Hard to take inquiry seriously
What's the point of a Senate inquiry into supermarket pricing? As we have seen in the past, if the government of the day wants to ignore findings from a Senate inquiry, they are buried and never enacted. Never has there been a better example than the Senate inquiry into the Murray-Darling Basin Plan, conducted in 2015.
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Many flaws in the plan were identified at the 2015 inquiry, with more than 30 recommendations which could have improved its implementation. But they did not suit the political narrative of Labor and the Greens, while the Coalition did not have the numbers in the Senate to enact legislation to support the recommendations, so they have been left on a shelf gathering dust. I suspect any Senate inquiry attempt to pull greedy and powerful supermarket companies into line will have the same result.
Meanwhile, the Basin Plan which senators wanted to improve back in 2015 goes from bad to worse. The best way to keep supermarket prices down is to support our farmers, but unfortunately this is a concept our current PM does not understand.
Shelley Scoullar, Albury
Quality of our democracy eroding
And they call it democracy.
It is curious that since the Voice referendum, there is so little interest in listening. While lauding the virtues of democracy in the face of undemocratic systems of government, our political and commercial overlords have little appetite for consulting the stakeholders before casting the pearls of their decisions before the swine of the populace.
Local government, inspired by the success of such administrative steamrolling, have jumped aboard and are making a swag of courageous decisions from opening the floodgates to abandoned e-scooters to giving Australia's national day the chop with the assurance that they will listen later to any feedback that misses the circular file. Some supermarkets, seeing blood in the water, are enthusiastically waltzing with the government's magisterial Matilda in poisoning the commercial waterholes so that Australia Day is more difficult to celebrate, much like removing the sails from a yacht race or the "snags" from the "barbie".
It is little wonder that younger Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians are reluctant to engage with political and commercial decision makers when they look destined to join women, disabled, seniors, LGBTIQ and many others on the trophy wall of those who have already made the decisions before ever consulting the population.
In terms of the quality of Australian democracy, we may not be what we eat, but we are tragically becoming what we are willing to wear.
