Mike's Minute: The supermarket announcement was a dud

Talk about teasing me on a Sunday morning. 

At 10am we are told Nicola Willis is giving us the good word on supermarkets.

She doesn’t like the industry - she's been telling us this for a year and a half.

She is going to do something about the industry - she's been telling us this for a year and a half.

So, Sunday was the day. Except it wasn’t.

It was yet another diatribe about what needs to be done, what could be done and what might be done.

There were more threats, more possibilities, more questions and more investigations.

It was also a speech of hopeless contradictions. On one hand she was telling us how hard it was to enter the market at scale and how big that risk was.

Then she was telling us this was a $20+ billion sector, more than tourism and dairy combined, and yet she clearly hasn’t stopped to ask herself if that big.

Do you not think anyone who could, might have had a bit of a look at the prospect of entering it? 

She talked of a player being able to grab 10%. That’s over $2 billion dollars worth of business. You don’t reckon someone, somewhere hasn’t looked at the prospect of $2 billion dollars worth and thought "I wonder if that isn't a bit of me"?

To find out why we don’t have more competition, she announced she was launching yet another investigation. Then after six weeks she may, or may not, get Cabinet to do something legislatively. If that happens she wants to do it by the end of the year and get it passed by the end of the term i.e the end of next year.

So an entire term in Government having literally not produced one more shop.

As I've said all along, it may be we are too small for another major player. Maybe the niche players, along with the two giants, are what are market tolerates.

But as for Nicola and her finger-wagging, if threats were results then we'd be getting somewhere.

If speeches were shelves of well-priced food, the issue would be dealt to.

But for a Government with an image of more talk than action, she didn’t do anything to help that reputation. 

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