In November 1966, five women in Auckland placed an advertisement in the paper with a simple message: “Who wants to do something about rising prices?” They listed their names and numbers and waited. Then the phones started ringing, and for a week they didn’t stop. The Campaign Against Rising Prices – or Carp, as it became known – was born.
The next month, the price of wool collapsed, sending the economy into freefall. Inflation rose. Keith Holyoake’s National government opted for austerity in response, slashing subsidies on bread, flour and butter, increasing postal, electricity and rail charges, putting up state house rents, and hiking taxes on tobacco, cars and spirits.
The impact on households was brutal. To the women who placed the newspaper ad, it was an outrage. Carp branches soon sprang up around the country and membership grew to the thousands by 1970. It set to work organising protests, writing newsletters, monitoring prices, and lobbying MPs with its demands – price controls on essentials, the control of profits, tougher action on profiteering. It also took the fight to businesses directly, calling for boycotts of products from companies that it saw as hiking prices unfairly. Unilever soap powder and Wattie’s tinned tomatoes both came into the firing line. The price of both dropped as a result.
Finance minister
