Would You like Some Slavery with That?

You say ‘tomahto’ and I say ‘tomayto’. You say ‘ethically sourced’ and I say ‘product of slave-labour’ – probably not Ira Gershwin.

When the Trump administration recently announced punitive tariffs on Australia, because our government and big business haven’t done enough to eliminate the products of slave labour from their supply chains, the guilty parties were outraged. How dare the Bad Orange Man suggest Australian businesses are profiting off slave labour!

Except…

One of Australia's biggest tomato brands and two major supermarkets are selling products that independent scientific testing shows do not match the country of origin stated on their labels.

Forensic testing conducted for Four Corners has revealed dozens of tomato paste and passata products that claim to be from Australia or Italy are actually from China.

About half of those are sourced from Xinjiang, an area known internationally for its use of forced labour.

The majority of tomato paste products from Leggo’s have misleading labels. This despite its strong claims on its packaging about being sourced from Australian farms. Coles Italian tomato paste and Aldi’s home brand Remano paste also failed. Overall, 22 per cent of the 221 products tested failed country-of-origin testing; all the failures came from China, and 53 per cent of those traced straight to Xinjiang.

Well-known tomato brands that passed country-of-origin testing include Mutti, SPC, Woolworths, Providore d’Italia and Annalisa. Diced tomato cans and passata from Leggo’s and Coles also passed.

Source Certain, the lab that has worked with the FBI and Interpol, is better than 98 per cent certain. The chemical fingerprints in the soil, water and climate do not lie. The packaging does.

Simplot (owner of Leggo’s), Coles and Aldi all reject the results, of course. They have “trusted suppliers”, “comprehensive traceability” and “regular due diligence”. What they do not have is forensic testing of their own. The supermarkets may genuinely not have known the tomatoes were Chinese. That is precisely the point. Australia’s verification systems are so limp that the world’s biggest free-market democracy has just slapped a 12.5 per cent tariff on us for failing to keep slave-labour produce out of the supermarket aisle. The Albanese government calls the tariff “completely unjustified”. The laboratory results suggest otherwise.

Xinjiang is not some abstract human-rights talking point. It is the region where the Chinese Communist Party has industrialised forced labour on a scale the West prefers not to notice. The United States banned Xinjiang tomato products in 2021 for exactly this reason. Australia shrugged and kept stacking the shelves.

The hypocrisy runs deeper than supermarket brands. Mining billionaire Andrew “Twiggy” Forrest has spent years burnishing his credentials as an anti-slavery campaigner. His entire fortune, like most of the Australian resources sector’s, rests on selling iron ore and other commodities into the same Chinese system that runs the Xinjiang labour camps. Virtue is easy when the cheques clear.

And the tomatoes are only the entrée. As the lab’s own Cameron Scadding observed, “consumers should not assume the problem was limited to tomatoes”. Walk into any supermarket and the opportunities for misrepresentation stretch down every aisle.

More damning still: 96 per cent of the solar panels that underpin the Albanese government’s Net Zero fantasy are made in China. A very large share of those panels come from the same forced-labour ecosystem that produced the tomato paste. The government subsidises them, the green lobby cheers them and the Uyghurs keep working the lines at gunpoint.

So the next time a politician or a corporate social-responsibility officer lectures you about ethical supply chains, remember the tomato paste. Remember the labels that said “Australia” or “Italy” and meant Xinjiang. Remember that Trump’s tariffs were not an act of random spite: they were a blunt response to a system that prefers comfortable lies to inconvenient verification.

Australia can keep pretending its due diligence is world class. The DNA fingerprints say otherwise.