Tag Archive for 'craig emerson'

Australians for Australian books

Published
by
Mark
4 months, 1 week ago
in Books, Writers & Writing and Markets
. 188 Comments

In a second piece of good news to come from the Federal government today, the Productivity Commission’s mooted changes to the import regime for books have not been accepted.

The argument about consumer benefit was always spurious – the purported reduction in prices would have been small (and well run public libraries exist precisely to stock books for those for whom marginal prices are a real impact), and the effect would have been to reduce the range of titles available – both because it would have enabled large retailers to further dominate the market and because of its impact on local publishers.

Nevertheless, Guy Rundle is right to say that the interests of authors and publishers are separable, and to highlight the fact that it’s the provisions in the US-Australia free trade agreement preventing particular support for Australian literary production which are the real – but largely ignored – issue.

However, it should be very pleasing to see that governments are not so prone to accepting all free market ideological arguments on trust. And to see the Labor backbench able to influence government policy.

It also might be an appropriate moment to consider what good the Productivity Commission actually serves.

Update: Spike.

So who killed GroceryChoice?

Published
by
Robert Merkel
8 months, 3 weeks ago
in Economics, Elections, Federal Elections and Politics
. 68 Comments

The first incarnation of GroceryChoice was pretty useless, but GroceryChoice Mk II would have been a big improvement. So what prompted Craig Emerson to kill it, a few days before launch?

Emerson’s media release claims that it wouldn’t work, because supermarkets change their pricing information too often to keep such a website accurate.

It doesn’t make sense to me. The supermarkets have to keep their price databases updated as soon as they change the price, to allow their cash registers to charge customers the current price of every item. If that information is in a database at the store level, in principle there’s little difference in the difficulty of transferring that information to GroceryChoice on a daily or weekly basis, or do it live or semi-live.

The alternative theory is that Woolworths and Coles wanted it killed. But that doesn’t make a huge amount of sense either – they’ve got the lowest costs of any of the full-range supermarkets, and their IT systems are most likely to be the easiest to set up to provide the pricing information wanted by GroceryChoice. It’s the independents who probably had most to lose, with the highest costs to provide the information and the likelihood that their prices would be the highest.

So we’re back to the original question? On whose behest, and why, was GroceryChoice quietly killed off on a day where Michael Jackson’s death wiped most other things off the media agenda?

UPDATE: Thanks to Addo in comments, the SMH has more info. It seems clear from the story that Woolies and Coles wanted it killed. I still reckon their reasons why don’t stack up.