Raising prices is not illegal. Exactly.

As we work ourselves into a collective lockdown frenzy over price gouging that clearly doesn’t exist, the Prime Minister, at the end of her Cabinet briefing, made that startlingly obvious economic reality.

Raising prices is not illegal.

Did she not learn her lesson from the petrol fiasco? She told us this time yesterday she had no evidence of price gouging. That's before you get to the simple fact, we don’t actually have a national measure of what price gouging might actually be. Further, we got evidence yesterday as well from Foodstuffs that the numbers of specials is almost as high as it has been normally. The only difference being the stuff they can't put on special is because supply is an issue.

And Chris Quin, head of Foodstuffs in North Island said hand on heart there is no gouging.

So we don’t actually have a problem. Some people will. But the main issue will be the variability of fruit and vege prices from people that don't understand seasonal variability and importation issues. Surely the avocado scandal of recent years gave us all the insight we need?    

However, doing what this government does so well, they set up a complaint service for feedback. You can now dob in a can of beans, or whatever the sight is, and have all your grievances, what? Ignored, I suspect.

It's the same as the dob in a jogger website they opened over the weekend. Thousands of sticky beak protesters crashed it on day one. As people with a world of boredom on their hands, and a lot of venom in their hearts, let rip on some poor, unsuspecting dog walkers.

What the government were supposed to be dealing with at Cabinet yesterday was the question as to whether supermarkets should be open over Easter. And yet again they did what they do so well.

Procrastinate. It's a 30 second decision. The government needs to get out of the way of essential services. It's not hard.  

If supermarkets want to close that’s their call. If they want to serve the community the govt won't stop them. How hard is that? It’s a couple of phone calls at best, we have a handful of supermarket brands.

Dairies can stay open, same with pharmacies. With so much actually locked down and comparatively so few players to deal with, making decisions should actually get easier, not harder.

It seems to me, we are still obsessed with the minutiae. This country is in a health and economic crisis. We need big picture thinking, with big picture ideas, and big picture answers.

How to come out of this the other side, who's in work, what business survive, who prospers, who doesn’t, how big the debt hole is, how big welfare becomes. It's the serious stuff.

But no, let's obsess about websites and playing spooks on neighbours. That’s a mile more productive, isn't it?