What we learned, Friday 8 November
This is where we’ll leave the blog this evening, but first a quick recap of the day’s big events:
A parliamentary inquiry into the big four accounting firms recommended more help was needed for whistleblowers.
Fresh produce suppliers appeared before an inquiry into supermarkets.
Bill Shorten said ‘a duty of care is a legitimate proposition’ when it came to the social media age limit’.
ANZ posted a $6.7bn profit as overdue loans surge.
David Pocock suggested the Aukus deal has limited Australia’s ability to advocate on climate.
A far-right extremist sentenced to one month jail for performing the Nazi salute.
A systems outage affected international arrivals and departures at Sydney airport.
Michelle Rowland said YouTube Kids may be exempt but not YouTube from the social media ban.
Life expectancy decreased for a second year in a row due to Covid-related deaths.
A mental health ruling was handed down over a paramedic’s killing.
A plane made an emergency landing at Sydney airport as crews respond to a fire.
Abortion services will be restored at Orange hospital, the state health minister confirmed.
Indigenous ancestral remains have returned from US museums.
A Melbourne student has been rushed to hospital with serious injuries after an accident on one of the school’s decks.
A water pipeline burst in Sydney sending water into nearby homes.
That’s it for now, enjoy your weekend.
Updated
Growers face changing quality guidelines from supermarkets, inquiry told
Back at the ACCC’s supermarkets inquiry, representatives of the fruit and vegetable industry have told the hearing about the challenges growers face due to inconsistent quality specifications by supermarkets.
The Ausveg general manager of public affairs, Lucy Gregg, told the hearing that vegetable suppliers were becoming increasingly concerned that some of the rejections of their produce seemed to be arbitrary.
Gregg said it was often not possible to repackage fresh produce if it was rejected by a supermarket because of the labour costs, the time and effort involved and the feasibility of shipping them back to the shed and reworking it before it perished:
Because margins are so low, if not negligible, a rejection of … a product in a generic bag that you’ve got no option but to dump or give to a charity, that’s now really starting to hurt.
Labour is such a huge cost, and when you’ve got carrots for $1.50 or $2 it just would not be worth repacking.
Gregg said she had heard “anecdotally” from suppliers that supermarkets had rejected their produce without an apparent reason if they had overordered a particular vegetable and were overstocked.
She said:
But … so much of this data is held within the supermarkets [so] that’s very, very hard to know.
As a percentage of rejections, I suspect that they would be very low. But still, as I said before, with such low margins, any rejection hurts.
Gregg said consumers had been “trained” or conditioned to expect fresh produce that looked “more and more perfect”.
Orchardist Peter Hall agreed, saying:
These quality specs, often there’s an element of subjectivity to it. So it’s about colour – is that the right shade, is it deep enough? Is it misshapen?
There’s subjectivity to a lot of this.
It often comes down to some perception.
Updated
