A new 'grocery watch' program will be introduced tomorrow after an ACCC inquiry into the grocery sector found competition was being impinged.
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission's (ACCC) grocery inquiry has finally been made public and has cleared Coles and Woolworths of any wrong-doing.
The 642-page report found there was not enough competition among supermarkets but concluded normal factors are pushing up the cost of groceries.
It makes several recommendations to help consumers, including changes to some anti-competitive impacts of zoning and planning laws which were reportedly abused for commercial advantage.
The government is already looking at some of them, like the barriers which are locking competition out of the market.
A grocery watch scheme with up-to-date prices will also go live from tomorrow but Consumer Affairs Minister Chris Bowen today said he could not guarantee grocery prices would go down.
"We will do everything possible to ensure the market is as vigorous as possible to ensure prices do go down," Mr Bowen told reporters in Melbourne.
He refused to say supermarkets were "ripping off" consumers.
Opposition leader Brendan Nelson said shoppers should not put much faith in the new scheme.
"What Mr Rudd’s now proposing as some sort of what he calls GROCERYchoice is in fact GroceryWatch.
"Australians have woken up to FuelWatch as being nothing more then a stunt. So too GroceryWatch.
"Giving shoppers a pair of binoculars and telling them to look at the price of groceries is not going to do anything to bring it down."
Family First Senator Steve Fielding says the only way to bring down prices is for the government to hurry up and introduce mandatory unit pricing.
The government today said it would consider the best way to introduce a mandatory national unit pricing scheme, one of the key recommendations of the ACCC's six month inquiry.
But Senator Fielding said the government needs to stop discussing the issue and act.
"The Rudd government needs to get on their bike and get on with unit pricing," he said.
"They've had already seven months and if they're going to deliver on lower grocery prices, unit pricing has to come first."
Senator Fielding suggested the government fast-track the implementation of the scheme by using the unit pricing draft laws he introduced into parliament earlier this year.
If the proposal is passed, retailers would be forced to display the price per kilo, litre or item as well as the overall product price in order to help shoppers compare prices and find the cheapest products.