Anti-Competitive Supermarket Practices

I can help Steve Abel. Steve is the Greens agriculture bloke and he wants an urgent inquiry into what he's Heinz Mess and Hawks Bay. He's wasting his time, of course, not because he shouldn't be concerned because he should. We should all be concerned. But the answers he seeks are already readily available. He asks about four main things. The regulatory environment, energy costs, foreign owner and difference and anti-competitive behaviour from the supermarkets. Well, newsroom, as in the website, they wrote a very solid piece about all of this several weeks ago, featured it on the... it on the programme in which it was broadly concluded the troubles in the bay had been coming for basically a decade so some late-breaking alarmism from Steve via yet another committee address is nothing. Costs in this country of course are too high and I refer you to Paul Conway's speech last week to a bunch of financial operators we are unproductive have been for years. Supermarkets have indeed played a part the home brand scenario damaged the more premium brands and what is etc have suffered because of it. Now is that anti-competitive or offering more competition? See, does the punter want choice and price range? I would have argued yes. Energy costs specifically, well, Watties and Heinz have both spoken to this. They are ruinous. Gas or lack of it has killed a lot of manufacturing in this country. The Greens might like to ask themselves why they got obsessed with solar panels and banned gas before there was enough solar panels to cover the energy gaps. The old regulatory environment, now that's an interesting one. Because Labour and Nicola Willis have both jawboned rules and regs and watchdogs and com-com investigations, but to what avail? Nothing has changed, which either means there is nothing to change or they're useless. Foreign owner indifference. Now, I would suggest that sounds a little bit xenophobic on old Stevie's part. Yes, I know what he means. Could be a massive player in Detroit, could they? Sit in Detroit, cut ties without losing sleep and little old New Zealand at the bottom of the world. Of course they could. But no one invests and runs businesses or does it with indifference. They're all invested. Now, between the dumping, the cheap stuff consumers prefer, the size of our market and the ruinous cost of energy, you see it's all there as a combustible recipe to blow up a lot of business models. Peas in a bag, peaches in a tin is one of the victims. The inquiry is not needed.