Sonya Bateson: Labour’s GST policy on fruit and vegetables leaves a bad taste

Labour announced it will remove GST from fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables if re-elected.

OPINION

It turns out that affordable fruit and vegetables make what I believe is a good election bribe.

For those of you who may have missed the headlines, Labour announced that the party would remove GST from fresh and frozen fruit and vegetables as part of its tax policy.

That would mean the removal of the 15 per cent tax from April next year.

It should please a lot of people. Removing GST from fruit and veg is a policy that’s been bandied around for many a year now, especially since the high cost of living began affecting more than just the bottom earners. And, of course, that means it’s been talked about even more since the pandemic.

On the face of it, it’s a policy that makes me quite happy. It’s my weirdly controversial opinion that fruit and vegetables should be affordable for everyone. Even more radically, I think it should be cheaper to cook a basic meal at home than to buy a piece of fish and a scoop of chips from the neighbourhood takeaway.

Seriously, though. The three most basic essentials to sustain human life are food, water and air. They’re what I’d describe as human rights; if we are deprived of any of those three things we will eventually die.

But I also believe that the food available to us should always, quite literally, start from the ground up - fruit and vegetables. They’re what has fed human bodies (quite literally) since the dawn of time.

For that reason, I believe making fruit and vegetables as cheap as possible is the right thing to do.

Removing the GST from these food items is a direct way for the Government to push the cost down and, administration aside, a way of doing so without involving supermarket supply chains or the growers themselves.

I also like how the policy would work: It would cover all foods labelled “zero-rated”, defined as foods that have had no processing.

Frozen spinach and cut pieces of pineapple are zero-rated; frozen mashed potatoes and cans of creamed corn have been processed so therefore would have GST.

A new grocery commissioner would monitor supermarkets to ensure they pass on the full savings to customers.

Sounds good, right? Cheaper food will benefit almost all of us.

You’d have to be living, well, maybe not in a cave, but rather in a generational wealth-funded mansion, to be ignorant of the struggles of even middle-income earners in recent years.

Let’s take my grocery bills as anecdotal evidence: I’m spending about 33 per cent more on my groceries now than I was two years ago. I’d estimate that about half of my spending is on fruit and vegetables when you take frozens into account - and almost all of that would be zero-rated under this policy.

A 15 per cent discount would make a noticeable difference to my household.

There are also cold, hard numbers to support my anecdote.

According to the food price index for July, food prices have risen 9.6 per cent in the past 12 months. Other year-on-year highlights from the index are as follows:

• Fruit and vegetable prices increased by 6.2 per cent
• Meat, poultry and fish prices increased by 9.3 per cent
• Grocery food prices increased by 11.9 per cent
• Non-alcoholic beverage prices increased by 9.1 per cent
• Restaurant meals and ready-to-eat food prices increased by 8.9 per cent.

And, to be thorough, I dug up some figures on Stats NZ to see what the 12-month food price index percentage change was each July in the past eight years.

• 2023: 9.6 per cent
• 2022: 7.4 per cent
• 2021: 2.8 per cent
• 2020: 4.2 per cent
• 2019: 0.9 per cent
• 2018: 1.1 per cent
• 2017: 3.0 per cent
• 2016: -1.3 per cent

Says a lot, really.

That’s what gets me the most about Labour’s new policy - food prices have increased dramatically in the past two years, and considerably in the two years before that. Why now, Labour?

When petrol prices begin their steep ascent, it didn’t take long for Labour to step in and suspend excise taxes, which made a big difference to many people’s budgets.

Granted, I’m sure removing an excise tax is simpler than having to decide on a method to target specific food items and then figure out how to implement it nationwide.

But, still. Why now when we’ve been struggling for years? Why make us wait until April? And why make it dependent on re-election instead of just pushing it through now?

It leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Dangling a literal carrot in front of our faces in exchange for votes during a time of hardship is, in my opinion, callous.

In my view, food should never be used as a bargaining chip.

Sonya Bateson is a writer, reader and crafter raising her family in Tauranga. She is a Millennial who enjoys eating avocado on toast, drinking lattes and defying stereotypes. As a sceptic, she reserves the right to change her mind when presented with new evidence.