Ron Boswell (Queensland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have just received this document and I want to make a few remarks. GroceryWatch and Fuelwatch were cases of rhetoric outreaching performance. They were cases of Labor Party polling, no doubt, that showed that people were concerned with grocery and petrol prices. They said: ‘There is the polling. That is what our focus groups are saying—what are we going to do? Will someone come up with an idea around the cabinet table? Any idea will do, we have to do something, we made a promise, we made a commitment—what do we do?’ I do not know who came up with this but he should have got the prize for the most incompetent minister. He should have been sacked on the spot for coming up with such a ridiculous concept as GroceryWatch.

I have spent 15 years of my life as a manufacturer’s agent. I used to call on these retail stores and I understand, probably to a greater extent than most people in the Senate, the pressures of prices. I have understood them for a long while. The only way to make the best prices available is competition. You cannot put some system in such as GroceryWatch that will tell people what prices are available and what the best prices are. Those prices could fluctuate four or five times a week. They could change on a daily basis. Both Woolworths and Coles—and I could imagine Ken Hendrick in the gallery—would have people running around different stores monitoring each other’s prices. If the prices go up or down they are monitored and adjusted, and that is competition.

The independents are in there now with a bigger share of the market. Aldi now has a share of the market and the prices are going to be adjusted by competition. But this was an $8 million dollar gimmick. The Labor government had come up with something. They had to do something to show that they had the answers. They never had the answers. They didn’t even have the question right. Their polling showed them that they had to do something—‘Let’s just spend $8 million and we can say we tried; we’ll have to say something to the battling families, to try and appease them somehow.’ What a ridiculous way to spend $8 million.

But there was not only that. There was Fuelwatch. That came to a similarly disastrous end. What it showed me was that there is a lack of business acumen in the Labor Party. When you look around, you can understand that. Every Labor Party person in here, bar one—I think it is the senator from South Australia—has worked their way up through the Labor Party. They have started as union reps, they have gone through university and then they have been selected by the Labor Party to finish their degrees. Then it is a case of, ‘If you want to come in, we’ll find you an office somewhere, we’ll find you a place to start’—and by the time they get to the pointy end, where they have sorted the sheep out from the goats, they give those people some sort of a leg-up into government. That is how it happens in the Labor Party.