Government told to ‘get a bit more spine’ and improve competition to lower prices
Pressure is coming on the Government to improve business competition to push down prices for cash-strapped Kiwis as the cost of living emerges as the top concern in an election year.
Weak competition in some markets is making it easier for businesses to pass on cost increases to customers, Reserve Bank chief economist Paul Conway noted in a recent speech on inflation.
As a small, remote country, some industries in New Zealand are dominated by a few big players.
“When I look at the two building companies, the two supermarket chains, and the four banks that dominate their respective markets, some of that is typical of a country of this size – it’s not that unusual,” says Sam Stubbs, managing director of non-profit Kiwisaver provider Simplicity.
“That means that actually government have a bigger role to play here. It’s not as if you just leave it to market forces to ensure competition.”
That’s right!
The obligation of the Government is to regulate Capitalism so that we the people benefit from the competitive dynamics of competition!
The disgusting right myth is that NZ is an over taxed, over regulated economy when that is total bullshit!
Max Rashbrooke highlighted the horror of NZs under regulated market…
The bad news is that, to investigate 200,000-300,000 terrible rentals, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has employed a frontline inspectorate numbering … 37. Each inspector will have to check somewhere between 5000 and 8000 rentals.
…there is only 37 inspectors of rental properties for 300 000 terrible rentals?
Similar poorly funded regulation is apparent in the 82 labour inspectorates who are supposed to police hundreds of thousands of migrant worker exploitations!
Time and time and time again in New Zealand we see an old boy matrix of vested interests who occupy market dominance and act like a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly raking in vast wealth while leaving the local small and medium sized operators outside the cosy relationships!
Up and down NZ, small and medium enterprises are unable to compete because of the lack of basic regulation in the market!
We’ve seen it with the Supermarket duopoly, the medicinal cannabis oligopoly, the Gib Board monopoly – each time under regulated and poorly regulated capitalism continues to screw over us the consumers at a time of a cost of living crisis!
Frustration inside the drainage industry has reached boiling point recently with anti competitive practices and crony capitalism that would make your average South American Drug Cartels blush.
We are not an over taxed, over regulated economy!
Our top tax rate is the 39th highest in the world behind all the Scandinavian countries plus Germany, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France and South Africa!
Australia’s top tax rate is 47cents!
Our GST rate doesn’t even get us into the top 50 and our corporate tax rate is 40th while Government spending against GDP ranks 56th!
And we are voted easiest to do business by the World Bank!
I’m not looking for socialism here folks, just basic garden variety regulated capitalism!
We can’t drain the swamp because the crocodiles have learnt to shoot machine guns at anyone who attempts it.
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Well the Commerce Act. gets new teeth this April.
Landlord or “Unpaid-Janitor”? RE: “200,000-300,000 terrible rentals” – When I worked in Western Australia# – on the big resource projects – the Americans called us “Landlords” (now accommodation providers – in woke-speak@ (or greedy landlords)): “Unpaid-Janitors”, house-prices in Texas were going down and the work maintaining a rental house where every problem at the house was your problem etc. (and if you don’t “need” the money)…
– I have a brother in Auckland who is in a state-house (or whatever the woke translation is now) – I asked him yesterday “how many rent increases have you had the last year or so – given home owners have had around 10? – his response 0/zero – so that will go into the woke inflation model – imagine if there was some formula that applied to state housing and they had 5 or 10 rises so they were exposed to the “realities” of the economy like borrowers – and the governments had to adapt their narrative to being “tough” on inflation$.
At the margin there are Janitors that don’t need the money and don’t get paid for work or are slaves – don’t sack them – you will end up contributing to the rental crisis.
