Barnaby Joyce (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

On behalf of the Chair of the Senate Economics References Committee, I present the final report of the committee on the GROCERYchoice website together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

When the Labor government came to power, one of their cries to the electorate—and probably a worthy cry—was that they were going to ease the squeeze on working families and be part of a mechanism to reduce the amount of money working families were then expending on groceries. In Australia we live in a nation that has the highest food inflation in the Western world, which is not something to be proud of; it is actually disgusting considering that we are one of the food baskets of the Western world. Through this process, the government believe that through an element of transparency consumers could become more discerning about where they could purchase their groceries from, and as such a GROCERYchoice website was suggested.

That is where the story comes unstuck, because like everything Labor touches it went to mud. It was an absolute fiasco. The GROCERYchoice website was, from go to whoa, a great metaphor for how the Australian Labor Party work. It is one of the reasons that we have to be so suspicious and circumspect about their grand visions in other areas, especially the proposed emissions trading scheme. The GROCERYchoice website, to give you just a few of the areas, brought in an issue where you could find out the price of groceries all right, but the price of groceries could be up to almost two months old—hardly worthwhile. It was ridiculed because it was open to ridicule. It was one of the most ridiculous concepts that ever had breath put into it. What became very peculiar was that, when the Labor Party were given the capacity to turn this into something that might actually have worked, they ran a thousand miles from it. They acceded to the lobbying that came to them from the major retailers and basically rolled over, and we scrapped the whole idea.

In the initial website we had the ridiculous issue of the regions, and I just want to give you some idea of the regions that they had. If you were looking for groceries, in the one region you could find Dalby and Charleville—or Kulpi, I imagine. I do not quite know how that worked when people wanted to go shopping. They could find the best deal, but the deal might be hundreds of kilometres away. Cairns was in the same region as Mount Isa. Another thing to note is how much this debacle cost. Of a possible appropriation of $12.8 million, the government appropriated in this farce $7.693 million.