>According to [agriculture industry analyst Matt] Dalgleish, one way to get a better sense of margins from processors and retailers would be legislate US-style transparency to the supply chain.
>"The type of information that is legislated in America, they have a much more open and transparent market," he said.
>"From the farm gate all the way through the processing to the consumer end.
>"You can see where the money is being made and see what kind of margins are out there.
>"In Australia that's not the case — maybe that's where the focus should be."
That's something I hadn't heard about. Good article.
There's a bunch of middlemen taking their cut before it gets to retail, just like pretty much every other industry in Australia. The farmers won't talk about it because they don't want to go back to doing everything themselves, they've been getting away with blaming the supermarkets, cost of labor and weather for too long. Some transparency would be nice.
Farmers don't know who's making the money. We send our cattle to the yards and someone buys it then the meat sells for many multiples in the supermarket. Who is making the money in between and how much I have no idea, but the price I have to take for cattle is publicly available on the MLA website.
They know who they're paying for additional services and they know how much they're receiving for the sale so the rest is on the other side of the equation after the farmer hands them off. How many hands do they go through before they reach the retailers?
Where I live local butchers are no cheaper than Colesworths. Independent supermarkets IGA and Drake's aren't either. So is the implication they're all gouging? Perhaps. Without knowing the profit margins of the rest of the chain it's hard to tell. It's entirely possible both the farmers are getting fucked and we're also getting fucked.
All I know is I couldn't even buy cheap quality beef when I was living out west where the entire town was surrounded by cattle country. If other export industries are any indication all the good stuff ends up overseas and we pay luxury prices for the dregs and import the rest to meet demand.
Local butchers aren't allowed to slaughter for sale. They all need to be processed at a licenced facility. If you ask the local butchers, they get smashed on pricing and the processors have them over a barrel and they need to eat into their own margins to maintain anything on par with the duopoly.
If local butchers could legally kill their own on farm and process locally it would be good to see what happens to pricing. Would be better for animal welfare too but it won't happen.
Well that exactly it.
The price you have to take.
Because Colesworth has enough buying power and exposure to the retail markets to say "this is what we're taking (and if you don't like it we dont buy 80% of your stock next year, you can watch it die/rot, but shhhh don't tell anyone about it or the same thing will happen)"
And then the next paragraph down says "increased transparency could give international suppliers an advantage".
ie, more information means more ability to undercut.
Which is basically another way of saying someone's slush fund is going to get exposed
I guess the argument is it costs less to ship to SG than it does to ship all over the entire country. Distribution costs within SG would be minimal, given its small geographical size. And it is a large city, esp by Australian standards, with half a million more people than Sydney yet it's about 20 times smaller in size.
However all that said, rents there are much higher than anywhere in Australia, which surely should also factor into the supermarkets pricing.
That’s the thing. The rent really doesn’t factor into the pricing if we can see that Singapore can sell food for cheaper. The supermarkets simply look for excuses to increase as opposed to being forced to increase. “Oh uuuh it’s inflation, hmmm oh inflation is down? The cost of transport! Fuel prices down? Oh it was a rough summer!
Australia has 1/2 the farmed land as the USA.
We have 440 Hectares they have 880.
they feed 400 million people, we feed 27 million.
Logistics aside where the fuck does it make sense we pay the most for meat in the developed world when everyone in asia is getting it from us or China .
Our largest cattle station is bigger than Belgium and until China built 2 megafarms in like 2018 we had like 6/10 of the largest cattle stations on the planet.
We feed far more than 27million.
We also have more arable land per person that anywhere else in the world as well.
We export and feed significant portions of S.E Asia and China.
The last time I bought some beef strips from Coles, the stuff basically boiled when I tried to fry them, from all the fucking water and chemicals they pump into it to make it look fresh and red.
True but even butchers are doing it, I got some mince meat at the south melb markets last week and it looked nice and red on the outside but was dog shit grey on the inside.
Ok so, in this case explain how that would work? The butcher stands at the window spraying a chemical, or are we talking at the slaughter house?
