Written By:
- Date published:
7:43 pm, September 6th, 2026 - 2 comments
Categories: election 2026, food, greens -
Tags: Affordable Kai policy, food security, Kiwimart, supermarkets
from the Green Party website:
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“Our country produces enough food to feed 40 million people. There is no shortage of food in Aotearoa, but it’ssomehow becoming too expensive for too many New Zealanders,” says Green Party Co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick.
“Two companies control what almost everyone in this country eats, and they take about a million dollars a day in excess profit out of our shopping baskets. That is money that should be in people’s pockets.”
“Everyone agrees we need competition in the grocery sector to drive down prices, but successive Governments have failed to lure one. That’s why today we are announcing the real solution: a supermarket owned by all New Zealanders, for all New Zealanders.”
“There are only so many places in a town where a supermarket can go, and Woolworths and Foodstuffs have seen to it that these sites are locked up. 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.”
The full policy includes:
Modelling by the Parliamentary Library puts the cost of acquiring 120 stores and two distribution centres at $1.3 billion, with a further $1.5 billion to capitalise KiwiMart as a commercially viable competitor.
“Successive governments have studied this problem to death. There have been market studies, codes of conduct and stern letters, while the price of groceries skyrocketed. The Greens will not sit on our hands. We will ensure New Zealanders get the affordable groceries they deserve,” says Swarbrick.
Green Party Co-leader Marama Davidson says the plan also rebuilds the parts of the food system that governments have run down.
“One in five children in this country live in a household that runs out of food. The Luxon Government’s response was to cut what it spends on a child’s lunch, hand the job to a handful of big companies, and destroy up to 2,000 local jobs doing it.”
“Half of those lunches now fail to meet nutrition standards. Children who miss meals are two to four years behind their classmates in maths, reading and science. We will restore Ka Ora, Ka Ako, put it back in the hands of schools and local providers, and expand it so 150,000 more tamariki get a decent lunch every day.”
“We will also put $150 million a year into the food rescue organisations, food hubs, marae and social supermarkets already doing this work on the smell of an oily rag, because they know their communities better than any Minister does.”
“We will lift funding for food banks and regional food distribution from up to $8 million to $25 million while we fix the system that made them necessary.”
The Green Party launched the plan at Everybody Eats in Glen Innes, where meals made from rescued food are served on a pay-what-you-can basis.
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Honestly, I quite like this.
It’s ambitious, it’s legible, and most importantly it’s an actual attempt to solve the structural problem rather than commissioning another market study, tweaking a code of conduct, or hoping a third entrant will eventually appear.
I also have no particular ideological objection to the state owning supermarkets. If we think the duopoly itself is producing bad outcomes, creating a publicly owned competitor is an entirely legitimate market intervention.
My question is whether owning and operating 120 supermarkets and two distribution centres is the most effective way to achieve the underlying objective.
The obvious risk with KiwiMart is that we spend $2.8 billion creating a perfectly functional third supermarket chain, perhaps offering somewhat cheaper groceries to its customers, without putting enough downward pressure on prices across the rest of the market to justify that investment.
Or, even worse, it falls victim to the Kiwibank effect: too expensive to scale into a genuinely disruptive competitor, but too politically important to let fail. So it gets stuck in an awkward middle ground: minimally profitable as a going concern, but periodically needing substantial injections of public capital to remain competitive.
I wonder whether another tool could sit alongside KiwiMart, or achieve some of the same objectives much more cheaply: a government house brand of essential groceries.
The Crown could competitively procure a standard range of staples at very large volumes, require the major supermarket groups to stock them, and regulate the margin they can charge for distributing and selling them. Rather than owning the whole retail stack, we effectively hijack the infrastructure that already exists.
It also gives us some useful price discovery. We don't actually know that every expensive grocery item is expensive because of excess supermarket margins. It could be market power, genuine production costs, transport and distribution, upstream supplier power, or some combination of them.
If the Crown can procure and sustainably put a tin of tomatoes on the shelf for $1.50 while comparable products sell for $3, we've learned something useful about the market. If it turns out that $2.80 really is the sustainable price, we've learned something different.
And if we decide $2.80 is still socially unacceptable for an essential food, subsidise it. There's nothing inherently wrong with that either. But now the subsidy is explicit and targeted at the difference between the sustainable price and the price we want people to pay.
The government brand doesn't even need to dominate sales to work. If Foodstuffs and Woolworths respond by dropping the prices of their own brands to compete with it, that's a successful intervention too.
So I think there may be a broader package here: structural competition policy, a public competitor where it provides useful competitive pressure, a government house brand using existing retail infrastructure, and explicit subsidies where affordability rather than market power is the problem.
KiwiMart has the considerable virtue of actually doing something at the scale of the problem. I'm just not convinced we should jump immediately from "the supermarket duopoly isn't producing acceptable outcomes" to "therefore the state needs to own the entire supermarket stack".
I'm assuming the objective here isn't necessarily to own supermarkets. It's to make food cheaper.
The question is which combination of interventions gives us the greatest downward pressure on prices for the public money we're putting in.
This is the first time any party has said anything sensible regarding breaking the supermarket duopoly. This plan is the absolute minimum required to have any effect on the price of food. But not only that. Also and importantly the quality. This is the path to local food production initiatives that we saw develop around the healthy school lunches but on steroids.
If the left fail in November, it is no longer possible to say that we weren't offered a radical and life affirming alternative.
If you are on the Maori roll, vote Te Parti Maori for your candidate vote and Green with your Party vote. The resulting overhang wil give the highest Maori MP numbers ever seen and when all the tamariki are fed and full of nutritious food, produced in NZAotearoa locally our full potential can be reached