Just bananas: Woolies boss latest casualty in pro-Voice CEO graveyard

As Woolworths CEO Brad Banducci heads for the exit with millions of dollars lining his pockets, farmers are being ripped off, workers not appropriately paid and consumers shafted. It’s just another day in the cost-of-living crisis, writes Vikki Campion.

The latest casualty in the pro-Voice CEO graveyard is Woolworths’ retiring boss Brad Banducci — but he cannot allow himself to be single-handedly used as a scapegoat in cost of living investigations.

It could be entertaining for some to blame the person born in South Africa who lauded his Italian heritage, who learnt at the Boston School of Economics, who funnelled $1.5 million of shareholders coin into the Yes case that most Australians didn’t support and tried to cancel Australia Day in a marketing ploy to avoid heat over price-gouging, as the sole reason why farmers are getting ripped off, workers weren’t appropriately paid, and consumers are getting shafted.

But this is beyond the remit of just Brad.

It would be unsurprising for him to take the Alan Joyce Monopoly Get-Out-Of-Inquiries-Free card and disappear to another country given he was at the helm of Woolworths, which has 90 per cent saturation in some areas and market concentration everywhere else, for eight years on a reported $7 million a year.

You don’t have to be Pythagoras to work out where the $1 billion half-yearly profit Woolworths announced this week, indicating a doubling of the $1 billion annual profit they announced last August, is coming from.

Woolworths ex-boss Brad Banducci. Picture: NCA NewsWire

While it’s trendy to worry about overseas sweatshops, farmer’s groups such as the Horticulture Council warn that “the circumstances and conditions under which many growers find themselves supplying supermarkets could just as easily be framed as a modern slavery risk”.

Shocking submissions to upcoming supermarket inquiries reveal only the most compliant farmers to the whims of supermarket giants survive, while anyone who dares to speak out or use the avenues of complaint regarding unfair practices doesn’t feature in future purchasing agreements.

Senators should know they won’t get a full and frank confession from farmers when the system has a grip on their throats - it will be left to groups like NSW Farmers to reveal stand-over tactics of supermarket buyers threatening to boycott farms forever if they did not accept the price offered, even when it is below the cost of production.

It’s disgraceful that it’s only now that the cost of living is so bad that the people who were in power for nine years have suddenly had an epiphany in opposition and woken up to long-term abuse of those who turn sun, soil, water and back-breaking labour into nutrition.

With vain hopes of the prospect of a future career on a well-paid board, the Coalition gushed their support of big business as always morally correct.

Brad Banducci’s train wrekc interview with Four Corners. Picture: Four Corners/ABC

Labor’s motivation was pecuniary as well. Agriculture Minister Murray Watt quickly defended supermarkets when a boycott was suggested. Labor needed no reminder of where the millions of dollars of the Shop Distributors Alliance union fees ends up.

The big supermarkets make convoluted, labyrinthine arguments of why they can squeeze the last drop of sweat from the farmer and the last cent out of the pensioner’s purse.

A simple explanation of why the banana farmer gets $1.50 a kilo from them, yet you pay $5 a kilo would enlighten us all.

Why not declare each week the price they paid to the farmer, the costs the supermarket wore, including refrigeration and fuel, and the price charged to the customer?

No one has a problem with shops making a dollar, but we take issue with exploitation.

Shoppers can easily avoid fast-fashion made in foreign sweatshops, but navigating the fruit and vegetable aisle, where Aussie farmers are punished, is hard to avoid unless they put the whole family on meagre rations.

Banducci told Margin Call at an inner Sydney cafe that it was “about the people”. What people? The board people and the shareholders?

If a skerrick of that is true, he can absolve himself by exposing the very practices he was part of that earned him an estimated $24 million golden handshake.

If he is a man of his word, his next first-class flight will be a return trip. Unless, like other pro-Voice ex-CEO’s, Australia was merely another stamp on his passport.