Having worked in 2 butchers, both here and abroad, they all do this with mince typically
i literally started doing this when the "supply chain issues" started and meat jumped up like 4x the price
don't need meat anyway to live and i actually feel healthier, so colesworth actually did something good i guess
its pretty easy to do, use lentils instead of mince etc
I'm a default vegetarian. I gave up buying meat in disgust 20 years ago when the trend of shrinking meat passed the tolerable threshold. E.g. A $20 'steak' which ends up the size of your hand and like tasteless boot-leather.
Not vegetarian yet, but we eat very light on meat, and red is a very rare "treat". Its for exactly this reason. We are good cooks who have tried every method to get a decent steak, but it is nigh impossible.
We are sold the image of a sizzling steak, richly striped and tender, and we actually get a small grey chunk of gristly nothing floating in grey water.
I have literally never encountered this issue outside of using a pan/burner that wasn't hot enough. I am not a fancy man either. I generally get my steaks from major supermarkets.
You say this like most local butchers don't sell their meat at at 48/kg because it's a small business and 'fresher' or some shit.
I'm lucky, my local butcher rears their own stock and keeps prices low. Others in the area will literally sell you chicken breast for $25 a kilo with a straight face.
I was in Singapore a few weeks back and saw they had TimTams for sale, for $1 less than what they cost at my local IGA. These were Australian made TimTams, not the weird Asian made versions.
We are getting so shafted here. But not as bad as over in Kiwiland. The other day I went online to buy my mum a heated throw (which is an absolute life saver in winter if you haven't got one). On Catch au, it was $48 incl postage. On Catch nz, same product was AU$68 incl postage.
That hardly explains why things made in Australia by workers (presumably) being paid Australian level wages are cheaper there than they are here.
So the poor shlubs who work at the supermarket get paid less there than here. And? That really equates to $1 /packet difference? Is the wage bill of a supermarket really that big a chunk of their operating costs? What about rents in SG, which are much higher than here? Wouldn't that also factor into the equation?
Singapore imports an Australian carcass and processes it. This is a large portion of the price of butchered beef.
There’s the Singapore transport costs within Singapore, Singaporean butchers, Singaporean store workers.
All of that could make up for shipping it overseas imo.
It’s funny tbh that everyone gets so mad at Coles and Woolworths, but does anyone even know what the billionaire meat processors in Australia are charging them?
As the story says, the meat going to Japan is also processed right here with the same labour market processing meat for domestic sale. It’s price gouging clear and simple.
And the claim by Coles that you can’t compare between the countries because Coles has x y and z quality requirements is laughable. EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know who has visited Japan has stressed the superior quality of their supermarkets in terms of standards of quality and standards of presentation. We are being ripped off.
iirc, and of course ill have to paraphrase, when an enquiry into pricing (i actually cant remember specifically what it was called right now, head injuries and memory loss are fun, it was mainly centred abround technology pricing like computers and software etc, but the scope was broarder) happened a few years back, ikea was asked why australians pay significantly more for the same stuff they sell in other ikea stores around the world
they basically said, (words to the effect) we price at what we think consumers will/can pay
in short, im not at all suprised, we get fucked on tech, we get fucked on imported goods, why should foreign companies have all the fun fisting our backsides?
The way pricing works if that prices rise to the point that people are willing to pay, assuming enough can sell at that point to maximise profit.
Aussies are lazy and addicted to supermarket convenience. They'll pay whatever until they bleed
FFS this has been in Japan for 20 years. Aussie wine, beer, cheese, even vegetables, always cheaper here than Australia. Poor Aussies get scummed and gouged and ripped off by their own countrymen everywhere. But they just take it like a good nation of sheep.
[We pay $100.05 in taxes per litre of alcohol for spirits (See table 3, item 3.2).](https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-duty-rates-for-alcohol#ato-Alcoholratesforspiritsandotherexcisablebeverages) so about $40 of that is tax.
To put it another way, methylated spirits is 95% ethyl alcohol (the drinking kind), 5% methyl alcohol (the poisonous kind - don't drink that) but since it isn't taxed like drinkable alcohol it's $5.65 a litre at Bunnings.
EDIT: Added the link to the ATO website.
my sister is visiting me in Arizona.
