Latest news with #MilesHurrell
The Spinoff
a day ago
- Business
- The Spinoff
Butter prices are just a symptom of everything being completely rooted
Butter is the latest in a long line of individual products to be scapegoated for our crushing and ongoing cost of living reality, which shows no sign of abating. Miles Hurrell may have mentally cursed Nicola Willis for believing in him as he sweated through a barrage of media questions last Thursday. The finance minister had told the Fonterra chief executive he'd be great at this, emerging from their meeting two days prior with nothing but praise for his efforts to explain the price of butter. He was 'so good at communicating about this that I've encouraged him that he should provide that information directly to New Zealanders', she'd said. 'And I've been assured that that is something that he will be doing later this week.' Later that week had arrived, and things weren't going as well as expected. 'Do you actually understand what it's like for consumers to go to the supermarket and face these prices?' asked a reporter, her voice betraying an unmistakable hint of being extremely pissed off. 'Absolutely, I was in the supermarket last night,' hazarded Hurrell. Unfortunately, he'd omitted a small detail which may have undercut his attempt at relatability. 'What do you get paid?' the reporter asked. The answer, as it turns out, is nearly $6 million per annum, or enough to buy about 600,000 blocks of Anchor butter. The reaction to the interview wasn't universally positive. Analysts asked whether the dairy cooperative has lost its social licence. Social media users called for boycotts. On the one hand, fair enough. It feels like yesterday farmers were driving their tractors down Queen Street, complaining that climate regulations had made it impossible for them to do business. They won, with the incoming coalition government extending agriculture's exemption from the Emissions Trading Scheme. Now, after securing their own bespoke financial arrangement, they're saying they can't create another one for us sadsacks weeping in the Woolworths aisle. On the other hand, butter is only the latest disgusting boil on a massive pus-bleached body of unaffordability. When he wasn't uttering hexes on the finance minister, Hurrell's mind likely turned to Leviticus 16:21, where the high priest Aaron was commanded to place both his hands on the head of a live goat, and confess over it all the inequities of his people. The scapegoat would then be set free in the wilderness as a wandering representative for the sins of the nation. Butter is our current scapegoat. Before it came along, we had domestic airfares. Before that, fuel prices. Before that, flat whites. For one weird moment in late 2024, we had a collective freakout over the price of bean products. Before that, we had rates. Before that, avocados. All these products serve as a temporary focal point for the broader sense that everything's completely rooted. Butter is guilty of being too brazen about filching from our back pockets, with its roughly 50% price rise year on year, but most household staples are getting way out of hand. Buying enough mince for burgers costs an hour's work on the minimum wage. Cheese toasties are in 'sell your kidney' territory. Most significantly, sour coke lollies are now upwards of $2 a bag. Unless you're earning $6 million as the chief executive of Fonterra, it hurts paying for the basics. Something's got to give. The cost of living crisis has become the cost of living reality, and outside of urban upzoning and some positive noises about increasing supermarket competition, few politicians are proposing changes that could meaningfully alter the problems at the heart of our economic funk. If we want to leave a New World without feeling like we've just been mugged, we need higher wages and fairer tax settings. Instead we'll get rotating media freakouts about individual price spikes. This week a goat has been sent out into the desert, lathered in a 500g block of Anchor salted butter. But even as the castigation subsides, the underlying curse remains. A new representative for our collective failings will have to be selected soon. Have you seen the price of a block of Whittaker's Hazella lately? It's absolutely outrageous.
