With everything else that's going on, it's easy to lose sight of the everyday because people are still doing it tough in business and in families. It's just that things like World Youth Day and rail strikes and climate change provide little hope for people's concerns being heard, let alone understood.
To return to what I've been saying for years now, the failure of competition in this country to provide relief on prices for struggling families.
It stands to reason that if outfits like Woolworths and Coles have over 80 per cent of the market, they can do what they like to the supplier and so the farmer or the grower is doing it tough. And they can do what they like to prices because for many there's nowhere else to shop.
And we talked last week about the truck driver. He has to bear all the increases in the cost of fuel on his own. But outfits like Woolworths and Coles keep telling the customer that the price of fresh food is going to go up because of the petrol prices.
And they get away with it.
Everyone's forgotten that way back in December 2004 - three and a half years ago - the ACCC advised ABC Learning Centres, the big childcare provider, that it wouldn't oppose ABC's acquisition of Peppercorn Management Group Limited and Child Care Centres Australia Limited. ABC acquired all the shares and it meant they became the largest child care provider in Australia, managing 771 centres.
2004. Well now what do we know?
With all the difficulties parents face with petrol prices, interest rates, supermarket prices and now the spectre of climate change adding to all of them, ABC are eliminating the competition and buying out their child care competitors to please themselves on price. And so now because the Trade Practices Act and the ACCC haven't prevented these mergers in the child care industry, the market for child care is excessively concentrated.
Adam Smith warned in his seminal text, The Wealth of Nations "To widen the market may frequently be agreeable enough to the interest of the public; but to narrow the competition the public must always be against it, as it can only serve to enable the dealers by raising their profits above what they naturally would be, to levy, for their own benefit, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens."
Well, there you have it, an absurd tax upon the rest of their fellow citizens.
ABC Child Care can now levy for their own benefit increased child care costs of 11 per cent.
Belting the same families already struggling under the Woolworths effect of the world's fastest rising supermarket prices. And the Reserve Bank's response to all of this is to whack up interest rates, when in fact if ABC Child Care hadn't been allowed to narrow the competition they wouldn't have been able to jack up prices. Customers could go elsewhere and ABC Child Care would lose business.
We don't have a diversified market in anything, and that's why we've got prices where they are and the only answer seems to be stop all this by jacking up interest rates.
We've got FuelWatch, GroceryWatch and I suppose we'll get Child Care Watch.
Meaningless.
The failure is the failure of the Trade Practices Act and excessively concentrated markets. How great a mess do we have to get into till someone wakes up that the problem is a lack of competition?
Reduce the number of players in the market, you reduce the competition and the consumer pays for this in higher prices.
It's not rocket science, but it seems beyond the understanding of all governments.
Or is it beyond their will?
