Pacific Media Centre
Kiribati President Anote Tong called for a moratorium on new coalmines and coalmine expansions in a letter to world leaders in early August. This has been given a cool reception in New Zealand, reports Asia-Pacific Journalism.
Pacific Scoop:
Report – By Mata Lauano
Although renewable energy plays an important role in New Zealand, says Energy and Resources Minister Simon Bridges, shifting away from non-renewable energy cannot be done overnight.
However anti-coal campaigners, Coal Action Network Aotearoa (CANA), say this just isn’t good enough.
Earlier this month President Anote Tong sent a letter to world leaders calling for a moratorium on coalmines and coalmine expansions as Kiribati is under threat from rising sea levels and changing weather patterns due to global warming.
“Kiribati, as a nation faced with a very uncertain future, is calling for a global moratorium on new coal mines. lt would be one positive step towards our collective global action against climate change and it is my sincere hope that you and your people would add your positive support in this endeavour,” President Tong wrote.
When Asia-Pacific Journalism asked Prime Minister John Key whether he had received his letter, we were advised: “The Prime Minister has not received a letter from President Tong calling for a moratorium on new coalmines.”
All letters to heads of state or governments were being physically sent out since the beginning of this week, says Rimon Rimon, a spokesperson for the Kiribati government.
“We anticipate Prime Minister Key will receive the letter perhaps this week or next depending on the courier.”
Kiribati considers New Zealand a major development partner, says Rimon, advising that the larger country “has been assisting Kiribati in many areas involving fisheries, education, sustainable town planning, housing and including an annual quota of 75 for the Pacific Access Category among others”.
No real action
However, Cindy Baxter of CANA says she doesn’t believe that the government is serious about reducing coal production in order to reduce emissions.
“It has done nothing to encourage this.”
Baxter advises that New Zealand needs to listen to our Pacific neighbours and reduce our reliance on coal, both in the export markets and domestically.
According to CANA the government needs to strengthen the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS).
“First give it a cap, state that there are only x amount of emissions allowed to be traded, so that they become more scarce as the cap reduces to meet an emissions reduction target.”
However the government, says Baxter, also needs to stop subsidising the big emitters, “so that they actually pay for their emissions and that would encourage them to cut them. Coal would be on its way out if there was a price on its emissions”.
Baxter tells Asia-Pacific that the government has subsidised the biggest emitters so that the taxpayer pays for the vast majority of what they would have to pay to emit under the Emissions Trading Scheme.
New Zealand’s current plan
According to Bridges while renewable energy plays a hugely important role in New Zealand, and has an increasingly significant role to play internationally, it’s impossible to make an instant switch from non-renewable energy instantaneously as the world is transitioning to a lower-carbon economy.
“The International Energy Agency expects non-renewables, including coal, to continue to account for more than half the world’s energy needs for at least another two decades. That’s why this Government has a mixed and balanced approach to energy production and use.”
Bridges says it’s worth noting that in 2014, about 80 percent of New Zealand’s electricity generation came from renewable sources, “we have an ambitious goal of 90 per cent by 2025.”
Genesis Energy has also announced plans to shut down the last two coal-burning electricity generators at Huntly power station by 2018. The closure will mark the end of coal-fired power generation in New Zealand.
However Baxter is dubious, bringing up the biggest coal users in the country such as Fonterra.
“Why am I talking about Fonterra? Because after NZ Steel and Huntly, Fonterra is our biggest coal user – and our research shows its use of coal has grown 38 percent since 2008.”
There are others, such as Christchurch Hospital, which is installing new coal-fired boilers instead of wood burners.
“Because, again, the government provides no disincentives.
Kiribati’s call
President Anote Tong says the future safety of his people depends on collective and aggressive action to stem the use of coal, which is the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions that are driving climate change.
“Let us join together as a global community and take action now. The construction of each new coal mine undermines the spirit and intent of any agreement we may reach, particularly in the upcoming COP 21 in Paris, whilst stopping new coal mine constructions NOW will make any agreement reached in Paris truly historical.”
It will be interesting to see how John Key will respond once he receives his letter especially as he has stated earlier this year, during a statement on deploying NZ soldiers to Iraq, that New Zealand takes its responsibilities regarding climate change seriously.
“It is why we have an emissions trading scheme, it is why we are investing heavily in science, and it is why we will be taking a responsible target to Paris. We are a small country but we do our bit.”
Mata Lauano is a student journalist on the Asia-Pacific Journalism Studies paper at AUT University. She is completing a Postgraduate Diploma in Communications (Journalism).
Kiribati president calls for a moratorium on coal mines
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Kiribati president’s coal challenge faces deaf reception in New Zealand
Indonesian law outlawing presidential insults unlikely to pass, say analysts
Pacific Media Centre
President Widodo … distancing himself from the draft presidential defamation law. Image: DW
A draft Indonesian Criminal Code amendment, condemed by critics as undermining freedom of speech, is interpreted to mean that burning pictures of the president and vice-president and mocking them in public are insults carrying heavy jail penalties. But, asks Asia-Pacific Journalism, will the law pass? Pacific Scoop: Report – By Michael Neilson Fears that “authoritarian-era” defamation laws will be reinstated in Indonesia are unfounded, say observers of the country’s political scene. Indonesian activists and journalists expressed outrage earlier this month, after President Joko “Jokowi” Widodo said he supported a proposal by the government to re-introduce criminal charges for insulting the president in the draft of a Criminal Code (KUHP) amendment. Sony Ambudi, an Indonesian human rights activist of the Asia-Pacific Human Rights Coalition (APHRC) who currently resides in New Zealand, says Jokowi is merely testing out other members of Parliament, and seeing what he can get away with. “I don’t think they will pass this law. It is a way Jokowi can test out the capacity of Indonesian members of Parliament. Why would parliamentarians pass it, as the President could then use it against them?” An experienced observer of Indonesian media and politics, who seeks anonymity due to his position in Indonesia, also does not believe the draft will become law. “I am confident the proposed Jokowi protection law will never get up, like so many other proposals. I suspect this issue will drag on as it has for three years and die a quiet death.” The idea to restore the provisions was initially proposed by the previous administration of Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono in 2012, but discussion on it has been delayed until now. Distancing move Ambudi says President Widodo is using that fact to distance himself from the draft laws. “He is trying to show to everybody it is not from him, but from the previous administration,” he said. Three articles of the Criminal Code that criminalised defamation were scrapped by the Constitutional Court (MK) in 2006 following a court ruling in favour of lawyer Eggi Sudjana and activist Pandapotan Lubis, who were facing charges for slandering President Yudhoyono and his aides. It was argued the articles undermined freedom of speech, as defined by the constitution, and caused uncertainty, as they were subject to multiple interpretations. One interpretation ruled that burning pictures of the president and vice-president and mocking them in public were insults, and the violators were subject to a maximum of six years’ imprisonment. Such laws were often used arbitrarily by former President Soeharto, and Indonesia’s first president, Soekarno, to arrest their critics. Draft amendments The current draft amendments under concern are Article 263:“Anyone who publicly defames the President or Vice President is liable to criminal charges and is subject to imprisonment for five years maximum or is subject to Category IV fine.”And Article 264:
“Anybody who broadcasts, show or places writings or pictures in a way that they are visible to the public, or play records so that they are hearable to the public, which contain defamation against the President or Vice President or which aims to make defamation contents known or better known to the public, is liable to criminal charges with imprisonment of five years maximum or is subject to Category IV fine maximum.”Thousands of Indonesians have condemned the “authoritarian-era” draft laws via social media, and the Alliance of Independent Journalists (AJI), based in Indonesia, released several press releases condemning the proposals. An excerpt from a statement on August 15 by Suwarjono, the chairman of AJI reads:
“The first victims if those articles are reinstated would be the press. These articles on defamation of heads of state are flexible and can be arbitrarily interpreted. If a journalistic source or the media becomes critical, the rulers can easily gag them.”Political journalist and media freedom advocate Brent Edwards, chair of the print and media arm of the Engineering, Printing and Manufacturing Union in New Zealand, says the EPMU opposes any moves to restrict freedom of press or to place restrictions on journalists reporting news free of fear or favour. “My understanding is this legislation will have a chilling effect on journalism so we believe it is a backward step for Indonesia.” Legal misunderstanding Indonesian journalist Hera Khaerani says she does not believe the law will pass, and that it is unnecessary. “President Joko Widodo doesn’t need the presidential insult law to exist again. We have a similar law, covering all citizens, regulating insults. “Of course we should differ insult from criticism, because criticism is good… [But] insulting a president is not healthy for democracy. “He doesn’t have to feel insecure about not being protected by law when getting insults. So I see it is a mere lack of understanding of the law,” she says. Even though the MK scrapped the three defamation articles from the Criminal Code in 2006, a person can still be charged for defamation if someone files a report against that person, as per articles 310 and 311. Ambudi said much of the concern from the activists is unfounded. “Unfortunately some activists haven’t properly read the draft, yet they make strong reactions. But fortunately they are only a few. “I don’t think the law will be passed, because the other parliamentarians are so afraid of it.” Michael Neilson is a Postgraduate Diploma in Communication Studies student journalist at AUT University. Part of this story was published first by Te Waha Nui. Indonesia slumps in press-freedom index –]]>
Keith Rankin on The Future of Income
Analysis by Keith Rankin. This article was also published on TheDailyBlog.co.nz.
