Excerpt from theaustralian.com.au

The residents of the Torres Strait and other remote communities in North Queensland don’t have the supermarkets that many city and town dwellers take for granted.

Instead, they pay higher prices for food items and have lower quality fresh food than is available in other parts of Australia, says Robbie Sands, Kowanyama Aboriginal Shire Council mayor and chair of the Torres Cape Indigenous Council Alliance.

And while shop owners in remote communities are often accused of unfairly hiking up their prices, a report by the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Indigenous Affairs in 2020 concluded: “The committee did not find evidence of systemic price-gouging in remote communities.”

Instead, the committee heard that much of the reason for the higher prices is the difficulty in transporting food to these communities, often from Brisbane or even further south.