This is Albanese again trying to divert our attention from the real problem - Albanese himself.

The response to Covid was not just “unbalanced”: it was the work of totalitarians.

Totalitarianism always starts with an ‘emergency’ to justify ‘temporary’ suspension of individual rights - and in Australia, spend our money, wipe out businesses and jobs forever.

Once rights are suspended, it is not difficult for the people who have assumed the emergency to see to it that the emergency will persist. Government and media are still dragging up cases of what they claim to be Covid, but the public doesn't seem to be buying it anymore.

As for ‘price gouging: I don't know how other people budget and control their spending, but my wife and I have not had to increase our house keeping budget by a single cent. We do, of course, shop at a South Australian-owned supermarket, not with one of the two global giants.

Governments cause problems. They don’t fix them. As in all areas of commerce in a capitalist system, governments should keep their snouts out and let the market do the regulating.

Customers are the ones who can control how supermarkets treat them. But, as these customers are increasingly expecting governments to ‘look after them’ instead of taking control of their own lives, they are going to have suck it up in the march towards a communist-style existence.

It is obviously a complicated situation and, like all complicated things, well beyond the abilities of a bunch of politicians to solve.
Bargains are about and, if you ignore junk food, can be found.

I'm certain every farmer knows that supermarkets price gouge, based on farmgate returns and that charged by supermarkets for the same goods.

But Graham is correct, that's not the whole story, the rest is created by the cost of energy and its impact on all goods, services, transport, production and the checkout.

And as energy increases so also, the cost to the mug consumer, of the transmission line losses and distribution losses, which as a combined total add up to 75%!

So, if you're paying a dollar PKWH, then 75% of that is what you pay for combined (1950s-time warp) transmission and distribution losses.

This is entirely down to labor and their love affair with dirty, polluting coal and their insane refusal to embrace nuclear (MSR thorium) and microgrids.

Micro grids would all but end most of the current transmission and distribution losses.

So, micro grids would mean we could get the price down to around 1 cent PKWH and with that, usher in an economic miracle the like of which the world has never seen. And make transmission/distribution far less vulnerable! AND THEY NEED TO BE!

Importantly, as this economic miracle occurs, we must keep foreign real estate investors out of our marketplace, so they don't f--k it up. As they did with the Irish economic miracle!

The current fiscal surplus has nothing to do with crowing (cock-a-doddle-do) labor's policies, but the windfall taxes they get from the increased prices we get for our rocks and energy exports.
Alan B.

If the donors and "stakeholders " agree, that inflation has nothing to do with Albanese's massive migration, all-time rental squeeze, and failure to take on the gas cartel, then that becomes the alternative truth.

So much the better, if Albanese and the stakeholders agree, to look-over-there at the complete non-issue of grocery prices. Try Aldi, guys

Graham is right, supermarket margins are too small to account for more than a tiny fraction of the increases in consumer prices we have seen in recent years. The Australia Institute’s arguments about a “profit-price spiral” are also nonsense, suggesting that growth in the GDP price deflator caused by record high prices for our commodity exports is somehow responsible for domestic consumer price inflation.

https://www.rba.gov.au/information/foi/disclosure-log/pdf/222347.pdf

When the ACCC looked at the supermarket sector in 2008, it concluded that lack of competition and increasing profit margins had made only a small contribution to rising prices, and “the vast majority of grocery price increases in Australia are attributable to other factors, such as supply and demand changes in international and domestic markets, increases in the costs of production and domestic weather conditions.” It also made some sensible suggestions to improve competition, for example by removing lease provisions that prevented shopping centres from leasing retail space to competing supermarkets. If this inquiry does the same, it might actually do some good.

https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/Grocery%20inquiry%20report%20-%20July%202008.pdf

And if it comes up with measures to promote competition and productivity more broadly, not just in retailing, it would definitely do some good. Lack of dynamism and competition across the Australian economy (not just in retailing) could be part of the explanation for a more serious and intractable economic problem, namely the stagnation in productivity in recent years that has contributed to the slowdown in growth in living standards. Some interesting analysis has been done on this by Andrew Leigh, who is now a Labor government assistant minister but was formerly an academic economist. He points to rising industry concentration, lower job mobility, fewer business startups and the long-term dominance of a few large companies as symptomatic of a lack of competition and economic dynamism that is not good for Australian consumers.

https://www.andrewleigh.com/a_more_dynamic_economy_fh_gruen_lecture

So at least one member of Albanese’s team understands the importance of competition and productivity, even if the government itself seems hell-bent on measures that will make productivity growth even harder to achieve.

This is just a red herring to cover up Liebor's huge cost of living increases and the drop in real wages.