ANDREW LEIGH:
Good morning, and thanks very much for coming out today. My name’s Andrew Leigh, the Assistant Minister for Competition. Today, we have CHOICE handing down their third quarterly price monitoring report. This is quarterly grocery price monitoring, funded by the Albanese government, in order to ensure that shoppers get the best deal at the checkout.
Previously, CHOICE had done this more irregularly, every couple of years, and with not all the information available publicly. Now, we’ve funded this so that every Australian has data on where they can get the best deal. This quarterly grocery price monitoring report shows that Aldi is the cheapest supermarket, followed by Coles, followed by Woolworths and then IGA.
It’s important that we set up this supermarket price Olympics in order that Australians can see where to get the best deal. At a time when Australians are feeling the cost‑of‑living pressure. It is vital. That we put more competition into the supermarket industry.
Since the second quarterly grocery price monitoring report came out, there’s been a number of important developments in supermarket competition. Labor’s merger laws have passed the parliament – the biggest shake up in merger laws in 50 years, which allows the ACCC to have better scrutiny over high risk mergers and for low risk mergers to be moved through more simply, taking less attention with the regulators. Every supermarket merger will be automatically referred to the ACCC.
We’ve also had the legislation that puts in place multi‑million dollar penalties for the Food and Grocery Code of conduct passing through the parliament. That was voted against by the Liberals and Nationals, despite the fact that they themselves had been calling for this kind of change. This gets a fairer deal for farmers and it ensures that the relationship between suppliers and supermarkets is reset. Labor wants a fairer deal for families and a fairer deal for farmers. And the Food and Grocery Code of Conduct, set up as the toothless voluntary code by the Liberals and Nationals, will now have real teeth with multi‑million dollar penalties.
And we’ve also seen over recent weeks, the states and territories getting together to agree to revamp National Competition Policy. National Competition Policy was an engine of growth for the Australian economy through the 1990s, but it hasn’t operated as effectively in the period since then.
Getting that in train involves ensuring that we get more competition in areas like supermarkets, with planning and zoning rules taking into account the benefits to competition of multiple supermarkets competing against one another.
All of that sits on top of the work we’ve done to address shrinkflation, by better enforcing the unit pricing code. The work we’ve done in setting up the first in 16 years review of supermarket competition by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission.
The Albanese government understands the importance of more competition in the economy, to get prices down now and to get productivity up in the future. We now have inflation back inside the Reserve Bank’s target band, sitting at 2.8 per cent on the ABS headline number. We have unemployment still sitting at 4.1 per cent. The Albanese government has managed to bring inflation down without driving unemployment up.
If Peter Dutton had had his way inflation would be higher and unemployment would be higher too. His solution is to smash the economy by smashing workers and households. Labor’s solution is to get more competition, more dynamism into the economy, ensuring that farmers’ families get a better deal. Thanks very much.