Many readers commenting on the Dick Smith retail scandal yesterday assumed Smith still owned the company.



''They claim that their surveys show most people don't liken Dick Smith Electronics with me. I don't agree with that and I think [by changing the name to just Dick Smith] they've been very astute in basically playing off the fact that I try to help people, I'm very pro Australian,'' he said.

But Smith said that generally in the last 25 years Woolworths "could have damaged my name and they haven't".

He initially said if he was running the company today he would make sure returned goods were erased of data before putting them back on the shelves and he would mark returned goods as such. Smith then offered a more radical solution: ''scrap'' returned goods.



''If I was running it today the staff would be very disciplined and I would communicate very clearly that anything that gets brought back is recycled, and everything else has a slightly higher price on it so you absolutely know you get something brand new,'' he said.

Asked what he thought about Gerry Harvey setting up an overseas offshoot to sell cheaper video games to Australians without GST, Smith said ''it's the only thing he can do''.

''All of these retailers will go broke, I can tell you, they will all go broke - the Harveys, the Dick Smiths, the JBs - if the government continues to allow people to import directly,'' he said.



He said that when successive governments removed duties on imported TV sets and opened our skies, they were effectively saying that they did not want to have a local industry anymore.