Smith DamienDAMIEN SMITH (ACT): It's great to hear about duopolies as we're in this House with the Labour duopoly over there and the National duopoly over here and the emerging market player the ACT Party who is expanding in this market. There's a simple analogy here that what's good for the goose is good for the gander. I'm going to set it straight: the Government's pledge to help supermarket shoppers get a fair deal and why there is a bit of a myth here around some of the facts. Let's start with those and we'll talk about market intervention at the end.Food prices are being pinned on supermarkets as their fault yet in the year from March 2021 to March 2022 food prices increased by 6.7 percent. The Government's go-to excuse is to blame the greedy supermarkets. Though ACT agrees that New Zealand needs competition—and where there's a market failure we will intervene—Countdown and New World are not to blame for the food price explosion. The Commerce Commission report on the sector found that excess profits—and I'd really like to clear this up—which gets the blame for the legislation and sort of moral virtue of this rejig were at almost $86 per New Zealander. Now that's less than 2 percent of the average New Zealander's annual grocery spend. So between March 2021 and March 2022 alone prices have increased by $282 per person and even if the Government wants to focus on supermarket profitability they've no one to blame but themselves.New Zealand has the most stringent foreign investment laws in the OECD. The Resource Management Act (RMA) makes it exorbitantly expensive to build new supermarkets with scale and facilities that actually can compete. Several analysts actually argue: is there any space left to do this? Is there any growth left in the market to make this work? Our strict liquor laws give competitors another tool with which to bludgeon newcomers and all the while the Government is threatening any newcomer that they might be forced to share their expensive new supply chains with their competitors. So is it any wonder that foreign supermarket chains don't want to see New Zealand as an attractive destination for expansion and would probably rather go to Australia?Instead the skyrocketing cost of food is driven by global forces as we hear compounded by bad Government policy and red tape is constantly pushing up costs at the farm gate. According to Beef and Lamb New Zealand on-farm price inflation from March 2021 to 2022 was more than 10 percent. This is exacerbated by excessive restrictions like national winter grazing rules that ignore regional differences and simply the RMA makes it more difficult for farmers to respond to higher prices by expanding facilities and in some areas where New Zealand producers supply the vast majority of our needs and set local prices these cost pressures may be transmitted on to the consumers in the form of higher prices.To bring food prices under control we need to kill inflation. It doesn't matter how we structurally rejig buildings in various towns and cities that is the key goal. To bring food prices under control we need to free up the supply chain from the farm to the fruit and vege aisle. So ACT has got some additional ideas. To start on from the rejigging of the covenant base of the existing duopolies it's that we need to repeal and replace the Resource Management Act to make it clearer and easier to build new supermarkets and farm facilities and repeal stifling new regulations on farmers including input costs and management and we need to exempt OECD members from the Overseas Investment Act allowing foreign supermarket chains like Aldi and Costco to invest in New Zealand with certainty. Why would you invest here if you didn't have that certainty?So this is one of the few situations in which ACT supports State intervention for market failure. If supermarkets are going to be brought on-stream and are using covenants in an anti-competitive way this does merit Government intervention but let's be honest in the House and say that inflation is the driver of supermarket prices and that the important thing for New Zealanders is that food arrives on time on the shelf in the right place to feed the families of New Zealand. Thank you.