Price monitoring shows living costs have risen more in remote towns than in metropolitan areas due to transportation, limited storage and a lack of competition. In the northern Western Australia community of Kalumburu locals are paying twice as much for fuel and some basic food items.
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00:00 Some of the specific examples, we did a bit of a snapshot of the local store, are quite
00:05 extraordinary. So, for example, fuel costs there, unleaded, is $3.75 per litre. Things
00:12 like biscuits, like Tim Tams, $11.70, Sayo biscuits, baked beans, a lot of food products
00:19 like this are all more than double what they retail for here in towns like Broome or in
00:23 the capital cities. This is obviously nothing new and there is no suggestion that people
00:28 are being ripped off. Previous parliamentary inquiries have found that there is no evidence
00:34 of systematic price gouging. It is the inevitable result of the challenges of providing services
00:41 in remote communities. For example, in Colombooro, the food supplies have to be brought from
00:46 Darwin which costs, with the barge, about $25,000 a fortnight. So obviously the markups
00:52 you can imagine that have to be put onto the food and other goods are considerable in order
00:57 just to break even. It is also worth mentioning that many of the stores, like in Colombooro,
01:02 actually charge a bit more for packaged and unhealthy food to subsidise healthier goods.
01:07 The latest monitoring from the Northern Territory Government, which does the most detailed,
01:12 regular snapshot of food costs, shows that over the last decade, the cost of living has
01:18 increased more significantly in remote Aboriginal communities than in the rest of Australia.
01:24 That is obviously an issue undermining efforts to close the gap on Indigenous disadvantage
01:28 when it comes to things like budgeting, poverty and also health outcomes.
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