Melissa Parke (Fremantle, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Health) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the Deputy Speaker on this red apple day. It is very appropriate, because last weekend I spoke to my father, who is a fruit grower in Donnybrook in south-west Western Australia, and I asked him what he thought of the proposal by Woolworths to charge primary producers a so-called voluntary levy to pay for Woolworths' Jamie Oliver advertising campaign. My father said this proposal is breathtaking and obscene. He said:

I have been selling fruit and vegetables for 60 years into the metropolitan market, in Perth and have had to live with the fact that this is a supply and demand market, as are all the fresh produce markets in Australia.

As with any perishable crop, withholding supply to market is not an option, so growers are in the position of being price-takers rather than price-makers. This is a fundamental imbalance between products and buyers. We commonly see mark-ups of wholesale to retail of 100 to 1,000 per cent. A farmer may receive 40c per kilo for their plums, which are then retailed for $4 per kilo, a 1,000 per cent mark-up. This situation is deteriorating even further due to the distorting influence of Australia's two supermarket chains. Because we have no anti-trust laws in Australia to prevent this type of market dominance, it will only get harder for primary producers.

Supermarkets commonly sell fresh produce sourced from other countries and use this as a strategy to keep prices for local produce artificially low. Primary producers already pay levies for the promotion of fresh fruit and vegetables and to have this impost put on them again by a company is untenable, as the company is already effectively dictating the wholesale price that the grower receives.