Law Council of Australia

Business Law Section

Consultation on improving price transparency in the supermarkets industry

Submission Date: 17 February 2026

The Competition and Consumer Law Committee of the Business Law Section of the Law Council of Australia (the Committee) welcomes the opportunity to comment on Treasury’s consultation paper ‘Improving price transparency in the supermarkets industry: Consultation paper’ (the Consultation Paper).

In summary, the Committee considers that any reforms to advance the objectives of the Consultation Paper should:

  1. require all supermarkets to display prices on all products in‑store, regardless of size or location of the supermarket;
  2. require all large supermarkets (not only Coles and Woolworths) to publish their prices online. Treasury should also consider extending this to other larger retailers who sell a substantial number of grocery items such as Chemist Warehouse;
  3. adopt a web‑scraping‑based model for price comparison tools and avoid mandating APIs, which would impose a significant compliance burden on supermarkets;
  4. ensure that any minimum information requirements for promotional tickets are workable in practice and do not make pricing tickets crowded and more difficult for consumers to review quickly; and
  5. confine record‑keeping obligations to the data required to appear on promotional tickets, avoiding unnecessary or duplicative requirements.

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Last Updated on 03/03/2026

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