Time to smash the supermarkets

While Labour is reflexively cowering and refusing to release any policy, the Greens released a cost of living policy we can all get behind: breaking up the supermarket dupoly:

The Green Party is campaigning on establishing a publicly owned supermarket chain to break up the duopoly and drive down food prices.

[...]

Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said successive governments had failed to lure an existing chain to New Zealand to introduce competition in the sector, which is dominated by Foodstuffs and Woolworths.

"That's why today we are announcing the real solution: a supermarket owned by all New Zealanders, for all New Zealanders," she said.

"We're not short of supermarkets, we're short of competition. As experts have noted, divestment - that is, buying already existing stores - is key to breaking up the duopoly."

There are complications - one half of the duopoly (Foodstuffs) is a cooperative, so Foodstuffs doesn't actually own those stores. But that's just a matter of legislative language. The key is legislating them out of the cooperative and into a viable competitor, while also stopping the fragments from reuniting into a duopoly again. And while it would undoubtedly be cheaper to simply force the split, and hope some foreign chain buys in to provide competition, their demonstrated reluctance counts against it, and even if they did they could just sell up again and leave us right back where we started. Nationalisation gives us protection against that. It gives us control, allowing us to set policy direction (not just on competing on price, but also on employment standards). Another foreign-owned chain won't do that. Meanwhile the government buying an asset doesn't cost anything in a budget sense - it simply moves money from one column (cash) to another (assets), with no change in the overall balance.

And forced divestment and nationalisation is clearly necessary. Because despite all the status quo parties' pleading, the market is clearly not going to provide, and the current situation (where the duopoly makes a million dollars in excess profits a day, money which could be in our pockets rather than theirs) is clearly unsustainable. We can no longer afford to allow these tyrants to gouge us. Time to smash their cosy cartel and get some real competition. And while we're at it, do the electricity companies, the fuel retailers, and the banks.