Barry Soper: Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent on the Finance Minister's investigation into butter prices

The Finance Minister says all roads lead back to supermarket competition, as questions loom over spiralling dairy prices.

Nicola Willis yesterday spoke with with Fonterra chief executive Miles Hurrell - in a meeting she's called constructive and candid.

Newstalk ZB senior political correspondent Barry Soper says it's likely the Government will make an announcement on supermarkets in the coming days.

LISTEN ABOVE

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Barry Sooper, senior political correspondent. Is the High Barry good afternoon,
So Nicholas war on butter? Is it working or is
it backfiring?

Speaker 2 (00:07):
Well, the expectation was, wasn't it that when she had
the head of Fonterra up to her office, that something
was going to be done about the price of butter.
But you know the reality was that nothing could have
been done about the price of butter. She does meet
with Fonterra from time to time, will several times a

(00:28):
year in fact, But where was the expectation created. Maybe
she would have been better not to have mentioned that
she was going to have a meeting with Fonterra given
the price of butter.

Speaker 1 (00:39):
No, she said, I am going to have a meeting
with Fonterra and ask them to explain the price of
butter exactly.

Speaker 2 (00:46):
And so that was interpreted as being her being able
to drive down in some way the price of butter
by having a meeting with Fonterra, which of course would
never have been the case. She the she was reminded
by Labour's Barbara Edmunds in Parliament of her own attacks

(01:09):
of Labor over the price of food when she was
in opposition here they are.

Speaker 3 (01:13):
Does she regret doing a Facebook video waving a block
of cheese complaining it was too expensive, only to see
it increase under her watch. No, not at almost to speaker,
because what I was highlighting at that time was that
under the watch of the government I was critiquing food
price inflation went to double digits, double digits, mister speaker,

(01:35):
up over twelve percent, and every week I recall coming
down to this house and saying, with your please, he's
up on the waistful spending. It's charging the inflation and
kiwis are paying the price. And you know what, there
was a little election about that. Guess who won.

Speaker 2 (01:51):
Yeah, pretty uptight about it.

Speaker 1 (01:54):
But does that feel a little wee one you lost
eat that?

Speaker 2 (01:58):
Oh? Yes, absolutely. The thing is that she keeps coming
back to supermarkets and what they are, what their markup
clearly is by the supplier being Fonterra. There is an
expectation I think within the next few weeks. I inquired
around the Behave today that there will be some sort
of announcement by the government on supermarkets within the next fortnight,

(02:22):
so keep your eye out for that. I also looked
at what Fonterra gets and you probably know this anyway.
Vonterra gets for a kilogrammer butter is thirteen dollars fifty
Now five hundred grams of that is six dollars seventy five.
So the markup in supermarkets is not that massive when
you look at the international price. So not a hell

(02:44):
of a lot can be done.

Speaker 1 (02:46):
Well quite, I mean, that is exactly the point. What
do you make of the police target being moved?

Speaker 2 (02:51):
Well, this is yet comes back to expectations, doesn't it
In politics that you know, you should never put numbers
on things like police and other things like creating an expectation.
You'll remember National got into trouble in the first place
over this. They said that we'll have another five hundred policemen.

(03:13):
Initially it was two years. Then they said, oh no,
hang on, it was three years. Now it's back to
two years. They're not going to get there now until
about August next year, according to the Police commissioner. Now
the associate policeman is to Casey Costello, very conveniently, she's
the one responsible for this particular policy. She said in

(03:33):
February she was even more confident that the target would
be reached in November this year. Well, of course they've
got another police college now in operation here in Auckland,
but it's not going to be reached and they're going
to come nowhere near the five hundred. Ginny Anderson, of course,
she's the Labor Police spokesman. She condemned the delay as
an example of Luxelon's inability to deliver. But let's remember

(03:58):
the last Labor government almost eighteen hundred new policemen on
the beat, they said three years from becoming government in
twenty and seventeen. They only achieved that in a mid
twenty twenty three and of those two hundred and seventy
weren't sworn police officers, so they weren't bopping to the

(04:20):
beat as we were assured they would be. They were
in the back office doing work for frontline policemen.

Speaker 1 (04:28):
Tell me if I'm wrong, but that homelessness report really
was not worth waiting for, was this?

Speaker 2 (04:33):
Well, it's to me the figures are disturbing when you
think homelessness, now that's people sleeping rough are what nearly
five thousand people? Yes, so, according to the last census,
that's the size of Dargaville.

Speaker 1 (04:48):
Yeah, that's not what I mean though, right, this thing
has been hyped up. Q and A was going hard
on it. Various media were going hard on it because
it was supposed to show us that ending the emergency
accommodation and cleaning that up has led to an increase
in homelessness. All of these figures are from the labor government.
That none of us is capturing the national government.

Speaker 2 (05:06):
No, it's not, and that's right. And to claim that
closing down emergency housing has led to people going out
on the streets, I mean interestingly, if you look at
the number of people that are living without any shelter
on the streets, the majority of them are older. Fifty

(05:27):
five percent of them are males and forty four percent
females and are over the age of I think about
fifty plus their age groups. So they're older people that
are on the streets, not the youngsters with families that
need to be housed.

Speaker 1 (05:46):
Thanks very much, Ary, so per senior political correspondent.

Speaker 2 (05:49):
For more from Hither Duplessy Alan Drive, listen live to
news talks it'd be from four pm weekdays, or follow
the podcast on iHeartRadio.