Green Party breaking up Supermarket Duopoly is exactly what capitalists should be doing!
Greens promise to create ‘KiwiMart’ supermarket chain and break up duopoly
The Green Party says it will split up the supermarket duopoly, bring back and expand the previous government’s school lunch programme, and establish a government-owned supermarket chain, if elected to power.
It believes the cost of setting up the new chain under the brand ‘KiwiMart’, and buying 120 supermarkets off Woolworths and Foodstuffs and two distribution centres, would have a $2.8 billion price tag.
Policy documents likened the proposed chain to Kiwibank’s impact on the banking sector but said it would be “at a competitive scale”.
As part of the suite of policies the party said it would also introduce a bill to ban “excessive price gouging” at supermarkets and in the fuel and energy sectors.
The Post
Isn’t it embarrassing when the Left has to lecture the free market right about capitalism?
I’m not looking for socialism from the political left, just basic regulated capitalism!
The fact is NZs Capitalism is rigged!
We have always been two giant sparsely populated Islands that have relied on the State as the 40% foundation stone! The competitive dynamics that shape free market capitalism don’t work in low population density countries!
In NZ, regulated capitalism requires the State to step in and be a player when breaking up monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies.
The Commerce Commission has always had the power to break up the Supermarket Duopoly and hand them over to a third player, utilise them dammit!
Where the Greens should look in terms of structures is Kiwibank and 2 Degrees.
I prefer the 2Degrees version as it open the door for Iwi to be a 50% stakeholder in this.
A State backed 50% owned Iwi chain of supermarkets with a focus on better prices for food supplies, lower prices for consumers and better standards of wage for staff would do more to build food security in NZ than anything else.
The Greens are the only party bringing big ideas to the table from the Left this election (other than Te Pati Māori’s tax policy platform which is chef kiss perfect).
Labour are missing in action.
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The Green Party’s proposal for a publicly owned supermarket chain has predictably been met with hostility by the Government and its supporters. But all it is has achieved is expose the bankruptcy of a political establishment so wedded to a failed neoliberalism that it cannot even imagine a public solution to obvious market failure. As far as the political establishment is concerned, New Zealanders can continue to go hungry.
IT COMES AS no surprise that the Green Party’s proposal for a publicly owned supermarket chain has been met with outright hostility by the Government and its supporters. Nothing exposes the brittle insecurity of a failed status quo quite like its reaction to even the mildest deviation from market orthodoxy.
National’s response has been textbook: panic, caricature, and the lazy invocation of ‘Soviet planning’ as though the mere utterance of the phrase is enough to shut down debate. Christopher Luxon and Nicola Willis clearly believe that if they repeat the line often enough, voters will forget the very real, very contemporary failures of the duopoly that currently dictates the price of basic food in this country. While it might impress the likes of Newstalk ZB and the Taxpayers Union, its doubtful it will convince those of us struggling to put food on the table each day.
https://nzagainstthecurrent.blogspot.com/2026/09/kiiwimart-has-exposed-insecurity-of.html
Cause this has worked with the gentailers…
Time to smash the supermarkets
While Labour is reflexively cowering and refusing to release any policy, the Greens released a cost of living policy we can all get behind: breaking up the supermarket dupoly:
There are complications – one half of the duopoly (Foodstuffs) is a cooperative, so Foodstuffs doesn’t actually own those stores. But that’s just a matter of legislative language. The key is legislating them out of the cooperative and into a viable competitor, while also stopping the fragments from reuniting into a duopoly again. And while it would undoubtedly be cheaper to simply force the split, and hope some foreign chain buys in to provide competition, their demonstrated reluctance counts against it, and even if they did they could just sell up again and leave us right back where we started. Nationalisation gives us protection against that. It gives us control, allowing us to set policy direction (not just on competing on price, but also on employment standards). Another foreign-owned chain won’t do that. Meanwhile the government buying an asset doesn’t cost anything in a budget sense – it simply moves money from one column (cash) to another (assets), with no change in the overall balance.
