Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Trade Practices Amendment (Cartel Conduct and Other Measures) Bill 2008. It never ceases to amaze me how facile and superficial the approach in this place is on issue after issue. There is no depth of understanding. There is no effort made to even come remotely close to the situation that exists. People have been watching too much television. They want to run around all the time and find some bloke with his hands in the cookie jar. That is not the way it works. The way it works is that, if you own 85 per cent of the marketplace, you can do what you like. There is a lovely name for it. It is not called ‘collusion’; it is called ‘conscious parallelism’. If Woolworths know that Coles are charging 293c a dozen for eggs, they would be bloody mugs if they charged 291c a dozen for eggs, because that might just touch off a bit of a price war, mightn’t it?

One of my relatives owned a very big supermarket, and he said: ‘They never compete against us on price, but their lady comes down every morning and checks out our prices. She just walks in with a notebook and jots down all our prices. So long as we are not being naughty, if they want a price war, of course they’ll blow us clean out of the water, but they don’t work that way; it doesn’t suit them to work that way. They know that in the end we will go under and they will prosper.’ I do not like using people’s names without their permission, but in the particular town to which I am referring they did eventually go under and were bought out, luckily for them, by Coles. So now we have Woolworths, Coles and nobody else, whereas 15 years ago we had three locally owned supermarkets.

What this means in a town the size of, for example, my home town of Charters Towers is that when we wanted a professional rugby league player I took one block, another person took another block and a third person took another block, and we would come back with enough money to pay the salary for a rugby league player for that year, which was about $50,000. We would have no trouble in raising that. If we did that now in Charters Towers, we would not be able to raise $2,000. None of those businesses are left. They have all gone. The business all resides in the Woolworths and Coles that sit in Charters Towers.

Successive governments are responsible. I am not blaming the current government—they have only been there for 12 months—but the Labor government of Mr Keating have got plenty to answer for. He was the architect of economic rationalism. He was the architect, founder and father of it all. Let us have a quick look at his handiwork—and, I must say, the last government continued his work magnificently well. The story starts in 1991, when Woolworths and Coles had 50.5 per cent of the Australian market. That is all they had. At that point in time they were not powerful enough to take the government on. We can say that it will be a pretty courageous government that will take them on now.

There are four faces up on Mount Rushmore. There are George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Abraham Lincoln, of course. But the fourth one was not one of the founding fathers, nor did he abolish slavery and keep together the United States. No. What was he up there for? I will tell you what he was up there for: because he took on Rockefeller. He blasted Standard Oil of New Jersey into 23 separate companies. The man had most extraordinary courage, tenacity and belief in morality. He had made his name as a crime fighter in New York. He was Theodore Roosevelt. Amongst his many other attributes, he was one of the few people in history to stand up to the big corporations.

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