More than $2 billion in profit for Coles and Woolworths and their CEOs taking home millions upon millions of dollars in bloated pay packets—and, for everybody else, skipped dinners, empty lunch boxes and mounting grocery bills. Woolworths gets an 18 per cent surge in profits while you can't afford to fill your trolley. What a sick, ugly system, and all Labor and Liberal governments can manage is to shrug their shoulders and say, 'That's just the way things are.' Well, I reject that completely. The Greens believe that things can be better. We know that, if a system is failing people, you don't keep tinkering around the edges; you change the system.

That's why the Greens have put publicly owned supermarkets on the table. When voters were asked if they wanted this idea to be tried in Australia, 84 per cent said yes. Of course they said yes, because they are struggling, and because children shouldn't be going hungry in one of the richest countries in the world while corporations make billions. Those rebuffing publicly owned supermarkets want you to believe that there is no alternative, that governments cannot intervene and that corporations must run everything and we simply have to accept whatever they give us. That is a lie. Throughout history, governments have stepped in when markets have failed to provide the basics—the essentials—that people need. We have enough food, we have enough wealth and we have enough resources in this country for everyone to share. What we don't have is a government willing to take on corporate power. If the system can deliver billions of dollars in profits but cannot feed people then it is time to change that system.