Labour promises to outlaw "price gouging" at the checkout. National promises to carve up Foodstuffs. Both say they will finally sort the supermarkets.
Both sound like him.
Hipkins has discovered excessive prices. Substantial market power. Commerce Commission with teeth. Hand back every dollar. Not your dairy. The big end of town. Butter prices are the villain and government regulation the cure.
Luxon and Willis have discovered structural separation. Pak'nSave one way, New World and Four Square the other. Three nationwide chains if you squint. First 100 days. Six months for the Commission. Legislate if it nods.
Ostensibly, an election fight.
But really a reunion tour for Alliance economics.
In the 1990s Anderton wanted control of essentials, knuckles on the Commerce Act, monopoly profits counted out. Labour flinched. National would have called it socialism and meant it.
Now Labour wears the coat. National the trousers. They race each other to out Anderton each other
Willis swears politicians will not play supermarket executive from the Cabinet table. Then she camps the Commission outside Foodstuffs with a mandate to recommend the split she’s campaigning on. Hipkins swears he will personally oversee fairness. The man who oversaw the Covid years.
Different press releases. Same instinct: prices are a moral failure, competition is something you legislate into existence, and the checkout is where you win an election.
A Foodstuffs breakup wont help. At best it rearranges the logos and adds lawyers. At worst. Costs are up. "Excessive" is not a number. It is a speech. Neither party will admit the other half of the grocery bill — tax, regulation, land, labour, energy — because that is them.
So they promise Jim's politics to each other and call it a contest.
Anderton spent a career telling them the state should lean on the big end of town until prices behaved. They used to edge away.
Now they out Anderton each other.
It’s 2026 and Labour and National are campaigning on Alliance economics. I would never have picked that.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
Luxon and Willis have discovered structural separation. Pak'nSave one way, New World and Four Square the other. Three nationwide chains if you squint. First 100 days. Six months for the Commission. Legislate if it nods.
Ostensibly, an election fight.
But really a reunion tour for Alliance economics.
In the 1990s Anderton wanted control of essentials, knuckles on the Commerce Act, monopoly profits counted out. Labour flinched. National would have called it socialism and meant it.
Now Labour wears the coat. National the trousers. They race each other to out Anderton each other
Willis swears politicians will not play supermarket executive from the Cabinet table. Then she camps the Commission outside Foodstuffs with a mandate to recommend the split she’s campaigning on. Hipkins swears he will personally oversee fairness. The man who oversaw the Covid years.
Different press releases. Same instinct: prices are a moral failure, competition is something you legislate into existence, and the checkout is where you win an election.
A Foodstuffs breakup wont help. At best it rearranges the logos and adds lawyers. At worst. Costs are up. "Excessive" is not a number. It is a speech. Neither party will admit the other half of the grocery bill — tax, regulation, land, labour, energy — because that is them.
So they promise Jim's politics to each other and call it a contest.
Anderton spent a career telling them the state should lean on the big end of town until prices behaved. They used to edge away.
Now they out Anderton each other.
It’s 2026 and Labour and National are campaigning on Alliance economics. I would never have picked that.
Rodney Hide is former ACT Party leader, and Minister in the National-ACT Government from 2008 to 2011. This article was first published HERE
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