Melbourne Law School - Research Publications
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ItemThe Food Label as Governance Space: Free-Range Eggs and the Fallacy of Consumer Choice(Boom Juridische Uitgevers, 2014)In a neoliberal age governments, NGOs, food producers and retailers all state that the food system can be governed via consumer choice aka voting with your fork. This makes the retail food label an important space for contests between different actors who each seek to govern the food system according to their own interests and priorities. The paper argues that this makes it crucial to ‘backwards map’ the regulatory governance networks behind the governance claims staked on food labels. The paper uses the example of the contested meaning of ‘free-range’ claims on animal products in Australia to propose and illustrate a methodology for this backwards mapping.
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ItemThe Happy Hen on Your Supermarket Shelf: What Choice Does Industrial Strength Free-Range Represent for Consumers?(Springer Verlag, 2013)This paper investigates what "free-range" eggs are available for sale in supermarkets in Australia, what "free-range" means on product labelling, and what alternative "free-range" offers to cage production. The paper concludes that most of the "free-range" eggs currently available in supermarkets do not address animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and public health concerns but, rather, seek to drive down consumer expectations of what these issues mean by balancing them against commercial interests. This suits both supermarkets and egg producers because it does not challenge dominant industrial-scale egg production and the profits associated with it. A serious approach to free-range would confront these arrangements, and this means it may be impossible to truthfully label many of the "free-range" eggs currently available in the dominant supermarkets as free-range.
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ItemVoting with Your Fork?: Industrial Free-Range Eggs and the Regulatory Construction of Consumer Choice(SAGE Publications, 2013)Labeling and information disclosure to support consumer choice are often proposed as attractive policy alternatives to onerous mandatory business regulation. This article argues that choices available to consumers are constructed and constrained by actors in the chains of production, distribution, and exchange who bring products to retail. It traces how “free-range” eggs come to market in Australia, finding that the “industrial free-range” label dominating the market is not substantially different from caged-egg production in the way that it addresses animal welfare, public health, and agro-ecological values. I show how the product choices available to consumers have been constructed not just by the regulation (or nonregulation) of marketing and labeling, but also by the regulatory paths taken and not taken all along the food chain.
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ItemOut of the Cage and into the Barn: Supermarket Power Food System Governance and the Regulation of Free Range Eggs(Griffith University Law School, 2014)The highly concentrated nature of food retailing in Australia gives supermarkets considerable control over the interface between consumers and producers. Legal and regulatory commentary debates what can and should be done about the market dimensions of supermarket power. This article shows that Australian supermarkets are amassing not only economic power but also political power in the food system. The article makes this argument by reference to two major supermarkets’ initiatives in the regulatory space around food labelling, specifically the contested meaning of free range eggs. The article examines how the supermarkets are using their market power to create private standards for suppliers of own brand products that set the meaning of ‘free range’ for consumers too. This entrenches supermarkets’ market share as well as their political power as food authorities.
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ItemFront-of-Pack Food Labeling and the Politics of Nutritional Nudges(Wiley, 2016)This paper examines the potential for new front-of-pack nutrition labelling initiatives to “nudge” consumers towards healthier food choices. The libertarian-paternalist approach to policy known as nudge initially developed by Thaler and Sunstein is discussed, with its emphasis on designing spaces (including the space of the food label) to shape the behaviour of individuals while not restricting consumer choice or imposing restrictions or penalties on producers. In the context of concerns over diet-related chronic diseases and obesity, new front-of-pack interpretive nutrition labels have been proposed or implemented in an attempt to shift consumer dietary choices, including the multiple traffic light labelling system (MTL) in the U.K. and the Health Star Rating (HSR) system in Australia. We identify some of the characteristics, the underlying nutritional philosophies and the limitations of these front-of-pack labelling schemes. We suggest that the potential of these schemes is compromised by the co-existence on the food label of many other forms of nutrition information and food marketing. Some alternative ways of labelling and communicating the nutritional quality of foods are also discussed.
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ItemMisleading the Ethical Consumer: The Regulation of Free-Range Egg Labelling(Melbourne University, Law Review Association, 2016)In mid-2014, Australian consumer affairs ministers announced that they would together set 'a national, legally enforceable definition of free-range eggs'. A response to significant conflict, claims and counterclaims about what free-range should mean, the proposed code could take the form of a mandatory information standard under the Australian Consumer Law. This paper asks whether this approach would adequately respond to the underlying conflict between various actors as to what free-range means. Conflict over the meaning of free-range on the label is the latest expression in an ongoing series of challenges, defences and counter-challenges to the legitimacy of intense, industrial-scale animal food production and particularly conventional cage egg production. This paper briefly explains how it is that the regulation of welfare of layer hens is now largely a matter of voluntary labelling for consumer choice rather than mandatory government regulation of animal welfare in production conditions. It goes on to critically evaluate whether the current network of voluntary regulation of free-range labelling adequately informs consumers about animal welfare conditions using data collected about the claims on egg carton labels between 2012 and 2014 to do so. It goes on to assess the potential of a mandatory information code or other consumer regulation to improve animal welfare labelling on eggs.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableEducation Before Enforcement? Key Insights from Cartel Research(Thomson Reuters, 2012)Tough sanctioning of cartel conduct (price-fixing, market sharing, output reduction, or bid-rigging) are now a focus of competition law and enforcement. However, our research revealed problems with the assumptions that are made about the likely effects of criminalization on business behavior both as deterrence and as moral inducement.
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ItemRegulating Law Firm Ethics Management: An Empirical Assessment of an Innovation in Regulation of the Legal Profession in New South Wales(Wiley, 2010)The Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) was the first jurisdiction to fully deregulate law firm structure and allow alternative business structures in the legal profession. At the same time it also introduced an innovation in regulation of the legal profession, requiring that incorporated legal practices implement ‘appropriate management systems’ for ensuring the provision of legal services in compliance with professional ethical obligations. This paper presents a preliminary empirical evaluation of the impact of this attempt at ‘management‐based regulation’. We find that the NSW requirement that firms self‐assess their ethics management leads to a large and statistically significant drop in complaints. The (self‐assessed) level of implementation of ethics management infrastructure, however, does not make any difference. The relevance of these findings to debates about deprofessionalization, managerialism, and commercialism in the legal profession is discussed, and the NSW approach is distinguished from the more heavy‐handed English legal aid approach to regulating law firm quality management.