RNZ News
3 days ago
- Business
- RNZ News
Mediawatch: Media milking butter battle
Big money for butter - as seen on TV on 1News on Tuesday, reporting the bitter butter battle turning political. Photo: screenshot / TVNZ 1News "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. The tension was palpable. This was a high-stakes moment. "About $8.40 in New Zealand at the moment," Christopher Luxon responded. 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. The consequences for getting it wrong would undoubtedly have been dire. 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. The price has risen nearly 50 percent in a year and that's caused quite a few conniptions back home on Earth. Stuff actually ran a story on Luxon getting the price of butter right. Meanwhile journalists accosted Fonterra boss Miles Hurrell out in the open with questions about the cost of his company's yellow gold. First he had to fend off TVNZ political editor Maiki Sherman , not once but twice, ahead of a heavily-promoted meeting with finance minister Nicola Willis at Parliament. Hurrell got away, only to encounter RNZ's political reporter Giles Dexter afterwards - and by then he was pretty fed up. "I'll talk to media in the morning," he replied tersely to Dexter's enquiries. (Two more days passed before he actually did). But the media's intense interest in that meeting was understandable. It had been billed as a kind of 'please explain' and the finance minister told RNZ's Checkpoint she would grill Hurrell on the price of butter. "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. But that tough talk got the goat of Newstalk ZB morning host Mike Hosking during his weekly interview with the prime minister on Monday. "No she's not," he responded, after Luxon said Willis was doing a good job on food prices. "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." "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 . The following morning Willis was keen to tell RNZ's First Up her meeting with Hurrell was just a regularly scheduled catch-up. But the Fonterra boss was pursued around Parliament and the streets of Wellington nevertheless. 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 . The Herald 's Liam Dann implored the media to have a little bit of perspective in his weekly column in the Herald on Sunday last weekend. He said high butter prices are actually only costing many families about $4 a week and other price rises hit harder. He told Mediawatch we might be overreacting to the incredible cost of a spreadable product. "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." 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. But he acknowledged those gains were less tangible and visceral than the sight of a $10 block of butter in the supermarket aisle. The high price of butter was also emblematic of the wider cost of living crisis, he said. "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." "Perhaps it is just that we need something to focus on, to channel that anger around what's happening to the overall supermarket sector." Dann has pleaded with politicians to " raise the quality of debate " and focus on structural economic issues rather than the price of butter. But surely that goes for the media as well? Liam Dann didn't want to blame the media, but said the wider issue of New Zealand's low wage and under-productive economy was far more important and worthy of analysis than individual commodity prices. "How do we organise the system so we've actually got a thriving domestic economy, people are paid more and can afford to eat these products that we've grown up culturally seeing as our own?" Good question. For now though, the media is firmly focused on butter. The meeting between Hurrell and Willis, in particular, would have been a friendly one rather than the adversarial encounter some stories suggested. But that reporting was driven by the intoxicating allure of thousands of clicks. "We see that the butter story is what everybody's clicking on... and it becomes a topic that gets momentum. We start asking economists about the butter, and then that gets into people's heads," he said. "We get a sort of a media spiral going where it just becomes a bit of a phenomenon in its own right." That may not be as edifying as a discussion of the economic conditions behind our lagging wages, but it's certainly a lot more clickable. In the end, just like Fonterra, the media is a business too - and it also follows the money. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
NZ Herald
3 days ago
- Business
- NZ Herald
Heather du Plessis-Allan: We are being irrational about the price of butter
