Two topics this week, and we came at the second one from genuinely different angles. First, a review of the Australian Women in Agriculture national conference in Albury, which other ag organisations could learn a great deal from. Then Coles, Woolworths and the enormous gap between what the big supermarkets say about being good corporate citizens and what they actually do.
Episode 7 Australian Women in Agriculture and The Big Supermarkets who's really paying? – Agsolutely Fabulous
Albury: how to run a conference
Enormous credit to the Australian Women in Agriculture organising committee, because they are all volunteers and they pulled off a genuinely excellent two days in Albury in September 2024 — the year AWiA marked 30 years. Beautiful venue, beautiful town, sessions that were entertaining and informative in the right proportions, and a mood across the whole event that was relentlessly positive without being saccharine.
Katja’s highlights were Cathy McGowan and Leila McDougall, and both are worth understanding if you don’t already. McGowan is a former AWiA president and a genuine trailblazer, connected to the Invisible Farmer Project — the largest study ever undertaken of Australian women on the land, a three-year national partnership between rural communities, universities, government and cultural institutions. Its whole purpose was getting women on farms recognised as farmers, which sounds absurd until you remember how long the census and the paperwork said otherwise. McDougall made Just a Farmer, the feature film about mental health in farming families that she produced on her own place in Victoria. If your local screening was scheduled at a time no farming family could ever attend — which was most of them — it now streams from her website. Watch it.
The single best structural thing about AWiA, and the thing the bigger conferences consistently get wrong: the speakers stayed. They didn’t parachute in, deliver, and sprint for a plane. They sat in the crowd for the whole event, so if something on stage resonated you could find that person at morning tea and have a real conversation. That is where the value of a conference actually lives. Their emcee Carissa was excellent and kept three notoriously chatty panellists to time, and their succession planning is so well thought through that there’s no jostling for position — again, take notes.
One complaint, and I’ll die on this hill. The live band at the networking event. You cannot hear a single person speak. Networking evenings exist because there isn’t enough time to talk during the day, and then we drown the talking in a covers band. Please. Save the money, spend it on something else, keep it for next year. No more live music at networking events. If that’s the worst thing I can find to say about a volunteer-run conference, they did extraordinarily well.
The supermarkets: a necessary evil with a marketing department
Let’s be fair before we’re unkind. The big supermarkets are important buyers of Australian produce, particularly red meat, and you need buyers or everyone goes broke. Nobody is arguing for their abolition.
What winds me up is the hypocrisy. They have ESG commitments and they market themselves relentlessly as good corporate citizens, and then when it’s time to put money behind the growers and suppliers actually meeting those standards, profit wins every single time. That in itself isn’t shocking — they’re corporate behemoths and that’s what corporate behemoths do. What’s insufferable is the direction the obligation travels. They tell farmers to be carbon neutral so they can point at a product on a shelf and say look how sustainable we are, while the cost and the compliance burden rolls entirely downhill onto suppliers. They don’t carry the can for any of it. And the “consumers demand it” line doesn’t hold, because consumers have almost nowhere else to go and vote with their wallets anyway.
Katja’s angle was the pricing. The figures she found had grocery prices up around 25% over three years, concentrated in dairy, eggs and baking staples — which is to say, in exactly the things people can’t substitute away from, and often the things mysteriously out of stock. The stated explanation is commodity and energy costs. Her fair question: if energy is the problem, why aren’t these enormous buildings covered in solar? They own the roofs. They’re part of the malls. If you have the balance sheet to lecture your suppliers about emissions, you have the balance sheet to get off the grid.
Then there’s the checkout ask. “Would you like to donate $10 to charity?” No. You donate it. You’re the one making billions. I can barely afford the trolley.
How this one aged
We recorded this in October 2024 calling the supermarkets out on pricing, and it turns out we were early rather than wrong. In September 2024 the ACCC had already commenced separate Federal Court proceedings against both Coles and Woolworths, alleging their “Down Down” and “Prices Dropped” promotions misled shoppers — the allegation being that products sitting at a stable price for months were briefly hiked by at least 15%, then “discounted” to a price equal to or higher than where they started.
In May 2026 the Federal Court found against Coles. Justice O’Bryan found that in 13 of the 14 pricing tickets before the court the discount was not genuine and would have misled an ordinary shopper, and that Coles had not sold those products at the higher price for the required period before discounting them. The Woolworths judgment was still pending at the time of writing, and penalties in the Coles matter are a separate question again — so this is a finding of liability, not a closed book.
I don’t take any pleasure in it. It confirms the thing we were actually complaining about: an organisation that spends heavily telling the country what a good corporate citizen it is, while a court finds it was misleading the people it was selling to. Set the tone for everyone else after you’ve fixed your own house.
The part that genuinely worries me isn’t the shareholders or the ESG reports. It’s that we are a wealthy nation and people cannot afford to eat properly. Those of us on the land have our own problems and we forget what it’s like to pay rent in town on an apprentice wage and do a grocery shop every week. My son does. If we spent a bit more time worrying about each other’s problems we might get somewhere, and every big corporate player in this country has a role in that whether they’d like one or not.
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