Ryan Bridge: You don't know what you've got 'til it's gone

We're learning a few hard truths this week and the old saying rings true - you don't know what you've got 'til its gone.

Parties on the left and the right all crying out for more oil. Turns out, it's actually still quite important.

Centrist: Households now paying the real price of bread

New Zealanders are paying a lot more for basic food not because inflation has suddenly spiked, but because years of artificially low pricing have quietly ended.

New data from Stats NZ shows food prices rose 4 percent over 2025, while the price of a standard loaf of white bread jumped almost 60 per cent.

David Hargreaves: December quarter inflation figures....

Statistics NZ's Selected Price Indexes show moderate price pressures over December, indicating few likely nasty surprises in next week's December quarter inflation figures

Food prices edged up 0.1% in December, following a 0.1% drop in November, according to Stats NZ.

Point of Order: Buzz from the Beehive - 13/3/24

Van Velden brings free-market approach to changing labour laws – but her colleagues stick to distributing state aid

Workplace Relations and Safety Minister Brooke van Velden told Auckland Business Chamber members they were the first audience to hear her priorities as a minister in a government committed to cutting red tape and regulations.

She brandished her liberalising credentials, saying

Bruce Cotterill: Something's going wrong with the food prices.....

..........and it's not the supermarkets

I was listening to Jamie McKay on The Country radio show last week [early November]. He was talking about the retail price of a rack of lamb.

Farmers in this country are selling their lambs for about $6 per kilogram. In case you’re wondering, that’s not a lot of money. The average healthy lamb will weigh between 16 and 18 kilos and so in round figures we’re talking about a farmer doing a whole lot of work for $100 per animal.

Kate Hawkesby: Groceries aren't getting cheaper anytime soon

I’ve been obsessed with grocery prices this year – I mean, haven’t we all? Anyone who does the shopping knows what a shock it can be when you see the prices of some things literally quadruple right in front of you.  

I have an ongoing debate with the person in our household who does not do the groceries about this. His solution is: if you don’t want to pay $20 for blueberries, shop around. Now, that’s all well and good if you have lots of time on your hands and all day to trawl through supermarkets and greengrocers all over the city, but most of us don’t.  

Kate Hawkesby: Be prepared for a bunch of cost increases over the next few weeks

We are in for a bunch of cost increases over the next few weeks. I know, more.

It’s not like we haven’t been facing a steady stream of rising costs for a while already, but a couple of things are coming up to bite us.

One, the Government’s petrol subsidy is coming to an end this Saturday, which’ll see petrol prices jump by 29 cents a litre. That’s a lot, and it’ll hit hard in a cost of living crisis.

Kate Hawkesby: The powers that be tell us food prices will come down soon, I hope that's true

So I’m not sure the Mother’s Day brunch this weekend will be including avocado on toast given the shortage of them – and therefore the cost of them.

Although despite avocado being $9 and $10 each in some parts of the country at the moment, other places tell me they can still get them and get them cheap. So it might be a case of the old postcode lottery at the moment when it comes to fruit and veges.

But yesterday we heard that we’ve had our largest food price increase since 1987.

Kate Hawkesby: Price of food's getting so high, I might bake my own bread

 

With the price of food the way it is, lest we forget we are in a ‘cost of living crisis’, I have become hyper-alert at the supermarket these days in terms of what I’m paying. And it seems I’m not the only one.

Headlines these days say shoppers are fed up and looking to go elsewhere than a supermarket. It used to be, back in the good old days, that the supermarket was the best deal for food.

You’d be mad to buy cereal or butter at the local dairy because it was smaller scale so sold at a premium, you could guarantee back then it would always be the more expensive option.