Greens push for $10M supermarket pricing ban before election
The Green Party wants the coalition government to support a member's bill that would ban supermarkets from charging excessive prices, with penalties of up to $10 million, before Parliament finishes sitting for the election.
The Commerce (Excessive Pricing in Retail Grocery Industry) Amendment Bill will go into the members' ballot — a system where MPs' proposed laws are drawn at random for debate — placed there by Green consumer affairs spokesperson Ricardo Menéndez March. It would ban supermarkets from charging prices deemed "excessive" compared with the cost of supplying a product plus a "fair margin" (RNZ).
Under the bill, the Commerce Commission — New Zealand's competition regulator — would apply to the courts to rule on whether a supermarket had breached the ban. Supermarkets would have to keep pricing records and hand them over to the Commission on request. Penalties would be set at up to $10 million, three times the value of any commercial gain from the breach, or 10 percent of turnover.
Menéndez March said the proposal mirrors Australia's approach, which brought in the same ban with the same penalties on 1 July.
Green co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick said New Zealanders pay too much for groceries and that supermarket profits exceed $1 million a day. She called on the prime minister and the wider coalition to use Parliament's remaining sitting days to lower the cost of living.
The bill forms part of the Greens' affordable kai election policy, to be announced next month. It arrives in a political landscape where the government has already tried, without success, to lure an international competitor into the supermarket sector, and where New Zealand First has pledged to break up the duopoly — the two-company dominance of Foodstuffs and Woolworths — if elected.
The Greens have previously called on the government to urgently tax excess supermarket profit and redirect the revenue to households (Green Party). Party material has cited food prices rising 4.5 percent over the past 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 stance 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 member's bills drawn from the ballot need cross-party support — or at least abstentions from the governing bloc — to pass. 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 the bill becoming law.
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 stays 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 take hold.
