours over the festive season.

“The McGowan Government wants consumers and major Perth retailers to take full advantage of Christmas and post-Christmas shopping this year,” Johnston said.

This year, his media release promised “Extra hours of Christmas retail trading for Perth shoppers”, but actually reduced the additional time available to shoppers to 34 hours.

Despite the 15-hour cut to the retail trading regime from one year to the next, Johnston’s media release repeated, rather strangely, the pro-Christmas shopping mantra word-for-word.

“The McGowan Government wants consumers and major Perth retailers to take full advantage of Christmas and post-Christmas shopping,” it maintained.

How do consumers take “full advantage” of greater restrictions?

The confusing contradiction prompted the Chamber of Commerce and Industry to go on the attack, arguing the decision would push more people into online shopping and “strangle WA jobs”.

“For a Government elected on a platform of creating jobs to then reduce the number of additional jobs created over Christmas by 30 per cent is a slap in the face of retail workers,” CCI chief executive Chris Rodwell said.

Polling published in The Sunday Times on the weekend strongly suggests the public wants more choice over the times they can go shopping.

It seems Liberal leader Mike Nahan wants to roll the dice on the issue by promising full deregulation of retail trading if his side is elected in 2021.

This would offer voters a clear difference in policy between Labor and Liberal.

It would also mean that McGowan’s 2012 words would come back to haunt him if he decides to park any further reforms to nonsensical shopping rules in WA.

Whether he likes it or not, the “boring” debate about retail trading hours has flared again because — in McGowan’s own words — they remain a mess, confusing, bad for tourism and uncertain for consumers.

Perhaps it is worth quoting the man who McGowan replaced six years ago.

“Once the move has been made to Sunday trading between 11am and 5pm, what is the purpose of any remaining restrictions?” pondered Ripper during the retail trading debate of 2012.

“What is positive at all about the remaining regulations. We should sweep away all these stupid regulations.”