David Seymour says ACT will put its foot down over his coalition partners’ pledges to split Foodstuffs if the coalition is reelected after the election, saying the National and NZ First separation proposal "won't happen."
“If we didn't [put their foot down] it would have happened already,” the ACT leader told interest.co.nz. "I mean, this is partly why the ACT Party exists: to stand up for whatever minority is being picked on at a particular point in this country's history. It's the dark underbelly of… an otherwise admirable culture as Kiwis.”
Seymour described the spate of supermarket political promises as “a state of real electoral madness right now.”
Seymour said that the public were “fed up with the last six years where wages have not risen as fast or not much faster than inflation, people channel that frustration onto supermarkets because it's the place you go and swipe your card once or twice a week for things you can't afford buying”.
“People are then going to pollsters and focus groups and saying, "I'm upset about the cost of living.' They say, ‘Well, what's getting me there? Oh, the supermarket. Someone should do something about that.’
“Politicians, without even question, have then fed, ‘Well, we're going to beat them up and do something about it’, and then they're just basically coming up with these like fourth form social studies assignments.”
Labour on Sunday promised to require Woolworths and Foodstuffs to run wholesale supply businesses independently from their supermarket stores. That followed National’s announcement that, subject to an independent Commerce Commission assessment, it would pursue structural separation of Foodstuffs, breaking the co-operative up into two competing grocery chains.
NZ First leader Winston Peters said National had “just cut and pasted our policy to break up the supermarket duopoly and give the commerce commission more teeth”.
If a structural separation were to go ahead, New World and Four Square would be one nationwide chain and PAK’nSAVE would be another.
Meanwhile, the Green Party previously announced it wants to establish a publicly owned supermarket chain called KiwiMart, with a mandate to prioritise affordability for consumers.
And on Monday, Te Pāti Māori announced it would introduce a tax credit for those earning less than $60,000 a year, worth up to eight weeks of food and create a $100 million seed funding for Māori-owned supermarket and retail alternatives.
Seymour described the Greens’ policy as “going to somehow start… ordering the right amount of loo paper from the cabinet so they don't run out of stock on the shelves.”
“It's just so crazy. New Zealand First said they just want to break them up. The National Party have now copied New Zealand First.”
'It won't happen'
If the coalition were reelected, Seymour said the Foodstuffs separation proposal “won't happen...”
He said New Zealand has “a fundamental problem: productivity growth is weak, inflation has been too high, people are feeling the pinch, the supermarkets have become the scapegoat”.
“But we've got too many politicians who, instead of actually listening and reflecting and proposing better solutions, even trying to address the underlying problem, are trying to treat a symptom for short-term political gain. And in the process, they are doing enormous damage to this country's reputation.”
Asked if he would put his foot down if he was in that coalition, Seymour said: “Yeah, if we didn't, it would have happened already”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said the National Party policy had been “substantively thought through”.
“We've got a proposal which I think is the most sensible proposal to take forward. But you're also seeing political consensus across the parliament.. other parties here having their own views as well," Luxon said.
“It's a hypothetical because I'd like 20 of those ministers, frankly, be National Party Ministers."
“Importantly, we're putting it into an independent Commerce Commission with their economists, their competition experts, and econometrics analysis that we need to confirm that the benefits do outweigh the costs.”
Luxon said there “ may well be a voluntary demerger from Foodstuffs, there may well be one that we will mandate… Maybe if the Commerce Commission says no, benefits aren't there when we do the deeper analysis and more analysis than we can do as a government, then [we’ll] deal with that too.”
In response to the promise to break up Foodstuffs, a Foodstuffs spokesperson said National's policy "would have significant implications for our co-operatives".
"All of whom are hearing proposals that could fundamentally change the co-operatives they own, work for and support, and the businesses they have spent years building in communities throughout New Zealand."
"Any proposal of this scale raises important questions about how long a major restructure would take to implement, the level of disruption involved, the costs of making those changes, and whether those costs and disruptions would ultimately deliver meaningful savings at the checkout," the Foodstuffs spokesperson said.
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