Unless you're into commercial scale baking, butter is not the thing putting the most pressure on household budgets. Try power. This winter power is costing the average household almost a block of butter every day. Or rates. That's costing the average Wellingtonian more than a block of butter every day. Those expenses have no alternatives. You have to pay them. With butter we at least have alternatives. If we don't like the price we can do a swap. I don't want to be Marie Antoinette but at least we have the option to switch to margarine. Not only have we abandoned logic, but also facts. Even the Finance Minister briefly took to complaining that butter is cheaper in Australia than in the very country that produces it. Except that's not true. At the time of writing, if you take Woolworths' salted butter, which is available both sides of the Tasman, adjust for currency and the fact the Australian Government does not charge their equivalent of GST on butter, we actually pay 30c less. Discounting butter domestically is impractical, as it would require subsidies, impacting farmers and shareholders. Actually, the price of butter is a good news story for New Zealand. Because if we're paying our farmers more, the world is paying our farmers more. And they're buying a lot more blocks of butter than we are. So that means they're paying a good chunk towards our tax take, our health, our roads, our schools. It's become slightly fashionable to suggest the solution is to discount butter domestically. That's a nutty idea. A discount is a subsidy. A subsidy has to be paid by someone. Who? Fonterra? The shareholders will probably object to that. Maybe, if this drama runs on long enough and there is enough reputational damage to Fonterra, it might be in the business' interest to cut the price to make the pain stop. That would not be a good day for farmers and shareholders. Miles Hurrell attributes the 46.5% rise in butter prices to global demand and supply issues. Photo / Alyse Wright The Government? Again, bonkers. If New Zealand is too broke to afford the full Dunedin hospital build, we're too broke to help commercial bakers afford their butter. The truth is there is no fix to the price of butter that isn't stupid or temporary. We simply have to pay the price that we pay. And the Finance Minister knows this. She knows this because she is a very clever woman. And because she worked for Fonterra for six years. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has turned butter into the cost-of-living symbol. Photo / Mark Mitchell So, she should never have turned butter into the cost-of-living symbol she has. This really started with her in April when she visited Costco and was taken by the fact it could sell butter for about half the price mainstream supermarkets were selling it for. It became her evidence that supermarkets were ripping us off. But then somehow, Fonterra got dragged into it and one of their regular ministerial briefings became a please-explain. And then the TV news was chasing the CEO Miles Hurrell around the forecourt of Parliament and going live to air while the meeting was under way. And there were expectations. And then nothing happened. And it has become yet another example of the Finance Minister, disappointingly, talking big but doing nothing. Just like with the retail banks. And just like with the supermarkets, so far. Spare a thought for Hurrell. The man is one of the most impressive Kiwi CEOs of his generation but had to spend his week cast as the villain of the butter story. There is no story. It's not even the biggest pressure on our weekly bills.
1News
5 days ago
- Business
- 1News
NZ 'lucky' to have 'premium' butter as only option — Fed Farmers
Federated Farmers' dairy group chair says New Zealanders are lucky to have premium butter, but he hopes prices drop at the checkout as soon as the cost of milk solids do. The price of butter rose nearly 50% to the year ended May, Stats NZ data showed. Dairy giant Fonterra's boss Miles Hurrell sympathised with households feeling the pinch but said price increases were a reflection of supply not being able to keep up with demand. Fonterra could not offer cheaper prices to local customers, he said. Federated Farmers Dairy Industry Group chairperson Karl Dean said New Zealanders had to pay the market rate. ADVERTISEMENT "We are lucky we get a premium product as our only option... the rest of the world would love to have grass-fed butter all the time," he said. "So it is good that we have that option, but all that we ask is that when the prices come down - which they will, they always do - that flows on through the supply chain." The morning's headlines in 90 seconds, including Hulk Hogan dies, sentencing for a New Zealander who assaulted two airline stewards, and a big accolade for Te Papa. (Source: 1News) Dean believed Fonterra, wholesalers and supermarkets were doing their best to keep prices down. But they needed to react quickly when contract milk prices changed, he said.
Otago Daily Times
5 days ago
- Business
- Otago Daily Times
NZers 'lucky' to have premium butter
Miles Hurrell. PHOTO: ODT FILES Federated Farmers' dairy group chair says New Zealanders are lucky to have premium butter, but he hopes prices drop at the checkout as soon as the cost of milk solids do. The price of butter rose nearly 50 percent to the year ended May, Stats NZ data showed. Dairy giant Fonterra's boss Miles Hurrell sympathised with households feeling the pinch but said price increases were a reflection of supply not being able to keep up with demand. Fonterra could not offer cheaper prices to local customers, he said. Federated Farmers Dairy Industry Group chairperson Karl Dean said New Zealanders had to pay the market rate. "We are lucky we get a premium product as our only option... the rest of the world would love to have grass-fed butter all the time," he said. "So it is good that we have that option, but all that we ask is that when the prices come down - which they will, they always do - that flows on through the supply chain." Dean believed Fonterra, wholesalers and supermarkets were doing their best to keep prices down. But they needed to react quickly when contract milk prices changed, he said.
