Butter prices are just a symptom of everything being completely rooted
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.
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