WELLINGTON, New Zealand (AP) — New Zealanders will wait for weeks to discover who will lead the country after Saturday’s election failed to deliver a decisive win for the right or the left, leaving fraught negotiations for a wafer-thin governing majority the only apparent path to victory for either side.
The tightest vote in years delivered a stinging rebuke to the major parties which have long dominated New Zealand politics, Christopher Luxon’s center-right National party and center-left Labour led by Chris Hipkins, as voters threw more support behind minor parties on the ideological flanks than before. On Saturday’s numbers, minor parties would enter negotiations for a governing deal with leverage to extract deeper policy concessions from a weakened National or Labour.
The near-deadlock was partly produced because voters, apparently weary of New Zealand’s economic woes and apathetic about both Luxon and Hipkins, chose to propel a new entrant group to Parliament for the first time in years. Opportunity, led by 38-year-old business consultant and political newcomer Qiulae Wong, is unaligned with either bloc and Wong has said she could work with either side to form a government.
I already know that we’re cooked. The right won and this is just us coping.
Opportunity will negotiate first with the party that secures the highest number of seats, but its vision for a low-emissions future, and an inclusive New Zealand, will drive its final decision. Its five bottom-line issues include action on New Zealand’s supermarket duopoly…
So…what determines who governs New Zealand is going to maybe be who can get a third line of supermarkets to set up shop?
We have a duopoly right now with deep vertical integration and the companies are ruthless at squeezing out potential competitors. It’s distorted the market.
What that means is producers get crap (low) prices and consumers get crap (high) prices.
I think the problem there is that groceries are just plain expensive in NZ. You’d need a lot of money to start a competitor, and it would take a fairly long time to become profitable.
I mean…yeah, but…it still seems wild that you’d have a party making this one of their major issues.
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It sounds like it’s not just that party, but a major political issue this year across multiple parties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarkets_in_New_Zealand
During the lead-up to the 2026 New Zealand general election, several parties campaigned on breaking up the country’s supermarket duopoly as a means of reducing grocery prices and promoting competition. On 19 April, New Zealand First proposed splitting Foodstuffs into two countrywide cooperatives—where one operates New World and Four Square, and the other operates Pak’nSave—in order to compete with Woolworths.[26] On 6 September, the Green Party proposed creating a new supermarket chain called KiwiMart, by purchasing 120 supermarkets from Foodstuffs and Woolworths, along with two distribution centres, at an estimated cost of $2.8 billion.[27] On 16 September, the National Party said it would supporting splitting Foodstuffs into two separate companies, contingent on a six-month review by the Commerce Commission into the feasibility of the split.[28]
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Apparently they just got Costco a couple years ago, but that’s not quite the same thing as a regular supermarket, and people want Aldi too, and Ikea.
“The brand people would love to see is definitely Aldi,” said First Retail Group managing director Chris Wilkinson, who described it as a potential disruptor.
“Aldi’s focus is low price, but it’s a pleasant environment,” he said.
“They are a massive player globally, so they’re able to leverage that.”
But Aldi has been saying no to New Zealand for years, and Wilkinson does not see that changing.
Lang agreed that the only viable alternative at the moment would be for another brand to enter the market as an online retailer.
But again, don’t hold out any hopes for groceries by Amazon.
“It’s like Ikea. Ikea’s business model works on the premise they need one million people within one car hour from the shop - you can easily achieve that in Auckland and you can’t achieve that anywhere else in New Zealand,” Lang said.
“I think for very much the same reason we won’t see a large-scale Amazon retailer entering the grocery market, because their business model is yeah they do groceries, but they do a whole bunch of other things, and we’re just too small.”
