You can listen to the Front on your smart sneaker every morning to hear the latest episode, just say play the news from the Australian. From the Australian, here's what's on the Front. I'm Claire Harvey. It's Thursday, July eighteen. Australia is accepting Israel's explanation for the airstrike that killed aid worker Zomi Frankom in Gaza. Franklm and her colleagues from the World Central Kitchen charity died instantly on April one, in what the Israeli Defense Force said was a tragic accident.
The Albanese government sent former Defense chief Mark Binskin to investigate the debts, and today The Australian reveals Binskin will recommend new protocols for international aid organizations working in war zones. The Greens want Labor to overrule the Reserve Bank of Australia if it tries to hike interest rates again. That story is part of the Australian series on the Small Party with Big Ambitions, and it's live now at the
Australian dot com dot au. If you live in the Bush, you're probably listening to the Front via satellite like Elon Musk's Starlink network, which has become a crucial part of Australia's food belt. In today's episode, we'll dive into the big issues for the Bush, including patchy internet and why
you might be eating mince for dinner tonight. I'm willing to bet you're cooking dinner at home much more often these days, and I reckon you've cut back on takeaway coffee times are tight and at the supermarket we're buying stuff in tins and stuff on special. But here's the twist, many Australians are also buying more expensive supermarket products. Here's Cole's chief commercial officer and a Croft.
Definitely a trendom frozen in bulk as customers become ready savy around how they shop.
Croft is speaking of the Australians Global Food Forum, a gathering of farmers, manufacturers, retailers and investors we hold every year.
But we are seeing customers trading into the premium tees. So there's nodar as customers are eating more at home that premium section across lots of our brands coming through and with seeing that and our calls fin ess up kind of twenty percent.
At the independent supermarket chain IgA Richies. They call it the mincemeat Index.
We're finding out mid sales beef min's chicken mince is through the roof, and that's an indication that people are trading down, perhaps from a steak and instead buying the cheaper cuts of meat.
This is the boss of Ida Richies, Fred Harrison. He's talking at the Food to Our retail reporter Eli Greenblat but I don't.
Think people are making a lovely specific meal five nights a week. I think people are making big batches of food. We know now our pasta sales are through the roof, and the ingredients are going the pasta sources, etc. People are making big batches and might put it in the fridge or the freezer and use that two or three times through the week.
And that twist again, we're buying a nicer kind of mints.
It is a little bit more of the premium into not just the cheapest means some of the premium minss. But that category is going strengths to strength.
So we're shopping more. But we are not loving the supermarkets right now. Allegations of price gouging and excessive market power have coals and woolies under pressure. But the retailers are suffering with the cost of living too, as manufacturers push up prices and the cost of fuel and energy saws and so are suppliers. Jeff Kennett is the former Premier of Victoria and now chair of the original Juice Company.
Right now, the public are looking around more than ever before for value, and that's tough on all the supermarkets, small and large. But there is a point which the public says, I'm not going to pay more than this price for a liter and a half of juice. So we're getting squeezed. One end, the public understandably is squeezing, as is the end, and I'm drinking more whiskey.
Here's a little example from IgA Richie's Fred Harrison says on July one, twenty three, the company's costs in Victoria rose by four million dollars in government charges overnight. That was an increase in payroll tax, a mental health levy, and work cover. That's just one.
State governments are screwing the private sector. They're screwing them. Why is it always the poor bloody supermarkets for actually delivering the farmer's product, employing the people paying the taxes and charges who have been whipped to death.
And here's another challenge staff.
We're finding people want to come in and perhaps work in the store, but they don't want any responsibility, so to get management, whether it be store management or deli managers or produce managers. I just want to come in work nine to five, had no hassles, don't want to take on responsibility. Getting leaders is one of the biggest problems in Australia at the moment.
And they want to serve in a supermarket from home, don't they thank you?
Supermarkets are so unpopular right now that there's a strange double act the Coalition and the Greens both want the power to force the powerful duopoly Coals and Woolies to break up. It sounds good, right, more owners, more competition, hopefully lower prices and better deals for workers and suppliers. But and across from Coals totally like she doesn't think it would work.
We're run eight hundred and fifty SUPs markets across office see their whole national footprint, and I think we have a very large fixed cost base. And if that was seven hundred and fifty supermarkets, it actually wouldn't make a meaningful difference to our cost base, and therefore it would really impede our ability to fractionalize those costs across our business and to drive greater efficiency, and therefore, as a result of that that could or may lead higher prices for customers.
