Senator McKim has submitted a proposal, under standing order 75, today, which is shown at item 13 on today's Order of Business:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Government to step in to break up the Coles and Woolworths duopoly and provide cost-of-living relief for Australians by rolling out publicly owned supermarkets.

Is consideration of the proposal supported?

More than the number of senators required by the standing orders having risen in their places—

With the concurrence of the Senate, the clerks will set the clock in line with the informal arrangements made by the whips.

At the request of Senator McKim, I move:

That, in the opinion of the Senate, the following is a matter of urgency:

The need for the Government to step in to break up the Coles and Woolworths duopoly and provide cost-of-living relief for Australians by rolling out publicly owned supermarkets.

If ever there was an idea whose time has come, it's this. Woolies and Coles made a combined $2.2 billion in profits last year, gouging hundreds of dollars from every family in this country in pure profit to the shareholders of Coles and Woolies, much of it going overseas to private equity firms who are making bank, literally. This duopoly is making bank while so many Australians are struggling just to put food on their table. It won't come as a surprise to anyone who's been out talking, but 79 per cent of Australians found it harder to put food on the table last year, and more than one in three reported that they'd been skipping meals or eating less due to the cost of groceries. People are pushing their trolley down the aisle and then, when they're heading up to the checkout, it's like they're pushing a boulder up a hill with the anxiety: will you be able to afford food for your family—food for yourself and food for your kids? The same basket of groceries at Woolworths has gone up by 8.5 per cent in just the last 16 months, and, at the same time as these prices are going up, people's pay cheques under Labor have just flatlined. They haven't moved since 2011. They are back to where they were in 2011. These numbers are shameful.

And the big supermarkets want us to think that they're struggling with inflation. Fuel prices, cost of living—'It's tough for Coles and Woolies too, you know, and that's why you're paying more.' But Australians don't buy that rubbish. We know that the likes of Coles and Woolies are profiteering, taking the money when they can, because they've got the power in the market. They dominate the market and they squeeze out other competitors. Don't let them compete on price to keep their profits up. And Australians feel that in the price of essentials, the price of food. And what does the government do? All we get from Labor are reasons for doing nothing. 'Oh, no, we couldn't possibly afford to build something. Oh, no, we haven't got the competence to do that. Oh, no, we can't.' They'll probably roll out sovereign risk or some other kind of do-nothing excuse.

And you know what? Australians don't buy that either. They have to buy overpriced groceries, but they don't buy that rubbish coming from this government. Eighty-eight per cent of voters say the federal government could do a lot more to reduce the price of food and groceries, and they're right. Government could do something, not wring its hands and say: 'Oh, isn't it bad that our mate Donald Trump started a war and increased the fuel prices? Oh, isn't it sad that it's getting so expensive?' They don't want you wringing your hands. They want government to help. People are right to be fed up with government saying it's too hard to make the bold action. We need to actually start making life better for people. Millions of Australians are struggling to put food on the table, and they want a government to be part of the solution, not one that's just protecting the profits of Coles and Woolies.

Here's an idea: Australians should have a publicly owned supermarket chain that makes food cheaper and puts pressure on the big chains to stop the profiteering. Mayor Mamdani is doing that in New York, right? When he rolled it out, the corporations there and all these political opponents said, 'Oh, this is terrible. This is terrible,' but you know what? New Yorkers love it. They love the idea of cheaper groceries. They like the idea of taking the profit out and not feeding the profit of some corporate when they're just trying to feed their families. Better things are possible. Labor, the Liberals, One Nation—they're all taking the dime from big corporations, taking the private planes, taking the big donations, taking the fossil fuel donations to run their campaigns. Do you know the party that doesn't? It's the Greens.

If Australians are struggling to put food on the table, Coles and Woolies should not be posting billion-dollar profits. It's time to break up the duopoly. It's time to act for Australia. (Time expired)

It's interesting that, every time we don't agree with the Greens on something, it's because we're on the take of the corporations or something like that, forgetting the fact that the Greens held the record for some time with the largest corporate donation in Australian history. That was from the Wotif corporation. But let's just go away from that. Maybe we don't support something because it's a stupid idea, and I think this is a stupid idea. All marks and no originality here, we mentioned Mayor Mamdani and what he's doing in New York, but it's been tried in Australia. If you go back to 1915-1916 in Queensland, Queensland thought, 'We'll go out there and we'll buy a whole lot of supermarkets, but we won't stop with that. We'll spend half a billion pounds'—

Senators—

Senators, Order! Please resume your seat. This is a Greens motion. We need to maintain our order. Senator Cadell, please continue.

