Temu-fying Australia isn’t really that cheap in the end | David Penberthy

Here’s a question - how is it possible to shop like a billionaire, writes David Penberthy.

The asbestos story involving Chinese-made play sand has been billed in more hysterical quarters as a terrifying child endangerment scandal – or to use that great journalistic cliche, a story no parent can afford to miss.

As a parent whose kids had this sand at their primary school, along with it appears almost every state and independent school and kindy and childcare centre in the land, the hysteria is unjustified.

From what I have read, the chances of any child getting sick from touching or even ingesting this sand seem negligible as it is not in a powdery, readily inhalable state, unlike the airborne fibres that caused so much illness and loss of life at James Hardie and other industries.

The part of the story that is kind of terrifying is that it goes to our growing retail ambivalence about importing any old crap from China, with scant regard for the manner in which it is produced.

The sale of this sand by generally scrupulous retailers is merely the latest example of what you could call the Temufication of Australia.

I am not much of a shopper and am also a total Luddite when it comes to technology, and have very few apps on my phone.

I have noticed lately that, annoyingly, one of my few iPhone apps, the Scrabble app, is being rendered unusable by the high rotation ads for Temu which pop up after every turn.

I have never used Temu to buy anything but thanks to my fondness for computer Scrabble, I now know its slogan by heart: “Shop like a billionaire”.

Here’s a question - how is it possible to shop like a billionaire?

How is it possible to pay $12.06 for a satin blouse that would cost $150 elsewhere, or to buy a set of four differently sized shifting spanners for $7.82, when the same set would cost 10 times that amount if you bought it at Bunnings or Mitre 10 made by a known manufacturer?

You can only do so by paying little if any regard to things like occupational health and safety, ethically and environmentally sound procurement and workers’ pay and conditions.

In Australia, with the growing dominance of Temu being a symbol for our reliance on Chinese manufacturing and sales, a lot of us now ask just one question when it comes to making a purchase. How much does it cost?

At the same time, thanks to the often hand-wringing demands of ESG (environment, social, governance) policies in our corporate sector, we tie our businesses in knots with fretful discussion about whether any children have been involved in the production of the coffee beans in the tea room.

Meanwhile, up the road in China, they’re working out they can make or obtain every item in the world for as little as possible.

And at that point, thanks to our demand for the lowest possible price points, it ends up on our shelves and in our schools and our homes.

I get why people are driven by cost questions in the midst of a cost-of-living squeeze. But this asbestos story shows that our desire to reduce costs can itself come at a cost.

We had a really interesting text from a listener this month who told the story of a whole bunch of wooden doors that were imported to Adelaide from China to be used in construction.

It turned out that all the doors had been filled with asbestos, the kind of asbestos which if you cut the door to resize, would have immediately turned into the deadly, dusty fibres which claimed so many lives through mesothelioma. The doors all had to be chucked out and they ended up at an Adelaide rubbish tip and were smashed up. Hazmat people needed to be called in to dispose of them professionally.

It’s something to think about next time you’re removing green waste from your trailer at the local tip, with a pile of broken doors of unknown provenance lying on the ground next to you.

Education Minister Blair Boyer raised an excellent point about the asbestos sand story this week.

Minister for Education, Training and Skills Blair Boyer. Picture: Emma Brasier

It is going to cost the Education Department $1.5 million to pay for the safe removal of this sand from the 500-plus government schools and kindergartens where it has been discovered these past few weeks.

Why is the department solely responsible for this cost? Is it even responsible at all?

Is it the responsibility of those retailers such as Officeworks and Big W and Kmart which bought the sand?

Is there also a federal responsibility which goes to whether there was any prior testing of the sand or any quarantine issues about its import?

It’s a hell of a lot of money for the Education Department to absorb, when it can argue it was simply buying an educational and artistic product which it presumed had been cleared as safe for sale.

But if you do want to go down the fretful parent path, it makes you wonder just how China is managing to come up with all those massive cut-price textas and felt pens and drawing sets that proliferate on Temu, costing less than 10 bucks compared to the usual $50 to $100, which are very quickly putting Smiggle shops out of business and hurting newsagents and Officeworks too.

It’s something to reflect on next time you see your tiny tots sucking on a texta or a glue stick when they’re having the world’s cheapest art session, all thanks to products of questionable origin and production, bought in an age where all we care about is cost.

Originally published as Temu-fying Australia isn’t really that cheap in the end | David Penberthy