An Israeli family of four now needs NIS 14,139 a month — roughly $4,480 — just to meet bare minimum needs, with NIS 3,797 going to food alone. Food prices in Israel are 51 percent higher than in EU countries and 37% than the OECD average, according to the State Comptroller. Israel ranks fourth in the OECD for cost of living. Nearly 27% of Israeli families faced food insecurity in 2025, up from 21 per cent the year before. And when the State Comptroller’s office examined 38 food categories — from bread and milk to coffee and frozen chicken — it found that in 20 of them, just three corporations control more than 85 per cent of the market.

This is not what a competitive economy looks like. It is what you get when market concentration is treated as a structural feature rather than a structural failing.

The Australian Precedent

In 1993, Australia faced its own version of this problem. State-owned monopolies dominated utilities. Professions were ringfenced from competition. Prices were high and productivity was stalling. The government commissioned Fred Hilmer — a McKinsey director turned business school dean turned corporate CEO — to review the entire competition framework from the ground up.

I knew Fred Hilmer. He was my Vice-Chancellor at the University of New South Wales, and I found tracing his career path — from chairing that 1993 competition review to running one of Australia’s largest media companies and then leading a great research university — genuinely inspirational. What struck me was that Hilmer never treated competition policy as an abstraction. He understood it as a practitioner who had operated on both sides of the markets he sought to open up.

The Hilmer Report did not tinker. It created new institutions — the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission and the National Competition Council. It established competition principles that bound all levels of government. It introduced fiscal incentives: states that reformed were paid to do so, and an independent body could withhold payments from those that did not. The Productivity Commission later concluded that these reforms underpinned a generation of sustained productivity........

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