Pitched as a way to take a "regressive tax" off the dinner table during a cost-of-living crisis, Te Pāti Māori's plan to scrap GST from all food and non-alcoholic drinks is the party's signature affordability pledge.

The Policy: TPM Remove GST from Kai — 2023 Election →

*Neutrality note: this is a tax and Te Tiriti-adjacent policy. Positions below are attributed to the people who hold them; nothing here is asserted in the tracker's own voice.*

What it does:

• Removes the 15% GST from all food and non-alcoholic beverages — the party deliberately avoids carve-outs and says it would "remove GST from all food products and non-alcoholic beverages", including packaging needed to supply food, to sidestep the boundary disputes seen overseas.
• Co-leader Rawiri Waititi, Member for Waiariki, frames food as "a right and a necessity that should never be taxed" and the party says whānau would, on average, get the equivalent of roughly seven weeks of "free" food a year.
• The party pairs it with regulation to force supermarkets to pass the savings on, and funds it inside a wider tax switch: a tax-free first $30,000 of income, new 42% and 48% top rates, and a net wealth tax it projects would raise about $23 billion a year.
• Cost estimates for the GST measure vary by source: Deloitte GST partner Alan Bulo and the party itself put the lost revenue at about $3.4 billion a year, National's Simon Watts cited $2.6 billion in the House, and then-Labour leader Chris Hipkins has referred to a figure closer to $4 billion.

The result: The pledge is popular but, on the evidence to date, not deliverable in this Parliament. Waititi's member's bill — an amendment to the Goods and Services Tax Act 1985 — was drawn from the ballot and reached its first reading, where it was voted down 6 votes to 117 on 21–22 March 2024, supported only by Te Pāti Māori's six MPs. Every other party opposed it: NZ First's Shane Jones likened the bill to a mayfly, National's Simon Watts called the cost impossible to overlook, ACT's Simon Court warned of UK/Australia-style classification complexity, while Labour's Barbara Edmonds and the Greens' Chlöe Swarbrick said they shared the cost-of-living goal but doubted GST removal was the best tool — Swarbrick arguing it "will not do what it says on the tin" given the supermarket duopoly. Independent economists are sceptical too: the 2018 Tax Working Group concluded GST exemptions are a "poorly targeted instrument" that hand a larger absolute benefit to higher-income households, and University of Canterbury economist Stephen Hickson notes Australia needs an 87-page guide covering 1,500 food types to run a comparable scheme. With the bill defeated, the policy now sits as an election pledge Te Pāti Māori carries into 2026.

The impacts to watch:

• Pass-through risk: overseas studies cited by Deloitte's Alan Bulo suggest only a small share of GST cuts reaches consumers, so the promised grocery relief depends on whether the supermarket-regulation half of the policy actually bites.
• Fiscal trade-off: replacing $2.6–4 billion of revenue leans entirely on the contested wealth and income-tax package; if those numbers fall short, the hole lands on the rest of the Budget.
• Compliance and boundary effects: a broad "all food" definition avoids some carve-out fights but still draws a line around alcohol and prepared/hot food, where Hickson and the Tax Working Group warn complexity creeps back in.
• Distributional debate: whether the measure is "progressive" turns on the whole tax switch, not GST alone — the point on which supporters and critics most sharply disagree.