Winston Peters: Foreign fingers in NZ's pie

Some of the headlines this week on domestic issues will have left most New Zealanders bewildered.
They concern two products critical to the national economy and every household in New Zealand. In essence they were about commodities, one of which we at present just cannot do without, and the other which more and more households are finding out of reach in the way they used to enjoy it.
Petrol prices this week are about $2.20 a litre or about 45 cents, in real terms, more than our Australian cousins pay in the "lucky country".
No real explanation exists for this huge differential between our two countries and despite an outbreak of head scratching or scratching elsewhere on the anatomy, no respite looms on the economic horizon.
And just to make sure that road users don't get too uppity in their concerns, the petroleum industry leaked that they could envisage, in the not too distant future, a petrol per litre price of an astronomical $4.
New Zealanders are paying up to $2.50 per litre for milk, the production of which New Zealand is the number one country in the world, not in volume, but in productivity.
We can, via our cows, turn grass and water into a world-class product cheaper than anyone else. Milk is a meal in a bottle. It is now dearer than Coke.
That being so, New Zealanders are asking themselves why that high productivity is not resulting in lower prices, which is after all what the market disciples have always argued.
It's the law of supply and demand, you see, which given we have got a milk glut in terms of our domestic consumption, then something funny is happening on the way to our market.
In a recent TV1 Close Up interview, the head of Fonterra clearly articulated that it was neither the farmer nor Fonterra, the collective supplier, ratcheting up prices here. He left viewers with the inescapable conclusion that at the retail end of the market something was going awfully wrong.
And it is.
To start with, all is not well down on the farm. Export milk commodities reached new heights in April but an out-of-control Kiwi dollar bobbling around at US80 cents more than swallowed those theoretical gains. Dairy products make up almost 25 per cent of our exports. Alongside this was the headline that our rural economy is "running at two speeds" where over-indebted dairy farms are in trouble. A number of dairy farmers are only just keeping up with interest and principal payments despite receiving record payouts for their product and are in the category that their banks describe as "distressed rural assets".
It is said figures don't lie but a lot of lies can figure. That goes for language, as well. Instead of calling a spade a spade and attacking our floating exchange rate under the Reserve Bank, which results in a grossly over-inflated dollar damaging to exporters, the beneficiaries of this bloated dollar, the banks, resort to the language of illusion.
Their message to the consumer is that this is all about globalisation, the world market, and market forces. Oh really? When an industry's political clout warps key components of market forces, interest rates and the currency, the bank's excuse is lame indeed.
However, consumers should not hold their breath waiting for relief because one thing is certain as any household knows, food is reaching a new premium and milk is the most common component in any refrigerator.
Now back to petrol prices, about half of which, by taxation, goes in to the Government coffers. Right there is a pathway to relief, but again those holding their breath are candidates for the world's underwater diving record.
A second solution is also obvious and set out decades ago in a book on the petroleum industry, titled The Seven Sisters. That answer is to regulate petrol prices. Again, that won't happen any more than it has in 21 years of price-gouging in the telecommunications industry.
Why not? Because the industries involved scream "governmental interference" or "anti-business practices". In all three industries above, the dairy industry, the petroleum and the telecommunications industry, the irony is that those phrases are correct but in reverse. For what is going on in failing to act in the interest of New Zealanders is totally anti the interests of the remaining 98 per cent of businesses and households.
A wise US President, Theodore Roosevelt, once called these price-gougers "overmighty subjects".
He was right then, and we have them here now, except most of these overmighty subjects are foreign-owned corporates.