<\/p>\n
\nBig money for butter – as seen on TV on 1News on Tuesday, reporting the bitter butter battle turning political.
\nPhoto: screenshot \/ TVNZ 1News\n<\/p>\n
“How much is a block of butter?” a reporter from Stuff asked as things wrapped up the prime minister’s post-Cabinet media conference on Monday.<\/p>\n
The tension was palpable. This was a high-stakes moment.<\/p>\n
“About $8.40 in New Zealand at the moment,” Christopher Luxon responded.<\/p>\n
Close enough, thankfully for Luxon. Woolworths’ in-house salted butter is $8.50, and you can get 500g of Rolling Meadow at PaknSave for $8.29.<\/p>\n
The consequences for getting it wrong would undoubtedly have been dire.<\/p>\n
In case you’ve been living under a rock inside a cave on the planet Venus during a solar storm – while wearing a blindfold and noise-cancelling headphones – our entire nation and nearly all of its media organisations have been fixated on the price of 500g of pure concentrated uncut dairy.<\/p>\n
The price has risen nearly 50 percent<\/a> in a year and that’s caused quite a few conniptions back home on Earth.<\/p>\n Stuff actually ran a story<\/a> on Luxon getting the price of butter right.<\/p>\n Meanwhile journalists accosted Fonterra boss Miles Hurrell out in the open with questions about the cost of his company’s yellow gold.<\/p>\n First he had to fend off TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman<\/a>, not once but twice, ahead of a heavily-promoted meeting with finance minister Nicola Willis at Parliament.<\/p>\n Hurrell got away, only to encounter RNZ’s political reporter Giles Dexter afterwards – and by then he was pretty fed up.<\/p>\n “I’ll talk to media in the morning,” he replied tersely to Dexter’s enquiries. (Two more days passed before he actually did).<\/p>\n But the media’s intense interest in that meeting was understandable. It had been billed as a kind of ‘please explain’<\/a> and the finance minister told RNZ’s Checkpoint she would grill Hurrell on the price of butter.<\/p>\n “Sometimes we’re seeing cheaper prices in British or Australian supermarkets and I’m interested to understand how much of that is about the lack of supermarket competition here – and how much is about the prices that Fonterra is passing through,” she said.<\/p>\n But that tough talk got the goat of Newstalk ZB morning host Mike Hosking during his weekly interview<\/a> with the prime minister on Monday.<\/p>\n “No she’s not,” he responded, after Luxon said Willis was doing a good job on food prices.<\/p>\n “She’s off to Fonterra this week to meet who? Miles. And what’s she going to talk to Miles about? She’s going to talk about the price of butter. I can tell you why the price of butter is the price of butter, and I don’t know why we have a finance minister who doesn’t know. We get the international price for butter.”<\/p>\n “Nicola has this penchant for saying stuff that might lead you to believe she could produce an uzi out of a handbag and blitz the room,” he said later in a two-minute-long Mike’s Minute<\/a>.<\/p>\n The following morning Willis was keen to tell RNZ’s<\/a> First Up her meeting with Hurrell was just a regularly scheduled catch-up.<\/p>\n But the Fonterra boss was pursued around Parliament and the streets of Wellington nevertheless.<\/p>\n It didn’t deter our media from delivering blanket coverage of the meeting and post-butter discussion analysis – and the price of butter more generally in news bulletins, commentary and explainers<\/a>.<\/p>\n Was all this actually a storm in a butter vat?<\/p>\n The Herald’s Liam Dann implored the media to have a little bit of perspective in his weekly column<\/a> in the Herald on Sunday last weekend.<\/p>\n He said high butter prices are actually only costing many families about $4 a week and other price rises hit harder.<\/p>\n He told Mediawatch we might be overreacting to the incredible cost of a spreadable product.<\/p>\n “If you’re going to get worked up about a food product in New Zealand, it’s going to be dairy. There’s a sort of cultural connection to dairy and this feeling that we produce so much of the stuff that it’s not fair that it costs so much.”<\/p>\n Dann said high dairy prices were a net positive for the country’s economy, with the current spike expected to bring in an additional $10 billion in export revenue over this year and next. Politicians – including former Fonterra employee Nicola Willis – were well aware of that.<\/p>\n But he acknowledged those gains were less tangible and visceral than the sight of a $10 block of butter in the supermarket aisle.<\/p>\n The high price of butter was also emblematic of the wider cost of living crisis, he said.<\/p>\n “I’m certainly not downplaying the cost of living crisis… but if you actually do the maths and crunch how much discretionary income’s coming or going based on your butter consumption, we’re talking cents.”<\/p>\n “Perhaps it is just that we need something to focus on, to channel that anger around what’s happening to the overall supermarket sector.”<\/p>\n