Supermarket competition: Seymour puts emphasis on ‘red tape’, while Hipkins stresses importance of wholesaling
Monday, 13 July 2026
The Government has “rolled out the red carpet” to overseas investors seeking to enter the supermarket industry by providing new guidance that will help them navigate the Overseas Investment Act, Associate Finance Minister David Seymour says.
Seymour said the guidelines specified which provisions of the act applied to them, “what tests their investment needs to meet, and how Land Information New Zealand would apply those tests to their application”.
The country was not well-served by having only two large supermarket companies, Foodstuffs and Woolworths, he suggested.
The Government was prepared to issue new entrants consents that would let them “buy as many sections of land as they may need to establish a full network of supermarkets”, he said.
Read more:
ComCom backs off additional regulations on supermarkets, after 20-month inquiry
NZ supermarket competition little better despite years of reform: Commerce Commission report
Rushed, awkward and unbalanced: the fast-track saga continues
“We’re doing this because, with all the talk about breaking up and punching down on our supermarket operators, what we ultimately need to do to get justice and affordable prices at the checkout is to remove the rules that keep the drawbridge in place.”
Labour leader Chris Hipkins said the Government’s policies weren’t working.
“All we saw today from the Government is more promises to do more of the same. They have no new ideas.”
Seymour disputed the suggestion that the failure to date of the removal of red tape to attract new entrants meant it was time to take a different approach.
“Just because it hasn't worked yet doesn't mean it’s not a good idea,” he said.
“We remain resolute that if we remove all of the barriers to more competition, then we will find that there are people there, perhaps Aldi, perhaps somebody else, who sees New Zealand as being an attractive place to do business.
“I believe that we need to keep on removing red tape until it does happen,” he said.
The Government rushed a number of major changes to the fast-track regime through Parliament in November and December, giving the public and interest groups just 10 days to make submissions on about 130 alterations to the one-stop shop consenting regime.
The Fast-track Amendment Bill was ostensibly afforded “urgency” because of one change that opened the door to rivals to Foodstuffs and Woolworths using the fast-track regime to accelerate consents for new supermarkets.
However, there is so far no record of the fast-track regime being used for that purpose.
The debate over supermarket competition has reignited in the wake of a decision by the Commerce Commission last week not to recommend imposing additional wholesale regulation on Foodstuffs and Woolworths.
New rules could ultimately have required them to sell groceries from their distribution centres to rivals at prices and on terms and conditions set by regulators.
However, intervention of that nature has remained controversial, in part because of concerns it could backfire and entrench their dominance over local supply chains.
Hipkins said “wholesale is clearly a major issue” but declined to set out the party’s own approach to improving competition, indicating it would do so before the election.
“It’s clear that a major barrier to any new retail entrant is that they can’t access the wholesale supply chains and very little has been done by this government to deal with that issue,” he said.
Prominent competition advocate Ernie Newman, a former executive director of the Grocery Manufacturers’ Association, said he would continue to advocate for a break-up of Foodstuffs and Woolworths that would see them forced to sell some of their stores to a new rival.
Commenting on the case for some structural reform of the industry, Hipkins said he didn’t see that and reform of the wholesaling regime as mutually exclusive.