Every year, Australians are treated to the familiar spectacle of the Australian lamb ad. Tongue-in-cheek, self-aware, and unapologetically cheeky, it leans hard into national identity, mateship, humour, the barbecue as a unifying ritual. This year’s instalment was no different. It asked us, with a wink, to gather around the BBQ, share a chop, and remember who we are.
For me, and I suspect for many Australians, it landed differently.
Not because the ad was offensive. Quite the opposite. It reminded me of something that feels increasingly out of reach: the ability to participate in what was once a simple, shared staple of everyday life. Lamb wasn’t a luxury food in many Australian households when I was growing up. It was part of the weekly shop, the Sunday roast, the backyard barbecue. Today, for a growing number of families, it’s something you pause over, or quietly skip.
This is happening in the middle of a cost-of-living crisis. Mortgage repayments have jumped sharply. Rents continue to rise. Energy bills, insurance, and groceries have all increased faster than wages. Many households aren’t cutting back to get ahead; they’re cutting back to keep up.
Against that backdrop, the price of lamb has taken on a significance that goes beyond the meat aisle.
Australia produces lamb in abundance. In fact, more than 70 per cent of our lamb production is exported. That’s a success story in trade terms, but it also shapes domestic prices. Export demand sets the benchmark, and local consumers effectively compete with overseas buyers. At the retail level, lamb prices in Australia have frequently sat in the mid-to-high $20s per kilogram for common cuts, with premium cuts often higher.
What jars is that, in some overseas markets, imported Australian lamb has sold at comparable, and sometimes lower, prices once exchange rates are factored in. That’s not because foreigners are being favoured, but because global pricing, scale, and competitive retail environments can work very differently elsewhere.
Farmers are not to blame for this. Many are dealing with rising input costs, volatile seasons, and narrow margins. Nor is this an argument against exports or a swipe at a light-hearted advertising campaign. The issue is more structure, than intent.
Australia’s domestic grocery market is highly concentrated. When prices rise at the farm gate, they move quickly at the checkout. When costs fall, retail prices are far slower to follow. Over time, this erodes trust, especially when staples start to feel like discretionary purchases.
For me, and I suspect many Australians, that’s where the sense of unease creeps in. It feels like something more than inflation at work. It feels like ordinary consumers are no longer the reference point in systems that were supposed to serve them.
There is another layer to this conversation that’s harder to quantify, but difficult to ignore. Across much of the developed world, there is a growing consensus, among global institutions, governments, and corporate leaders, that eating less meat is not just a personal preference, but a moral and environmental good. Livestock farming is increasingly discussed through the lens of emissions, impact, and reduction, rather than nutrition, culture, or food security. Whatever one’s view of the climate debate, this shift in framing matters. When a food is culturally recast as something we should feel cautious or guilty about consuming, it becomes easier to accept outcomes where it drifts out of reach for ordinary people.
This didn’t happen overnight, and it wasn’t imposed by some external authority. Successive governments of both political stripes have broadly shared the same assumptions: that global markets allocate resources more efficiently, that resilience is a secondary concern, and that domestic affordability will sort itself out. These ideas became normal over the decades through convergence, shared frameworks, shared language, and a reluctance to challenge prevailing economic orthodoxy.
During stable times, those trade-offs are easy to ignore. During a cost-of-living crisis, they become impossible to miss.
That’s why the lamb ad struck a nerve. It wasn’t mocking anyone. But it highlighted the gap between national imagery and lived reality. Being encouraged to gather around the barbecue feels different when you’re juggling grocery bills against mortgage repayments.
This isn’t a call to abandon trade or turn inward. Australia benefits enormously from being outward-looking. It is a call to ask a simple, reasonable question: When a country produces food in abundance, should its citizens feel priced out of it during economic hardship?
Markets are powerful tools, but they aren’t moral arbiters. If outcomes consistently leave people feeling sidelined, it’s fair, and healthy, to question whether the balance is right.
Humour and tradition are part of who we are. We should keep both. But if lamb on the barbie is meant to symbolise something shared, then making it accessible to Australians again shouldn’t be an unreasonable aspiration.
