We are one month into the Australian Year of the Farmer, but I wonder how strong the collective commitment to supporting our farmers really is when it comes to choosing Australian produce over imported goods.
Take Australia Day, for example.
Around the nation, and around the Illawarra, there was plenty of flag-waving and chest-beating on Australia Day about how great it is to be an Aussie.
But despite our apparent national pride, Aussies love a bargain. Our supermarkets flog off cheap Australia Day t-shirts, aprons, flags, stubby-holders and hats that are mostly made in China.
They also sell vast quantities of imported food and liquor at the expense of the local products – and at the expense of our farmers and our diminishing pool of food-processing workers.
One of the unfortunate consequences of the strong Australian dollar is that we are being flooded with cheap overseas food and drinks, and the big supermarket chains are only too happy to push these products instead of the Australian brands.
Consider this quick trip around the supermarket picking up food for an Australia Day lunch.
Let’s start with the nibbles: rice crackers from Asia with European cheese and imported nuts. For main course we could have imported salamis and other cold meats from Italy, ham from Canada or prawns and fish from Asia.
If we barbecued some sausages, chances are they would have been made with Australian-raised beef, but the tomato sauce would most likely have been made overseas - especially since Heinz closed its Australian tomato sauce plant in Victoria after 70 years at the beginning of January, in the face of too much competition from cheap imports.
Even if the sauce was made in Australia it probably would have been produced using “imported and Australian ingredients” – which generally means most of the ingredients came from overseas.
The salad probably would still be true blue. Supermarkets sell fresh Australian-grown vegetables, but increasingly the canned and frozen fruit and vegetables and some fresh fruit are imported.
A popular Australian Day dessert is pavlova, which is probably still made with Aussie eggs. But these days you may well be topping your pav with kiwi fruit imported from Italy of all places (not even New Zealand!) or canned passionfruit from Thailand.
And then there are the drinks. How about an orange juice made from re-constituted Brazilian concentrate or a mineral water from some mountain spa in Italy?
Fancy a beer? Let’s knock the top off a Mexican Corona, Dutch Heineken, American Budweiser or Belgian Stella.
Prefer wine? Australians have been guzzling vast quantities of New Zealand sauvignon blanc for years (although I can’t understand why), and now the big liquor chains are also pushing cheap wines from Europe and South America, again at the expense of Australian producers.
When Heinz ended tomato sauce production in early January, John Bent from rural advocacy group AUSVEG said Australia’s fruit and vegetable processing industry faced being wiped out.
He is right, but there is a simple solution. Be patriotic and buy Australian. In most cases you’ll be getting a superior product, and even if it costs a little more you will be sending a powerful message to the supermarket chains that Australians care about their farmers.
Nick Hartgerink is a former Mercury editor who now runs his own media consultancy.
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