'And, not only that, we'll get the supply chains. We'll go and we'll buy some farms and we'll get some transport and we'll do this.' The only problem was it lost money. So you might not be paying more in the shops, but you're paying more overall in your taxes. You're paying more overall.

One thing I do know—and I was on the supermarket inquiry, Senator McKim, and I know these guys aren't good guys. When you can have a company like Lidl spend half a billion dollars knowing that they don't want to compete in Australian markets, you know that it's a tough gig out there. And you think the Australian government can compete any more with these guys when the scale is there, when the logistics are there? You won't be delivering things cheaper unless you subsidise, which means higher taxes. Someone always pays. That is the problem with this. That's why increasing competition in the sector is better. That's why I stood and supported the motion for divestiture in this place—because greater competition is required in supermarkets. With less power, a lesser number of stores and less crowding out—and it's not through their contracts on their purchases; it's through their property dealings. It is when they sit on blocks of land for 20 or 30 years to crowd out the little guys, because these big supermarkets can. That is the problem. It is a market failing to maintain competition in the market.

An Australian government supermarket will not work. When you're going into retail—when you're going into markets—if the answer is government then the question is bloody stupid. We've found that so many times in this space.

Except in health and education.

I hear the interjection about health and education. Where there is market failure, I agree. But the supermarkets that are out there have too many outlets. They have these sorts of things. You have people like IGA and you have the Metcashes of the world out there, trying to have a go. But the answer is more competition and less government control so they can have a crack—getting these things there. The answer to getting supermarkets in more competition is simply that: restrict the outflow and restrict the market size.

That's why I go back to having supported Senator McKim's very good motion for an inquiry on divestiture from supermarkets. It was unpopular for votes over on that side, but it had to be done. But this is a cut-and-paste socialist playbook. It is nothing more than that. It is nothing less than that. People in this country do best when they are not bound by unfair rules and unfair guidelines, and the economy does better when it can be all it can be. In the supermarket space, there are some adverse things, but government cannot do it cheaper than the big guys. When a corporation that actually specialises in grocery diversification in Europe comes here and says, 'We can't compete,' that is a problem. These people think a government body—when we see how long it takes this government, or any government, to do anything—can go out and compete in a free market. That is wrong.

The motive is good: more power, more buying and a lower cost of living for people. I get where they're coming from. They're coming from a good place of giving people more groceries for their buck, but that is in the hands of the government. It is in the hands of inflation. It is in the hands of government spending. It is in the hands of all these things we've raised. If people want to be able to afford more, we have to become a wealthier nation, and we don't become a wealthier nation through socialism; we do it through embracing markets, employing people and lifting everyone up. We don't cut different slices of the pie; we build a bigger pie so everyone eats more. Unfortunately, some rich people will get richer. I accept that. But everyone will be better off, and we will build an efficient safety net. That is where we're going. That's what we should do.

They go out there and talk about Mamdani supermarkets. People might love them. They aren't making money. They aren't doing the right thing yet. You always pay, whether it's through taxes or whether it's through subsidies, just because you go in there. There were many ways we looked at people helping out. People were dumpster diving when we went to Tasmania and toured. We can do food banks. We can do all sorts of things to help those people doing it tough, probably at a cost less than what we would lose by operating supermarkets. The objectives of this are good. The process is wrong. Let's help people who need it, not flush millions of taxpayers' money on supermarkets.

I'll begin with an area of agreement: supermarket competition is not working as it should, and Australian families are rightly concerned about grocery prices. The ACCC has established that. But the Greens' own research institute's solution is to spend $25 billion turning the Commonwealth into a supermarket operator. If the economics sound extraordinary, wait until you meet the authors. The Green Institute describes itself as a think tank. It also describes itself as the official research institute of the Australian Greens, devoted to building their political movement. Its executive director is Max Chandler-Mather, the former Greens MP defeated in Griffith at the last election. So let's be clear. This is not independent economic assessment; it's a Greens political campaign dressed up as economic research. What does this think tank produce? An eight-page report proposing $25 billion in public spending, 624 supermarkets and 13 distribution centres. That's more than $3 billion for every page of research. I've seen longer and more sophisticated shopping lists.

