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Summarised by Centrist
The Democracy Project’s Bryce Edwards gives Winston Peters credit for having “smartly read the room” with NZ First’s supermarket reform announcement, coming “just weeks after announcing NZ First would campaign to break up the big four electricity gentailers”.
“But,” Edwards cautions, “there is a gap” between the rhetoric and the reality of breaking up New Zealand’s food duopoly.
Peters is calling for Foodstuff’s brands to be broken up with Pak’n’Save on one end, and New World and Four Square on the other. However, Edwards is critical that Australian-owned Woolworths NZ is left untouched.
In other words, the politics may be punchy, but the mechanics are missing. “In fact, if you were a supermarket lobbyist designing the least threatening ‘reform’ you could live with, it would probably look something like what NZ First has announced.”
He’s further critical of the plan, saying, “The NZ First announcement contains no costing, no timeline, and no explanation of how the forced split of a cooperative would be legally and commercially implemented.”
Edwards says a serious reform package would mean divesting distribution centres to an independent operator, addressing competition geographically rather than just by logo, and breaking the grip incumbents have over loyalty-card data. He cites Tex Edwards, arguing that, letting supermarkets control that information “while using it to price, promote and profile at a granular level, is itself an anticompetitive act”.