We are starting to hear, again, more discussion about the ‘future of work’, and about robots taking over. This was a fashionable topic in the 1820s (the machinery question), the 1920s (automated production lines), and the early 1980s (computers). It’s a misguided concern, because its premise is that there will not be enough work for our workforce in the future.
It’s a bit like being concerned that we will not have enough pollution in future, and certainly more pollution creates more work; so, more pollution must be a good thing. Yeah right?
Work is unambiguously a cost (not a benefit), and we should never ever forget that. The real concern is the future of income, not the future of work.
In the late 1920s there was a substantial process of automation. A good example in New Zealand was the introduction of milking machines, and the migrations to the larger urban centres on account of less labour required on the farm. In Germany and the United States it was a time of huge investment in fixed capital, ramping up the global mass-production system just when markets for wage goods were collapsing. It was the era of Taylorism and Fordism; time and motion studies of workers doing repetitive tasks, and then assembly-line production.
Aggregate income, by definition, is the same as economic output. But we use the word ‘income’ most when we are emphasising the distribution of output rather than its composition. The really important concept, that of ‘wage goods’, captures both the idea of income and the idea of output. It was a commonly used phrase in the 1920s, rarely heard today.
In the early 1930s – the depression years – the world economy was ramped up to produce lots of wage goods, but workers’ earnings were so low (in large part because so many were unemployed or on short-time) that the market demand for wage goods collapsed. So, capital became as unemployed as labour was. Indeed Keynes was as concerned about unemployed factories and machines as he was about unemployed workers. Under these conditions, economic investment made no sense.
If, in the future, robots take over much of our work, then not only do workers stand to become unemployed, but so do robots.
The central structural crisis in the world economy today is that we have a productive structure based on pumping out masses of wage goods – ie the goods and services that wage workers buy – at a time when ordinary workers are paid too little to be able to afford them in the quantities we want to produce. At least Henry Ford understood that, if he was to create a great company and a great automobile industry, his own workers (and other workers like them) would need to be able and willing to buy automobiles. So he paid his workers more. Ford understood that, if the car was to have a great future, it would be as a wage good, not an elite good that only the rich would buy.
This system, where workers are not paid enough to buy the wage goods they make, may be called ‘scrooge capitalism’.
Debt is the short- and medium-term solution to scrooge capitalism; when the system requires the mass consumption of wage goods, but does not pay ordinary consumers sufficient income to buy them. If we won’t pay workers enough, we instead lend them the difference, so that the workers can buy the wage goods that the scrooge capitalists make. Indeed this system does work, so long as these capitalists never insist on the repayment of these credits. That can actually work for a long time, because it’s in the nature of scrooges that they do not wish to be repaid; rather they like to simply accumulate credits. (When one debtor repays a scrooge, the scrooge invariably looks for other debtors to lend to, rather than spending the repaid debt.)
Scrooge capitalism crashes when the scrooge capitalists stop lending to the communities of workers and to the workers’ communities. (We saw such a crash in 2008 with the temporary cessation of sub-prime lending.) Workers’ households must buy the wage goods; it’s central to industrial capitalism that they do so. Captains of industry live by making and selling wage goods. (The remaining rich mostly live by selling financial and business services to these industrialists, or by selling such services to each other.)
Is there another way? Yes, it involves distributing income in such a way that the ‘plebs’ – the 99% in recent parlance, but better thought of as the 75% – receive as of right bigger income shares than they presently do, despite this being a time when there is less need the labour.
So, if capitalism is to survive, the future of income has to involve a much more equitable distribution of aggregate income. It cannot be through higher payrolls, because wages are a cost to individual capitalists, just as labour is a cost to individual workers. (Capitalists, like workers, are cost minimisers.) What is required (in addition to present forms of income) is a return on collective equity; the recognition of the social need for a form of income that is more equal than wages.
By its very nature, private equity income is the most unequal form of income. Public equity income can compensate, by being the most equal form of income. Just as high wages helped Ford and his workers, public equity income can help today’s budding Fords sell their wares, can help ensure their workers are able to enjoy what capitalism offers, and can help those many people who are worse off than fulltime wage workers.
Further, once the plebs get a bigger share of the cake – both as an equity right and as a pragmatic means to maintain a market for the capitalists’ robots’ outputs – the working plebs can choose to work fewer hours, happily passing up the overtime (which I regard as anything more than 30 hours a week of wage work) to the robots and to the unemployed. The result can be substantial productivity gains, bearing in mind that labour productivity is total output divided by the total hours of labour supplied.
All society gains when we are able to choose to work less, while continuing to enjoy the same amounts of wage goods as before. Further it’s sustainable; the demographic transition to permanently low birth rates occurred in advanced and emerging economies once there was widespread income security. When we have income security, the production system responds to genuine consumer needs, rather than overloading us with the needs that its marketing machine requires of us. It’s no longer ‘profit or perish’.
In Economics 101, the production system (supply) is our servant, not our master. It can be so.
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]]>NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 28, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 9 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Friday 28th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle include a prediction the New Zealand economy will get a $100 million boost with the announcement of direct year-round flights between Christchurch and China, the Prime Minister acknowledging a strong link between children who have been in state care and crime and the death of a Waikato farm worker in an accident just a day after Parliament passed legislation that deems farms to be a low-risk workplace.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Bay of Plenty place names corrected; Huntly section of the Waikato Expressway begins; Minister welcomes Canterbury Regional Economic Development Strategy; Cook Islands to benefit from Tropic Twilight; Minister opens South Island’s first Urban Cycleways; Manukau Court’s $51m court upgrade complete; Healthy Families NZ launched in Waitakere
ACT Party: Auckland Council must stop coveting neighbours’ assets
Greens: Ihumatao should be protected; Minister needs to follow overseas examples; dump SERCO; Kiwis lose $871 million from power company privatisations; Kiwis lose $871 million from power company privatisations
Labour: Time for inquiry into petrol margins
New Zealand First: Seven Years On And National Is In No Rush To Help Children; We Say It Again – Serco Must Go
NZ National Party: Bishop to hold public meeting on family violence
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
ALCOHOL & PREGNANCY: The Social Policy Evaluation and Research Unit (Superu) has released new research on drinking during pregnancy using data from the longitudinal study Growing Up in New Zealand. Read more here:http://www.superu.govt.nz/alcoholandpregnancy
ALPS 2 OCEAN CYCLE TRAIL: John Key has announced a further $935,000 will be invested to help complete the Alps 2 Ocean cycle trail. Go here for more: http://www.alps2ocean.com/trail-map
CANTERBURY DEVELOPMENT : Minister for Economic Development Steven Joyce has welcomed a report from Environment Canterbury which will provide the building blocks for a strong and vital economic future across the Canterbury region. A copy of the report can be found at http://www.ecan.govt.nz/CREDS
COUNCIL SUPPORTS FARMERS: Waikato Regional Council says it’s keen to help where it can when it comes to farmers and related agricultural businesses weathering the stresses caused by the current low dairy payout. More information on council rules relating to farming is available at www.waikatoregion.govt.nz/Community/Your-community/For-Farmers/
EMPLOYMENT LAW BREACHED: The Employment Relations Authority (ERA) has ordered Pro-Build Canterbury Limited to pay more than $58,000 in penalties and arrears to workers for breaching employment laws. Read more here: http://employment.govt.nz/workplace/determinations/PDF/2015/2015_NZERA_Christchurch_111.pdf
FMA RELEASES REPORT: The Financial Markets Authority (FMA) today published its enforcement and investigations report for the year ending 30 June 2015. The full report is available here:http://fma.govt.nz/news/reports-and-papers/monitoring-and-compliance-reports/investigations-and-enforcement-report/
HEALTH AND SAFETY LAWS: The much anticipated Health and Safety at Work Act was passed by Parliament yesterday following a fortnight of debate and last minute “tweaks” to further clarify the new requirements. Click here for more: http://www.bellgully.com/resources/resource.04049.asp
NAMES CORRECTED: Land Information Minister Louise Upston has today announced her decision to correct the spelling of 12 place and feature names in the Opotiki District. The full list of Waiotahe place names are available at:http://www.linz.govt.nz/regulatory/place-names/recent-place-name-decisions-and-place-names-interest/nzgb-decisions-august-2015.
UNDP LAUNCHES STORYTELLING CONTEST: UNDP has launched a global storytelling contest, Voices2Paris, to contribute to raising public awareness on the negative impacts of climate change as well as on the opportunities and solutions seen in actions by individuals and governments alike across vulnerable developing countries worldwide. Read more here: http://www.europe.undp.org/content/geneva/en/home/partnerships_initiatives/climate-stories.html
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Friday 28th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>New Japanese weapons bill stirs nuclear anxiety in the Pacific
Pacific Media Centre – Asia Pacific Journalism’s Niklas Pedersen reports on a controversial new Japanese piece of legislation. Video: APJ Pacific Scoop: Report – By Niklas Pedersen A new bill due to be passed by Japan’s diet next month could counteract the longstanding Japanese opposition against nuclear weapons. Japan’s Defence Minister, Gen Nakatani, said that the bill would formally allow the military to transport nuclear weapons of foreign forces. This proposition goes against one of the three non-nuclear principles of Japan, which states that the country shall not possess, manufacture or let nuclear weapons be transported on their soil. “This is a pretty dramatic change. Allowing nuclear weapons into Japan reverses the policy of the last half century,” said Associate Professor in Politics and International Relations at Auckland University, Dr Stephen Hoadley. The bill passed the lower chamber of the Japanese diet last month despite public outcry and demands from the opposition to scrap it. For some countries the foreign policy development in Japan is more troubling than others. The Pacific Islands have had a tempestuous history with nuclear weapons and commentators say a new stance from Japan could make those feelings come rushing back. ‘Great concern’ “This is an issue of great concern to the [Pacific] region, given that so many nuclear tests were conducted in the Pacific,” said Asia-Pacific Director of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, Tim Wright. Associate Professor Steven Hoadley pointed out that especially the republic of Kiribati and the French Polynesian islands as two nations could fear a possibly more aggressive Japanese nuclear policy given their proximity to nuclear test zones. “They will be concerned that a renewal of any nuclear capability might result in future tests,” he said. There are still 15.000 nuclear weapons left in the world. 1800 of them are on high alert and are ready to be launched with few seconds notice. Asia-Pacific Journalism video report by Niklas Pedersen of AUT University and the Danish School of Media and Journalism. –]]>
A little bit of ‘Whim Wham’ for National Poetry Day
NewsroomPlus.com
Wellington-based online news agency NewsRoom_Plus has chipped into National Poetry Day by recording a reading of two satirical and whimsical newspaper verses from the days of ‘Whim Wham’.