Then there's the inspiration: New York mayor Zohran Mamdani has promised five publicly owned supermarkets. Not one of them has actually opened yet, but Mr Chandler-Mather has seen that and decided Australia needs 624 of them. The original hasn't even opened, and we've already got the tribute act proposing a nationwide tour! Mamdani won an election. Mr Chandler-Mather lost his. Labor's Renee Coffey defeated him 61-39 in the two-party preferred, but apparently taxpayers can now fund the comeback.

Let's examine the economics for a moment. The Greens promise grocery bills that are 22 per cent lower and essentials that are 30 per cent cheaper. Here's the problem: Coles's latest supermarket operating profit margin is 5.7 per cent. Woolworths's Australian food margin is 5.5 per cent. For every $100 spent at the supermarket, roughly $5.50 is operating profit. Wipe out every cent of that profit, and you've saved yourself $5.50. But this so-called Greens plan promises to save $22. So where does the extra $16.50 come from—the farmers, the workers or the taxpayers? They claim they will eliminate marketing, executive salaries and unnecessary expenses. That would save you about 60c per $100 in sales. Their report even assumes a 25 per cent reduction in other store expenses by eliminating security guards and CCTV. Apparently, government ownership also abolishes shoplifting. But the real trick is having the Commonwealth pay for the land, buildings and distribution centres. The cost hasn't disappeared; it's simply been transferred from the supermarket checkout to the taxpayer. And their own financial forecasts reveal how fragile this scheme would be. By year five, they project almost $22 billion in revenue but a surplus of just $24 million. That's a margin of approximately one-tenth of one per cent. One bad assumption, and taxpayers are back on the hook.

Then there's the polling. The Greens proudly claim 84 per cent of Australians support trying publicly owned supermarkets. But look at the question; it was push polling at its finest. Respondents were first told about New York establishing publicly owned supermarkets to lower prices by cutting out profit. Then they were asked if they'd support trying that here. They weren't told about the $25 billion price tag or the compulsory acquisition of 200 existing supermarkets. Of course people support cheaper groceries. I'm surprised it wasn't 100 per cent. The challenge is delivering them, not writing them into polling questions.

Australia needs genuine supermarket competition. Labor is focused on making supermarkets Australians already have compete harder and charge fair prices. Since 1 July, excessive pricing by Coles and Woolworths has been illegal. We've made the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct mandatory. We've tackled Shrinkflation, because a smaller pay packet at the same price is no bargain. We've strengthened merger laws, so supermarket acquisitions face proper scrutiny. And we're giving the ACCC more resources to enforce the rules. The ACCC delivered 20 recommendations covering pricing transparency, supplier protections and barriers to new competitors. But Australians deserve serious economic policy, not a $25 billion political publicity exercise based on eight pages of wishful thinking. Mr Chandler-Mather can try to be Australia's Mamdani, but he can't make $5.50 in profit pay for $22 in discounts, and no amount of political cosplay can make the arithmetic work. I cannot support this ridiculous motion.

This motion is two-thirds of a good idea. Yes, the Colesworth duopoly needs competition. One Nation would do that, funding the ACCC to investigate and prosecute restrictive trade practices in the industry used for the market advantage of Coles, Woolies and Aldi, including supplier agreements, side agreements, rebates, dishonest advertising and disadvantaging competitors, sweetheart union agreements and government policy designed to damage small and medium competitors. Secondly, yes, everyday Australians desperately need cost-of-living relief. One Nation would do that, shrinking the government to fit the constitution, as we said, in early 2025, eliminating government waste and duplication, then passing on the savings in the form of tax cuts, with more people keeping more money of their own. That's One Nation's way.

It's the third part that One Nation opposes: a government run supermarket. With this policy, the Greens looked across the Pacific to New York and its communist mayor, Mamdani, and thought: 'You know what? We're going to try to run state run supermarkets.' That's always failed badly. And price caps have been another disaster wherever they've been tried. At least Mamdani is building his supermarket. The Greens just want to steal Coles's and Woolies's existing sites. Mamdani doesn't open his first supermarket until next year, and already the Greens are declaring the idea a winner. There's no talk of just compensation, because it's against the federal constitution, so I assume the Greens will use state governments for acquisition—the same trick John Howard used to steal farmers' property rights to comply with the UN Kyoto protocol. Strange bedfellows, indeed!

