Most of us are straining to pay $80 for a meagre bag of basic food items at the local Coles, Aldi and Woolworths. Local farmers are also tired of downward pressure at the farmgate when selling to the very same chains.
MP David Littleproud has begun rumbling about breaking up the big supermarket chains if they don’t address price gouging.
The Nationals Leader and Federal representative for the folks of the Southern Downs and Maranoa is spruiking the Coalition’s planned changes to the Food and Grocery Code.
The changes are “just a big deterrent to the supermarkets to make sure there’s transparency and fairness from the farm gate to your plate,” he recently remarked. The plan includes larger fines, a new supermarkets Commissioner and smooth pathways to ACCC investigation.
Mr LIttleproud says that cattle and sheep prices have dropped by 60 to 70 percent at the farm gate. “Yet at the checkout they only dropped by about 8 percent. So, someone was cleaning up and it was the supermarkets.”
Currently the penalty for infringement is just short of $200,000 which Mr LIttleproud says is so small that “they’d pull that out of their tills in Sydney to pay for that. That’s just the cost of doing business.”
“We're saying it should go up to $2 million and then go up to 10 per cent of their turnover. And then a break glass is divestiture, which a court would have to arbitrate on, not politicians, but the ACCC would have to take it to a court. A court would then say, yes, there are certain stores that would have to be sold, but they could only do that if there's no job losses.”
Divestiture powers currently already exist in Australia and are only used in “the most egregious cases”, Mr Littleproud pointed out, adding that the three major supermarkets control 74 percent of the market.
Hopefully, for those of us cringing in the check out line, Mr LIttleproud’s plan will be, as he promises, something that keeps them in check”.
