EVERYBODY buys groceries and petrol, which is presumably why Prime Minister Kevin Rudd made it his business to raise community expectations that he was going to take action to keep their prices down.
He hasn't. He can't. And he won't.
The best he has been able to do is ask the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to investigate the marketplace for petrol and groceries and promote a couple of websites for consumers to visit.
For its part, the ACCC took reams of evidence, heard witness after witness and concluded that in the case of neither petrol nor groceries could it find that the dominant corporations in either sector were responsible for high prices.
Never mind the clear and repeated evidence that petrol prices don't move in line with the much-quoted Singapore index, as so often claimed by retailers. Time and again prices are seen to move up as soon as the index does, but when the index falls it isn't matched by a price drop at the bowser.
Never mind that a number of surveys have found lower grocery prices in suburbs where real competition exists than in suburbs served only by the dominant supermarket retailers.
And never mind the 2004 Government study which showed that farmgate prices for products ranging from milk to pineapples had fallen or stagnated while shop prices and retailers' margins had risen during the years surveyed.
The ACCC's findings won't persuade farmers and other producers that they are being hurt by their relative powerlessness in the food supply chain. And it won't persuade consumers that limited competition in the grocery marketplace isn't letting retailers widen profit margins.
Meanwhile, the Government's only real action in its war on prices has been to promise a national "Fuelwatch" website to help consumers find cheap petrol, and to establish a "Grocerychoice" website to do the same for supermarket products.
Hopes are high that Fuelwatch may help suppress petrol prices, but there is little prospect that Grocerychoice will have much effect. Its data is so general it is hard to see how any intending shopper could use it to advantage.
Perhaps the best prospect for improvement is proposed legislative reform to prevent large established retailers from using planning rules and questionable lease provisions to prevent competitors from setting up shop.
Red-tape diagnosis
SUGGESTIONS that bureaucratic red tape may discourage Hunter general practitioners from taking part in proposed GP superclinics in the region are worrying. Hunter people suffer badly from inadequate access to GP services and the superclinics have been eagerly awaited as a means of easing the problem. It is only natural that the Government should want to subject participants to proper scrutiny, but it is equally important that unnecessary obstacles are not put in the way of interested doctors. Hunter people need the clinics to succeed. This will require goodwill from both GPs and the Government.
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