Do we need a KiwiMart? w/ the Green Party's Ricardo Menéndez March: 9th September, 2026

There’s 47 days until voting starts in the 2026 NZ election and the issue that dominates polls remains the cost of living. Yet, year on year, the amount of food the average kiwi can put in their basket is getting smaller and smaller as the cost of food grows faster than wages. On some essential items such as butter and sliced white bread, costs have risen more twice as fast as wages over ten years. To understand why we must look at our market for food. Dominated by two big players, The first is Foodstuffs - who owns Paknsave, New World and Four Square, - the other big player is, of course, WoolWorths. Together they control between 80 to 90 % of the grocery market. They can set the prices as high as they like, and if you can’t pay for it, you probably can’t eat it.  Earlier this year the Green Party announced a bill to ban price gauging, and now they are proposing to go further. They want to establish a third big grocer in to the market, owned by the state, to compete with duopoly and would force the Duopoly to make room in the market for them. So for this week’s catch-up with the Green Party’s I asked the Greens Policy MP Ricardo Menéndez March, why they prefer a state run supermarket to a free market