Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I do love my comrades on the left, but not so much on the right this morning! What's important is that we have a complaints mechanism that will enable protection from retribution, requiring incentive schemes and payments that apply to a supermarket's buying streams and category managers. We need to make sure they are consistent with the purpose of the code.

In the evidence to our inquiry on supermarket prices it was very clear that those practices were not consistent with the existing voluntary code of practice. It was almost as if the code did not exist. You could be told you were going to get one price for your products and you would nominate and commit to supplying a certain amount at a certain price, and then the day that you took those goods in to sell to Coles or Woolies for them to sell on their shop floor the contract would change. It's simply not sustainable for our Australian producers.

It's very clear when you look at the record price differences between Coles and Woolworths and, below that, Aldi. So, where are the dollars of Australian families are going? We have a cost-of-living issue in Australia. We need to keep downward pressure on grocery prices. This is something the Labor Party and the Labor government take very seriously, which is why we have done the work. We don't have a pie in the sky announcement about divestiture, nor do we have a flimsy code of conduct that we refuse to fix in government. We are doing the work. We've been doing the work consistently and carefully in partnership with consumer organisations like CHOICE, the Food and Grocery Council and producer organisations. It's time that we got on with real reform, rather than these sidelines as proposed by Senator McKim.