The Greens have secured cross-party support to set up a senate inquiry into the market power and pricing decisions made by Australia's big supermarkets. Greens senator Nick McKim says market dominance by the two leading supermarkets is driving prices up unnecessarily.
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00:00 You only have to walk around the supermarket aisles and have a look on the shelves to know
00:07 that food and grocery prices have gone through the roof in recent times in Australia.
00:12 And at the same time, you've got the major supermarkets, Coles and Woolworths, making
00:17 billions of dollars in profits.
00:19 Now millions of Australians are struggling to make ends meet and having to make difficult
00:25 decisions around whether they're going to put food on the table for their kids, whether
00:28 they're going to pay their power bills or their school levies.
00:31 And we think there's a prima facie case that the concentration of market power in the supermarket
00:38 sector is such that Coles and Woolworths are able to raise their prices over and above
00:46 any increases in the cost of supply to them.
00:49 And we need to use this inquiry to find a way to make food and groceries more affordable
00:54 in Australia.
00:55 The evidence is simply prima facie that when you look at the food prices, they appear in
01:02 many, many cases across a range of foods and a range of groceries to have increased far
01:09 ahead of inflation.
01:11 We want to use this inquiry to examine the price setting practices of Coles and Woolworths.
01:17 We want to use this inquiry to deliver greater transparency around the supply side.
01:22 In other words, how and how much they pay for the goods and services, the goods that
01:28 they then sell to Australians.
01:30 And we want to understand the impact that the concentration of market power in this
01:36 sector, which is extraordinary, has because ultimately competition is one thing that can
01:42 bring prices down, but there is a massive lack of competition, particularly in rural
01:49 and regional Australia, where often you're either shopping at one of the big two major
01:54 supermarkets or you're shopping at the corner shop and there's not much in between.
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