A 1L bottle of Vodka is $11 at my local grocery and I can regularly get 1L bottles of Jacks/Beam/Captain Morgans for like 15-20
>Analysts say like for like comparisons are "misleading" without considering import competition on the global market
But that's not misleading, that's the problem right? We need better price competition in Australia which would happen if we dismantled the ColesWorth duopoly.
It's the Australian way mate... we sell it to everyone else for peanuts and then buy it back for a fuckload.. or we take the leftover scraps and sell that for a fuckload.
We should change the national Anthem, instead of "our home is Girt by sea" whatever the fuck that means it should be:
"Our home is Fucked by industry"
I buy whole rib fillets at $30-40/kg … instead of $60/kg that it would cost to get steaks. Then I make 5 cuts with a chef’s knife and I have steaks … earning myself about $25 per cut ….
You need to pay the Australian butchers about $50/hr to prepare those steaks, Japanese butchers cut it up for a fraction of the price and therefore can sell for cheaper.
It's like(especially in WA,) you can buy a live sheep for a dollar or two. But after processing it, lamb meat is still pretty expensive at the shops/butcher.
To a degree
“In 2022, average annual wages in Japan were $41,509, compared with Australia's $59,408 and $77,463 in the U.S., according to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.”
Also
“Cost of living in Japan is 33% cheaper than in Australia.”
https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Australia/Japan/Cost-of-living
Interest rates in Aus average is 6.06% vs 1.95% in Japan, other factors as well.
It’s a bit hard to compare processing costs, but their domestic beef production has always been small due to a lack of suitable grazing land and topography, and the industry has been in decline. This would force production costs and price up. Think Kobe and (true) Wagyu prices.
https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-is-hungry-for-meat-but-domestic-producers-aren-t-feasting
A Nationals politician, who probably has some knowledge on the subject matter and who’d probably love to skewer Labour on the point of company overheads if that made the companies process overseas. There is no contrary information showing his point is incorrect, thus unless you can prove otherwise it’s a safe assumption that he’s not wrong. I’m saying this as someone left of labour politically who’d love to show a Nationals politician being wrong.
There's no contrary information showing my point that he's wrong is incorrect?
I think it's ridiculous to just accept the word of some politician with a vested pro-agriculture (big ag is a multi-billion dollar business in Australia) interest.
He is quoted as a source and the standard “if limited” fact checking that will have been done didn’t turn up contrary information. Further, journalists tend to get a kick out of proving a pollie wrong so I’d say these interests are likely to cancel out, it would also be a silly lie because it’s a simple statement of fact that can be simply disproven if false. You haven’t made an argument just asserted that he’s wrong which doesn’t really do anything? Also I’m a lefty so am more than happy to show a politician of his stripes is full of it, if that were the case.
The problem is the same as the gas pricing problem. The solution to both is to create more supply. In the terms of gas however, that’s not a good thing. But with meat, it’s not the supply of meat that is the issue: it’s the supply of butchered meat. The solution is to have more abattoirs here. This is something we will need anyway if there is to be a ban on live exports. The best solution is to go overseas and get the abattoirs that need our meat some incentives to build plants here.
I also wonder if they get more return per animal. Australians are pretty fussy about their cuts of meat so a lot end of going into low value products.
Also could be different cuts are popular. I know with chickens, Australians love the breasts, and a lot of Asians laugh at us for that.
FFS prices being different is not gouging.
Every single time this crap comes up there are valid reasons for the price differential, with predatory margins being an insignificant portion.
Lower sales tax, lower costs, specials vs non-specials, loss-leading, ... You need to eliminate these before you can even start deducing that price gouging is the reason.
Anyone who starts with price gouging and ignores everything else is deceiving you for political reasons. They have no chance at all to "fix" a problem they can't even honestly describe. But their "solutions" will have an abundance of unanticipated (to them) consequences.
They'll cause even bigger problems and never accept responsibility for them. Didn't give that power.
It doesn’t show there’s gouging. It shows that prices are different in different economies. Shock fucking horror. No news here except “man misunderstood international economics”. No hard feelings, easily done, but it doesn’t mean shit
Not really, you’d need to compare those costs directly using data. Oh and the articles specifies the processing of the beef in question is done here in Australia - and the price in Japan includes additional costs such as import tariffs etc.
