Greens push excessive-pricing bill targeting supermarket duopoly before Parliament rises

The Green Party is urging the coalition government to back a member's bill that would ban supermarkets from charging excessive prices, with penalties of up to $10 million, before Parliament rises for the election.

The Commerce (Excessive Pricing in Retail Grocery Industry) Amendment Bill will be placed in the members' ballot by Green consumer affairs spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March. It proposes banning supermarkets from charging prices that are "excessive" relative to the cost of supplying products plus a "fair margin" (RNZ).

Under the bill, courts would decide whether a supermarket breached the ban, on application from the Commerce Commission. Supermarkets would be required to keep records of their pricing and provide them to the Commission on request. Penalties for breaches would be set at up to $10 million, three times the value of the commercial gain, or 10 percent of turnover.

Menéndez March said the proposal is consistent with Australia's approach, which introduced the same ban on 1 July with the same penalties.

Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said New Zealanders pay too much for groceries and that supermarket profits exceed a million dollars a day. She called on the prime minister and the wider coalition to use Parliament's remaining time to lower the cost of living.

The bill forms part of the Greens' affordable kai election policy, to be announced next month. It lands in a political landscape where the government has already attempted, unsuccessfully, to attract an international competitor into the supermarket market, and where New Zealand First has promised to break up the duopoly if elected.

The Greens have previously called for the government to urgently tax excess supermarket profit and redirect the revenue to households (Green Party). Party material has cited food prices surging 4.5 percent over the last year while supermarkets made $1 million a day in excess profits (Green Party). The party has also introduced a separate member's bill that would require the largest supermarkets to partner with food rescue organisations (Green Party).

Swarbrick has been sharpening her public posture on the issue for months. On 19 May she posted on Instagram that New Zealanders cannot afford their groceries and called MPs who ridiculed bills "cowards" (Instagram). A week later, on 26 May, she described supermarkets as making "demonstrable, proven excess profit" and called the situation a "greed crisis" (Instagram). More recently, Swarbrick was removed from the House of Representatives after challenging what she called the Speaker's "double standards" (RNZ via Facebook).

The broader context here is that members' bills drawn from the ballot advance only with cross-party support or at least abstentions from the governing bloc. With Parliament's sitting days narrowing before the election, the window for the bill to be drawn, let alone debated and passed, is tight. The Greens' strategy appears to be as much about forcing a parliamentary vote that puts the coalition on the record regarding supermarket pricing as it is about legislative outcomes.

The trans-Tasman precedent Menéndez March referenced gives the proposal a concrete comparator. Australia's ban took effect on 1 July, meaning any New Zealand government choosing not to follow suit would need to explain the divergence. Whether that argument gains traction with the coalition, or whether the bill remains a political positioning tool in the lead-up to the election, will depend on how much appetite there is for direct price regulation in a market where structural remedies have so far failed to materialise.