“What better way to celebrate the joy of the written and spoken word – the real essence of poetry – than by recalling the marathon efforts of Allen Curnow to marry the poetic form with every day news events,” says NewsRoom_Plus journalist Stephen Olsen.
“Our team decided we would record two poems from a collection of his newspaper work edited by Auckland professor Terry Sturm in 2005 and put them up on Soundcloud at https://soundcloud.com/newsroom_monitor/newsroom-on-national-poetry
“As detailed in the foreword to that collection of 200 pieces – simply called Whim Wham’s New Zealand – Curnow’s astonishing output mounted up to more than 2000 verses spanning five decades. Apparently the first verse was written as a gently mocking account of an all-night sitting of Parliament, and was only intended as a space-filler when Curnow was working at the Christchurch Press. As noted by Professor Sturm, Curnow’s work under the pseudonym of Whim Wham went on to be a mix of ‘light’ pieces on commonplace topics and ‘serious’ poetic pieces designed to challenge readers.
Olsen said he was struck by how lively and topical the verse remains, and left the last word to Professor Sturm, who sadly passed away in 2009:
Terry Sturm – “The personnel might have changed, the spin merchants might go under different names and use different languages of deception … but the issues remain the same”.–]]>
Radio: New Zealand Report – Maori Party Accuses Govt of being Slum-Landlord + Complaint Against Witch-Doctor
New Zealand Report: Selwyn Manning joins FiveAA’s breakfast team Jane Reilly, Dave Penberthy and Mark Aiston to deliver New Zealand Report. This week: Maori Party Accuses Government of being Slum-Landlord + Complaint Against Witch-Doctor Ads – Recorded live on 28/08/15. Opening video image: Mouldy State Houses – Image courtesy of Lauren Baker Radio New Zealand.
ITEM ONE The co-leader of the Maori Party has delivered a stinging attack on the National-led Government, criticising it as a “slum landlord”. Marama Fox – whose political party actually props up the Government with a confidence and supply agreement – said Thursday that until the Government brings its state housing stock up to liveable standards it is “the biggest slumlords of this country”. A recent study of state houses found over 95 per cent of state owned homes would fail a warrant of fitness. The findings back up news of a surge in hospital admissions for respiratory illnesses that have driven even large hospitals, like Auckland City Hospital, to operate beyond capacity. A pattern has been in evidence where children and the elderly living in state houses have fallen ill due to damp, drafty, mouldy, and at times toxic living conditions. Last year the coroner found the death of an Auckland toddler, Emma-Lita Bourne, was “entirely possible” that the cold, damp, state house where her family lived had contributed to her death. And UNICEF’s Deborah Morris Travers – who was once our youngest ever government minister as Minister of Youth Affairs in the National-New Zealand First coalition between 1996-99 – said yesterday: “With outgoings for rental housing costs at a historic high, families up and down the country are struggling to provide even minimum shelter to their children.” She added: “Likewise, when housing is of such poor quality that it makes children sick, it breaches their right to the highest attainable standard of health.” Maori Party co-leader Marama Fox said: “The standard of rental housing in this country is appalling and our children are getting sick, and we cannot afford to let that happen.” However, the Prime Minister John Key said in Parliament on Wednesday that the Government had insulated 280,000 homes, 48,000 of which were state houses. He added that the Government had spent $30m providing heating and housing, and was spending $300m a year maintaining homes. The politics of this issue suggests the Government is attempting to avoid state houses becoming subject to a warrant of fitness. It appears committed to minimising maintenance costs prior to offloading thousands more state homes onto private ‘social housing’ providers. ITEM TWO A complaint has been laid with the Advertising Standards Authority after it was revealed “witch doctors” healers and astrologers had been charging fortune seekers thousands of dollars for promises of prosperity and a fabulous love-life! It may surprise few to know, nothing tangible resulted from the promises. A former Fijian newspaper publisher, Ranjit Singh, has laid a formal complaint with the Advertising Standards Authority over the ads placed in the Indian Newslink newspaper, the Fairfax-owned Manukau Courier, and on Apna TV. According to Mr Singh the adverts claimed to provide lifelong protection and even a solution to Lucky Lotto! Unfortunately it does sound too good to be true. New Zealand Report broadcasts live on FiveAA.com.au and webcasts on EveningReport.nz, LiveNews.co.nz and ForeignAffairs.co.nz. –]]>NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 27, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 8 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Thursday 27th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle includes the Children’s Commissioner releasing a report on the welfare of children in state care, the Financial Services Council (FSC) disputing the Treasury’s view that KiwiSaver is not helping boost retirement savings and the extension of Mt Eden prison investigations due to the high number of complaints from prisoners and their families.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Organ Donors Bill passes first reading; Minister welcomes State of Care report; Govt launches Green Paper to explore digital convergence; Views sought on 21st century content regulation;War on Weeds begins; Competing interests balanced in changes to anti-dumping laws; Good progress continuing under Housing Accord; Minister announces investigation; Traders benefiting from online registration; Next Ambassador to Argentina announced; Rheumatic fever rates drop 24 percent; Original waiata wins Supreme Award; Māori Technology Scholarship to change lives
Greens: Commissioner’s findings on CYFS require emergency response; SERCO review extension a clear signal for Final Warning; Landcorp’s ‘dairy at all costs’ strategy is not working; Greens To Prioritise Fixing Health And Safety Law; First new houses at Fenchurch opened; CYFS state must not be used to justify privatisation
Labour: Bleak report on the state of our children; Dodgy data used to justify axing KiwiSaver kickstart; Serco inquiry extended; Truck Shops ignore consumer laws; Taihoa at Ihumatao says Labour; Figures suggest National deliberately excluded farming
New Zealand First: Merchandise exports sharply down; Minister’s Rheumatic Fever Claims Undermined By Figures
United Future Party: Dunne Speaks- Sometimes the Silly Stuff Gets in the Way
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
EUTHANASIA INQUIRY: Public submissions are invited into the inquiry by Parliament’s Health select committee into “ending one’s life in New Zealand”. More details are available at: http://www.parliament.nz/en-nz/pb/sc/make-submission/0SCHE_SCF_51DBHOH_PET63268_1/petition-of-hon-maryan-street-and-8974-others
FIRST STATE OF CARE REPORT: Children’s Commissioner Dr Russell Wills today released his Office’s first public annual report on the service Child, Youth and Family provides to our most vulnerable children. The report is available on-line at http://www.occ.org.nz/state-of-care
FIRSTBORN WOMEN OBESE: The study led by New Zealand’s Liggins Institute, in collaboration with Swedish scientists, shows firstborn women are more likely to be overweight or obese than their second-born sisters. The report is available here: http://press.psprings.co.uk/jech/august/jech205368.pdf
GREEN PAPER TO EXPLORE DIGITAL CONVERGENCE: Communications and Broadcasting Minister Amy Adams today launched a Green Paper and work programme outlining the Government’s response to the challenges and opportunities of a converged world. More information on the Green Paper and associated work programme can be found at :
http://convergencediscussion.nz/
HOUSING PROGRESS: Eleven new Special Housing Areas (SHAs) that will provide up to 1600 new homes across Auckland were announced today by Building and Housing Minister Dr Nick Smith and Mayor Len Brown. Further information on the Auckland Housing Accord is available from:www.aucklandcouncil.govt.nz/EN/ratesbuildingproperty/housingsupply/Pages/aucklandhousingaccord.aspx andhttp://www.hnzc.co.nz/housing-development/developments-overview/auckland/northern-glen-innes-redevelopment-1
REPORT ON MOBILE TRADER INDUSTRY: The Commerce Commission has today released a report detailing the findings of its year-long project looking at mobile traders, commonly known as truck shops. The full report on mobile traders can be found on the Commission website: http://www.comcom.govt.nz/the-commission/consumer-reports/mobile-trader-201415-project/
TAIC RECOMMENDATIONS: The Transport Accident Investigation Commission has this morning published a report setting out urgent recommendations to address three safety issues for pedestrians using level crossings within the Auckland and Wellington metropolitan rail networks. The report is available at:http://www.taic.org.nz/LinkClick.aspx?fileticket=ixbzWWtOa54%3d&tabid=36&mid=613&language=en-US
WAR ON WEEDS: “It’s time to declare War on Weeds”, says Conservation Minister Maggie Barry as she encouraged New Zealanders to roll up their sleeves and join forces to fight against invasive weeds in a new campaign launched today. More information on the campaign can be found at: http://www.doc.govt.nz/our-work/war-on-weeds/ andhttp://www.beehive.govt.nz/sites/all/files/War-on-Weeds.pdf
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Thursday 27th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>Across The Ditch: Petrol Prices Cheaper But Not Cheap Enough + RWC Law Will See Bars Open 24/7
Selwyn Manning and Peter Godfrey deliver Across The Ditch. This week: Petrol prices are cheaper in New Zealand but not cheap enough when compared to petrol pump prices in Australia + Rugby World Cup Law passes in the NZ Parliament making it possible for bars to remain open 24/7 which the World Cup is played in the UK – Recorded live on 27/08/15.
