Just ten days ago the Greens promised to smash the supermarket duopoly, forcibly breaking up Foodstuffs and (foreign-owned) Woolworths and nationalising part of each to form a state-owned KiwiMart. It may have been a bit tricky to implement (because Foodstuffs is an owner-cooperative), but it clearly caught public imagination. Because today National has been forced to announce that they, too, support smashing the supermarket duopoly, though only after a review, and only by forcibly splitting it up:
National has made a supermarket break-up a key part of its election pitch, proposing to sever Pak'nSave from New World in a bid to drive down grocery prices.The policy is heavily caveated - how many propertarian weirdos and supermarket execs has National appointed to the Commerce Commission? - and clearly subject to a veto by ACT (which they have reliably delivered), so its arguably an insincere PR exercise aimed at providing the appearance of support for change without any substance. But even that is a huge victory. The fact that the party of protecting established economic interests has been forced to publicly support the breakup of one of the most established economic interests in the country shows how far the public mood has shifted, and how desperate National are to avoid being on the wrong side of that shift.The shake-up would be contingent on a six-month review by the Commerce Commission into whether the split would actually leave shoppers better off.
If the watchdog gave it the green light, National said it would legislate to force through the separation.
So what about Labour? They've been silent about our cartel problem, and their response to National has been to get pissy about it. Which makes me suspect National has "stolen" their carefully caveated, multiple-outs, aimed at preserving the status quo policy, meaning they'll have to go back to the focus groups and get another one because they have no values or principles to guide them and they can't just agree with National. (They have announced an anti-price-gouging law, but that is only part of a solution, addressing the symptoms while ignoring the cartels in the room). Hopefully Labour's eventual policy - if they manage to get one before the election - will be stronger. But it would not surprise me if they failed to take advantage of the huge opportunity this represents, because it would mean change, and that apparently is what Labour now exists to prevent.
As for the Greens, getting National to support decartelization is a huge victory for them, and a huge victory for their theory of political change (use policy announcements to change the conversation and the political landscape, forcing policy to shift closer to Green outcomes as a result). They've shifted the Overton window such that the status quo of cartels is no longer politically acceptable. The other parties (especially Labour) now have to respond to that.
