Max Chandler-Mather pitches Mamdani-style $25bn plan to nationalise 200 Coles and Woolworths supermarkets as reflected on by Father Raymond Connolly
Every Tuesday morning, our St. Jude parish hall opens its basement doors. The St. Vincent de Paul food pantry welcomes our neighbors. Long before eight o’clock, the line begins forming along the brick wall. It faces the old cold-rolling mill. These are not strangers; they are our community. They include retired machinists whose pensions vanished in bankruptcy. Young mothers carefully calculate milk prices. Shift workers find their wages cannot cover thirty days of groceries. When food becomes an instrument of extraction, rather than sustenance, a community feels deep injury. This struggle highlights a core truth about economic justice. Far away, a political figure has stirred debate by proposing to nationalise supermarkets.
The Moral Call to Nationalise Supermarkets
In Australia, Max Chandler-Mather suggests public ownership of hundreds of corporate supermarkets. This plan aims to curb crushing prices. Economists and editorial boards will debate balance sheets and state powers. They will discuss the immense sums involved. Yet, beneath these technical arguments lies a basic moral reality. Our valley understands this intimately. We ask: Is feeding human beings primarily a sacred duty of stewardship? Or is it merely an unrestrained market for profit? Catholic social teaching offers clear guidance here. Our tradition has never treated property as an absolute right. From the early Church fathers through great encyclicals on labor, we teach the universal destination of goods. God gave creation for the sustenance of all humanity. Therefore, private ownership carries a built-in social mortgage.
Indeed, when an economy allows two or three corporate giants to corner basic necessities, it fails. They squeeze farmers at one end. They starve families at the other. This system ceases to serve the common good. Instead, it becomes a form of extortion. This extortion often dresses itself in the respectable language of retail efficiency. Whether a massive state takeover is the right administrative mechanism remains an open prudential question. Bureaucracies, too, can grow cold and indifferent. They might ignore local needs. The principle of subsidiarity reminds us to keep solutions close to the ground. They should remain at a human scale. They should serve working communities directly.
Bread, Dignity, and Our Economic Choices
We need food systems anchored by family growers. Regional cooperatives and vibrant neighborhood grocers are essential. These grocers know their customers by name. However, Chandler-Mather’s proposal rightly diagnoses a problem. A market left entirely to concentrated monopoly capital will inevitably grind the poor to dust. In the liturgy of the Mass, we bring forward bread and wine. These are the fruit of the earth and the work of human hands. Bread is not incidental to God’s revelation. When Christ multiplied the loaves, He did not charge admission. He did not check credit ratings. He saw a tired, hungry crowd far from home. He had compassion on them. He commanded His disciples to feed them. To treat bread purely as a high-margin consumer asset is a quiet sacrilege. It offends the basic dignity of God’s children.
Here along the river, we know the consequences. Essential things are abandoned to boardrooms thousands of miles away. Mills close. Grocery stores vanish. Food deserts expand. Eventually, convenience stores selling processed junk become the only pantry in town. The desperation we see in our church basement is not an inevitable fact of nature. It is the predictable harvest of an economic philosophy. This philosophy forgets that every person has a God-given right to eat. Ultimately, whatever the Australian parliament decides, the essential question confronts every modern society. We cannot claim to honor family life or human dignity. Yet, we permit an essential lifeline like the dinner table to be ransomed for executive bonuses. When a father cannot afford bread for his children, the entire social order stands under judgment. The measure of any economic order is not the return delivered to distant shareholders. Instead, it is whether the humblest among us can sit down to supper in peace.
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