"Laser focused"

When the regime was elected, they claimed to have a laser focus on bringing down the cost of living. So how's that working out for them? Badly:

Food prices are rising much faster than wages, putting more pressure on household budgets and creating a squeeze that's feeling worse for some than the global financial crisis, one economist says.

Stats NZ data for August shows prices were 5 percent higher than a year earlier.

Depending on how wage growth is measured, incomes are growing by as little as half that.

[...]

Higher prices for the grocery food group, up 4.7 percent, contributed most to the annual increase in food prices.

That was largely down to the increase in milk, cheese and butter. Milk was up 16.3 percent to $4.72 per two litres, cheese up 26.2 percent to $12.89 for a kilogram block and butter was up 31.8 percent year-on-year to $8.58 per 500g.

Meat, fruit, and vegetables are also all up. And what's the government's answer? Nothing. Oh, they'll tinker around the edges and wish for a deep-pocketed competitor to enter the market, but they won't actually do anything. They won't make a KiwiKai to provide competition, or forcibly break up the oligopoly which gouges us. And the Prime Minister's response to basic food prices being so high is to blame "international markets", without once asking why kiwis, the people who subsidise food production and bear its environmental costs, are paying those prices, or why food producers are allowed to export in preference to feeding us first. Because asking those questions would be very bad for the people who fund this regime, and who profit by gouging us.

But if this regime doesn't have an answer, then voters can and should look for one at the ballot box. Price gouging does terrible things for your social licence, and its time we reminded our grocery oligopolies of that. Regulate them properly, force them to sell to us first at a fair price before they export anything, and make it clear that their primary purpose is to serve the New Zealand market, not foreigners. The problem with having a food industry which exports 90% of its output is that they don't have to care about us; so maybe we need to challenge the problem at its root, stop those exports, shrink the industry to something more manageable (and less environmentally destructive), rather than letting them impoverish us economically, socially, and environmentally for their own profit?