Tammy Tyrrell (Tasmania, Jacqui Lambie Network) Share this | Hansard source

Raise your hand if you've ever been personally victimised by high supermarket prices. I'm pretty sure every single one of us has stood at the check-out, looked at the number on the screen, looked at our bags, looked back at the screen and wondered how on earth just a few things can cost that much. I've been there. I was a single mum living on Centrelink payments. I know what it's like to stand in the supermarket aisle weighing up two things that you really need but can only afford one, the way you look around to check no-one is watching you as you're putting something back on the shelf and the way you feel ashamed, guilty and embarrassed that you can't afford a few simple groceries to feed your family.

That was 25 years ago. Today, people are feeling the pinch more than ever in our current cost-of-living crisis. Groceries are a cost you can't afford or avoid. You do everything you can to scrimp and save and try to find things cheaper, but, at the end of the day, you have to buy food, and you have to buy it from a store that's available to you. People in regional areas like Tassie are paying more for their groceries because of the lack of options. We don't have Aldi or Costco or any of those other stores the mainland has, and we're quite literally paying the price for it.

During the Senate supermarket prices inquiry, we heard that, when a new grocery store opened in a town, prices at Woolies and Coles went down. Increase the players in the game, and the other stores will lower their prices to compare. That's why in my comments to the committee report I called on the federal government to work with states and territories to address competition issues, especially in regional areas like Tasmania. Since then, report after report has echoed these words. CHOICE surveys, the ACCC interim supermarket report—they all say that regional areas are paying the price for a lack of supermarket competition. It's pretty clear I'm on the money. Tassie needs more supermarket choices.

But how do we encourage more competition? There are a lot of factors that go into why it's so hard for new supermarkets to compete with the big two, and cowboy behaviour from Woolies and Coles is a major part of that. We know that Woolies and Coles engage in practices like land banking to stop other grocery stores from entering the game. Land banking is when a company buys up land or space in a shopping centre just so no-one else can have it. They could have bought the prime development sites 10, 15 years ago, and they're still just sitting there empty. There are examples of this everywhere, even on Tassie's north-west coast.

Burnie has a population of about 20,000 people. It has one Woolies and one Coles. A brand new Woolies is being built less than five minutes drive from the existing Woolies. I can't say for certain that this is land banking, but I can tell you that Burnie didn't really need another Woolies.

Some people would say that private businesses have a right to buy the land they want, and I agree, but there is a line between buying a space as a genuine business decision and buying it just to stop someone else from having it. The ACCC could do something about allegations of land banking, but they don't have the power to investigate it. It's a point we keep coming back to over and over. If we really want to hold the major supermarkets to account, we have to give someone the power to do it. The ACCC is currently a lapdog with false teeth. They want to do more, but they're hamstrung by government legislation.

Just a few weeks ago the ACCC announced that they're taking Woolies and Coles to court over their dodgy promotions. I think everybody in Australia said, 'About time.' But the investigation is only about misleading sales. The case has nothing to do with the actual prices that supermarkets are charging, because the ACCC doesn't have the power to do that. Pollies of every colour of have been taking the supermarkets to task for charging huge prices. The $6.50 for Tim Tams has really got them going. But nothing will change unless the government gives the ACCC more bite. That's why I support the intent of this bill by Senator McKim and his team. We can't keep talking about reining in cowboy behaviour by the two major supermarkets if no-one has the power to take them to task.

Every single person that has been to a Woolies or Coles lately has noticed that prices are going up and up and up. The supermarkets say they're not charging excessive prices. They say their costs, for freight, fuel, wages and inflation, have gone up too. To be fair, some of those costs have gone up—but not by that much. If you knew that the prices were going up but that that money was going back to farmers and producers, you would probably feel a little bit better about it, but it's not. Producers are getting a measly few cents here and there and barely getting by.

The supermarkets are ripping off customers and farmers and making record profits. Coles had a profit this year of $1.1 billion. Woolies had a profit of $1.7 billion. These are some of the highest profit margins in the world of supermarkets everywhere. It's pouring salt into the wound. Coles and Woolies say they're doing it tough, but they don't know what it's like to cut back to two meals a day because you can't afford three. They don't know what it's like to not have a price rise in a decade, like the farmers who supply them—farmers who are giving up family farms and having thoughts of self-harm because dealing with the major supermarkets is so bad. Businesses should make a reasonable profit for their shareholders, but at what point is it just taking advantage of struggling Australians?

This bill, the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Make Price Gouging Illegal) Bill 2024, will give the ACCC a stick to take the supermarkets to task if their prices are excessive. It wouldn't see the ACCC taking Coles and Woolies to court every month over an item here or there. It would allow the ACCC to apply to the court if they thought Coles or Woolies were price gouging, similar to what they're doing with the dodgy promotions.

But this bill doesn't just apply to the supermarkets. It would apply to any business with a turnover of over $10 million. We're talking about not only supermarkets but also airlines, insurance companies, retailers like Kmart or Bunnings—any business you can think of. The ACCC doesn't have the resources to monitor every single big business in Australia for price gouging. I think this bill should, at first, only apply to supermarkets. Let's test the waters to see that it works and that the powers can be used to get results for consumers. If it does, funding and resources to the ACCC can be expanded along with the scope of the bill.

My other concern is how we define 'excessive'. What's an excessive price to one person could be different to another. Some people might think that $10 for grated cheese is too high. Other people might think, 'That's okay.' One thing we all agree on is that $6.50 for a packet of Tim Tams is way too high! Senator McKim says the definition of 'excessive price' in the bill is deliberately broad to allow for the courts to decide what is or isn't price gouging, but there has to be some kind of threshold for the ACCC to make a referral to the court in the first place. So who decides when something enters the price-gouging territory and how could that threshold change? If there was another year of high inflation like we saw in the past two years, would this change the threshold? There's too little information in this bill to figure out how can you tell if someone has been price gouging or not. We need to equip the ACCC with the tools they need to do the job and take the supermarkets to task.

When you're heading into battle, you make sure you've got everything you know you're going to need and a few extras just in case. If the power to investigate price gouging is the 'just in case' the ACCC needs, let's give them that. But it needs to be done in a way that's actually going to deliver the results. If the bill is too broad or the idea of excessive prices is too vague, it's not going to help the people who really need it. Trust in supermarkets is down. People are feeling the pinch at the hip pocket every single time they go to the checkout. But that pain isn't equal. It's like comparing a scratch to a knife wound.

People in regional areas and people in Tasmania are paying more for groceries because of a lack of competition. Changing that begins with looking at more powers around land, banking and price gouging. It begins with looking at the high freight costs stopping supermarkets from getting shops up in Tasmania. Living in a regional or remote location shouldn't automatically mean you sign up for higher grocery costs simply because of a lack of competition. Sure, you expect to pay a bit more and not have as much choice, because there are fewer people buying the food. It takes extra freight to get the goods to the supermarket. But less competition shouldn't mean prices are one-third more. Yes, I said one-third. That figure comes from a CHOICE survey showing the average basket of groceries costs $68 in Tasmanian Woolies but $50 in New South Wales, Queensland and here in the ACT. We don't deserve to be at the mercy of Woolies and Coles just because of where we live.