Retail and Commercial Leases (Designated Anchor Lease) Amendment Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 3 February 2021.)

The Hon. D.C. VAN HOLST PELLEKAAN (Stuart—Minister for Energy and Mining) (12:55): I take this opportunity to rise on behalf of the people of Stuart to discuss this bill that has been put forward by the member for Florey, no doubt in a very strong desire to support commercial tenants in larger retail establishments. She makes it very clear in the bill that it refers to larger retail establishments that have an anchor tenant, or perhaps two or three or four.

If I think about the member for Florey's electorate, it is a long way from mine, but Tea Tree Plaza comes quickly to mind. She may well have others—I am sure she does have others—in her electorate that would fit into this category, but it is the Tea Tree Plaza type arrangement the member is talking about. What the member wants to do is set up a situation whereby if the anchor tenant, or an anchor tenant, in one of these large shopping malls, essentially, is to leave for one reason or another, the other smaller tenants in that shopping centre would get some protections.

In circumstances where the lease of an anchor tenant is to be terminated or not renewed, the lessor must give at least three months' notice to all other lessees, i.e. smaller lessees, which may request a rent review according to certain criteria. Until the rent review is determined by an independent valuer, the rent would be reduced by the greater of either 10 per cent or an amount prescribed in the regulations. That is a quick summary of what the member wants to do.

In terms of my contribution, I have been a tenant in commercial premises, one of them very large commercial premises. There was me and two business partners, and I was the managing partner. In fact, one of these properties had an extremely large rent by my standards, well in excess of $200,000 a year, and there were others as well.

I come to this debate as a person who has some experience in business and certainly some experience of the pressures associated with being a commercial tenant. I have never been a commercial tenant in a shopping centre. I have never been a commercial tenant in the context this bill addresses. I acknowledge that, but I certainly have a great deal of sympathy for particularly the smaller tenants in these commercial shopping centres, and I have a great deal of sympathy for why the member for Florey would want to support them in this way.

There would, of course, be different circumstances for the different tenants. It might be that one tenant is a franchisee of a bigger chain that has a name and a reputation and an opportunity to draw trade in its own right, or they might just be a one-person or perhaps a family business, a relatively small family business, which really does need the foot traffic the anchor tenant creates in the property for that small business to survive.

There would also be differences between a tenant whose shop faces inside the shopping centre versus facing outside the shopping centre, because then the pull of the anchor tenant would be different. For a tenant whose shop face is very close to the entrance of the anchor tenant's trading premises or one that is close to the door or somewhere else internally, there would also be a very different impact. I certainly have sympathy for wanting to support these small tenants, but if this chamber were to support this private member's bill we would need to find a way to provide the appropriate support in different ways for different tenants based upon their different circumstances.

Debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 12:59 to 14:00