In Monday’s Australian Financial Review Rod Sims argued: “The way I always approach issues is in two stages. Stage one is, do I think there’s economic harm? Either to the competitive process or to consumers if we’re talking about consumer issues. Has there been any detriment? And then step two is do we think we can succeed in court?”
It’s an odd way to approach competition. Both steps assume a centralised regulator knows when a market is perfectly competitive, and what drives the consumption behaviour of 22-odd million consumers.
Read the whole thing – it is very good.
Update: The Monday AFR piece is here.
There’s no milk on sale for $1 a litre where Australian Competition and Consumer Commission chairman Rod Sims does his grocery shopping – at David Jones Foodhall.
Wow. People who can afford the David Jones food hall don’t have to worry about prices much. No wonder the ACCC will undertake action to raise prices on everyone else.
Sinc – I don’t want to bombard this article. But this has come out of Rome today:
http://www.zenit.org/en/articles/how-not-to-report-a-papal-conclave
It shows just how BAD Australian media reporting is!
The ACCC is a parasitic organisation infested with smart-arse lawyers who know less about life than a political adviser.
The only useful things it could do in relation to supermarkets is apply pressure to state and local governments to remove barriers to entry, and make it too risky for supermarkets to engage in unconscionable conduct with suppliers.
And if it was abolished before doing those, the net benefit would be positive anyway.
That’s because they sell milk. The stuff being sold for $1/L is not milk. Or hadn’t you noticed the milk companies falling over themselves to put ‘permeate free’ on their labels?
Which is what the ACCC is for, amongst other things. As I said before, companies behave ever so much better when they know they are being watched. Perhaps Mr Sims should make a point to shop in a different supermarket every week.
And as always you need a watcher for the watchers, or they breed out of control too. Especially if lots of superannuated ALP luvvies need new jobs.
Human nature does not change. So long as you engineer for this everything will go just fine.
When Sims was appointed I thought he should be given the benefit of the doubt. Now he’s shown himself to be a dope and menace. I heard him freting about petrol discounts the other day and realised he actually has no idea that raising prices is bad for consumers.
The majority of Coles and Woolies milk is permeate free and soon it all will.
There is no such thing as real milk in Australia it was made illegal by our betters may moons ago.
We are the only country in the world that is outraged by cheap food and petrol.
Garbage. Companies behave better when they know that if the fuck up, the consumer will abandon them for other competitors. We need open markets not pencil pushing cock gobblers with clipboards.
Aren’t permeates just a natural milk byproduct? There is nothing harmful about them and leaving them out doesn’t make the milk taste better. ‘Permeate free’ is a marketing gimmick – and even if permeates were a problem, it would be a problem for Food Standards Australia, not a competition issue.
OK I have a question for the Cat followers on the ACCC. My understanding is that this body is to protect the consumer from predatory behaviour from ruthless businesses.
I had what looked like an invoice for renewal for a domain name that was about to expire, on what looked to be one of the business groups domain names. I approve all such invoices except these notifications come via email and we didn’t deal with this company so I was suspicious. I checked the ABN and it was registered. The fine print on this invoice stated that it was for registration of a new domain name with a .com extension, not an existing .com.au, at nearly 10 times the going commercial rate. This in my opinion was predatory as an unaware and busy accounts payable clerk would process this without a second thought. I shot a complaint though to the ACCC and they responded with “that’s not our problem”. If not, what are they there for?
Permeate is the liquid left over when you remove the good stuff like protein. It comes out of the NF membrane units (like desalination membranes but bigger pores to let salts through but not milk protein).
Adulterating anything is a form of dishonesty. They are skirting the regulations by taking some milk, pulling out the good stuff to produce milk powder, then diluting the rest of the milk with what is basically water, salt and calcium lactate. Dilute too much you get $1/L “milk” which tastes like chalk.
This is not so much different from the Chinese milk formula scandal where they flouted the protein regs by adding an industrial nitrogen containing chemical to make it look like they had the right protein content. Which oh by the way then poisoned the kids.
Adulterating food for profit is an old old crime. Nothing is new under the sun, not even human credulousness. That is why we need something like the ACCC to do its job and not turn into a sinecure for incompetent Laborites.
Rohan
Good question – I thought predatory pricing was in the ACCC’s domain. Apparently not.
Yes I do also fail to see why I have to drink byproduct in a country that is well capable of producing enough true milk thanks and I always look for that permeate free label. So when did this practice start?
Permeate got knocked out because it became cheaper to produce milk without it. That’s my understanding. It’s a bit like “HORMONE FREE CHICKEN”…. all chicken is hormone free, the industry has never used them in Australia.