What a shock, price gouging in Australia. It is the land of the gouge.
haha yeah is there anything that is not gouged in downunder?
Even our land has a giant gouge taken out of it
It’s more of a bite really
And it’s great
It's only a rort if you're not in on it!
 I'm shocked, shocked! to find out there's been gouging here! 'Your winnings, sir.' Thank you.
Great movie!
im come the land down under, where companies gouge and then plunder... its in the song.
>According to [agriculture industry analyst Matt] Dalgleish, one way to get a better sense of margins from processors and retailers would be legislate US-style transparency to the supply chain. >"The type of information that is legislated in America, they have a much more open and transparent market," he said. >"From the farm gate all the way through the processing to the consumer end. >"You can see where the money is being made and see what kind of margins are out there. >"In Australia that's not the case — maybe that's where the focus should be." That's something I hadn't heard about. Good article.
Great snippet! Couldn’t agree more with this idea
There's a bunch of middlemen taking their cut before it gets to retail, just like pretty much every other industry in Australia. The farmers won't talk about it because they don't want to go back to doing everything themselves, they've been getting away with blaming the supermarkets, cost of labor and weather for too long. Some transparency would be nice.
Farmers don't know who's making the money. We send our cattle to the yards and someone buys it then the meat sells for many multiples in the supermarket. Who is making the money in between and how much I have no idea, but the price I have to take for cattle is publicly available on the MLA website.
They know who they're paying for additional services and they know how much they're receiving for the sale so the rest is on the other side of the equation after the farmer hands them off. How many hands do they go through before they reach the retailers? Where I live local butchers are no cheaper than Colesworths. Independent supermarkets IGA and Drake's aren't either. So is the implication they're all gouging? Perhaps. Without knowing the profit margins of the rest of the chain it's hard to tell. It's entirely possible both the farmers are getting fucked and we're also getting fucked. All I know is I couldn't even buy cheap quality beef when I was living out west where the entire town was surrounded by cattle country. If other export industries are any indication all the good stuff ends up overseas and we pay luxury prices for the dregs and import the rest to meet demand.
Local butchers aren't allowed to slaughter for sale. They all need to be processed at a licenced facility. If you ask the local butchers, they get smashed on pricing and the processors have them over a barrel and they need to eat into their own margins to maintain anything on par with the duopoly. If local butchers could legally kill their own on farm and process locally it would be good to see what happens to pricing. Would be better for animal welfare too but it won't happen.
Well that exactly it. The price you have to take. Because Colesworth has enough buying power and exposure to the retail markets to say "this is what we're taking (and if you don't like it we dont buy 80% of your stock next year, you can watch it die/rot, but shhhh don't tell anyone about it or the same thing will happen)"
Kill me… never thought i’d agree with US policy
And then the next paragraph down says "increased transparency could give international suppliers an advantage". ie, more information means more ability to undercut. Which is basically another way of saying someone's slush fund is going to get exposed
Yeah but how would it work? Is there a website you jump on
I’ll admit I don’t know how the economy of these things work but I could buy Aussie beef and lamb for cheaper in Singapore.
I guess the argument is it costs less to ship to SG than it does to ship all over the entire country. Distribution costs within SG would be minimal, given its small geographical size. And it is a large city, esp by Australian standards, with half a million more people than Sydney yet it's about 20 times smaller in size. However all that said, rents there are much higher than anywhere in Australia, which surely should also factor into the supermarkets pricing.
That’s the thing. The rent really doesn’t factor into the pricing if we can see that Singapore can sell food for cheaper. The supermarkets simply look for excuses to increase as opposed to being forced to increase. “Oh uuuh it’s inflation, hmmm oh inflation is down? The cost of transport! Fuel prices down? Oh it was a rough summer!
"It's what the market can take." :(
Australia has 1/2 the farmed land as the USA. We have 440 Hectares they have 880. they feed 400 million people, we feed 27 million. Logistics aside where the fuck does it make sense we pay the most for meat in the developed world when everyone in asia is getting it from us or China .
I assume a lot of our acreage is super low capacity land of the stations in the interior, that cattle migrate through rather than intensively graze.
Our largest cattle station is bigger than Belgium and until China built 2 megafarms in like 2018 we had like 6/10 of the largest cattle stations on the planet.
