Commerce Commission to investigate Drainage monopoly while Kāinga Ora fuels it
The Commerce Commission has agreed to investigate monopoly practices inside the drainage industry while Kāinga Ora continues to fuel it.
The insanely under regulated NZ industry allows for monopolies and duopolies and oligopolies to form and there is a huge one inside the drainage industry, but because it’s all under ground, the full costs of this uncompetitive market is hidden.
Allegedly Two large infrastructure companies – who were both quite capable of doing large subdivision builds themselves – formed a Joint Venture to become the ONLY company Kāinga Ora would contract to for work in the entire Tāmaki region. So neither company had to worry about their margins or competing with each other.. they just take turns and divide the work up between them.
They then put out a RFP for a company to supply drainage products to them. They sent the RFP to ONE company only to pitch for the work – and then made it a multi year exclusive contract!
There is no free/fair market at play – it is a completely closed loop where Kāinga Ora is paying with Tax payers money into a completely rigged system where price wasn’t the issue – just give the Govt the ability to say we have built XXX houses this year and it doesn’t matter if they cost twice as much as last year! Kāinga Ora has no idea if the price they are paying is to high or not as there is no clear market forces at play.
The sooner the Commerce Commission investigates the wider issues in the drainage industry, the sooner we can start forcing prices down for housing.
I’m not looking for socialism from Labour anymore, just basic regulated capitalism!
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Didn’t Fletchers have a monopoly of building supplies and building contracts and wasn’t the National party complicit in creating monopolies?
That’s true, Fletcher’s ended up building many (most?) of the houses themselves
They were meant to be designed by the Housing Construction Dept. and then built by the Public Works Dept. housing division. State Advances Dept. then managed the leases.
Bring back Ministry of Works. They didn’t need road Cones by the thousands like today, as they had an army of site foreman s directing workers to smoko,s and telling them where to stand
But at least the money was going to the workers and the charge out rate s we’re regulated.