Rebekha Sharkie (Mayo, Centre Alliance) Share this | Hansard source

I'm really pleased to speak on the Competition and Consumer Amendment (Fair Go for Consumers and Small Business) Bill 2024 and to support this bill. This bill will require the Australian Competition Consumer Commission to respond to designated complaints lodged by designated complainants. A designated complainant may be approved to lodge the complaint on behalf of consumers and/or small businesses against another party they believe is acting systematically in a manner that causes detriment to consumers or small businesses.

So what does that mean? This opens up the way for consumer groups, such as CHOICE, and our own food growers or farmers to have better, faster mechanisms to access the ACCC's enforcement functions in case of significant or systemic market issues. If accepted by the minister, the ACCC must determine a designated complaint within 90 days and act on it as soon as possible or within six months. This seems to be a start to providing the ACCC with some teeth—I would say a badly needed set of molars—but this does not go far enough.

One concern is that no additional funding has been provided to the ACCC to implement this additional vital function, and that, I believe, is utterly crucial. We can't empower bodies such as the ACCC and then not put the funding in behind them that is required to ensure what we in the parliament and the consumers want: a robust ACCC that has the financial capacity to actually deal with complaints and deal with them thoroughly. Further, the minister can refuse to designate a complaint or decide to limit the number of designated complainants in a year without having to give reasons for that decision. I believe reasons should be given for that decision, and that is a transparency issue that just makes good sense.

Moreover, it's not just grocery retailers and the price that consumers are paying that are common knowledge and hot talking points in this place at the moment. But, aside from the fact that many people are spending $60 or $80 on just two bags of shopping, it's the fact that many famers are not getting a fair deal at the farm gate. I have a rural electorate. I have many farmers who are very reliant on having a relationship with one of the two major supermarket chains, and it is an incredibly imbalanced relationship. Once at the farm gate, the supermarket chains push prices paid to producers down, and we know that farmers are on the brink.

We also know that, when these supermarket giants decide that they're going to have specials, they don't wear the margin in between; they push that back to the producer as well. Consumers are also not benefiting from this, because consumers are paying massively higher margins on produce. Why are they doing that? Well, because we just don't have competition in this country. We are a country of duopolies, and I think there is no worse duopoly than that of the supermarkets.

This is not news. I've been talking about this in this place for years. Going back to 3 December, I mentioned a fantastic book called Supermarket Monsters, and I think every member in this place should read that book. It's by an author called Malcolm Knox. In fact, I think it's even available in the library, so we could all take turns and share it from the library. It goes into a really deep study on the practices of our major supermarkets and how they affect our growers and how they affect us as consumers—it goes right the way across. We're not just talking about horticulture, and we're not just talking about dairy. It even goes into viticulture. I have six wine regions in my electorate, and I think most consumers would be really surprised to know how many labels are actually owned by the supermarket chains.

We need to refresh the ACCC. We need to make sure that the ACCC has funding behind it, but I would also like to see it have divestiture powers to break up uncompetitive market-power-abusing monopolies and duopolies. I think that we could do this through the Federal Court. The Federal Court should be given the power to be able to break up bad-behaving duopolies.

In November 2022, I discussed the need for us to support producers, given the pronounced influential power of the supermarkets. This is particularly challenging for the horticultural industry because they can only sell products that are of a very specific size, and so much of their product can be turned away. They can sell to a supermarket and then be told that their product didn't meet a certain criteria and be downgraded. This is crushing and, when you're working on such tiny margins, it can mean many farmers going to the wall. The question we need to ask here is: do we want to have Australian-made produce? If we look at what brands are on our supermarket shelves now and what were on our supermarket shelves decades ago, it's a very limited number of brands. If you're a producer and one of the major two decide that they're no longer going to stock your product, or in the case—which might seem like a good contract to begin with—where one of the major two decides they want to have your product exclusively, you are actually then incredibly beholden to them. You've really put all of your eggs in one basket, as a producer.

As well as talking about this in relation to ACCC monitoring back in June 2023, just yesterday I talked about the overarching need to break up anticompetitive concentrations in our Australian supermarkets. I know that some have said, 'That's the kind of thing that happens in Russia.' Actually, it happens in America too. America has far greater protection laws for consumers and for producers. They have antitrust laws, and we need to have them here. This bill from the government is good. It's small; it's a start. I do support this legislation, but it really does need to have some financial backing behind it. If there's no extra money behind it, I think that it's really quite worthless, because we're asking the ACCC to do more with less when we know there are some serious issues.

As I said yesterday, it's not socialism to look at this. We actually need to look at the Sherman Antitrust Act in the United States. The US looked at this as an issue in 1890 and said that they needed to have free competition to ensure much less chance of monopolies and duopolies forming. Their Clayton Act of 1914 prohibits price discrimination. This is an act about selling the same product to different buyers and charging different prices based on who is purchasing the goods. The law prohibits such practices if they substantially lessen competition, as the practice may incidentally create a monopoly. These antitrust laws have been going in the United States for more than a century. We need to empower the Federal Court here and we need to make sure that we give the ACCC the money to investigate properly, and not just put legislation through this place with no money behind it.

There is an inherent power imbalance, and that power imbalance is between consumers and the duopoly supermarkets, and also between the duopoly supermarkets and the growers. As I said, this goes across everything that we can buy in the supermarket.

So, in closing, I do commend this bill, but I think the government could go much further. I would like to see the government look at what the rest of the word does. As I said, we can learn a lot about this from what many people consider to be the greatest nation on earth, with respect to commerce, the United States. We, as consumers, need to rise up, because the duopolies are hurting all of us. And this isn't just supermarkets; it's airlines and it's right the way across—there's the fact that we only have four big banks in this nation. We need to do better in this place to ensure that we're protecting the needs of consumers over these duopolies.

See this speech in context