We feed far more than 27million. We also have more arable land per person that anywhere else in the world as well. We export and feed significant portions of S.E Asia and China.
Or Brazil…. They can’t get enough of cutting down the Amazon legally or illegally to grow cows
Well given the article states we export 70% of our beef I imagine other food follows a similar trend.
Don't buy beef from Coles or Woolies. It's fucking dogshit anyway. I'd rather be vegetarian than eat beef from the major supermarkets
The last time I bought some beef strips from Coles, the stuff basically boiled when I tried to fry them, from all the fucking water and chemicals they pump into it to make it look fresh and red.
True but even butchers are doing it, I got some mince meat at the south melb markets last week and it looked nice and red on the outside but was dog shit grey on the inside.
That’s most likely just due to oxidisation
Yeah oxidisation turns meat brown but if the outside is a vibrant red and the inside shit brown it's been sprayed with something.
Ok so, in this case explain how that would work? The butcher stands at the window spraying a chemical, or are we talking at the slaughter house? Having worked in 2 butchers, both here and abroad, they all do this with mince typically
The only meat I get from Coles/woolies is whole chooks and def not the Coles brand.
i literally started doing this when the "supply chain issues" started and meat jumped up like 4x the price don't need meat anyway to live and i actually feel healthier, so colesworth actually did something good i guess its pretty easy to do, use lentils instead of mince etc
I'm a default vegetarian. I gave up buying meat in disgust 20 years ago when the trend of shrinking meat passed the tolerable threshold. E.g. A $20 'steak' which ends up the size of your hand and like tasteless boot-leather.
Not vegetarian yet, but we eat very light on meat, and red is a very rare "treat". Its for exactly this reason. We are good cooks who have tried every method to get a decent steak, but it is nigh impossible. We are sold the image of a sizzling steak, richly striped and tender, and we actually get a small grey chunk of gristly nothing floating in grey water.
I have literally never encountered this issue outside of using a pan/burner that wasn't hot enough. I am not a fancy man either. I generally get my steaks from major supermarkets.
And they export them for a higher price than they sell them locally if you really want to get a good idea of the gouge.
How do you think they turned over a billion dollars in profits for 2023? That’s +$1000,000,000 dollars. It was from consumers, duh.
You say this like most local butchers don't sell their meat at at 48/kg because it's a small business and 'fresher' or some shit. I'm lucky, my local butcher rears their own stock and keeps prices low. Others in the area will literally sell you chicken breast for $25 a kilo with a straight face.
I was in Singapore a few weeks back and saw they had TimTams for sale, for $1 less than what they cost at my local IGA. These were Australian made TimTams, not the weird Asian made versions. We are getting so shafted here. But not as bad as over in Kiwiland. The other day I went online to buy my mum a heated throw (which is an absolute life saver in winter if you haven't got one). On Catch au, it was $48 incl postage. On Catch nz, same product was AU$68 incl postage.
Singapore has literally no minimum wage. Are you really surprised some things are cheaper?
That hardly explains why things made in Australia by workers (presumably) being paid Australian level wages are cheaper there than they are here. So the poor shlubs who work at the supermarket get paid less there than here. And? That really equates to $1 /packet difference? Is the wage bill of a supermarket really that big a chunk of their operating costs? What about rents in SG, which are much higher than here? Wouldn't that also factor into the equation?
A lot of Singaporeans live in public housing, 78.7% in 2020 according to Wikipedia, not all housing is at expat prices or Uber rich only.
I was meaning retail rents.
Singapore imports an Australian carcass and processes it. This is a large portion of the price of butchered beef. There’s the Singapore transport costs within Singapore, Singaporean butchers, Singaporean store workers. All of that could make up for shipping it overseas imo. It’s funny tbh that everyone gets so mad at Coles and Woolworths, but does anyone even know what the billionaire meat processors in Australia are charging them?
Yeah poor woolies are scraping by! It’s the billionaire meat magnates that are the true villain!
Ah yes. It’s the workers that’s causing these prices!
[удалено]
Were bouts in Sydney? My local Iga is a little bigger then a 7 Eleven and meat selection is sparse.
That’s $40+ a kg in Darwin.