ITEM ONE Petrol prices in New Zealand are dropping after global oil commodity prices sank this week. Prices in Auckland fell below NZD$1.90 per litre of 91 unleaded petrol. As a comparison, the NZ Dollar is currently tracking the Aussie Dollar at around NZ$1 to Australia $0.91. Or to look at it from the other side of the equation for every Australian dollar you get around $1.098 NZ dollars. The Automobile Association has predicted the slump in global oil prices per barrel will cause prices at the petrol pump down below 1.80 per litre of 91 unleaded petrol. Already this week, it appeared a competitive war among outlets was in evidence. GULL service station outlets in Auckland led the market down to $1.86 per litre. Fairfax reported Thursday that three Z service stations were offering 91 octane for $1.829. Those stations were located on the North Shore of Auckland and one outlet in South Auckland. Most outlets played the market conservatively with prices between $1.91 to $1.99. ITEM TWO As you have probably realised over the past few weeks, Rugby is a religion in New Zealand. So much so, the politicians have forced legislation through Parliament so that pubs and bars can stay open all night during the Rugby World Cup tournament. The World Cup tournament will be contested in England and kicks off on September 18. The new law is designed to ensure Rugby fans and punters will be able to drink and watch the Rugby World Cup games, irrespective of what time the games will be screened. The New Zealand Herald’s political editor Audrey Young reports there will be some restrictions however…• There must be no outdoor speakers; no discarding of empty bottles and no use of outdoor courtyard areas. • The police have to be given seven days’ notice. • Premises which have had their licenses varied or suspended in the previous 12 months will not be able to extend their hours to show Rugby World Cup games.
Excluding those three points, the pubs and bars throughout the land will be the winner on the day. That outcome caused Green Party MP Kevin Hague some discomfort, especially as Parliament in his view was forcing a liberal booze law on local councils. He argued that councils not parliament ought to decide whether bars and pubs could stay open. The Greens also were against pubs and bars being able to remain open when they were located near schools and kindergartens. At the end of the day, it looks like politicians have found a remedy for hangovers, at least in delaying the inevitable.Across The Ditch broadcasts live on FiveAA.com.au and webcasts on EveningReport.nz, LiveNews.co.nz and ForeignAffairs.co.nz.
]]>In the horse’s mouth: Windows 10
Concerns for my Microsoft dependence My name is Carolyn, and I’m a long time Windows OS (Operating System) user. Recently I began to see how it might be impacting negatively on my, and maybe all our lives. I upgraded to Windows 10, used it for a couple of weeks, then began to have second thoughts. I reverted back to Windows 7 as offered in the first month after the upgrade. All seems well on the most visible surface of the new OS, but it is the less visible operations that require more investigation. My biggest concerns are with the ways Windows 10 may violate users’ privacy, and/or delivers users up to Microsoft’s other money-making services, and to other marketers. In this Microsoft seem to be taking a step beyond such incursions by others into social media, especially on Facebook, and delivering them to the most private spaces where we live. My worries are that, not being a tech-head, and having gone along with the ongoing developments of operating systems, I now have very little control over what Microsoft is doing with the systems I use for my most personal data. It is also a major step along the way to the commercialisation of computing and the internet, once seen as a revolutionary open source system that would promote grassroots, citizen democracy: a free, sharing, gift economy. Windows 10, as a (possibly desperate) move by Microsoft to protect and expand its market monopoly/dominance, in the face of increasing competition. It just seems to be a step too far for me. Windows 10: the pros and cons Generally Windows 10 has been getting good reviews as regards its usability, and the capabilities it offers. A few reviewers recommend that Windows 7 users stay with it. However, many also say 10 is a better option than Windows 8, which is considered to have been a pretty mediocre system: it took on a lot of features of touch screen mobile devices, but when used for a device focused on the keyboard and mouse, it seems a bit chaotic and confusing. For instance Woody Leonhard at infoworld says:
Windows 10 is what Windows 8 should have been, but it has too many rough edges to attract Windows 7 users. Continuous upgrades could change that as early as this fall.He does not seem to have concerns about Windows 10 and privacy issues, praising the security features, which
… proudly offers a bundle of new features, including improved security, a new browser, and the voice-activated intelligent assistant Cortana. You might even call Windows 10 the most revolutionary version of Windows ever, mainly because it will be continually upgraded as part of Microsoft’s “Windows as a service” effort.In the gift horse’s mouth: enticement to revenue-generating capabilities “Windows as a service” makes the OS free to non-business users, in order to shift the costs to businesses (they will have to pay for it), and to accessing add-on services such as games and apps. Search capabilities also aim to encourage the generation of revenue. Gregg Keiser explains:
Microsoft’s strategy is to go low on consumer Windows licenses, hoping that that will boost device sales, which will in turn add to the pool of potential customers for advertising, services and apps. In other words, what Microsoft gives up in selling each Windows license it figures to make up in volume elsewhere.Leonhard is glowing about most of the new features in Windows 10, although he also does point out some flaws. His claim for increased security does seem to relate to a built in anti-virus and to security breaches by those outside of Microsoft’s sphere of influence:
This includes “… multifactor security techniques tied to accounts where you simply log in once and do nearly anything.It also aims to make private data secure when using public networks, and more. Windows 10 and privacy Online there are arguments for and against Microsoft on privacy. The pro-Microsoft arguments tend to say that there are similar features in earlier Windows OS’s, and that the 10 version is just a continuation of that. They also argue for such features being necessary, and against them being a bad invasion of privacy. WheezyJoe outlines some of the privacy concerns, with a link to an article on Verge article on the privacy policy for Windows 10. WheezyJoe argues that Verge’s piece takes a “Microsoft-friendly” approach. There is also a link to the Windows’ privacy policy: Alex Hern writes in the Guardian, on 1 August:
Hundreds of commenters on sites such as Hacker News and Reddit have criticised default settings that send personal information to Microsoft, use bandwidth to upload data to other computers running the operating system, share Wi-Fi passwords with online friends and remove the ability to opt out of security updates.Windows 10 includes embedded personalised adverts, gives the user a unique advertising ID, which is linked to the users’ email address. The latter is linked to other services.
Using that information, Microsoft is able to personalise ads to the user, during both web surfing and, for newer apps downloaded from the Windows Store, app usage.For instance, Windows 10 turns Microsoft’s previously in-built Solitaire card game into an app that has unskippable ads. Some articles provide advice on how to switch of the 12 or 13 features that could enable privacy breaches: However, others claim the OS will continue to send data to Microsoft even after the data-sharing features have been turned off. Beyond privacy to loss of control, & spying potential This leads to suggestions of Windows 10 (possibly inadvertently) enabling spying on users – invoking the likes of the NSA/5 Eyes keystroke digital spying capabilities. Since I have reverted back to Windows 7, every time I logon, I get a pup op message saying Microsoft recommends that I upgrade to Windows 10, or that my Windows 10 Upgrade is waiting for me. Such a desperate hard sell just makes me feel resistant. Leonhard also points out that people like me, who have had second thoughts about Windows 10, will be locked from further upgrades for Windows 7 – he gives a step by step guide as to how to disable the lock. It puts me in mind of Doctor Who’s Cybermen and their refrain, ‘You must be upgraded” – to the free system, promising a higher level of humanity; but where people will become an integral part of the machine, and lose their humanity and freewill. The alternative to being upgraded, is being deleted [see Merovee on WordPress, site of the feature image]. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQs3gVobcfg In the next part I will look at some of the alternatives to Microsoft. Also: Check out this thought provoking article: 8 Ways Technology Is Improving Your Health.]]>
NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 26, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 8 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Wednesday 26th August.
This is the first birthday for NewsRoom_Digest (or ‘ND’ as it’s known to the NewsRoom team) since it first commenced appearing on 26 August 2014. Happy Birthday ND!
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle include Air New Zealand making a record profit of $327 million in the year ending June, Finance Minister Bill English says the risk of recession in New Zealand is greater if China has a hard landing, and the 2015-2020 National Drug Policy has been launched at Parliament today.
Featured content on our news-log today includes an interview with Anton Oliver about a new exhibition that opened at the weekend to commemorate a set of rugby-related personal stories from the First World War, and a contribution from the UNDP Pacific Centre about their Continuing Market Business Education (CMBE) programme in Fiji. See:http://newsroomplus.com/the-journal/
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Law Society gets it wrong; Better information for Judges making family violence bail decisions; Consultation on steps to ozone recovery and asbestos ban; NZ aid to assist Timorese coffee and cocoa farmers;Free weather forecasts for recreational pilots; Release of 2015-2020 National Drug Policy; Review aims to optimise palliative care services
ACT Party: Nanny state retreats;..
