Pro-competition battler Tex Edwards finds kindred spirit in Winston Peters as his cause gains steam
Sunday, 7 June 2026
Tex Edwards says he does not like being front and centre of media attention. And yet, that’s exactly where he is increasingly as he spearheads a crusade to get this country’s biggest industries operating more competitively.
Representing his pro-competition think-tank Monopoly Watch, Edwards has been publicly spitting tacks about a wide variety of what he considers corporate malfeasance in the country ‒ saying the legislative process was being “swamped by lobbyist interest”, calling the banking market structure “broken” and accusing its well-paid phalanx of lawyers of bamboozling and ultimately triumphing over lawmakers.
He’s previously weighed in on reforms aimed at decreasing the power of supermarkets, while accusing the incumbents of lying about wanting genuine competition. (A report from the Commerce Commission this week suggests, in fact, they still don’t have real competition). Building supplies, insurance and energy companies are also in his sights.
Edwards comes at the fight with great bona fides ‒ he was the man who battled more than a decade to launch telecommunications challenger 2degrees against the mobile duopoly of Telecom (now Spark) and Vodafone (now One New Zealand) by forcing structural separation of their network to allow for more competition.
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He’s popping up all over the place, but it remains a bit of a lonely battle, especially when a full array of mainly Australian-funded corporate might is assembled against him. But Edwards was thrilled recently when a new ally emerged: Winston Peters, on the campaign trail as leader of NZ First, proposed the Government buy back the Bank of New Zealand from its Australian parent, National Australia Bank, and merge it with Kiwibank to create a bigger sovereign bank.
The idea was not one championed by Monopoly Watch, and yet, “we thought that was a nugget from heaven”, Edwards tells the Sunday Star-Times.
Calling it the Bank of New Zealand was a “misrepresentation” to New Zealand consumers, who might think they were putting money into a New Zealand bank, “when they're giving it to the Aussies”.
For Edwards, Peters’ comments affirmed the point that there have been “three expensive, long-form government inquiries into banking, and they've all gone nowhere. You've seen a dance from heaven about the possibility of a recapitalisation of Kiwibank, which has gone nowhere, and New Zealand still remains the only country in the OECD without digital-only banks”.
Monopoly Watch’s own submission to the inquiry posited breaking up the ANZ and ASB as well as raising the idea of windfall taxes and other penalties on banks (modest windfall taxes on banks were in fact one of the initiatives in Budget 2026). Edwards says there is an irony that in other countries, penalties on banks for their behaviour leading up to the global financial crisis funded the emergence of genuine challengers. For example, the European Commission ordered Royal Bank of Scotland to provide £775 million to fund infrastructure that challenger banks used, as penance for its pre-GFC behaviour.
One of those that benefited was Revolut, which is now seeking to expand within New Zealand.
“The diagnosis to fix the broken banking market is to immediately initiate the licensing of three New Zealand-owned, internet-only challenge banks,” says Edwards. “The software and the banking legislation are ready to go.”
Pushing it uphill
This country’s banking inquiries ‒ the Commerce Commission’s Market Study and the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee inquiry ‒ have definitively found New Zealand’s personal, business and rural banking sectors suffer from a severe lack of competition caused by an uncompetitive, highly profitable oligopoly that generates excessive profitability.
“It’s also the independent agencies, notably the OECD, Goldman Sachs, UBS, Standard and Poor’s and Moody’s that articulate that the BNZ, ANZ, ASB, Westpac are ridiculously profitable,” says Edwards.
Essentially the same huge profitability is being generated by the country’s supermarket duopoly ‒ as evidenced by the Commerce Commission’s Market Study ‒ while the government-commissioned Review of Electricity Market Performance concluded that sector’s market structure is heavily distorted and mitigating against keeping costs affordable.
In all cases, and across successive governments, the problems are acknowledged, but the hard work of structurally separating the big powers in each has not been undertaken.
And for this, Edwards points the finger squarely at lobbyists and their influence over lawmakers. That is timely, given this week it emerged that in mid-2024 executives from Fonterra and Z Energy supplied the prime minister's staff with a draft statutory amendment explicitly designed to strip New Zealand courts of the power to hear civil climate claims. Their ideas were uncannily similar to what turned up in a legal amendment to the Climate Change Response Act in 2025, which effectively scuppered a long-running legal battle against big polluters launched in 2019 by Māori climate activist and iwi leader Mike Smith.
The development takes Edwards back to when “all the goodness” to try and create competition was lobbied out of the Telecommunications Act 2001 “overnight” as he was working offshore to get the money together to create 2degrees. And it didn’t stop at telecommunications.
“I was sitting in my office in South Africa, and we'd secured $100m investment in [2degrees], and one of my South African investors came up and threw a file a me ‒ he actually was quite funny and he didn’t hurt me ‒ but he said “what the f…! Are you expecting us to be the third mobile operator in New Zealand when they've just merged the supermarkets from a three-player market to a two-player market?!”
The methods that market incumbents used to keep 2degrees and other challenger brands out of the market ‒ the “Telecom Playbook” ‒ are now studied in business courses. One of them sees incumbents surround policy makers, ministries and regulators with armies of lawyers and public relations teams who swamp select committees with complex submissions to dilute or delay any pro-competition laws, ensuring the regulator remains toothless.
As the man who fought the Mark 1 version of the Telecom Playbook, Edwards believes he knows what he’s seeing.
Money shot
For those who follow the topic, there is an undeniability about most of what Edwards and fellow pro-competition campaigners like Ernie Newman, Kent Dunston and, increasingly, the Commerce Commission and even the Government itself say about the way many key sectors in New Zealand are structured.
Where Edwards is different is in his sheer energy, his (let’s be honest) wealth and his extensive background in stock broking, equity analysis, asset management and a host of other related roles, all of which give him a gimlet eye when parsing financial accounts. They also give him a swath of interesting stories from his time in elite global financial markets, most of which are simply not repeatable.
But he also has a penchant for singling out certain industry figures for the kind of criticism the New Zealand media often shies away from. He was scathing, for example, about shots of ANZ chief executive Antonia Watson seated next to Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at a recent trade trip to Singapore: “This picture makes a mockery of a well intentioned trade mission and three recent govt enquiries as to why NZ banks are so profitable…In banking, in treasury dealing rooms, this is described as the ' money shot ' … it allows bond dealers to imply a govt too big to fail [to provide a] guarantee to ANZ bonds.
“This picture improves ANZ NZ’s profitability because it lowers their cost of funds from investors and credit counterparties …the board of ANZ are laughing all the way to the bank (or the boat [at] St Tropez ), their lobbyists have made fools out of NZ policy makers.”
There are those who defend this country’s large company-control of key sectors, saying New Zealand is small, the cost to service is high and making large corporates less profitable will ultimately make New Zealanders pay more.
Edwards knows from bitter experience that has not been the case in telecommunications, but he is prepared for the question of whether his take is actually more anti-business than pro. Is he a secret socialist?
“No,” says Edwards. “Though our marketing strapline now says ‘Market structure matters’, we had originally considered ‘Saving capitalism’. We’re not some bizarre socialist field-day… and actually our solution on banking isn’t to buy back the BNZ to nationalise it. Our solution is to create more genuine competitors, and get the market working the way it should.”