If only it were true:
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has accused Coles and Woolworths of stifling competition by sitting on undeveloped land near their stores and vowed measures to protect consumers from higher prices.
The Coalition is working on a plan to forcibly break up the supermarket giants if they abuse their market power and Mr Dutton said the Morrison government had brought down power bills via “big stick” laws that threatened to break up electricity retailers, signalling a similar approach may be possible for supermarkets.
We know that land banking was a key reason why German supermarket giant Kaufland binned expansion plans. So bravo.
But I do not remember ScoMo doing anything to boost competition among energy firms. On the contrary, he lied to Senator Rex Patrick about installing gas reservation in return for his passing in the Senate of the Stage 3 tax cuts.
Then, he pursued the farce of the “gas-led recovery” on behalf of Santos.
This is the concern. LNP pollies are lying corporate whores, so believing anything they say is perilous.
For instance, the LNP did act to regulate the failed gas market under Malcolm Turnbull. But his successors never used the ADGSM.
Worse, the two scumbags tasked with drafting competition laws are intellectual pygmies. David Littlepenis is the originator of the LNP nuclear policy, a fantasy only possible owing to LNP energy policy failure. Shadow chicken Angus Taylor’s superpower is a cloak of invisibility.
Credit goes to the LNP for making the right noises. But believing them at this stage is impossible.
The policy utterances might as well have been a squeak from a mouse secreted in the crack of the senate camber.
Shall we put it in charge?
