Placing a Pizza Hut pizza on an airport baggage trolley to be taken to a plane, Eagle Boys Pizza founder Tom Potter has a message for TV viewers.
"I reckon there's one really important thing all Aussies should look for in a pizza.
PHOTO: AFP
"Is it a 100 percent Australian-owned company? Because if it's not, your money is being delivered overseas."
Wrapped in the Australian flag and flinging barbs at foreign companies, Australian corporate nationalists are fighting back against a deep fear that Australia may become nothing but a "branch office economy," run by multinationals from abroad.
From "Big Kev's" household cleansers to Potter's pizzas and Dick Smith's peanut butter, "Australian Made" is no longer good enough. "Australian Owned" is the new battle cry.
"If Australian business was as patriotic and as sincere about their business as what they are about their sport we'd be the best in the world," says Potter, whose pizza delivery business turns over A$60 million (US$30.6 million) a year.
The message is simple. Unless Australians support local companies, living standards will plunge as corporate profits are sucked overseas, say the champions of Australian Owned.
Australia's 19 million people will be at the mercy of distant and uncaring executives in New York, London or Tokyo, who will lay off staff, close down factories and jack up prices on a whim.
On the face of it, corporate jingoism appears to sell.
Opinion polls show that more than 80 percent of Australians feel it is important to support local firms as more and more top Australian companies list abroad in search of deeper capital markets or merge with global rivals to gain clout.
Choice magazine, published by the independent Australian Consumers' Association, found the "Buy Australian" issue was the single most important topic for its subscribers.
Potter says pizza sales in his 123-store franchise chain were up 10-12 percent nationally after three months of running the provocative advertising campaign.
"It has worked," he said in a telephone interview.
Dick Smith, who set up the successful Dick Smith Electronics chain in 1968 and sold it to Australian-owned Woolworths Ltd in 1982, founded a food company in 1999 that packages locally made products in the Aussie flag and markets them to big chains.
He says Dick Smith Foods has already ratcheted up A$101 million in annual sales.
And Dick Smith's peanut butter grabbed an 18 percent market share in its first month after he told TV audiences that top-selling rival brands Kraft and Eta were actually owned by a foreign cigarette company, Philip Morris Companies Inc.
Smith says foreign investment were good when multinationals invested in a country's future but that now foreign giants buy cheap, cut staff and then take the profits out with them.
"I believe we should be looking for a balance. Foreign investment has given us some great advantages in the past, however that does not mean that all future foreign investment is good," he says in a mission statement on his Web page.
Kevin "Big Kev" McQuay, a rotund Queenslander who lounges around a pool side barbecue in his adverts, also appears to be making a success of playing the nationalist card.
His firm is expected to make its Australian Stock Exchange debut in August, with a projected market value of A$19 million.
Perhaps the clearest sign that jingoism sells is that the foreigners have tried to fight back through the courts.
Pizza Hut, through local subsidiary Tricon Restaurants Australia Pty Ltd, sought an injunction against Potter's airport advertisements. It has since dropped the case.
"Wholly Australian owned" family firm Herron Pharmaceuticals irritated SmithKline Beecham Pharmaceuticals by saying in an ad that Australia's number-one painkiller, Panadol, owned by the US heavyweight, was not Australian at all.
SmithKline Beecham went to court but Herron won.
Herron chief executive Euan Murdoch said the company's market share in painkillers climbed to 32 percent from 25 percent before the ads, and public support was "huge."
But the nationalists are not simply irking the foreigners.
Dick Smith has had run-ins with former deputy prime minister Tim Fischer, ambassador of the "Australian Made Campaign," a body set up by national and state chambers of commerce to promote locally manufactured products and not just pure Australian firms.
"It's fortress Australia, it's ultimately devastating to the longer-term future of Australia," Fischer said back in March, criticizing Smith's "xenophobic" twist.
The campaign's executive director, Jenny Da Rin, says there is no proof that foreign investment is bad for the economy. The latest government study found that 97 cents of every dollar invested by foreign firms remained in Australia, she says.
Da Rin says she is not against promoting ownership. But ownership does not always mean a firm's products are made in Australia.
Ultimately, consumers should make decisions based on price and quality, and not just nationalism, she says.
The Consumers' Association is careful not to take sides in the Australian-made or Australian-owned debate, but on that point it agrees.
"Don't let the desire to buy Australian get in the way of normal shopping best practice," it says.
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