Matthew Abraham: Shop trading hours in metro Adelaide are a joke and need to be fixed

SHOP trading hours on public holidays in Adelaide are a mess with stores devising ingenious ways to comply with the law, says Matthew Abraham.

THIS must be what life is like inside the Death Star.

Harbour Town – perched at the end of the West Beach airport runway – has no beginning, no end and no middle, and while you can see the sky from inside the canyon of discount outlets, the total absence of shadows means you can’t know if you’re walking north, south, east, west, or just going around in circles.

In space, they say, no one can hear you scream, but in Harbour Town you can hear grown men crying.

This makes it the perfect place to study the lunacy of Adelaide’s shop trading laws.

Under the wacky Shop Trading Hours Act 1977, a business with a store area of less than 200 square metres can trade on public holidays at will, unless it’s a supermarket, which must be under 400 sq m.

So what if a shop in Harbour Town has a floor area of 250 sq m and wants to open on public holidays? Simples. Just hang a curtain to screen off 50 sq m, and you’re legit.

Rather than curtains, some shops build makeshift walls out of cardboard boxes to temporarily shrink their store area to squeak in under the magic 200. Technically, they could still be illegal because the law stipulates they must be under the 200 sq m for seven days before the public holiday but, like most of our shop trading laws, this is never enforced.

On Tuesday, the Marshall Government will have a crack at fixing this mess when it introduces legislation in the Upper House to deregulate shop trading hours, attempting to honour a central election pledge. They’re on a hiding to nothing.

Crown Law solicitors and legal armies for the small supermarkets have been argy-bargying over what constitutes the floor area.

While the exact form of the legislation is still unknown, it seeks to allow shops in the metropolitan area to set their own trading hours, with the exception of Good Friday, Christmas Day and Anzac Day morning.

It would mean that suburban shops would have the same deregulated hours that already operate in all South Australian country towns, save for one abstainer, Millicent. Don’t ask. It’s a Millicent thing. From Mt Barker fanning outwards, you can already shop until you drop.

Sound simple? It’s not. Treasurer Rob Lucas, who has photographed the Great Cardboard Walls of Harbour Town, tells me one of the big problems drafting the new law has been trying to define 400 sq m and 200 sq m.

Crown Law solicitors and legal armies for the small supermarkets have been argy-bargying over what constitutes the floor area. The retailers argue the store entrance can be excluded from the equation, and so can the shopping trolley bays, the locked cigarette screens, the returns section, and the serving area behind the deli counters because no goods are for sale in these spaces.

“It’s a dog’s breakfast,” Lucas says. “It’s an accident of history that’s been Band-Aided for decades. We’re saying ‘Here is a chance to fix it’.”

Way back in January 1980, I reported in The Advertiser that many Adelaide stores had devised ingenious ways to trick the Act that had restricted opening hours for stores bigger than 200 sq m that employed more than three staff.

One large store painted white lines down the middle of its floor, splitting it into two areas under 200 sq m, then stationed three staff on each side. Another used plastic garden trellis with separate entrances on each side for customers.

It’s now 2018, and we’re still playing the same games.

The so-called “small” supermarkets – one with total group turnover topping the billion-dollar mark – say they’ll be ruined. The shoppies union says it will ruin family life.

For many years, our family owned a small deli on Duthy St, Malvern, so I feel their pain.

But surely we can all agree on this: the present laws are a stupid, unenforceable joke.

Curtains, cardboard boxes, lawyers, red tape and tape measures at 40 paces. You couldn’t make this stuff up if you tried.