The Green Party is proposing to establish KiwiMart, a publicly owned supermarket chain providing affordable groceries. The problem is that the policy won't get past a Labour Party that won't concede that 'the market' has failed New Zealanders.
THE GREEN PARTY'S late conversion to the idea of a publicly owned supermarket chain is less a bold leap than an overdue acknowledgement of reality. For years, New Zealanders have been squeezed by a grocery sector so concentrated it barely qualifies as a market. Woolworths and Foodstuffs do not compete in any meaningful sense; they coordinate, they mirror, they entrench. The result is a duopoly that effectively dictates what we pay, what we eat, and how much of our income is siphoned upward into corporate profit. The Commerce Commission’s finding of roughly a million dollars a day in 'excess profit' was not a revelation — it was a confirmation of what households have felt every week at the checkout.
The Government’s response has been to fast-track the arrival of a new private entrant, as though shaving a few months off a construction timeline constitutes structural reform. It is a policy built on magical thinking. Any new entrant would still be operating within the same profit-maximising logic as the incumbents. They would still face the same land banking, the same exclusive supplier contracts, the same vertically integrated distribution networks that lock competitors out. They would still need to satisfy shareholders, not hungry families. In practice, the Government’s plan amounts to expanding the cartel by one — a slightly larger oligopoly dressed up as competition.
And even that fantasy is collapsing under its own weight. No major overseas supermarket chain has shown the slightest interest in entering the New Zealand market. Why would they? The barriers to entry are enormous, the incumbents entrenched, and the returns uncertain. Costco’s much-celebrated arrival in Auckland has barely dented prices in the region, let alone shifted national trends. The idea that a private white knight will gallop in to rescue consumers is not policy; it is a refusal to confront the structural failures of neoliberalism.
This is where the Green Party’s proposal — the creation of a publicly owned supermarket chain, KiwiMart — finally breaks from the stale orthodoxy. Costed at around $3 billion and built from the divestment of 120 stores and two distribution centres from the existing duopoly, KiwiMart would not be a boutique experiment or a token gesture. It would be a genuine public option in a sector where private provision has failed spectacularly. New Zealand already accepts public ownership in health, education, and infrastructure because these are essential services. Food is no less essential. Leaving it entirely to corporations whose sole obligation is to maximise profit has produced predictable results: high prices, limited choice, and a system designed around shareholder returns rather than human need.
Says Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick: 'There are only so many places in a town where a supermarket can go, and Woolworths and Foodstuffs have seen to it that these sites are locked up. We're not short of supermarkets, we're short of competition. As experts have noted, divestment - that is, buying already existing stores - is key to breaking up the duopoly.'
A public supermarket chain would not abolish private supermarkets. Rather, it would force them to compete with a benchmark that proves lower prices are possible. It would expose the fiction that high grocery costs are an unavoidable feature of a small market rather than the consequence of concentrated corporate power. It would give consumers a genuine alternative rather than the illusion of choice between two near-identical giants. And it would demonstrate, in concrete terms, what an economy organised around public wellbeing rather than private extraction can deliver.
The tragedy is that the proposal is almost certain to be strangled by Labour before it ever reaches the negotiating table. Labour remains locked inside a neoliberal worldview it no longer even bothers to defend — a worldview that treats public ownership as heresy and market failure as a problem to be managed, never solved. The party will likely join the predictable chorus from the right, denouncing KiwiMart as 'socialism by stealth,' as though ensuring people can afford food were some radical ideological project rather than a basic responsibility of government. But this is the bind of New Zealand politics: both major parties would rather preserve the sanctity of the market than admit that the market has failed.
The Greens should have championed this idea a year ago, when the Government first floated its market-based non-solution to the cost-of-living crisis. Their delay speaks to a party still hesitant to challenge the economic consensus head-on. But at least they have arrived at the correct conclusion: when private supermarkets are structurally incapable of delivering affordable essentials, the public sector must step in. The alternative is the status quo — a duopoly extracting millions in excess profit while families skip meals, cut back on fresh produce, and watch their grocery bills climb month after month.
KiwiMart is not a radical idea. It is a practical one. It is a recognition that food security cannot be left to corporations whose interests are fundamentally misaligned with the public good. It is an intervention proportionate to the scale of the crisis. And it is a reminder that neoliberalism, the ideology Labour and National cling to with religious devotion, has nothing left to offer except higher prices and deeper inequality.
New Zealanders deserve better than a political establishment that would rather let people go hungry than concede that the market has failed. A publicly owned supermarket chain will not solve every problem, but it will break the grip of a duopoly that has profited off scarcity and desperation for far too long. It is time to treat food as a right, not a revenue stream — and KiwiMart is a step toward that future.
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