Hi @smith9, welcome to the community and for your first contrinbution.
It is allowed. Suppliers can set recommended retail prices which are often adopted by retailers as this ensures that their price is similar to their competitors. If you look online, many appliance, accessories etc distributor/manufacturer which sell their products or having pricing on the own websites have recommended retail prices which are often replicated by retailers. This also ensure that the distributer/manufacturer doesn’t sell it’s products below recommended retail prices which would disadvantage the retailers.
It would be illegal is all the retailers communicated with each other and colluded into setting a price for goods so that they can manipulate the market place - this is called a cartel. This has occurred in the past and the ACCC has taken swift action. Where distributers/wholesalers set recommended retail prices which are adopted by retailers, this is legal and the ACCC won’t take any action as it isn’t price fixing/a cartel.
Even the government or their government owned corporations set retail prices of goods or services which are adopted universally, irrespective of whether they are bought directly from a GOC, franchised businesses or independent retailers. A good example are stamps which universally have the same price no matter where they are purchased.
If Bunnings did stock the item, it would have its own unique model number (only sold by Bunnings) which means that they won’t match prices of the same item elsewhere. There are other threads about Bunnings ‘changed model number’ practices so that their ‘price guarantee’ is in effect meaningless in most cases.