#:(i live in NZ and Perth/Thailand (no longer unpaid-janitor))
@: Woke: an articulation of perfection (safe, no risk, no responsibility, no accountability) – for the impotent “where only the impotent are pure” (Goff Whitlam)
$: Infaltion is a. high-street inflation and money supply (printing money in a short space of time) – if you believe the theory and apparently NZ has printed alot of money – haven’t heard of them buying gold to support the paper/fiat money/currency
You might want to consider getting urgent mental health care while you are at it…
Please explain how you have had 10 increases? What are you paying, it’s obviously not rent is it? Is it rates? Because if it’s rates, I assume the next thing you are going to whinge about is your property increasing in value.
Having never had an increase in rent in the 11 years I have been at the current address I can only come to the conclusion that ” home owners” offering up multiple rent increases is akin to rental rape.
If you can’t afford the 10 increases as a home owner, don’t take it out on the tenant otherwise you’ll become a “scum landlord”!
Yes, the Government could hold gold reserves to stabilise the volatile exchange rate however it doesn’t need to buy the gold it could just charge its mineral royalty in gold. The Martha gold mine in Waihi produces $40-$100 million of gold per annum after production costs but is only charged $1 million in royalties. Aussie miner, Oceania, justifies this low rate because apparently, the company pays the PAYE tax, not the workers. https://www.waihigold.co.nz/community/royalties-and-tax/
Time and time and time again in New Zealand we see an old boy matrix of vested interests who occupy market dominance and act like a monopoly, duopoly or oligopoly raking in vast wealth while leaving the local small and medium sized operators outside the cosy relationships!
Up and down NZ, small and medium enterprises are unable to compete because of the lack of basic regulation in the market!
That’s something that has occurred to me. The government opened up all our barriers that enabled our economy to run reasonably well. It then enabled undercutting of an operative economy for us, to benefit others from overseas. We lost our jobs and were encouraged then to look to ourselves in small ways, micro businesses, but then not enabled in them after all the bad karma they have brought on us. It is despicable behaviour from the self-satisfied merchants of glib. There is still time to act positively if they have a will. Where there is a will there is a way so the saying goes, and I believe it. So pull up your socks you prating sh..tes in government, earn your very satisfactory salaries and utilise your power still available, and make your administrative upstarts your lackeys instead of the other way round. Act is a word not just an acronym for nymph flies.
There are 500,000 private rental properties. I don’t believe anything like 60% of them are terrible rentals. It would imply, for instance, that every single private rental in South Auckland, is a terrible rental. Hardly likely.
Realistically the number of terrible rentals will be 10%, maybe as high 20%, say a maximum of 100,000.
It is not the top tax rate that is the key measure, rather the total tax take. New Zealand is notable for having relatively few deductions, and for GST, very few exemptions.
The much better measure is the total tax take as a percentage of the economy. New Zealand is pretty close to the middle of the OECD. Yes, we could go up to Scandinavian levels of the size of government being substantially more than 40%. I would suggest that New Zealanders would not want to make the compromises to their personal lives necessary to become like Scandinavians.
I appreciate the Greens are probably keen on that, but they are between 5 and 10% of the population. If there is Labour Green government they won’t determine the style of the government and more than ACT will determine the nature of a National ACT government.
Good grief – every time I hear a whinge about the top tax rate without the context of what income level it kicks in the whinger loses a lot of credibility…
We’re overtaxed AND suffer from idiot govt that overspends. As for regulation – the potential regulators are so inept that the far smarter businesses will just get road it.
It is naive to think that govt or govt bureaucrats have anything like the competence necessary to guide, regulate or enforce.
Government bureaucrats don’t have the competence to guide, regulate or enforce? So what are you suggesting? That only business leaders know how our tax dollars should be spent? Or perhaps we should do away with tax? Or perhaps that only a greedy selfish delusional fool like yourself knows how much and what to spend on this nations society?
Good grief everytime I hear one of you ultra right wing libertarians whinge about tax, I can envision this nation becoming a dystopian feudal kleptocracy run by oligarchs and corporations.
We urgently need Labour to regulate Capitalism – like urgently
Of course we do.
