Why smashing the Supermarket duopoly is such a wasted opportunity for the Left and such a huge win for Winston
Let’s be clear, Winston’s solution to break up the Supermarket Industry won’t work, and there’s very little chance of NZ First actually attempting it when you consider how many broken promises they’ve given over the decades but your average voter doesn’t get into the weeds of these policies so it’s announcement is still an enormous political win for Winston.
The Supermarket duopoly is just one more market distortion that is allowed in NZ.
The state’s responsibility is regulating capitalism and ensuring competition, we simply don’t do that here so we see monopolies, duopolies and oligopolies all fuelling a Plutocracy in NZ.
The current investigation in Australia against Supermarket price gouging keeps finding more and more deplorable actions and seeing as they operate here in NZ, the idea that they do terrible things in Australia and not NZ seems ridiculous to believe.
BUT it’s still a win for Winston because kiwis get mugged at the supermarkets every week.
It’s also an enormous blow to the Left because once again, no one between Labour, Greens or Te Pati Maori seem to have any sense of what to do and that is incredibly frustrating because we have in 2Degrees the perfect model.
I believe as part of our Treaty culture that Māori Iwi should be threaded as nerves into the backbone of the NZ Economy and that in essential industries Iwi investment should be woven into infrastructure to provide the deep long term guardianship that Māori culture embodies rather than the short term 3 months mindset of capitalism.
Breaking up the shopping duopoly and re-setting it with an Iwi backed organisation (similar to 2Degrees) with a focus on food security would do more for this country than any other single poverty policy.
Creating a Supermarket where cheap healthy food can be sold to consumers, pay good prices to supplies AND ensure workers rights at the supermarkets were championed would be a win win win.
The Left seem incapable of grasping that.
I’m not looking for socialism from Labour, Greens and Te Pati Māori, I’m just looking for basic regulated capitalism.
In theory the current system should deliver the lowest prices. Two large companies should enable economies of scale. They have the size to bargain with suppliers, to centralize an efficient distribution of product and to afford the capital requirements of providing buildings in which to operate. Break them up into smaller entities as Winstone is grand-standing and all you get is everybody paying 4 Square prices and no more Pak ‘n Save pricing.
If you consider the provision of food to our citizens to be an essential activity in society then it is logical that government should control that. The simplist way would be to determine a reasonable rate of return on the capital invested and then apply a punitive tax on excess profit above that amount.