Supermarkets are low-margin operations. Yes, they're getting greedy, and this is where One Nation would step in, as I mentioned. The $2.1 billion figure is not accurate. The figure includes all divisions: supermarkets, variety stores, pet stores, liquor, property, hotel businesses, and online and loyalty programs in Australia and New Zealand. Coles has funds employed—the investment to build and run supermarkets—of $12 billion on a 12 per cent return on investment. Woolworths has $19 billion invested on a 17 per cent return on investment. Those are healthy returns and suggest more competition is needed—not much, though. The actual $1 billion or so in profit that 'Colesworth' makes from supermarket sales comes from around $100 billion in annual sales. A one per cent reduction in prices would wipe that out completely. Are the Greens promising to subsidise their supermarkets with taxpayers' money? If so, be honest about it. How much will be needed, and whose taxes will you put up to pay for it? The most this idea will save is between one and two per cent. The Greens are promising a 30 per cent saving. It just doesn't add up.

Imagine a young man living in an Australian city today. He wakes up in a rental that costs him hundreds of bucks a week. It's mouldy, it's draughty and it's freezing in winter, but, if he complains, his lease won't be renewed, so he doesn't complain. When interest rates go up, his rent goes up. When interest rates don't go up, his rent goes up. His taxes subsidise the obscene tax breaks his landlord receives. He gets huge electricity bills from a privatised energy company charging exorbitant prices to heat a home that should never have been so cold in the first place.

For breakfast, he eats groceries from the supermarket duopoly. He knows he's being price gouged, but what choice does he have? Somebody needs to fund their billions of dollars of profits. He drives to the station to catch a train to work. He's going to work 11 hours today just to give himself a chance of economic survival, but he can't drive to work because petrol is two bucks 50 a litre, and, if he could drive to work, he'd be paying Transurban, a company that pays absolutely no corporate tax, 20 bucks for the privilege of using roads.

He gets on the train and he opens his phone. Social media companies serve him gambling ads. They know to serve him gambling ads because they're surveilling his data and selling it to the gambling companies. The other thing he gets served on his phone is extreme right-wing content funded by many of the same interests profiting from the economic misery that he and his mates are living through. That message is always the same: blame migrants, blame trans people and boo the welcome to country. Direct your anger sideways and down and never direct it upwards to where it actually belongs. The billionaires and the big corporations, the one per cent in this country, have got one hand around his throat, and their other hand is pointing him towards anyone except the actual people responsible for his immiseration. When election time comes, the Labor Party, the Liberal Party and their orange, racist rival keep it that way. At best, Labor will promise to investigate potentially loosening a single finger of the hand at this young man's throat, but only if the hand agrees.

But there is another way: break the hand, break the fingers and give people more power. We need governments that are prepared to act in the public interest, including a publicly owned supermarket to take on the supermarket duopoly. Get power out of the hands of the one per cent and back in the hands of everyday Australians.

My eyes couldn't possibly roll further back into my head watching the media and the usual suspects crash out over the Greens policy to run publicly owned supermarkets. But, if the commentariat and some of my colleagues took a single moment to unclutch their pearls, none would dare to suggest that the status quo of the supermarket duopoly is actually working for Aussies right now. Last financial year, Woolworths made $1.13 billion in profit, and Coles wasn't far behind, with a net profit of $1.09 billion. It's entirely by design that these figures are super-hard to comprehend, but, to put it into context, if these profits were combined and those supermarkets became a nation-state called 'Colesworth', they would have a bigger economy than most of our Pacific neighbours, half of the Caribbean and a handful of African countries. And where are these profits going? They're not going into the pockets of workers who keep the shelves stocked up and who are mostly on minimum wage—and that's if they haven't fallen afoul of another incident of systematic wage theft. They're not going into the pockets of the families who are buying the essentials like meat, bread, milk, fruit and veg, because, as we all know, the prices of those things have exploded dramatically.

So I do congratulate my colleagues the Greens on bringing this issue to light and providing us with the potential solution to the egregious corporate greed we continue to fall prey to. To all the naysayers out there: really look at the profits, follow the money, and you will know that this is not serving Australians at all.

