Consumer Preference For Cheap Goods

The Primary Production Select Committee is going to have a look into, well... Primary production, namely the Hawke's Bay scenario of Heinz and McCain's, both of whom have announced closures and job losses. I'm sure you're well aware of that. A briefing is different, by the way, to an inquiry, just in case you're thinking the committee is going to, you know, come up with something tangible. This is the sort of sad hand-wringing that we get into around bad news. Now, the simple truth is some industries are undercut by consumer choice. In this case, the consumer likes cheap. The cheaper, the better. And part of the problem in first world countries is we do like to be cheap. People like to pay people decent wages, and that tends to add to the price. Supermarkets invent home brands. These brands undercut brands like McCain's, peaches from China outsell peaches from Hawke's Bay. But here's the issue for the committee. I assume they know all this, because I know all this, because it's not hard to know. So once they find all this out, they will also look at the impact on communities. I think I can help here as well. It's not good. People losing jobs do one of several things. One, stop working. Two, find a new job. Three, move out of town. I note the two local mayors in Hawke's Bay have welcomed the briefing. Brilliant. My question is... How does that help? No one likes any of this. We'd all like Heinz and McCain's to be thriving, but they're not. I bet Americans would like farmers to buy more cows and raise more beef. But they aren't doing that either, so they buy our beef at ever-increasing prices. You see, quality is a good game to be in. If you can sell it, turns out, and wine and beef and lamb, maybe merino, we can. In peaches, we can't. So the places that host the factories that grow the fruit or the trees. and the places that put them into things like cans flounder or struggle until they fail. Looking into a story told many, many times over, often in rural and provincial New Zealand, is not going to change a thing. One of the mayors said, this should get to the bottom of why this is happening. I think I just told you that, and what can be done differently now? What can be done differently on that last part? I wish them all the luck in the world.