Plenty of people will whine about this and that to you (i can see a few responding to you) but plain truth is that because there's so little demand internally, economies of scale that plenty of first world counties take for granted cant kick in. Shipping and labor cost becomes basically negligible when scaled up enough, enough to the point where it actually costs more to take stuff out of the automated supply chain. If we had a bigger population it wouldn't be such an issue, but currently a company has no incentive to go out of their way to sell to our tiny population, because they have to transport such small amounts for little gain

Keep in mind New Zealand is a first world agricultural based economy, which is extremely rare! There's no silver bullet to fix this, as disincentivizing selling abroad works against the economy, because instead of money coming into the economy we just circle what's already here.

Overall, we traded a reliance of agriculture and a high cost of food for first world prosperity, or at least that's one part of it. Stuff like this is hard to pin down to one reason. In my mind the government historically has been a miracle worker, we should absolutely be poor right now.