Tania Lawrence (Hasluck, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I speak against the specifics of this motion, but in doing so I commend the member for Kennedy for the spirit of the motion and for the care he's shown over the now many years for consumers and particularly for the producers of the food we eat. I'll quote the member for Kennedy. In March 2007, speaking on this issue in this place, he said, 'You need to involve people who are at the coalface.' The good member then gave the example of a lychee farm in Kennedy who had a perfectly good product returned by the retailer not for any quality reason but due to the movement of prices. Kennedy 2007 is a long way from Hasluck 2024, but the same issues persist across our country. If anything, the imbalance of power between producers, distributors and retailers has worsened.

I recently had cause to refer a local matter to the ACCC. Some of my constituents working at the coalface—grape-growing families who have been feeding us for generations—found that their product was suddenly not required and then, by the time it got on the shelves, had been sitting too long to fetch its premium price. This recent story of the table grape growers in the beautiful Swan Valley serves to illustrate the problems we're seeing around the country, because by the time the growers had contacted me they were already facing significant losses—through no fault of their own. As I said, some of these growers have been producing and supplying grapes to the local market for over 50 years. But, with product on the vine and picking imminent, to be informed that their varieties would no longer be accepted by the major retailers is a situation that is untenable—they received no proper notice and no good reason. Finding a market, obviously, is challenging when you only have a very small supermarket retail chain. As the member for Kennedy has said previously, where an imbalance of power is exercised in relation to perishable goods—and of course much of our agricultural product is just that—producers have nowhere to go. It's simply impractical to say, 'Well, we'll find another market.' It isn't going to happen easily in Kennedy, nor in Hasluck. The concentration of retail power is a huge part of this; another part, a real chokepoint, is the situation where there's a sole distributor sitting between producers and the few retailers.

Additionally, many fruits and other products these days are the subject of proprietary strains and many of these patented products are owned by international interests. They license few growers and fewer distributors, and they guard their intellectual property jealously. They have an interest in seeing their products advanced and others shut out from the supermarket shelves. This was very much the experience unfolding in my electorate amongst the grape growers.

The member for Kennedy will agree that little has occurred in this policy space over the nine years of the coalition government. The Liberal and the National administrators were a conga line of hopelessness across many areas of government—and we just heard a reference to the code which they introduced as a dud. In contrast, the Albanese government is acting in the competition space, and I'll mention a few of ways in a moment. Both the Treasurer and the assistant minister for competition, the member for Fenner, are clearly interested in reform in this sector. Further, the Standing Committee on Economics, of which I'm a member, has also been inquiring into competition and economic dynamism, and will report very shortly. I acknowledge the leadership of the committee chair, the member for Fraser. The member for Fraser was born in Italy, where five companies share about 75 per cent of supermarket retail, which we may well say is actually twice as healthy as competition here. Most international comparisons indicate that we do have a serious issue. The member for Kennedy has made that point many times over the years.

To the motion: we're actually introducing serious reform. We've increased the penalties for anti-competitive conduct; we've banned unfair contract terms; we've initiated the Treasury's Competition Taskforce; we're legislating for a new designated complaints functions within the ACCC; we've commissioned the ACCC review of supermarket pricing; and, importantly, we have also initiated a review into that dud food and grocery code that we heard referred to previously. We've also funded CHOICE to provide comparison information for consumers. We are taking it seriously. We will take action.

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