Here's the offer that is on the table for everyday Australians: you put your hand out and receive the receipt for the weekly shop, and it is 31 per cent higher than it was in 2019. On the other hand, Coles and Woolies receive $2.23 billion in profit in just six months. What a dud of a deal for everyday people! The duopoly have been ripping people off for years. A trip to the shop shouldn't make you anxious. Picking up milk and bread after work shouldn't cause stress. The supermarket duopoly are simply out of control, prioritising their profits over people. But of course they will; they're corporations. It's the government's job to rein them in. Grocery prices in this country are being driven by predatory price gouging by Coles and Woolies, and people are absolutely desperate for relief.

I know that government are busy accepting donations from tech billionaires and gas companies, so we've done them a favour, and we have put forward a solution: publicly owned supermarkets. Dare to imagine essentials like milk, eggs, fruit, veg and nappies priced 30 per cent cheaper than at the major supermarkets. We can reduce anxiety. We can bring down people's stress in this terrible cost-of-living crisis that they're currently experiencing. If Labor had the guts to break up the Coles and Woolies duopoly, Australians could save in the realm of 80 bucks a week—over $4,000 a year—by shopping at a publicly owned local supermarket. Making big corporations pay their fair share of tax means that we can dare to fund meaningful solutions to the cost-of-living crisis and lift the burden off Australians' weekly shop, because you deserve access to affordable, high-quality local products more than the duopoly deserve their astronomical corporate profits.

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.

At my electorate office in Gladstone, we run a community pantry to do what we can to provide food to people who need it, and right across the road from that pantry is a Woolworths—a Woolworths that has a massive amount of food that's the result of a system of production and distribution that relies on thousands of farmers and workers to deliver that food to its shelves. But what is the point of that system if it can't feed ordinary people? What is the purpose of it if it can't prevent Australians from skipping meals? Ultimately, all this system is designed to do is to deliver billions of dollars in profits to Coles and Woolworths and the exorbitant executive pay going to their executives in the top one per cent. When we say that the economy is doing well, why is that defined by share prices and corporate profits? What is an economy for if it's not to deliver goods and services and food to people? But this isn't how our economy is run. Our government has let the supermarket duopoly decide how much food people can afford. If Coles and Woolworths cannot deliver the essentials to ordinary Australians without price gouging and excessive profits then what are they good for?

One of the most important sections of our economy is failing to perform its basic function, and, when that happens, we need to start talking about alternatives. Publicly owned supermarkets need to be on the table, and nationalising some of those supermarkets also needs to be on the table. In a democracy, power should not rest in the hands of duopolies; it should be with the people, and, if the people had their say, supermarkets would be run for human need, as my office's pantry is, and not for corporate profit.

Well, what are people talking about out there? I can tell you what they're talking about in the streets of Adelaide, and it's the price of groceries. We know this is a national conversation. Recent surveys by CHOICE tell us that, in June this year, 82 per cent of people across our country said cost of living is a major pressure on their household budgets, and we know what that pressure does. We know what that does to conversation in a household where choices are made between paying for a school excursion and putting food in the fridge or between paying the rent—now, on average across our country, $700—and trying to feed a family. It's the squeeze on budgets that is putting so many Australians under pressure—people who now face, of course, rapidly increasing costs for their mortgage. It's not just people facing price gouging in our big duopoly supermarkets; it's also the farmers and suppliers who are price takers from these big duopolies. They want and deserve fairer returns.

Here we are in our country with amongst the most concentrated supermarket chains in the world. Between them, Coles and Woolworths control 67 per cent of all of the supermarket business in our country. We know that they are price gouging because they have the power—the power to confront consumers and the power to set prices for those farmers and sellers. All this is happening against the background of a five per cent fall in real wages under Labor for workers across our nation. They are caught in a squeeze between big corporate profiteering on one hand and falling real wages on the other. Prices are up, we know from CHOICE's recent survey, by six per cent on basic goods, things like a combination of apples, bananas, strawberries, potatoes and rice—six per cent in three months. That is a massive increase in prices. Australians deserve better.

Thank you, Senator Pocock. The time for this debate has now expired. The question is that the urgency motion moved by Senator Shoebridge be agreed to.