Bruce Billson (Dunkley, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Small Business, Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I have just been heckled by the member opposite, who has little to offer on the issue of competition.

On the issue of price signalling, wasn’t it very interesting how, shortly after the election, when the coalition started working on issues of price signalling, all of a sudden Labor, who had said there was no opportunity to improve the competition toolkit, quickly came along and said, ‘We are going to introduce a price signalling law as well.’ The member opposite who chooses to interject may well benefit from the understanding that this is one sector of the economy. It is a very important one, but as to the concerns she seeks to talk about, if she bothered to learn much about other than what she wants to insist on for everybody else, she would see that these circumstances are actually happening in other parts of the economy. Because they are happening in other parts of the economy, there is a need to examine these concerns not through a straw, looking at a single industry, as important as it is, but also in the context of what else is going on where the supermarket chains are very dominant.

The supermarket chains are seeking to exercise their strong position in the marketplace to extend the range of supermarket own-branded goods and products. They are doing this in alcohol. We have already seen the supermarket chains rolling out their own lines of beer. The beer producers in Australia did not seek to cannibalise their own market, so they refused to play ball. So now the beer is coming in from New Zealand, where again the supermarkets are seeking to get an even stronger position and an even more dominant position in terms of the way they interact with their suppliers.

If the government recognised that there are shortcomings in the competition toolkit that is available, they would see that there is scope to improve it. That is what the coalition offered—an examination of the toolkit, an understanding of the national public policy initiatives that should drive competition law and then a recognition that, if the tools are not up to the task, they need to be improved. We actually believe that competition matters, but there is an important precondition for competition, and that is the existence of competitors. We also believe that there is an issue about durable benefits—

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