Willis says "let them eat butter"

Butter has become a flashpoint in the cost-of-living crisis, with the price of the baking staple doubling in the last 14 months, and people queuing for cheap blocks. Its got so bad that National - the party of rich farmers - has had to pretend to care, with Nicola Willis having a meeting with Fonterra's CEO in an effort to talk down the price. The result? everything is fine, apparently:

The Finance Minister does not believe New Zealanders are getting a "raw deal" on butter, but has accepted there is no getting away from how expensive it is right now.

We’re not getting a raw deal? Bullshit. We can see it every time we go to the supermarket. But Willis is paid $304,300 a year plus slush, so she can buy all the butter she wants. Which makes the above sound a lot like "let them eat butter".

So who’s to blame? Willis is desperate to deflect attention from Fonterra, so blames the supermarkets:

The meeting had reinforced Willis' interest in increasing supermarket competition to put downward pressure on the price of butter.

"All roads lead back to supermarket competition. I continue to believe that is the most powerful lever that the government has on this issue. We will never be able to control global dairy prices. What we can influence is the amount of competition in New Zealand's grocery sector and we have a lot of work underway to address that."

While the supermarket cartel is absolutely part of the problem, National's "work programme" is basically "hope a third party joins the oligopoly and gets in on the gouging". So they have no real solutions there. And they're certainly not going to do what is necessary: legislate to forcibly break up the cartel and forbid mergers in the sector or its underlying logistics to prevent such accumulation of market power.

And none of this should be letting Fonterra off the hook. Because while there's a global price, there's no reason we, the people who bear the environmental costs of the dairy industry's profiteering and who subsidise them billions of dollars a year in water and carbon, should pay it. And we have tools we can use to ensure we get some benefit from hosting this parasitic, polluting industry. For example, we could ban or restrict dairy exports to ensure they served the domestic market first. Or just directly regulate to require them to sell domestically at a low price. Because seeing butter exported overseas while it becomes unaffordable to kiwis is simply unacceptable.

Obviously, regulating Fonterra would be bad for farmers. But it would be far better for the rest of us. And why shouldn’t those subsidised rural parasites give something back to the community they leech off for once?