Greens: Green Party Bill Will Bring NZ Rental Laws Into The 21st Century; Greens to vote down bad World Cup booze law;Gambling Commission Reappointments; Social Sector Trial helping Dunedin youth into work
Labour: Takahe massacre supposed to get all New Zealanders involved in conservation; Waiver cost still a mystery; Housing New Zealand dividends could save children’s lives; China exports fall 27 per cent in a year; National should support all families for 26 weeks; National’s health and safety shambles puts school camps at risk; National’s asset stripping agenda hits schools; Democracy still the loser in Canterbury; Unsecure website risks Ashley MoBIEson hack
Māori Party:Māori Party Congratulates Hon Dr Sir Pita Sharples
New Zealand First: English caught out over official information act responses; First home buyers in the Hutt taking advantage of HomeStart; The facts on immigration and parent reunion for the uninformed; Evidence Doesn’t Back Up Cut To Limited Service Volunteers
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
2015-2020 NATIONAL DRUG POLICY: The 2015-2020 National Drug Policy has been launched at Parliament today by Associate Health Minister Peter Dunne. The Policy sets the Government’s approach to minimise harm from alcohol and other drugs for the next five years. The policy is can be viewed at : http://www.health.govt.nz/our-work/mental-health-and-addictions/drug-policy/national-drug-policy
DEMENTIA: A global study predicts the number of people with dementia will nearly triple by 2050, with the numbers in New Zealand to increase to more than 150,000 in the next 35 years. Go here for the World Alzheimer Report 2015:http://www.alz.co.uk/research/world-report
DONOR COMPENSATION: Improving compensation for live organ donors is a rare opportunity to save both lives and healthcare dollars, according to a report released yesterday by The New Zealand Initiative. Read the report here:http://nzinitiative.org.nz/site/nzinitiative/files/Organ%20Donors%20Final.pdf
FRUIT AND MEAT EXPORTS RISE: The value of total goods exported was $4.2 billion in July 2015, up $514 million (14 percent) compared with July 2014, Statistics New Zealand said today with fruit and meat leading the rise. More information is available at :http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/industry_sectors/imports_and_exports/OverseasMerchandiseTrade_HOTPJul15.aspx
KIWIS MORE FRUGAL IN WAKE OF GFC: A newly released University of Otago study of consumer lifestyles suggests many Kiwis have become thriftier and more closely aligned with traditional values in the wake of the global financial crisis (GFC). A PDF of the report is available here: http://www.otago.ac.nz/marketing/otago121778..pdf
MILLENNIUM DEVELOPMENT GOALS (MDGS): The head of the United Nations Development Programme, former NZ Prime Minister Helen Clark, says Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) to halve extreme poverty have been met, overwhelmingly because of changes in China. Read more here: http://www.unmillenniumproject.org/goals/
RBNZ CONSULTS ON OUTSOURCING: The Reserve Bank has today released a consultation paper with proposals for an updated outsourcing policy for banks. The consultation will run for 10 weeks and closes on 4 November 2015. See the consultation document here:http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/regulation_and_supervision/banks/consultations/consultation-review-outsourcing-policy-registered-banks.pdf
REGIONAL TOURISM INDICATORS: Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment released the Regional Tourism Indicators (RTI) for July 2015. Click here for more: http://www.mbie.govt.nz/info-services/sectors-industries/tourism/tourism-research-data/regional-tourism-indicators
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Wednesday 26th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>Keith Rankin’s Chart for this Week: Labour Productivity in New Zealand 1988-2014
Analysis by Keith Rankin.
[caption id="attachment_6703" align="aligncenter" width="987"]
Productivity: It depends on the denominator.[/caption]
When economists talk on the media, we often hear the word ‘productivity’. Interviewers’ eyes glaze over. To many, ‘productivity talk’ is code for blaming the workers for whatever economic ailments we might have, and for employers wanting to reduce labour costs more so they can make more gizmos for anybody but their own workers.
The ‘productivity’ concept is important, however, because it really is an indicator of economic success. It’s a ratio. Business commentators focus on the numerator; the outputs over the inputs. And most economic policymakers think we should achieve high productivity growth by having strong input growth and even stronger output growth. That’s not very intelligent thinking, at least for advanced economies.
In advanced (ie already high-productivity) economies, gains in living standards and sustainability come from reducing the denominator. Thus productivity increases through continuing to produce at present levels, while reducing inputs; especially reducing labour inputs. In advanced economies, such as New Zealand, continued increase in living standards arise from less labour, not more gizmos. Labour is a cost (input), not an output.
The chart here shows labour productivity rising more slowly after the mid-2000s.
I show two measures of productivity. One (top) is a measure of output per actual employed person (with part-time workers counting as half). The second measure is of output per person who is or would like to be employed. People who would like to be employed part-time are counted as half, and I have taken all people aged over 15 classed as neither employed nor retired nor students nor caregivers as counting as ‘half’ within the denominator. Thus the lower line is a more correct measure of productivity; of output per willing worker.
The difference between the two lines is a result of joblessness, which is a broader concept than narrowly-defined ‘unemployment’.
The ideal future has three components: increasing productivity, convergence of the two lines (the elimination of joblessness), and reductions in employment. On the latter matter, the ideal target could be that everyone who wants to be part of the workforce has 20-25 hours per week employment. The target then, to achieve future labour productivity gains, is to eliminate most full-time employment (as well as eliminating joblessness), while maintaining output and income at present aggregate levels.
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]]>Developing her market business with smile and learning
NewsroomPlus.com – Contributed by UNDP Pacific Centre Under a blue tarpaulin shade put up at the temporary market space next to the bus terminal in Lautoka, stalls selling vegetables, fruits, root crops, market vendors were slowly starting another busy day. Among them, Lidia Vilaiwaqa was putting bags of yagona on the table preparing to open her stall.
Hot Topic: The Age Of Resilience starts tonight
Hot-Topic.co.nz A quick heads up that the Royal Society of New Zealand’s panel discussion series on the theme of The Age Of Resilience starts tonight at the Auckland Museum at 6pm. French and NZ experts will consider the “economic conundrum” of transitioning to a low-carbon economy and at the same time deliver a “high and sustainable level of human well-being”. On the panel are Pierre Ducret (see the NZ Herald today), Dr Suzi Kerr, Professor Catherine Larrère and Fraser Whinerary. Kim Hill will be in the chair, and the evening is being recorded by Radio New Zealand for broadcast next month. More details at the RSNZ web site, and you can download a flyer here. Two further sessions are being held in Wellington and Christchurch: in Wellington tomorrow night on Climate in-justice? and Christchurch next Tuesday on The Anthropocene Challenge. Details and flyers from the RSNZ here. An interesting series — and if you can’t make the live recordings, all three will be on Radio NZ National in September and October as part of the Talking Heads strand.
]]>PERRIAM impresses at New Zealand Fashion Week 2015
Source: Info ScopeMedia.co.nz.
[caption id="attachment_6736" align="alignleft" width="187"]
Model wears the PERRIAM Woman 16 Lindis Cable Polo Jersey, the Roaming Jacket (with merino leather sleeve inserts) and the Classic Snow white pant_photo by Neil Gussey.[/caption]
Luxury merino fashion brand PERRIAM has impressed national and international media during its debut at New Zealand Fashion Week (NZFW) in Auckland yesterday.
PERRIAM Woman Winter 16 was unveiled on the catwalk as part of NZFW’s Choose Wool show, held at the ANZ Viaduct Events Centre in front of a capacity audience.
Curated by top Kiwi stylist Anna Caselberg, Choose Wool showcased some of New Zealand’s leading designers. PERRIAM featured alongside Sabatini, twenty-seven names, Tanya Carlson, Hailwood, Liz Mitchell, French83 and Wynn Hamlyn.
Titled “Untamed”, PERRIAM Woman Winter 16 is a collection of elegant, effortless wardrobe essentials with a contemporary, sport-luxe vibe. Inspired by the rugged beauty and natural environment of Central Otago, the collection features New Zealand merino wool with touches of rabbit fur, merino leather and other textiles.
Untamed teams luxurious cable knitwear with flattering silhouettes for a modern, relaxed style and features splashes of animal print and flashes of signature gold trims. Blacks, soft taupes and grey marl feature in the colour palette.
Wanaka-based designer Christina Perriam drew on her high country merino farming background for the PERRIAM Woman Winter 16 range. Christina hails from Bendigo Station, near Tarras, and is firmly entrenched in the wool industry through her upbringing and 15 years as a designer working with merino wool.
“To be selected for Choose Wool at NZFW has been an absolute honour, as PERRIAM truly represents what the show is celebrating – wool in NZ fashion. The NZ wool industry is repsected internationally and fashion plays an important role within the industry. PERRIAM garments are designed to last with timeless elegance and style and we’re proudly NZ-made, using NZ-produced merino,” she says.
[caption id="attachment_6737" align="alignleft" width="204"]
Model wears PERRIAM Woman 16 Dunstan Polo Dress and the Avalanche Pant_photo by Neil Gussey.[/caption]
The Choose Wool show was supported by an elaborate host of influential international media and fashion delegates, including ASOS, Marie Claire, global fashion and entertainment channel Fashion One, Glamour magazine and Vogue UK.
About PERRIAM:
PERRIAM is a New Zealand-made merino clothing brand that embodies the comforting luxury inherent in the spirit of the high country. The heart of PERRIAM is Christina’s family and their farm, Bendigo Station in Central Otago – a place of rich history, pioneering spirit, enduring natural beauty and the home of the famous Shrek the Sheep. PERRIAM is about slow fashion, not fast fashion, but it is fashion-forward. PERRIAM celebrates the beauty amongst the busy-ness of life. A relatively new brand, PERRIAM Woman was launched in October 2014, along with a flagship retail store in Tarras and online store www.perriam.co.nz. PERRIAM Woman Winter 16 will be wholesaled throughout New Zealand for the first time. Little PERRIAM, the brand’s babies and children’s label, was launched in February 2015. Designer Christina Perriam also has her eyes on a growth plan that includes PERRIAM retail stores and intends on eventually launching PERRIAM Man, PERRIAM Sleep and PERRIAM Home.
