Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected.<\/p>\n
Leader Chris Hipkins said a handful of big businesses were guilty of price gouging – that is, charging more than necessary for essential items.<\/p>\n
“Right now, a company big enough to dodge competition can charge excessive prices for the basics, like food and fuel, and there’s no law against it,” he said.<\/p>\n
“Labour will change that, by making it illegal for big powerful companies to rip off New Zealanders on the essentials.”<\/p>\n
Commerce and consumer affairs spokesperson Arena Williams said 97 percent of New Zealand businesses were small, and would not be affected by the policy.<\/p>\n
“It also only applies in markets for essentials, like food, power, fuel, transport, telecommunications banking, and insurance,” she said.<\/p>\n
Labour’s policy document said the law would apply where a company had enough market power that customers could not realistically shop elsewhere, suppliers had nowhere else to go, or new competitors struggled to enter the market.<\/p>\n
The full policy includes:<\/p>\n
Williams said similar rules were already in place in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected. Leader Chris Hipkins said a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":601524,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":["post-601523","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-new-zealand","tag-new-zealand","tag-news","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601523","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=601523"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/601523\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/601524"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=601523"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=601523"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=601523"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}