Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) | Hansard source

I appreciate the courtesy of the chamber there. I also want to place on the record our appreciation of Senator Wong and the government for establishing this debate in such a way that senators could make contributions to it and that amendments may be moved to the government's legislation.

The Australian Greens would like to make a few points on the way through here. Firstly, I would like to foreshadow an amendment to this motion, and that will be an amendment that either just has been or shortly will be circulated in my name. That amendment is to include the Treasury Laws Amendment (Mergers and Acquisitions) Reform Bill 2024 in the tranche of bills which this motion establishes in section (d). The reason we will be doing that is that it is really critical, around the issue of the consolidation of corporate power in Australia, that the ACCC be given the powers that it has long been requesting and which the government has formulated in that bill to which I have just referred. It is critical for the reason that corporate power has been growing in Australia for decades now.

We are seeing in many sectors of our economy a situation where big corporations are consolidating their market power. That means that competition in a range of sectors in our economy is less than it should be, and the losers there, in terms of low levels of competition, are the consumers of Australia. And we see that nowhere more than in the supermarket sector, where the market dominance of Coles and Woolworths has crept ever higher over the last few decades to where we find ourselves now, where those two giant supermarket corporations, who each make a billion-plus dollars a year in annual profits, now together make up over two-thirds of the food and grocery sector in Australia. That's why the Greens moved to establish the Senate Select Committee on Supermarket Prices, and we were very pleased that, as a result of that political pressure and the power that the Greens embody in this place, that forced the government to ask the ACCC to do a similar inquiry into the power of the supermarket corporations and their pricing practices among other things.

The ACCC is moving through that process. We've had some updates from the ACCC. We've even had an interim report from the ACCC. The Australian Greens look forward—and I'm sure every Australian who ends up going through the check-out at Coles and Woolworths and getting a rude shock about their grocery bills on a regular basis also looks forward—to the final report and the final verdict of the ACCC on the pricing practices of supermarkets and, importantly, on the concentration of market power in the supermarket sector and the impacts of that concentration of market power on competition. The Australian Greens have been very clear that we believe that the supermarket sector is too concentrated and that we believe that divestiture powers should be introduced in this country to provide the ACCC with the power to go to the courts and apply for a divestiture order in the case that a corporation has misused market power and for the courts to make relevant orders that would result in an improvement in levels of competition, potentially in a particular geographic area or by other means.

We are very pleased that the coalition has announced that they do support divestiture laws in the supermarket sector, and I firmly believe that's because of the work of the select committee. I want to acknowledge my colleagues on that committee. I notice Senator Cadell is currently in the chamber, and there were others, including Senator Tyrrell, who is not currently in the chamber, and Senator Sterle. There were a range of people. But that committee worked really collaboratively to get to the bottom of a range of issues, not limited, I might add, to just consumer issues but about the way that the big supermarket corporations treat their suppliers, which are often Australian family farms. I'm sure Senator Cadell would agree with this: we heard some heart-rending testimony from farmers or from people who had formerly had a life on a farming business in the agriculture sector in our country of how the giant supermarket corporations treated them and misused their market power in terms of the way that they purchased products from farmers. This is based on evidence that we heard. It's also based on conversations that I've had with farmers in my home state of Tasmania, and I know other members of the committee had similar conversations with people on the land in their local areas. Many farmers were simply too scared of retribution to even activate complaints against the big supermarket corporations when they believed that they were being treated poorly in negotiations.

That's why we would be more than happy—in fact, that's why we will be moving—to include the Treasury Laws Amendment (Mergers and Acquisitions Reform) Bill 2024. I hasten to add that is not because it will create divestiture powers—it won't—but because it will allow the ACCC to adequately assess proposals for mergers that come before them. Even though, in the area of competition, that bill won't itself deliver everything the Australian Greens think needs to happen—we believe that we should have divestiture powers—that mergers bill will in fact assist in preventing further concentration of competition in Australia, which will be a very good thing, given that we have seen far too much consolidation of market power in Australia in recent decades.

I move:

At the end of paragraph (d), add:

(xxi) Treasury Laws Amendment (Mergers and Acquisitions Reform) Bill 2024