And forced divestment and nationalisation is clearly necessary. Because despite all the status quo parties’ pleading, the market is clearly not going to provide, and the current situation (where the duopoly makes a million dollars in excess profits a day, money which could be in our pockets rather than theirs) is clearly unsustainable. We can no longer afford to allow these tyrants to gouge us. Time to smash their cosy cartel and get some real competition. And while we’re at it, do the electricity companies, the fuel retailers, and the banks.
https://norightturn.blogspot.com/2026/09/time-to-smash-supermarkets.html
Well, I don’t see much, if any, criticism by the media so at least they have got the delivery right this time. I like the KIWIMART name and look, but I otherwise put this in the too much trouble to be a goer with basket. I prefer better regulation – why this is currently not the case is worth discussing and more….
Before 2Degrees would operate its own network regulation/legislation was required to stop the incumbents from running cross-subsidised ultra-low loss-leader prices in the region where a new entrant was attempting to compete and still run high prices in other regions.
If any government had regulated this for the grocery sector Aldi might have had a chain of supermarkets here already.
The problem with capitalism is that it has a natural tendency towards monopoly.
Competition is good for consumers, but every individual competitor has an incentive to eliminate that competition and dominate the market. Left unchecked, successful competition can therefore eventually undermine the very conditions that made it possible in the first place.
That is why some form of reset or intervention is needed from time to time. A free market works only while the market is genuinely free. Taken to its logical conclusion, however, an entirely unrestricted market can produce concentrations of power that make it considerably less free.
This is where government has a legitimate role: not necessarily to control the market, but to preserve competition by preventing monopolies, restraining excessive market concentration, and stepping in when necessary to restore a genuinely competitive environment.
Of course, there is an irony in New Zealand’s supermarket situation. During the Covid lockdowns, Jacinda Ardern’s government effectively channelled an enormous amount of retail business towards the major supermarket chains by restricting which businesses could remain open. Whatever the justification for that policy at the time, it arguably helped strengthen the very supermarket dominance and lack of competition that we are now concerned about.
“A State backed 50% owned Iwi chain of supermarkets with a focus on better prices for food supplies, lower prices for consumers and better standards of wage for staff would do more to build food security in NZ than anything else.”
It would be more expensive to run based off the statements above and the (ever-dwindling) taxpayer would have to foot the bill. Given we are already borrowing to meet our interest bill this would be another example of economic retardation.
If the answer was more competition then the likes of Tesco and Aldi would already be here. Or indeed “Iwimart” would have been established already.
Supermarkets in NZ work on a 6% return to the investor remembering bank deposits currently sit at around 4% (i.e. put money in a bank account). The “excess” profits the Greens are talking about are due to scale and are one of the reasons why:
a). No international player has any long-term interest in New Zealand
b). Why smaller players remain small or fail.
In order for food prices and supermarkets to get cheaper/increased competition you would need either
a). Increased scale due to population increases (population of 10m people?)
b). Significantly lower the cost of supply (a pigs fly scenario)
Put this idea in the “fantasy” bin alongside world peace, democracy in North Korea and a 2-state solution for the middle east
The strength in the Greens proposal is not having to make a return (profit) apart from making enough to repay the loan. Giving the benefits of the majority of it to shoppers via savings.
Doing a PPP would rob the Greens plan of this vital strength
If the Greens are serious then why not make it a bottom line! Labour will rule this out within 24 hours of releasing it. Any policy like this will need JT to front it otherwise it’s just like all the other Green polices like reforming the tax system…it won’t happen. They just won’t fight for it.
The country is getting really cheap prices being involved in an Airline , railways ,power and the postal service that it shows how successful owning a supermarket would be for the voters.
Lol
Did you never notice how reasonable your electricity bill used to be in the NZED days? On routes where competition exists there are usually a range of flight prices available and the railways and postal service is what you would expect in a country that has less population than a major city overseas. You forgot to mention the actual evidence regarding current supermarket margins also so see if you can find better excuses next time.