Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will come to your amendments, Senator Scarr, in due course. The minister will also be able to direct a slow-paying business to state on its website, in procurement and in ESG related documents that it is a slow small-business payer.

We're supporting this bill because we know that big business too often drags its feet when it comes to paying much smaller suppliers. In many circumstances, it is a concentration of market power that allows big businesses to drag their feet in such an unconscionable fashion. We heard abundant evidence about this in hearings of the Senate Select Committee on Supermarket Prices, which the Greens moved to establish and which I chaired on behalf of the Australian Greens. We heard abundant evidence from farmers and overwhelmingly from small businesses—in many situations, they were small, family businesses—about how the big supermarket duopoly used its concentration of market power to behave unconscionably with a distinct lack of ethics and a distinct lack of integrity towards its suppliers, who, as I've said, are overwhelmingly small, family businesses.

We heard evidence about the supermarket duopoly charging farmers a fee if they want payment earlier than usual. Let's be clear about this: the big supermarkets will say, 'If you want to be paid earlier than usual, you have to pay us a fee, and then we will pay you earlier than usual.' Of course farmers, who are in many cases small businesses, are often cash strapped. They often have cashflow issues, and at times they would have to sacrifice some of the profits they've made—if in fact they were making a profit, and in some cases they weren't. But they effectively had to sacrifice a bit of their price to get payment earlier than usual.

While some farmers and suppliers to the big supermarket duopoly did give evidence that they were afforded reasonable payment periods of around 14 or 21 days, we had evidence of other farmers waiting up to 120 days to be paid.