Guy Barnett (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It was certainly obvious from day one, Senator Bushby, that this government had not got their hands on the tiller where they should have been. The GROCERYchoice initiative was characterised throughout by waste and mismanagement. The GROCERYchoice website was designed to fulfil a hollow election promise to put downward pressure on grocery prices, yet Labor knew full well that that would never be achieved. Despite that, they went ahead and established the GROCERYchoice website. Now this report confirms that it was an absolute debacle, a litany of waste and mismanagement throughout the process from go to whoa. They knew that they could not achieve their ends, despite the fact that they had made that hollow promise before the election. They should have said after the election: ‘We misled the public. We apologise for that. We will not ahead with wasting taxpayers’ money to set up a GROCERYchoice website.’

The ACCC website was poorly designed. They collected data in 61 regions—can you imagine—across Australia. Some of them covered tens of thousands of square kilometres and bore no resemblance to real-world consumer shopping patterns. The difficulties in making like-for-like comparisons across fresh produce and different private-label products also undermined the website’s effectiveness. In Tasmania, for example, there were three regions. They were comparing on this website supermarkets in north-east Tasmania in Launceston, St Helens, which is two hours away, and Scottsdale, an hour away. How absurd is that? There is no reality to it.