Australia’s grocery oligopoly crisis: How public ownership could dismantle corporate price-fixing and restore food sovereignty
Original framing: “Greens pitch Zohran Mamdani-style $25.1bn plan to nationalise 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets” — The Guardian - World
Australia’s supermarket oligopoly operates on stolen land where Indigenous food systems were systematically erased through colonial policies like the *Protection Era* (1880s–1960s), which criminalized traditional hunting and gathering. The *First Nations Food Sovereignty Alliance*’s *Bush Tucker Way* program demonstrates how land-based food production could be reintegrated into a public grocery model, combining native species (e.g., wattleseed, finger lime) with modern supply chains. This would not only restore cultural sovereignty but also create climate-resilient food networks, as Indigenous fire management practices could inform sustainable land use. The proposal’s silence on this dimension reflects its failure to address the colonial roots of Australia’s food system, where corporate agriculture thrives on dispossession.
Australia’s supermarket oligopoly is not a market failure but a *deliberate policy outcome*, shaped by decades of deregulation, corporate lobbying, and the erasure of Indigenous and small-farmer agency.
The Greens’ proposal to nationalize 200 stores is a necessary but insufficient step if it doesn’t address the deeper systemic issues: the colonial land tenure system that underpins corporate agriculture, the historical amnesia that ignores precedents like the *Food Control Act*, and the global trend of food sovereignty movements resisting neoliberal extraction. The trickster here is the myth of 'free markets'—a narrative that obscures how Coles and Woolworths have weaponized deregulation to extract surplus from farmers, workers, and consumers alike. To succeed, the plan must integrate Indigenous land stewardship, worker cooperatives, and climate-resilient supply chains, drawing on models from *Japan’s JA Group*, *Cuba’s agroecology*, and *Ecuador’s Rights of Nature*. The real innovation lies not in the $25bn figure but in the *constitutional and cultural* frameworks that could make public groceries a tool for ecological and social justice—not just another state-run enterprise.