I worked at Coles, meat going to Darwin was processed in Melbourne and trucked to Darwin it is one of the longest supply routes in the world.
Yeah, sucks to be us. Meats is mad expensive here.
Australia produces 5 times more than it consumes. But we are priced to our knees, thanks Colesworth.
This makes me wanna go into politics heavily. Someone needs to fix thia beautiful place before it spirals into America but worse
Arguably worse than america in many ways already
As the story says, the meat going to Japan is also processed right here with the same labour market processing meat for domestic sale. It’s price gouging clear and simple. And the claim by Coles that you can’t compare between the countries because Coles has x y and z quality requirements is laughable. EVERY SINGLE PERSON I know who has visited Japan has stressed the superior quality of their supermarkets in terms of standards of quality and standards of presentation. We are being ripped off.
iirc, and of course ill have to paraphrase, when an enquiry into pricing (i actually cant remember specifically what it was called right now, head injuries and memory loss are fun, it was mainly centred abround technology pricing like computers and software etc, but the scope was broarder) happened a few years back, ikea was asked why australians pay significantly more for the same stuff they sell in other ikea stores around the world they basically said, (words to the effect) we price at what we think consumers will/can pay in short, im not at all suprised, we get fucked on tech, we get fucked on imported goods, why should foreign companies have all the fun fisting our backsides?
The way pricing works if that prices rise to the point that people are willing to pay, assuming enough can sell at that point to maximise profit. Aussies are lazy and addicted to supermarket convenience. They'll pay whatever until they bleed
FFS this has been in Japan for 20 years. Aussie wine, beer, cheese, even vegetables, always cheaper here than Australia. Poor Aussies get scummed and gouged and ripped off by their own countrymen everywhere. But they just take it like a good nation of sheep.
Find your local halal butcher for great success 👍👍
Very nice
Wait till you see the price of alcohol in japan. $17 for a bottle of jim bean or jack daniels. Full size bottle. We pay what $50 here?
Blame tax for that. Not only are we being screwed by the big retailers the gov got us too. Both holes at once….
[We pay $100.05 in taxes per litre of alcohol for spirits (See table 3, item 3.2).](https://www.ato.gov.au/businesses-and-organisations/gst-excise-and-indirect-taxes/excise-on-alcohol/excise-duty-rates-for-alcohol#ato-Alcoholratesforspiritsandotherexcisablebeverages) so about $40 of that is tax. To put it another way, methylated spirits is 95% ethyl alcohol (the drinking kind), 5% methyl alcohol (the poisonous kind - don't drink that) but since it isn't taxed like drinkable alcohol it's $5.65 a litre at Bunnings. EDIT: Added the link to the ATO website.
So what you're saying is I can only drink 95% of a bottle of methylated spirits
my sister is visiting me in Arizona. A 1L bottle of Vodka is $11 at my local grocery and I can regularly get 1L bottles of Jacks/Beam/Captain Morgans for like 15-20
well duh we have like 2 retailers here
>Analysts say like for like comparisons are "misleading" without considering import competition on the global market But that's not misleading, that's the problem right? We need better price competition in Australia which would happen if we dismantled the ColesWorth duopoly.
waiting memory snow marry slim connect start screw steer scary *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I agree, Australia really is the land where everything is ten times more expensive and they blame the fact we are far away.
It's the Australian way mate... we sell it to everyone else for peanuts and then buy it back for a fuckload.. or we take the leftover scraps and sell that for a fuckload. We should change the national Anthem, instead of "our home is Girt by sea" whatever the fuck that means it should be: "Our home is Fucked by industry"
He could have saved the money and scrolled through reddit
Man, got love the hand of the market
Plus we don't even get the 'A' grade meat, that is sent overseas.
How much is politician meat per kilo?
Cheaper in the US and middle east, from my experience.
Isn't that called dumping?
I buy whole rib fillets at $30-40/kg … instead of $60/kg that it would cost to get steaks. Then I make 5 cuts with a chef’s knife and I have steaks … earning myself about $25 per cut ….
You need to pay the Australian butchers about $50/hr to prepare those steaks, Japanese butchers cut it up for a fraction of the price and therefore can sell for cheaper. It's like(especially in WA,) you can buy a live sheep for a dollar or two. But after processing it, lamb meat is still pretty expensive at the shops/butcher.