If Labour Party MPs can’t do it for us, their working class constituency, then they should at least do it for themselves, because if they don’t, they will be voted out of government to be replaced with an even more market driven party which will punish Labour’s working class constituency even more. The Labour Party MPs may think that sitting on the sidelines in opposition, for one or two terms, watching while National and ACt savage working familes and beneficiaries for one or two terms may not be so bad.
If the Labour MPs think that this will drive their constituency back to them, they are taking an awful gamble. As both Labour and National keep making things worse for working people, the siren song of the far right is becoming louder and more strident. A desperate people will try anything.
All politics is pressure.
To drown out the siren call of the Far Right. The voices of the parliamentary and activist Left must in turn become louder and more strident in making their alternative solutions to the market economy. Te Party Maori and the Greens must take every opportunity to raise angry voices to denounce the Labour governments market driven trajectory, and increase the pressure for their left alternatives be taken up by the Labour government.
Government used to regulate capitalism, but now capitalism holds government by the short n curlies, hence the forever growing economic inequality and near endless wars, just to name a couple of big money actions. The political divide is immaterial once you understand the context of today’s captured political world.
All politics is pressure.
Under the Hipkins administration, when it comes to climate change, business will be regulating themselves.
“Companies are in a great position to drive and support climate action, business leaders say.”
Olivia Wannan, Stuff climate reporter, Apr 06 2023
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/131678615/give-us-certainty-sustainable-business-leaders-plead-after-climate-assessment
The previous Prime Minister stated that climate change was her generation’s nuclear free moment. We all know that government had to pass legislation to ban nuclear vessels visiting our ports.
Under pressure from the Far Right and business, the Hipkins administration have “jettisoned” government efforts to regulate against climate change, and apparently are now leaving it up to business to regulate themselves.
“….with climate policies currently being jettisoned under the Hipkins-led Government, climate-concerned businesses may need to step up their efforts, they have warned.”
Olivia Wannan, Stuff climate reporter, Apr 06 2023
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/131678615/give-us-certainty-sustainable-business-leaders-plead-after-climate-assessment
We all know how this works out. in an unregulated competitive free market the most profitable companies drive the less profitable companies to the wall. In an unregulated free market, the most profitable companies able to undercut their rivals are the ones with the lowest wage bill and the cheapest (most polluting) methods of production. These are the companies that will drive their more sustainable rivals from the market.
Fuck the climate!
“It seems as if the only businesses speaking out about political change are in favour of not adapting,”
Kath Dewar, of sustainability-focused marketing firm GoodSense
https://www.stuff.co.nz/environment/climate-news/131678615/give-us-certainty-sustainable-business-leaders-plead-after-climate-assessment
“Pressure” gets the ball rolling, the actions or policy that follows determines whom is exerting this so-called pressure. Thus, whom has benefited the most from government actions over whatever period of time you wish to examine, for me, I’ll go back to the 1980’s until now, 2023, gives us an idea about whom government primarily serves.
For starters, neoliberal economic policy is still in place. Who does that serve, the rising economic inequality that has resulted from this policy shows that this does not serve the majority of the people, especially relative to how much it serves big business.
Unions, how strong are they now compared to 1980 or even further if you wish to go further back. Union power, aka people power, not a patch on what it once was.
Public services – infrastructure. One can make a case that these areas did indeed need a major overhaul, back in the day. But how well are they serving the people now. How well!
Taxes. Who is paying more taxes now compared to the 80’s. Big business or the people?
War. What do we the people prefer, peace or war? Why is this not even a topic of conversation in this day and age? War – never serves we, the people!
And so I could go on. It is clear that government actions speak to whom exerts the most “pressure” on them. We, the people, need to counter-balance this (big money) pressure and we need to do it now!
There’s a power imbalance in the political world and if we don’t get this soon, then its back to serf city for all of us.
BTW, all Stuff articles should start with this disclaimer….this is what government wishes us to say today….
“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. …We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of.” Edward Bernays – The father of PR
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