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Labour pledges to ban big companies from charging excessive prices (www.rnz.co.nz)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/politics@lemmy.nz
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Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected.

Leader Chris Hipkins said a handful of big businesses were guilty of price gouging - that is, charging more than necessary for essential items.

The full policy includes:

  • making it illegal for big companies with substantial market power to charge excessive prices for essential goods and services, or to pay unfairly low prices to suppliers
  • setting a legal test for price gouging: holding prices "well above what they would otherwise be in a competitive market, sustained over time"
  • requiring companies that gouge to pay penalties and hand back every dollar of excess profit
  • giving the Commerce Commission power to investigate price gouging and supporting consumer groups and suppliers to do the same.

Williams said similar rules were already in place in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia.

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[–] 4 points 1 month ago (1 child)

Politically setting prices never works as intended and always has highly problematic side effects. The real solution is to create conditions where no company can sustain a market dominating position. But this is a) hard and b) not easy to understand for voters. So "we'll make things cheap by law" is what it is.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 month ago

    Its also hard for new zealand to have the market to sustain a competition in a bunch of markets. I like this policy because it is using government for what it is ment to do. Regulate.

    Yes NZ is a small market. Yes your offshore money means you can be in a dominating position and quickly squash home growen competitors. No you cant be a dick about it, you can earn some of the monies, you dont need to have ALL of the monies.

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