10 takeaways on the state of competition in NZ

Monday, 18 May 2026

ANALYSIS: The key message from the Commerce Commission’s Competition Matters conference was that New Zealand can’t keep doing the same things and expect anything to change.

Two decades of data, released by the competition regulator before the conference at the SkyCity International Convention Centre last week, showed competition remained weak in too many sectors and there was a lack of economic “dynamism”, with a few large dominating industries which had no serious challengers.

“Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”

That quotation is erroneously credited to famous thinkers as varied as Mark Twain, Albert Einstein and Benjamin Franklin. But Tex Edwards, founder of 2degrees and of the Monopoly Watch pressure group, captured the zeitgeist of the conference on Thursday in his warmly applauded speech.

Read more:

• Bank lobbyist Roger Beaumont to be nominated for Australian of the Year by banking reform activist

• Competition weakest among banks, insurers and power companies, ComCom reports

• ANZ, ASB, BNZ and Westpac can ‘afford to ignore’ Kiwibank, MPs told

“For too long, corporate incumbents and their lobbyists have promoted what Monopoly Watch calls ‘cognitive surrender’ ‒ the argument that monopoly and duopoly in capital-intensive and platform industries are an unavoidable fact of New Zealand geography and market size,” he said from the podium.

“The Commerce Commission has done its job. It has armed New Zealand with the evidence. Now Parliament must arm the Commerce Commission with the powers, and protect it from lobbyists, so the evidence can be translated into lower prices, more choices, and a fairer economy for every New Zealander,” he said.

Here are the 10 takeaways from the conference.

1. Reformers were the stars

The commission took the unusual step of giving the podium to activists who would reform industries where power is concentrated, and market structure and regulation are leading to oligopoly profits, weak competition and a lack of investment.

Banking and electricity were the main targets.

Kent Duston from the Banking Reform Coalition got the laugh of the day from his speaking slot. He announced he would nominate Roger Beaumont, the banking sector’s lead lobbyist, for the Australian of the Year Award for all the dividends sent by New Zealand banks to their Australian shareholders during his time at the head of the Bankers’ Association.

2. OECD says neo-liberalism isn’t working

Reducing bank profitability and fixing the broken electricity market were the keys to turning around New Zealand’s economic performance and productivity, the head of the OECD’s New Zealand desk said.

David Haugh said after two decades of weak productivity and weak competition, New Zealand must heed the message that: “In a small, remote economy, competition does not emerge organically. It must be designed.”

Money that should be flowing around the economy, boosting growth and innovation, was being sucked up in OECD-high finance and banking costs, and power prices that were threatening to de-industrialise the country.

It was a stark message that New Zealand can’t expect broken markets to fix themselves.

3. Roll out the red carpet

Haugh said New Zealand needed to look out into the world for the companies it wanted to set up here, and ask them what they needed to do it.

He named digital neo-banks and electricity generators as those which should be at the top of the list.

New Zealand had the most profitable banks in the OECD, Haugh said, and it had fallen far behind countries with similar renewable power resources like Norway and Sweden on power prices.

Haugh wasn’t suggesting giving financial incentives to overseas companies, just designing regulation to make it easy for them to hang out a shingle here.

4. Regulate lobbyists, like sensible countries

One of Edwards’ bugbears is New Zealand failing to regulate lobbyists like other OECD countries.

To Edwards, “inertia, and government deferring to lobbyists” were a sickness in the New Zealand economy.

“We need a lobbyist legislation programme because everything gets cut off at the lobbyists,” he said. “The 2024, 2024 and the 2026 OECD reports about New Zealand … criticised New Zealand because we had no lobbyist registration.”

5. Entrepreneurs are ‘freedom fighters’

Edwards gave his speech after a panel session of Brooke Roberts from fintech investment platform Sharesies, Jimmy Ormsby from budget petrol station operator Waitomo, Margaret Cooney from Octopus Energy, and online supermarket operator Wayne Kennerley from Gourmet Grocery.

All have taken on big, oligopolistic markets, and made inroads.

They weren’t business people, Edwards said.

“They are freedom fighters.”

However, each had something in common, he said. And that was their sectors had come under scrutiny by the commission, making it harder for powerful interests to stymie them.

“The common denominator here is that they've all benefited from a market study with commerce commissions,” Edwards said.

6. Getting beaten on banking payments by Bolivia

Until very recently, New Zealand was ranked on the “Digital Public Infrastructure Map” in grey along with the other countries with third-world payments infrastructure, namely North Korea, and parts of Africa.

That point came up at the conference, and heads were shaken.

However, New Zealand has now made some progress, and the maker of the map University College London has moved it into better (yellow) company: Mexico, Mongolia and Canada.

New Zealand remains behind the advanced green-coloured Australia, India, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Scandinavia, Almost all of South East Asia, the US, the UK, most of Europe, some of Africa, and almost the whole of South America, including Argentina and Bolivia.

7. Kiwis don’t know how far behind we are

One delegate said New Zealanders were mostly so inward-looking they don’t know how far behind in many things their country actually is.

8. New Zealanders suffer from ‘Kiwibank syndrome’

Wayne Kennerley’s The Meat Box is an online supermarket that’s doing pretty well.

But, the conference heard that the “Kiwibank syndrome” was holding it back.

This is an affliction the conference heard many New Zealanders suffered from.

It was characterised by two symptoms: vocal dissatisfaction with large oligopolistic, often foreign-owned companies, and an inertia that stops the sufferer from doing something about it, like switching bank, or doing their groceries online with The Meat Box.

9. Political buck-passing

Who is responsible for getting our settings right so global neo-banks can launch easily in New Zealand, and bring down the cost of lending and increase access to credit for growing businesses?

The problem is nobody really knows, or it’s politicians beset by ignorance and lobbyists, or it’s government departments or it’s industries themselves. Or it’s all of the above.

The Government is intent on reducing regulation, but this wasn’t going to reshape markets, the conference heard.

For Edwards, the answer was simple: Power up the Commerce Commission to do it.

10. The Reserve Bank is killing fintech

A panel session on why New Zealand had such poor payments infrastructure identified various culprits, including the banks.

But the Reserve Bank came in for special criticism.

Other countries like Brazil have rocketed ahead with instant payments, and far better deals for consumers, by issuing things like e-money and banking licences to challenger banks and fintechs.

Asked whether the Reserve Bank’s failure to approve any new banks for as long as anyone could remember was killing fintechs, one panelist answered: “Obviously”.