OPINION: Rodney Hide
Chris Hipkins wants to outlaw “price gouging.”
He has no idea what it is.
Companies found guilty would pay penalties and “hand back every dollar of excess profit.”
Labour’s Arena Williams supplies the soundtrack: butter up 58%, bread up 45%, mince up 30%. Nearly one in three households couldn’t afford enough food.
Ostensibly, big business is ripping off households.
Underlying, Labour has discovered a new crime: charging what the market will bear.
What price is gouging?
Nobody knows. That is the point.
A price is not a moral verdict. It is a signal. It matches what is scarce with what is wanted. It tells farmers to milk, bakers to bake, truckies to drive. Get the signal wrong and the shelves empty.
High prices are rude. They are also how you get more supply. Cap them and you get less of whatever you claimed to care about.
Governments that take over pricing do not abolish scarcity. They hide it. Then they invent queues, coupons, black markets, and speeches about fairness.
Famines are not caused by shopkeepers. They arrive when politics replaces prices.
People are not poor because Countdown has a checkout. They are poor because policy has been stuffing the economy for years — tax, spend, regulate, then wonder why butter costs more.
Hipkins’ answer is more regulation.
Of course it is.
The Greens want KiwiMart: nationalise the shops. Labour wants to police “excess profit.” Same instinct. Blame the till. Spare the Beehive.
Hipkins knows better. He has sat in Cabinet. He has watched price controls abroad turn into shortages. He is not stupid.
He is desperate.
Election year. Voters feel the pinch. Someone must be the villain. Business is handy. Government never is.
So we get a law against a word.
Price gouging. Excess profit. Hand it back.
Hand what back? To whom? By whose spreadsheet? The Commerce Commission already has a job. Competition law already exists. What Labour wants is a political cudgel: the power to declare a price immoral after the fact.
That does not feed anyone.
It does discourage the next shipment.
If you want cheaper butter, stop strangling the productive economy. Cut the taxes and the rules that make everything dear. Let prices do their rude, useful work.
Outlawing the signal that keeps the supermarket stocked is not compassion.
It might be how you get some votes. It’s also how you empty the fridge.
Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT Party leader