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]]>Substituting Balls and Boots for Bullets
NewsroomPlus.com – Contributed by Rupeni Vatubuli, NewsRoom_Plus The just-opened Balls, Bullets and Boots exhibition in Palmerston North is all about telling the stories of fifteen individuals with rugby connections who served in the First World War. For that you need someone in the role of a story teller. Preferably, if possible, an All Black – but who?
Pictured above at the exhibition opening at Palmerston North’s Te Manawa cultural centre are Manawatu Mayor Margaret Kouvelis, Palmerston North Mayor Grant Smith and that doyen of sports historians and commentators Keith Quinn.
Links:
- Go to www.ww1rugby.nz for more information on the exhibition, where you get to ‘meet’ a woman coach, three pre-war All Blacks and three post-war All Blacks, a schoolboy rugby player-cum-soldier and a rugby-mad military defaulter, rugby players who served in the Royal Navy, Royal Air Force and NZ Tunnelling Company, three NZ Maori players and a highly decorated VC winner who had a stellar pre-war provincial rugby career. .
- Like the Rugby Museum Facebook page here: NewZealandRugbyMuseum
David Robie on Rainbows, warriors and ship naming
Analysis by David Robie. This article was first published on Café Pacific WHEN the 30th anniversary edition of my book Eyes of Fire (Little Island Press) was published on the day last month marking the bombing of the original Rainbow Warrior on 10 July 1985, Susi Newborn questioned my account of the naming of the Greenpeace environmental flagship. She was involved in the buying of the Aberdeen-built fishing trawler Sir William Hardy that was then renamed as the Rainbow Warrior. In the interests of historical accuracy, I have thus double-checked my sources for the book, including interviewing some of those involved at the time. I am quite satisfied there was no major inaccuracy in that section of my book comprising two paragraphs. There was only a minor one which I am revising in future copies thanks to modern printing-on-demand technology. The decision to rename the rusty old ship Greenpeace UK had just bought was a collective one, taken in October or November 1977 at a small meeting on board the vessel in West India Dock, London, following a proposal made in writing a few weeks before by Rémi Parmentier to dub her Warrior of the Rainbow. Those present at that meeting were Denise Bell, Charles Hutchinson, David McTaggart, Susi Newborn, Rémi Parmentier and Allan Thornton. Parmentier had first heard of the Rainbow Warrior Native American legend from a fellow called Georges Devez who had worked with him for some time in 1977-78. The hand-written note, sent by mail from Paris by Parmentier to Greenpeace UK was stuck on a wall in the Greenpeace London office for some time. Bob Hunter’s 1979 book on the seminal years of Greenpeace, Warriors of the Rainbow, was published two years later, but Parmentier says that it is quite possible that his colleague Devez could have heard of the Rainbow Warrior legend indirectly through Hunter. Bob Hunter’s book inspired me to write Eyes of Fire about the humanitarian mission to relocate the Rongelap people, suffering from the legacy of US nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands. There are many variations of the Rainbow prophecy, not just the Navajo-Hopi version. Among other tribes to have interpretations of the prophecy were the Cree (one of the largest groups of First Nation Native Americans) in Canada, Cherokee, Sioux, Salesh and Zuni. My inspiration for the Eyes of Fire book title was a Cree version of the legend, as represented in the title page preamble. –]]>
Harmeet Sooden: Iraqi Civilians Caught Between Scylla and Charybdis
Harmeet Sooden has recently returned from Iraqi Kurdistan, where he was working on a human rights project assessing communal tensions in a camp for internally displaced persons. In 2005, Harmeet was kidnapped in Iraq while working for an international human rights organisation, and held hostage for nearly four months. He argues the protection of civilians should be the cornerstone of New Zealand policy in Iraq.
Harmeet Sooden (second from left) interviews a displaced Iraqi family in Arbat IDP Camp, Iraqi Kurdistan on May 21, 2015. Up to 85 per cent of the camp’s 17,300 residents were displaced from their homes when Iraqi forces re-captured parts of Salah ad-Din governorate from ISIS. Image: Christian Peacemaker Teams.[/caption]
UN agencies warn that Iraq is “on the brink of humanitarian disaster” due to the escalating conflict between the US-led coalition and opposition forces, and the severe shortfall in international funding. At least 3.1 million Iraqis have been internally displaced since January 2014, and a further million could be displaced in the coming months. A total of 8.2 million people now require immediate humanitarian support.
The situation has deteriorated to the point where “[a]uthorities in Iraqi Kurdistan suspect that displaced people are selling their kidneys to feed their families.” At the same time, it is becoming increasingly dangerous for humanitarian workers to carry out their work.
The UN has concluded that civilians are the primary targets of the conflict in Iraq.
New Zealand’s main contribution to the coalition is through Task Group Taji, a New Zealand-Australian training mission co-located with US training teams at the Taji Military Complex (Camp Taji) site. The task group is a small but not insignificant component of the multiple-site ‘Building Partner Capacity’ (BPC) programme led by the US. The primary mission of the BPC programme at Camp Taji is to train the Iraqi army’s 15th and 16th Divisions. Both divisions were formed to replace the US-trained units that collapsed in 2014 when ISIS seized the Mosul region. They are composed of new recruits as well as soldiers who fled during last year’s assault. Since May 2015, Task Group Taji has trained Iraqi troops from the 76th Brigade, a formation within the 16th Division, and the 71st, 22nd and 23rd Brigades.
In April 2015, the Wall Street Journal interviewed several Iraqi soldiers being trained at Camp Taji, who openly said “they actively served on their days off with Shiite militia – some…still listed by the U.S. as terrorist groups”, some also sponsored by Iran. The UN has reported that the popular mobilisation forces (PMF) and other pro-government militias “seem to operate with total impunity, leaving a trail of death and destruction in their wake” that often rivals the depredations of ISIS. The Iraqi security forces, and to a lesser extent the peshmerga, collaborate with the PMF.
UNICEF has confirmed reports of children being recruited by militias from all sides, including those supported by the Iraqi government. The PMF is reportedly providing combat training to children in summer camps established throughout the country. Militias fighting alongside Iraqi and Kurdish forces are using armed boys and girls on the frontline – some as young as 10. Enlisting children under the age of 15 or using them to engage in hostilities is a war crime.
In addition to jointly operating Task Group Taji with New Zealand, Australia is running a Special Operations Task Group. This Australian task group is rendering military advice and assistance to the Iraqi Counter-Terrorism Service (CTS), a CIA-supported “elite Iraqi security force accused of killing prisoners and other human rights violations,” which include “torturing detainees with impunity” at a secret detention facility in Baghdad, and “unnecessary civilian casualties”. Iraqi Special Operations Forces (ISOF) – sometimes referred to in local circles as the ‘dirty brigades’ – provide CTS’s primary combat capability. ISOF units are under investigation by the Iraqi government for committing ISIS-like atrocities against non-combatants.
Iraqi soldiers trained by the NZDF at Camp Taji have now been deployed to the frontline to join the coalition’s Ramadi offensive. The military campaign to re-capture Ramadi involves elements of the Iraqi security forces that are spearheaded by the CTS and supported by coalition air power, including Australia’s Air Task Group, and pro-government militias, notably the PMF.
[caption id="attachment_6691" align="aligncenter" width="640"]
An officer with the New Zealand defense force gives a brief during a build partner capacity conference at Camp Taji, Iraq, July 22, 2015. The conference brought together coalition leaders to assess the Iraqi security forces training programs at BPC sites across the country. It allowed them to discuss topics like length of instruction, capturing lessons learned and leadership development as they apply to the Iraqi security forces trained at the sites. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Charles M. Bailey/Released)[/caption]
The NZDF training, even if it includes courses in “ethical behavior in war”, cannot address the root causes of the coalition’s human rights violations: for instance, the structural corruption and sectarianism introduced into Iraq’s military and state institutions after the 2003 US-led invasion. The NZDF cannot eliminate the risk of the training offering the Iraqi army greater means to worsen the human rights situation.
NZDF personnel are also deployed in unidentified roles in Baghdad and other undisclosed locations. The military role New Zealand’s intelligence services are playing in the conflict is secret. The full extent of New Zealand’s activities in Iraq is therefore not subject to public scrutiny.
Sectarian abuses that prevailed under the government of Iraqi Prime Minister al-Maliki continue unabated under his successor, Haider al-Abadi. Yet, the New Zealand Government insists on backing a regime that is showing little regard for civilians. When coalition forces were poised to re-conquer Tikrit in March 2015, Prime Minister al-Abadi said in a speech to the Iraqi parliament: “There is no neutrality in the battle against ISIS. If someone is being neutral with ISIS, then he is one of them.” His words epitomise the dilemma civilians face in areas where ISIS is active.
Far from being the “responsible international citizen” it professes to be, New Zealand is participating in a military enterprise that is exacerbating the humanitarian crisis in Iraq. There is a straightforward way New Zealand can begin to protect the people of Iraq: namely, by withdrawing its support for the human rights violators in the coalition, and acknowledging that worthwhile alternatives exist. New Zealand policymakers can get away with reckless policies so long as New Zealanders keep silent and tolerate them.
