Legislative Council - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, First Session (54-1)
2018-11-06 Daily Xml

Contents

Shop Trading Hours

The Hon. K.J. MAHER (Leader of the Opposition) (15:09): Supplementary: if upon checking, the Treasurer did discover that on Friday 5 October 2018 at 2.27pm he did in fact receive an email reply with an attached letter to his request for views about Christmas shop trading hours from the SDA, will he publicly apologise, in the same way that he has castigated the union in public in the media, and will he apologise for misleading the house if he did, in fact, receive a response at 2.27pm on Friday 5 October?

The Hon. R.I. LUCAS (Treasurer) (15:10): I am always happy, if anything I indicate to the house subsequently proves to be incorrect, to immediately correct the record and apologise to those who might have been offended. The clear advice from my office, and from all of those who have been associated with collating the replies to the submission, was that no submission was received from the shoppies union.

As I said, not just in relation to this issue, I am a very reasonable man. If anything I indicate, either publicly or to the house, subsequently proved to be incorrect, I would immediately seek to correct the record and indeed, if I have offended anyone, apologise for that. As I said, that was the very clear and explicit advice, not only soon after the submissions closed but even recently, as I sought to make the final decision, because I thought there may well have been people who missed the deadline and submitted things after the deadline, including the shoppies union.

To be fair, I think there were probably one or two other stakeholders who did not reply or chose not to; they did not have to reply. It was an invitation to them to reply should they so choose. I inquired prior to making the decision to my office whether we had received any further submissions, and the clear advice I got was that no, we hadn't. As I said, I am a very reasonable person. If anything proves to be incorrect, I will correct the record as soon as I establish that.

The PRESIDENT: Supplementary, Leader of the Opposition.