Price gouging supermarkets are breaking Australia and calling it ice cream

The government demands cheap ham in response.

As we sit at an inflection point in our society, record profits for foreign owned multinationals define a cost-of-living crisis in Aussie households. Well into a term of government that has yet to address any of the mounting issues around the cost of essential items, overseeing the second back-to-back annual profit gain from the titanic duopoly supermarkets, Senator Murray Watt, sensing the collective strain in the Australian people, set down a decree on the corporate leviathans: “I’m calling on the big supermarket chains to put a price freeze on Christmas hams so families can budget this Christmas”. A Christmas miracle.

Watt’s comical demand comes in the week that the Greens won cross-party support for a Senate inquiry into the effect of market concentration on food prices to assess the pattern of major chains’ pricing strategies. The scale of the profits for the supermarkets, well in excess of pre-pandemic figures, have also highlighted a new era of price gouging. Under the guise of global supply chain issues and inflation, the major supermarkets have charged more for their items than is necessary, outpacing CPI and not passing on a reduction in prices at the farmgate.

Australians stand in breadlines scoured by facial recognition technology, funnelled into automatic checkout corrals at duopoly supermarkets across the suburban drift outside our major cities and regional hubs. In an island continent where food is produced in volumes orders of magnitude greater than the domestic population consumes, we see a new trend emerging: record profits year-on-year and record high prices.

Price gouging has been one of the main drivers of inflation and the main cause of household headaches, yet the concentration of this industry-onset migraine is felt most sharply at the robotic paypoints of Coles and Woolworths. The Ooshies, collectable sticker sets and rewards cards barely mask the stench of seemingly random and chaotic price fluctuations for items produced locally and goods made domestically. The Vegemite, made in Port Melbourne as it always is, seems to fluctuate at times like it’s made on a moon orbiting Jupiter. Fresh Lebanese cucumbers, grown plentiful along the east coast, are priced like they are being airfreighted from actual Lebanon.      

The Labor government has ensured that the landscape that has enabled such fine profiteering conditions for major multi-nationals under its predecessor will continue unabated under its tenure. The ACCC, long known as a toothless tiger in an incestuous competitive marketplace, has applied a hands-off approach under the chair of former Murdoch trust fund lawyer Gina Cass-Gottlieb, issuing out the odd warning for chugging well past CPI, but doing nothing substantial such as mandatory and voluntary price controls on food and groceries.

Over at the RBA under its new Governor Michelle Bullock, they still talk about wage price spirals and the need to inhibit wage growth while they gift their economists a 11.2% pay rise, callously denying the profit price spirals that spin on the thermal currents whipped up by stressed household pay checks and overpriced goods, generating soaring profits for the wealthy and the titans of industry. Recently released from the treasurer’s powers of intervention to overrule interest rate decisions, fresh from deliberating the Melbourne Cup Day rate rise that has left many households reeling on the eve of Christmas, the RBA is now free to hike rates, raise unemployment and keep wages low at its own leisure, doing its bit to preserve the current (unsustainable) status-quo with industry and government, maintaining current conditions and leaving everyday Aussies to read the tealeaves. No amount of discounted ham is going to change that.    

We have yet to see sufficient action on soaring food and grocery prices by the consumer watchdog or the federal government, and the RBA thumbs their nose at us, pretending we don’t know the difference between consumer spending and open price gouging. The major duopoly supermarkets troll the public with the $8 yoghurts and the $10 cartons of eggs, the $5 boxes of Shapes, the sporadically expensive fluctuations on prices of fresh produce—and the profits—continue unabated.

The government has been friendly to the supermarket giants, complicating the work that needs to be done to curb high prices and profiteering (Source: Twitter/X)

The major parties tout their minor differences, but on supermarkets and corporate profits they are the same. Jim Chalmers prostrates before the industry lobby groups like his predecessor, the Prime Minister visits sprawling distribution centres and smiles in a Coles branded fluorescent vest talking about the importance of the giant corporations, while out the front of many suburban duopoly chains now dwell homeless Australians who hover around the fluorescent glow of the Australian supermarkets where cardboard cutouts of Curtis Stone’s family dinners and smiling farmers contrast against the neo-feudal nightmare that has beset the lives of millions of marginalised Australians who can’t afford food.

The same foreign owned multinationals companies that punch Aussies in the guts over fluctuating items needed for basic nutrition and sustenance, have refused to pay their staff adequately, sometimes at all, with rising claims of abuse by staff and poor conditions regularly reported. Companies offering up “poverty wages” are raking in mammoth profits selling cooked up basic essential items to everyday Australians, and a Labor government, who was elected to be a people facing leadership, is nowhere to be seen.

The government, the regulatory bodies, the press, and even the punters have been reticent to bite the hand that feeds when it comes to the major supermarkets. In every concentrated living area, they sit prominent in the beating heart of the community, automatic doors see millions of regular shoppers who pour tens of millions of dollars into the coffers of executives that have a strangle hold over the purse strings of increasingly desperate Australians in a bleak competitive market, taking advantage of limited competition to consolidate their stranglehold over the industry.

The supermarkets are profiting from a cost-of-living crisis, the government is enabling it through inaction, and the regulatory bodies and independent entities set up to rectify all of this either lack the powers to make change or are reticent to do so. There should be a national groceries regulator who sets the price nationally for household items, there should be a breakup of concentrated power in industry such as the two-thirds share of Coles and Woolworths, there should be bold announcements in the budget to curb corporate profits, there should also be leadership from a Labor government who claims that it represents the everyday Australians who suffer from the profit taking of the supermarkets. The government meekly pitches that there’s a battle over discount ham, when there is an entire war to be fought against the rapacious supermarket giants.