–]]>
NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 25, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 5 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Tuesday 25th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle include the Government giving an assurance that employees who don’t want to work on Easter Sunday will be able to refuse without giving a reason, KiwRail floating the idea that it could put Wellington Railway station up for sale as part of its wider programme of property sales and Social Development Minister Anne Tolley apologising to any child who was abused in state care.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Easter Sunday shop trading law to change; ED wait times target achieved again;Proposed merger of two Bay of Plenty polytechnics opens for public consultation; Unlisted platform granted exemption from FMCA licencing requirements; Partnerships push New Zealand’s profile abroad; Air NZ & Cathay Pacific alliance reauthorised.
Greens: Greens To Call For Personal Vote On Government’s Easter Trading U-Turn; Stock market crashes demand new thinking from Govt
Labour: Not too late to fix Health and Safety for New Zealand’s workers
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
BAY OF PLENTY POLYTECHNICS: Public consultation on the proposed merger of Bay of Plenty Polytechnic (BoPP) and the Waiariki Institute of Technology has been opened today. The online consultation can be found here:http://www.tec.govt.nz/Tertiary-Sector/Reviews-and-consultation/Public-consultation-on-the-proposed-merger-of-Bay-of-Plenty-Polytechnic-and-Waiariki-Institute-of-Technology/
EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT WAIT TIME: The latest quarterly health target results show the ED target has been met for the second consecutive quarter. The quarter four (April-June 2015) results can be found at:http://www.health.govt.nz/new-zealand-health-system/health-targets/how-my-dhb-performing/how-my-dhb-performing-2014-15
EMISSION CREDITS: Figures just released show that companies got about $30 million of emission credits from the Crown last year. Read the annual Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) report here: http://www.epa.govt.nz/e-m-t/reports/ets_reports/annual/Pages/default.aspx
E-WASTE REPORT:Report sparks new fears over increasing amounts of toxic e-waste in nz landfills. For more information and to download the latest MfE e-waste report, visit: http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/waste/e-waste-product-stewardship-framework-new-zealand
ORGANOPHOSPHATES AND CARBAMATES (OPCS): The Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) welcomes submissions on its reassessment of some organophosphates and carbamates (OPCs). View application details and information at: http://www.epa.govt.nz/search-databases/Pages/applications-details.aspx?appID=APP202098
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Tuesday 25th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>Bryce Edwards’ Political roundup: Is the media biased?
Political Roundup by Dr Bryce Edwards.
[caption id="attachment_4808" align="alignleft" width="150"]
Dr Bryce Edwards.[/caption]
Hating Mike Hosking became even more popular last week, with Winston Peters lashing out in a strongly worded column condemning the broadcaster and calling him a National Government “stooge”. So is our media politically biased? And, if so, how?
Too rightwing, too leftwing, too white, too male, too politically correct. These are some common complaints about the biases of the New Zealand media. So bias is often in the eye of the beholder, which means we can all see problems with how the media reports on politics and the world. It’s impossible to come to a consensus on the ills of the media and how to deal with bias, but it’s a discussion worth having nonetheless.
In the weekend, Radio New Zealand’s Colin Peacock put together a useful overview of some of these recent debates in his article, Are media bias claims anything new? You can also listen to his 12-minute Mediawatch examination of the recent Mike Hosking saga: Claims and counter-claims of bias, cheek-by-jowl.
Is Mike Hosking a “National Government stooge”?
Last week’s Hosking-hating was led by Winston Peters in his must-read column in the Herald: Mike Hosking’s Pollyanna world lets us all down. The strong words and condemnations were then amplified in opposition media platforms – see Rosanna Price and Jo Moir’s Had enough of Mike Hosking?
Satirists had a field day with the topic. The best was Steve Braunias’ Secret diary of Winston vs Hosking. And Jeremy Wells pushed the envelope even further with his weekly one minute parody ‘Like Mike’ Hosking Rant: Winston Peters Vs The Prime Ministers Cheeks & Me. See also, the Hosking parody column by Perfect Mike Hosking (@MikePerfectHosk): ‘The morons are those who fail to learn the life lessons that sport provides’.
Both Braunias and Wells also took on the previous week’s media bias debate instigated by Rachel Smalley – see Braunias’ The secret diary of Smalleygate and Jeremy Wells’ Rich White Straight Male Broadcasters.
And the band Climate Change also got a lift from the Hosking debate, with their song “Hosking As a Verb” getting wider play.
In defence of Mike Hosking
The Prime Minister jumped into the debate, joining others on the political right rubbishing the accusations about the broadcaster and, in doing so, possibly had the opposite effect to what he intended – see Jo Moir’s John Key dismisses opposition leaders accusing Mike Hosking of ‘political bias’.
Hosking himself then fought back on his Newstalk ZB breakfast show – you can listen to his 2-minute response: Whose Stooge Are You?, or see the Herald article Mike Hosking hits back: Winston Peters is ‘grumpy and bored’.
A more surprising defence of the broadcaster came from veteran broadcaster and Labour-friendly Brian Edwards, who argued that Hosking is just an old-fashioned conservative who probably does his best to be objective – see: Mike Hosking: You pays your money and…. But it’s also worth reading one of Edwards’ earlier blog posts, Sufferin Succotash – Mike Hosking is really, really huge!, in which he takes apart some of the promotional advertising for Hosking.
Free press under attack?
Do politicians attacking Mike Hosking constitute an attack on the freedom of the press? Press Gallery journalist Andrea Vance (@avancenz) responded to Peters’ initial column, saying, “Not sure I’m cool with politicians – of whatever shade – delivering personal attacks on journalists”.
Similarly the Herald’s Paul Thomas has said that he sides with Hosking in this fight because Peters is “no champion of journalistic freedom” and “A cornerstone of freedom of the press is that politicians don’t tell journalists how to do their jobs” – see: Focus on media personalities not healthy.
Thomas also goes on to discuss the issue of media bias and ponders whether a narrow Auckland media elite is taking over the conversation: “We’re in danger of being force-fed the “unique perspectives” of the likes of Hosking, Duncan Garner, Heather du Plessis-Allan and Smalley herself…. Is the ubiquitousness of this tiny and incestuous metropolitan media elite a healthy thing? Probably not, especially if they can’t or won’t bear in mind that, for two-thirds of the population, Auckland is not the New Zealand in which they live”.
National Party blogger David Farrar has also taken aim at the opposition politicians complaining about Hosking, saying that Peters’ criticisms are “a Muldoon like attack on the media”. Farrar argues it’s an unhealthy trend towards media censorship: “the opposition parties effectively demand that Mike Hosking be taken off the air, because – well he doesn’t always agree with them. So think about this. What Labour and Greens are saying is that they only want media that agree with them” – see: Opposition parties only wants media that agrees with them.
Similarly, blogger Pete George says that “Politicians attacking prominent people in media” is “bad for speech and democracy” – see: Sustained attack on the media.
Blogosphere debate
There have been plenty of other interesting contributions to the Hosking debate amongst bloggers. Chris Trotter says that the problem isn’t Mike Hosking the individual, but society at large, which the broadcaster is simply holding a mirror up to – see: Heart of Gold: Why Mike Hosking is a more popular broadcaster than John Campbell.
We shouldn’t expect those in the media to be without bias, argues Leigh Fletcher in her blog post, In the News Today: Mike Hosking and News Media. She says “What perhaps could be Hosking’s failing in this, is that he has entirely denied any form of political bias. It would be perfectly fine for Hosking to be openly aligned with the right-wing, provided that he stated this was the case. Many other countries have liberal and conservative news mediums: this does not necessarily destroy their credibility. In fact, the admittance of media personalities, especially those involved in topical, political issues, to bias in some cases makes them more useful”.
Similarly, on The Ruminator blog it’s argued that it would be a mistake to get rid of the likes of Hosking when the obvious answer is to find additional opinionated voices – see: Be Like Mike.
But according to Steven Cowan, “Mike Hosking is just a symptom of a much wider media problem” – that of a concentration of media ownership, which means that only pro-Establishment voices get prioritised – see: Sick of Mike Hosking?
For Danyl Mclauchlan the problem is that Hosking is used on the “state broadcaster” – see: The trouble with Mike.
The tabloid TV bias
Could it simply be that market forces are causing the biggest biases in the media at the moment? As we saw earlier in the year with Campbell Live, the ratings play a central role in determining what gets put on our screens. Joanna Hunkin has two interesting articles about on-going ratings issues – see Ratings wars and Future uncertain for TV3 hosts.
Some in social media see a conspiracy in relation to some of these issues – see Anthony Robins’ Gower and the 3 News ratings slump.
The 6pm TV news is becoming more tabloid according to Karl du Fresne, who explains Why I’ll no longer be watching 3 News, and complains Must TV cameras intrude on private grief? Similarly, see Mamari Stephens’ Memo to TV3 and TVNZ and Stuff: grieving children’s tears are not for our public consumption.
What about the quality TV political programmes? These too are biased according to Winston Peters, who is now targeting TVNZ’s Q+A, which he says is too narrow. According to John Drinnan, Peters is especially unhappy about who is chosen to appear on screen: “Yesterday, Peters said Q+A still treated politics as a two-party race and seldom offered any representation to the smaller parties. Panellists were chosen to represent the extreme left or extreme right, he said” – see: Peters rarks up Hosking attack.