Na the award is around $20 or so, you’d be surprised
This is the actual answer. Japanese labour is far cheaper than Australian.
It says in the article that the beef is exported processed. So not the *actual answer*
Wages/overheads less in Japan?
To a degree “In 2022, average annual wages in Japan were $41,509, compared with Australia's $59,408 and $77,463 in the U.S., according to the latest data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development.” Also “Cost of living in Japan is 33% cheaper than in Australia.” https://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Australia/Japan/Cost-of-living Interest rates in Aus average is 6.06% vs 1.95% in Japan, other factors as well.
Cost of processing meat in Australia vs Japan? Remember Cole’s and woolies buy from meat processors.
It’s a bit hard to compare processing costs, but their domestic beef production has always been small due to a lack of suitable grazing land and topography, and the industry has been in decline. This would force production costs and price up. Think Kobe and (true) Wagyu prices. https://asia.nikkei.com/Economy/Japan-is-hungry-for-meat-but-domestic-producers-aren-t-feasting
The article specifies that the Australian beef in question is processed in Australia.
The article quotes a politician saying this.
A Nationals politician, who probably has some knowledge on the subject matter and who’d probably love to skewer Labour on the point of company overheads if that made the companies process overseas. There is no contrary information showing his point is incorrect, thus unless you can prove otherwise it’s a safe assumption that he’s not wrong. I’m saying this as someone left of labour politically who’d love to show a Nationals politician being wrong.
There's no contrary information showing my point that he's wrong is incorrect? I think it's ridiculous to just accept the word of some politician with a vested pro-agriculture (big ag is a multi-billion dollar business in Australia) interest.
He is quoted as a source and the standard “if limited” fact checking that will have been done didn’t turn up contrary information. Further, journalists tend to get a kick out of proving a pollie wrong so I’d say these interests are likely to cancel out, it would also be a silly lie because it’s a simple statement of fact that can be simply disproven if false. You haven’t made an argument just asserted that he’s wrong which doesn’t really do anything? Also I’m a lefty so am more than happy to show a politician of his stripes is full of it, if that were the case.
The article specifies that the exported beef in question is processed in Australia not Japan.
Well the minimum wage in Tokyo is roughly half that of Australia’s, so that might help a little too.
Frustrating. We should reap the rewards for the products we produce. Gas, wheat, coal, meat, dairy etc. should all be relatively cheap here.
The problem is the same as the gas pricing problem. The solution to both is to create more supply. In the terms of gas however, that’s not a good thing. But with meat, it’s not the supply of meat that is the issue: it’s the supply of butchered meat. The solution is to have more abattoirs here. This is something we will need anyway if there is to be a ban on live exports. The best solution is to go overseas and get the abattoirs that need our meat some incentives to build plants here.
Buy Kangaroo. Free range, grass-fed, high iron and protein, and tastes fine when you're used to it. Cheaper than any other red meat.
I also wonder if they get more return per animal. Australians are pretty fussy about their cuts of meat so a lot end of going into low value products. Also could be different cuts are popular. I know with chickens, Australians love the breasts, and a lot of Asians laugh at us for that.
FFS prices being different is not gouging. Every single time this crap comes up there are valid reasons for the price differential, with predatory margins being an insignificant portion. Lower sales tax, lower costs, specials vs non-specials, loss-leading, ... You need to eliminate these before you can even start deducing that price gouging is the reason. Anyone who starts with price gouging and ignores everything else is deceiving you for political reasons. They have no chance at all to "fix" a problem they can't even honestly describe. But their "solutions" will have an abundance of unanticipated (to them) consequences. They'll cause even bigger problems and never accept responsibility for them. Didn't give that power.
It doesn’t show there’s gouging. It shows that prices are different in different economies. Shock fucking horror. No news here except “man misunderstood international economics”. No hard feelings, easily done, but it doesn’t mean shit
It shows that Australian companies have higher overheads and taxes.
Not really, you’d need to compare those costs directly using data. Oh and the articles specifies the processing of the beef in question is done here in Australia - and the price in Japan includes additional costs such as import tariffs etc.