Tuesday, 20 February 2024

Adjournment

Debate resumed.

Supermarket prices

Sarah MANSFIELD (Western Victoria) (18:36): (701) My adjournment matter is for the Assistant Treasurer, and I am calling for him to require the Essential Services Commission to take action to stop price gouging by supermarkets in Victoria. Last night’s Four Corners episode highlighted outrageous practices by the two major supermarket chains Coles and Woolworths, who made $1.1 billion and $1.62 billion respectively in the last financial year. These practices include supermarket design that makes it difficult for people to leave stores and influences their spending, misleading products and specials labelling, and ripping off producers and crippling their long-term viability.

There are those, including in this chamber, who like to put it back on the consumer. They say that consumers can just flex their choice muscles and go elsewhere or select different products. In the current system dominated by Coles and Woolworths, consumer choice is a mirage. Behind the supermarket duopoly there are also a range of mega food and beverage companies that pay the big supermarkets to promote their products and ensure high-prominence placements to influence our purchases. This reinforces the power of the supermarket duopoly in dominating our food supply chain, from dictating what our farmers grow and how much they get paid to what ends up at eye level on store shelves and what consumers pay for them. The duopoly and these mega corporations are adept at political lobbying, evidenced by the incredibly weak regulation of supermarkets and pricing. This has allowed profits to be concentrated in the hands of a few big players at the expense of farmers and everyday citizens’ fundamental right to food security.

Forty-eight per cent of our population now feel anxious about or struggle to consistently access adequate food, and almost all food-insecure households have had to cut back on food in the past year. Supermarkets’ predatory practices and pricing also drive people to make poorer food choices, encouraging increased consumption of ultraprocessed, high-sugar, low-nutrient food. Any parent who has taken their child to a supermarket knows that the check-outs are not lined with broccoli and carrots. It is junk food, with so-called ‘specials’ labels to attract attention. This is having enormously detrimental effects on population health, driving chronic disease, dental disease and poor mental health. The Victorian Labor government has the power to act, but they do not. Labor, it is time you stepped up and did more to stamp out supermarket profiteering at the expense of Victoria’s health and wellbeing.