[Jan Fisher]

Former Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) boss Allan Fels is supporting a union-backed probe into price gouging.

It follows on from banks and supermarkets recording record profits as the rest of us scramble to make ends meet.

I wish them well. I hope it works. But it probably won’t.

Very much like any investigation the ACCC conducts it will garner many headlines, be expensive to conduct but ultimately achieve nothing.

Do you think for one second large, powerful companies are going to listen to anything a union investigation finds?

Apart from anything even if they do find evidence of price gouging, they can do nothing about it, they have no prosecution powers.

We get it, it’s an awful time to be a consumer, but this just seems a colossal waste of time and money.

What do you think should be done about price gouging?

[David Ryder]

For starters all essential services should be in public ownership reducing the need to chase profits.
That includes services like electricity, water and some mass public transport.
As to everything else they are free to charge what they like in a free market economy so there is not a lot that governments can do. Competition in a free market is supposed to keep prices down but it often fails to do that.

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