Ida Richies has a different take. Asked if they could buy supermarkets in say, regional Queensland if Coals or Woolies was forced to sell them off. Fred Harrison said this.
Look in the instance of Richie's, we probably could. However, it's not quite as simple as the government saying you've got to offload one hundred stores or slow therese. Landlords involved, and landlords have made decisions and borrowed money and have commitments and cap rates that are important to them, and a lot of these Coals Wooly stores pay significant rents that independents are necessarily in a position to mat set rent.
Fred Harrison poses another solution, draw a line in the sand and accept the deewopoly as it is for the moment, but then plan for a future which gives shoppers more options.
In other words, instead of having Woolish Coals on every second or third street corner, what we could possibly do before a new site is approved, whether it be a greenfield site or an acquisition, is to a competition test and say okay, in that market a five kilometer radius, say a metro, how many woolies or coals are there there now? And is there an independent or good independent
in that area or anally? I think the more independence to get out there, the better it's going to be for competition in the long run.
After the break, why frustrated farmers have turned to Elon Musk's space program to get reliable internet. The Global Food Forum, sponsored by Visi is part of how the Australian gets into the contest of ideas from the city to the sticks. Check us out at the Australian dot com dot au and we'll be back after this break. Starlink, if you've heard of it, you might know this is one of the businesses owned by the world's richest man, Elon Musk.
It's probably the business rather than Tesla or Twitter that makes Masks so influential. Starlink is a satellite internet provider fired by Masks SpaceX rockets.
One contention and with a pad to have freeback so it.
Mask's big innovation was to create reusable rockets which can launch into space, set satellites into a low orbit and then return to Earth to be deployed all over again. On the grim battlefields of Ukraine, Russian and Ukrainian soldiers alike are buying Starlink boxes so vacant connect to the world, and in the Australian bush, anyone who wants reliable internet is also buying a Starlink box. They are about three hundred and sixty dollars and then you pay around one
hundred and forty dollars a month to connect. Starlink says it has more than two hundred thousand customers in Australia.
We've had Starlink for quite a while. I still have my Mbian Skymaster. I'm big on having a bit of security and redundancy.
This is Georgie Somerset. She's a farmer and a grazier and she's one of those powerful country women who was turned speaking up for the bush into her lifetime's calling.
But our businesses have become very reliant on being connected. So it's not a it'd be nice to have mobile coverage. It's actually we rely on it for telemetry and observations and things like that. Now and when we we saw one of the satellites failed last year, that's directing our tractors. That's our data and our planting and our harvesting data, you know. So we're this is not a nice to have, it's a actual business operations one I one to have connectivity now.
She's on the board of the ABC, a director of the National Farmers Federation and the general president of ag Force Queensland. For many farmers, local internet providers just aren't cutting it. Sales of the NBN satellite services have been in rapid decline, the number of connections falling almost twenty percent in the first quarter of this year alone. Starlink says it delivers between one hundred and two hundred and
fifty megabits of download per second across Australia. That's up to twice as fast as four G. While Georgie's keeping her Skymaster service, many others are not. It's not just connecting to the internet, which is fraught. Some regional areas could lose their phone in coming months. Telstra will shut down their three G services also known as their next G networks, in August. Optus isn't far behind with their
three G networks to shut down in September. While most of Australia moved off the three G network to four G and five G long ago, some regional areas still don't receive those signals. For some this goes beyond being able to make a phone call or send a text. Older automated farming equipment which uses the three G network will also become obsolete. Georgie Somerset says the cost of living crisis in the Bush is a little different.
And I think it's interesting when you hear that they talk about sort of twenty percent of people are chasing the specials. You often don't have that privilege of chasing the specials when you only go into town once every couple of weeks.
Are you seeing changes in the ability of families to remain on the land, to remain producing food.
I'm not saying a diminution of that at the moment, but what I think will see is probably more families doing the labor, so less labor units required, which then can have a flow through in rural communities. And when those families go, it has a flow on to schools and things like that as well. It's a tricky conundrum.
An artwork by the Australian's cartoonist Johannes Leek has prompted Green senator at Marine Feruki to threaten legal action. To see the cartoon and read Why Feruki is Upset, join ours subscribers at Beaustralian dot Com do AU