Dutton and Albanese are spruiking artificially sweet promises on supermarkets

We’ve all been there. You’ve gone to the supermarket, you’ve planned your shop, you’ve ticked off your list, then as you wait in line for the check-out you’re seduced by the siren call of a chocolate bar. Or a magazine. Or maybe you have your kid with you, a kid who is this close to a meltdown and is commencing to arc up in a way that you absolutely, self-loathingly know can be held at bay by the strategic application of a Kinder Surprise egg.

So you give in.

This is how supermarkets get you: it’s the impulse items. You know they’re junk purchases, and yet you just can’t help yourself.

But take heart, shoppers! The karma bus for supermarket giants comes trundling reliably back at every cost-of-living election.

And when that happens, the tables are turned.

Suddenly, it’s the politicians who are impulse-buying shiny junk at the policy check-out, even when deep down they know they’re loading up on empty calories.

And what’s their particular weakness?

Well, what do you know? Turns out it’s performative beat-ups of Coles and Woollies.

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Leaders are making promises

On Saturday — Day Two of this cost-of-living election campaign — Prime Minister Anthony Albanese announced that if re-elected, his government would create a “task force” to investigate and draft laws to ban price gouging by supermarkets.

Supermarkets, he said, were “taking the piss” and needed to be brought into line.

Aspiring prime minister Peter Dutton, meanwhile, says he will break up the big retailers if they abuse their market power. Also, he will appoint a “Supermarkets Commissioner” to investigate confidential complaints from farmers and suppliers. Dutton adds that Albanese’s plan is “weak” and resembles “wet lettuce”.

It’s hard to know, at this early stage, whether the high-level invocation of “weak as piss” and “wet lettuce” on the same day will have any knock-on sales effect in the supermarkets’ popular salad mix category.

But what is absolutely certain is that wherever you live in Australia, a politician near you will be trying to cash in on your check-out rage on May 3, probably with some performative supermarket-bashing.

So let’s have a more detailed rummage through their baskets.

In the past year, Albanese has commissioned a flurry of reviews of supermarket behaviour, promising to crack down hard on abuses of market power. He had the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission mount a full inquiry. He had the Rudd-era consumer affairs minister Craig Emerson investigate the food and grocery Code of Conduct, which this year celebrates its 10th birthday.

Emerson recommended toughening up the code and making it mandatory, which the government endorsed, passing laws which came into effect on Tuesday.

As of yesterday, supermarkets can face penalties of up to $10 million if they bully suppliers into lower prices, force them to cover the cost of promotions, or reject fresh produce without supplying written reasons, and so on.

This all ticks the thematic box marked “tough on supermarkets”, and the government has counted this initiative towards its “cost of living” measures, though it’s not clear how preventing Coles from paying a grower too little for a pallet of lettuce will translate into lettuces being cheaper for shoppers. Wouldn’t it be the opposite, especially when supermarkets can argue that compliance with the code creates new costs for them?

Never mind, because there’s going to be a task force, working on specific legislation to outlaw supermarket price gouging.

What is price gouging?

“Price gouging is when supermarkets are taking the piss out of Australian consumers,” said the PM at the weekend.

“That’s what price gouging is. Everyone else out there knows. Consumers know. We’ll take action.”

The task force assembled to free Australian consumers from this scourge will comprise Treasury officials, experts and the ACCC.

But the ACCC has just spent a whole year reviewing the supermarket sector.

And when it released its final report just a fortnight ago, the ACCC did not actually find that supermarkets were “price gouging”. Among the report’s 20 recommendations, you can certainly find calls for greater competition and better transparency of pricing, but you won’t find a call for price gouging legislation.

Neither, by the way, will you find a recommendation that the ACCC be given powers to split up the big chains if they abuse their market power, which is Dutton’s promise to voters.

Some quaint parliamentary background: price gouging bans and divestiture powers are both proposals that have gone before the federal Parliament in the last year, in legislation drafted by the Greens.

The government and the opposition opposed both, at the time.

But the government is now campaigning to do the first bit, while the opposition promises to do the second bit, while both accuse each other of being hopeless.

Let’s put it another way: Labor wants to enlist the ACCC to stamp out a problem it says isn’t happening, while the Coalition wants to give the ACCC break-up powers it hasn’t asked for.

This is all a bit mind-bending, until you recall that the main game here isn’t necessarily to make sense; it’s to be louder than the other lot in denouncing a duopoly we all love to hate.

The theatricality is intense. As the election draws closer, the language becomes earthier, the imprecations stronger, the phoney swings more elaborate and yet simultaneously less logically consistent.

One’s put in mind of that scene in Ocean’s Eleven, where George Clooney pays a thug $2 million to pretend to beat him up for an hour or so, to distract attention from the casino heist underway next door.

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Coalition turns from big to small business

Dutton has long incorporated pot shots at big business into his routine — remember last year, when he urged a consumer boycott of Woolworths over its failure to stock Australia Day merchandise?

And the opposition leader’s threat of divestiture — breaking up powerful retailers if they abuse their market power — is part of his plan to move the Coalition away from big business and towards small businesses and sole traders, who live and work in the outer-metropolitan areas he hopes to pilfer from Albanese’s electoral basket.

At various points in the last month, Dutton has indicated that his break-up powers would extend beyond supermarkets and hardware retailers to include insurance companies, whose steep premium hikes of late he is very keen to associate with corporate greed and perfidy, and less keen to associate with the ever-increasing tendency for built structures to burn down, get flooded or get bits knocked off them by climate-change-related weather events.

Every now and again, one of Dutton’s colleagues — usually Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor — adds a squeak of dissent. Dutton leads a party that is historically a free-market affair. And his openness to the prospect of wading in and busting up companies — when considered alongside his plan to build state-owned nuclear power stations — makes a lot of his colleagues itchy.

Sharing any policy ground at all with the Greens makes them itchy. And when Albanese last year refused to jump aboard the divestiture bandwagon, declaring that Australia was “not the old Soviet Union”, well, that made some Liberals itchy too. Being trolled by a political opponent: that’s to be expected. But being called a commie by a guy who grew up in Labor’s socialist left? That burns.

Dutton’s other supermarket-related policy is to install a Supermarket Commissioner, empowered to hear confidential complaints from farmers and suppliers who currently feel railroaded by the supermarket giants’ disproportionate negotiating power.

Again, this ticks the box marked “Tough On Supermarkets”. But also, again, if the supermarket commissioner compels Coles or Woollies to pay a farmer more for what they grow, how does that add up to cheaper prices at the check-out?

Never mind the details, just watch the fur fly!

Some of these ideas have been around the block before. Labor leader Mark Latham trailed the idea of breaking up big retailers in 2004, but later confided to his diary that he’d encountered stern factional resistance because Labor’s most powerful union, the Shoppies, were opposed to the move. They still are.

And Kevin Rudd, who empathised strongly with cash-strapped shoppers in 2007 and promised to hit the big supermarkets with a price-monitoring scheme called Grocery Watch, was forced to amend and ultimately abandon the measure when it proved cumbersome, onerous and not-very-helpful.

The lesson?

When shopping for supermarket policies, look for firm, consistent fruit with clear provenance. Avoid products with short use-by dates, excessively garish packaging, or claims of health benefits you can’t independently verify.

And don’t buy anything on impulse.