A report by the former chair of the ACCC Allan Fels has analysed price gouging and pricing practices by big businesses.Professor Fels will hand his findings to the government to consider the report's 35 recommendations.
Fels says Qantas has spent years invoking and curating its "national carrier" argument, which has given the airline plenty of benefits that we have paid "a lot for". "It needs to investigate and expose their causes and, as far as possible, remedy the problems, ineffective competition, vulnerable consumers, and exploitative business pricing practices."
"Companies have been able to leverage the disruptions and uncertainty that followed the COVID pandemic into unprecedented profitability. Professor Fels chaired the ACCC from 1995 until 2003 and his inquiry for the ACTU received hundreds of submissions from members of the public – mostly with concerns about prices in the supermarket, energy and banking sectors.The report recommended policy changes that could remove obstacles to competition, improve information to consumers, make it easier for consumers to switch suppliers and expose or shame exploitative business practices.
"In a period of rapid price increases, it is many consumers' evidence that businesses have not been fairly claiming to be discounting." "The last ACCC review of supermarket competition was in 2008 — it found the market was workably competitive and competition has only intensified since then," the spokesman said.Professor Fels accused Qantas of price gouging and made a direct link to the cost of living pressures being felt by Australians.
Professor Fels said the aviation sector was lacking competition and several policies and practices appeared to be making it difficult for a third player to enter the market. "The present system involves generators bidding on the basis of the prices they will charge. We should consider adopting the United States and Western Australian approach where the regulator determines how much production capacity is needed and allocates that task to the most competitive bidder."
"Australia's Big 4 banks not only have experienced larger profit margins over the period that the Reserve Bank has been raising rates since May 2022, but they have been able to raise their margins by enough to enable their profits to have been higher through the entire period of the pandemic than they experienced on average in the 15 years before the pandemic," Professor Fels wrote.
Loyalty taxes occur when a company sets a low initial price and then sharply increases the price in subsequent years when consumers cannot easily detect, question, or renegotiate them, and where the "transaction costs" of changing to other competitors are high., which were often a low-cost means of retaining and exploiting consumers by providing them with low-value rewards of dubious benefit.
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