Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has urged the nation’s supermarkets to take more action to pass lower wholesale prices on to consumers, arguing that they can do more to relieve the cost-of-living pressures on households.
“We know that when we have seen a reduction in the cost to supermarkets, that hasn’t been passed on in an appropriate way to consumers. And we want to make sure that happens”, Albanese said.
His comments follow the federal government’s announcement that former Labor minister Craig Emerson will head a review of the grocery industry’s voluntary code of conduct with suppliers, as well as Coles’ move to introduce price discounts on more than 300 food and grocery products for three months.
Supermarket giant CEOs must also contend with a parliamentary inquiry led by Greens Senator Nick McKim, who welcomed Dr Emerson’s review.
“This is a step in the right direction, but it is in no way a substitute for the Greens-led Senate inquiry which has powers to compel evidence and testimony which will see Coles and Woolworths CEOs held to account publicly”, he said.
The review comes amid falling inflation among household grocery prices, as illustrated in the next chart by Alex Joiner at IFM Investors:
The cost of red meat has raised particular attention. However, these costs have plummeted, according to Joiner:
I am all for ‘keeping the bastards honest’. But independent economist Tarric Brooker has hit the nail on the head with the following Tweet: why wasn’t the grocery inquiry kicked-off when food inflation was 9%+ in Q3 and Q4 last year?
Australian politics is an absolute clown show. Australians are living through the worst rental crisis in living history and politicians are faking concern about grocery prices that are already falling fast.
Meanwhile, the Senate Community Affairs References Committee’s final report on “The worsening rental crisis in Australia” doesn’t even mention the impact of immigration until page 201 in the “Additional Comments by Coalition Senators”:
Nor does “reducing immigration” get a mention in the report’s recommendations.
This is despite annual net overseas migration surged to an unprecedented 518,000 in the 2022-23 financial year:
This surge in net overseas migration has driven the collapse in the nation’s rental vacancy rate to record lows after rising at the beginning of the pandemic when net overseas migration collapsed:
Source: Core Logic
Australia is governed by corrupt clowns that prefer to virtue signal than address the real causes of Australia’s problems.