In fact yesterday’s Q+A included some relatively new faces and one of them, economist Shamubeel Eaqub, was less than polite about Peters during a debate about immigration: “You know, you’ve got to have a bit of balance here, and I know Winston in particular has a big thing about family reunification. Get f***king real.” Winston Peters is a long-time critic of the family reunification visa programme, which he claims is manipulated by Chinese immigrants” – see TVNZ’s ‘Get f***** real’ – economist drops F-bomb on Q+A.
For some reaction in social media, see my blog post, Top tweets about the F-bomb on Q+A. And for a more in depth look at how broadcasters and society are dealing with swearing, see Adam Dudding’s very good feature article, F&@#: the truth about swearing.
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]]>Keith Rankin on Hollow Auckland, Hollow Media, Hollow Opposition
Analysis by Keith Rankin. This article was also published on Scoop.co.nz.
I was interested to hear this story (More students at poorest schools) on Thursday (20 August), about the large changes in school enrolments in Decile 10 and Decile 1 schools. These are the schools that are located in the richest and poorest suburbs and towns in New Zealand.
The Radio New Zealand report cited was presented as an education story, and not – as it should have been – as a story about demography and changing neighbourhoods. And the headlines emphasised the smaller Decile 1 effect (increased children in the poorest neighbourhoods) over the larger Decile 10 effect (a 13.5% drop in school enrolments in New Zealand’s richest suburbs, with almost all the Decile 10 drop taking place in Auckland, making it a 33% drop there).
Much was made of a recent reallocation of schools. Evidently affluent suburbs in Auckland that still do have large numbers of children are now relatively less affluent; again a matter of demography. The real story is that the more affluent of suburbs in Auckland are either emptying of children, or are entering the richest tier of suburbs because they are experiencing depopulation.
More than anything else, this story is evidence of the demographic hollowing out of Auckland, whereby increasing numbers of houses in the most affluent suburbs (the high-speculation zones) are either unoccupied or underoccupied. Family homes in these suburbs are no longer being purchased by families. It’s a waste of our best located urban land.
I have been reading quite a lot of New Zealand history this year. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century the one single biggest issue in New Zealand politics was ‘land monopoly’. (Land monopoly does not literally mean ‘monopoly’, in that only one party owned it. It means concentration of ownership. Interestingly, one of the popular cures of the time – land nationalisation – would have created a literal land monopoly.)
The land monopoly problem was twofold: the very high concentration of land ownership (creating the very inequalities our early settlers were escaping from), and the lack of economic use to which much of that land was being put. These New Zealanders, from the 1880s and 1890s, would have had no trouble grasping the nature of the land problem in Auckland this decade. They were concerned that much good rural land was not being farmed. Today they would be concerned that much good urban land is not being lived in by New Zealand families, and that far too many families are being squeezed into the margins.
The increasing hollowness of our analysis of social issues matches the increasing hollowness of our biggest city.
The mainstream media keep telling us that the government has classified ‘worm farms’ as less safe than ‘dairy farms’, and that pastoral farming generally has been classed as ‘low-risk’. Of course nobody in government has ever tried to claim that worm-farming is dangerous. The statistical truth is that in the miscellaneous classification ‘other-livestock-farming’, the rate of deaths per person employed is higher than in, for example, dairy farms. Any person of some intelligence and integrity would realise that an average fatality rate for ‘other-livestock’ does not apply to every component of that category.
I am continually disappointed at the lack of listening that takes place by media interviewers. For example, on TVNZ’s Q+A yesterday (Workplace Relations & Safety Minister Michael Woodhouse, transcript on Scoop), Woodhouse said “they [the deaths] were obviously in the other occupations that made up that [‘other’] industry. The interviewer Michael Parkin replied “How were those people killed on the worm farm?” Listen, Michael, listen.
I have also been disappointed by Andrew Little’s getting caught up in this. He’s an intelligent man, who is genuinely trying to find a cross-party solution to the issue of work-safety. Yet he couldn’t help himself when he said “worm farming, which according to the minister, has caused deaths” (TVNZ’s Q+A yesterday Andrew Little – Health and Safety Reform Bill, transcript on Scoop). No Andrew, the minister has not made that claim. It does the Opposition no credit to go along with the silly gamesmanship displayed by too many in the mainstream media in lieu of presenting the actual stories.
Another problem of our shallow contemporary public discourse is the binarisation of truth. The classic case was George W Bush’s 2001 speech (20 September; transcript here) where he said “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists“.
On the health and safety issue Mr Woodhouse said (on Q+A) “what I did last week was agree to disclose the taxonomy that would be used to describe the upper quartile of high risk”. Thus it was implicit that most forms of pastoral farming in New Zealand would probably fall into the second risk quartile. (Trained journalists should be able to understand concepts such as ‘quartile’ and ‘decile’.) At no stage did any official say that pastoral farming was ‘low-risk’; only the journalists were saying this through a process of binary inference (ie by assuming that if it’s not high-risk then it must be low-risk).
I work in education, and I know that most students who do not pass their courses are New Zealanders of European ethnicity. Nevertheless, we pay more attention to Maori and Pacific non-success, because that problem is higher per person of those ethnicities enrolled. I would hope that most journalists would realise that more people dying on dairy farms than on ‘other-livestock’ farms does not mean that dairy farming is more dangerous, just as more aggregate non-success by Pakeha students does not mean that educationalists should be more concerned about the Pakeha ethnic group than about other ethnic groups.
There are very real issues about safety on our farms. The best solutions for farm workers may or may not be the same as the best solutions for miners or factory workers. Our journalists should appreciate these nuances. One size fits all may not be best.
There’s a role for humour in journalism and politics. But using humour as a cover for shallowness is not the best use of humour. Hollow city, hollow beltway, cheap shots. We can do better.
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]]>NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 24, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 4 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Monday 24th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle include fresh controversies at Mt Eden prison this time involving Serco staff, the commencement of a trial expected to last three weeks where a man is facing a charge of manslaughter after the workplace death of a forestry worker in 2013 and the Government has announced it will change the law to allow councils to decide whether retailers can open on Easter Sunday.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Increased focus on rural depression; HomeStart off to successful start; 10 year passports will be delivered early; Women who’ve got a trade have got it made; Graduate nurses finding jobs sooner; Easter Sunday shop trading law to change; Bright-line test targets gains on property sales
Greens: National MP caught misleading on TPPA; SERCO must be put on final warning; Pig-farm fire shows why it’s time for farrowing crates to go
Labour: Rules reduction – or rorting the rules; Burdett case must be reopened; website adds to long list of big spends at MBIE; Chickens come home to roost on climate change; Reserve Bank points finger at Govt inaction
New Zealand First:Woodhouse’s Massive Bungle Sees Animal Feed Classed High Hazard; Tainui’s Absurd Claim For Auckland; On-Air Expletive A Sad Fact-Free Response; Why are doctors begging for money in bowel cancer fight?
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
HOME LOAN AFFORDABILITY REPORT: A big jump in the lower quartile selling price of homes in south Auckland over the last two months more than wiped out the benefits of falling mortgage interest rates for first home buyer households, according to the interest.co.nz Home Loan Affordability Report for July. Click here for the report:http://www.interest.co.nz/property/home-loan-affordability
MBIE WEBSITE: The spending habits at the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment are again under fire after it was revealed that the department has blown $559,872 on its new website. For more information on the costs related to the website, click here: http://www.mbie.govt.nz/about/whats-happening/news/2015/welcome-to-the-new-mbie-website
RURAL DEPRESSION: Rural training for rural health professionals and community leaders to tackle depression in rural communities is going to increase. Written stories and videos from rural men and women who have been affected by depression can now be found at: http://www.depression.org.nz/rural
WESTPAC’S WEEKLY COMMENTARY: A sharp bounce in the latest GlobalDairyTrade auction offered a ray of hope for New Zealand’s dairy sector, but it is too early to draw any conclusions for this season’s milk price payout. Click here for more: http://www.westpac.co.nz/assets/Business/Economic-Updates/2015/Bulletins-2015/Outlook-for-Auckland-residential-construction-August-2015.pdf
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Monday 24th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>European Union slams Indonesia, other G20 nations on climate summit targets
Report – By Lachlan Carmichael The European Union has urged India, Indonesia, Brazil and other major economies to immediately submit their emissions reductions targets to help avoid failure at the United Nations climate summit in Paris later this year. In hard-hitting remarks in Brussels, EU Climate and Energy Commissioner Miguel Arias Canete warned that the window of opportunity for 195 countries to agree a deal aimed at limiting the rise in global temperatures “is closing fast” and called for speeding up technical negotiations. So far, he said 56 countries representing 61 percent of global green-house gas emissions have handed in their reduction pledges, just over a quarter of the total countries. “Key G20 countries such as Argentina, Brazil, India, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa and Turkey must submit their intended contributions without delay,” the Spanish commissioner said. In March, the European Union, the world’s third biggest emitter, became one of the first blocs or countries to formally submit its pledge to the United Nations. The second biggest polluter the United States and the number one emitter China have also submitted their pledges in the last few months. Canete praised these contributions, also noting the efforts of “some of the most vulnerable countries from Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific” to come up withproposals. Total cuts The failure of so many of the world’s 20 biggest economies to submit their pledges made it difficult to calculate the total cuts still needed to limit global warming to no more than two degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels, Canete said. The calculation needs to be done quickly, he said, to “know where we stand” before the climate conference, which kicks off in around 100 days in the French capital. “The window of opportunity to keep the global rise in temperature to two degrees is closing fast,” he warned. Canete’s remarks were the first time such a senior EU official had publicly named countries to come forward quickly with their emission reduction pledges. EU sources told AFP the 28-nation EU already launched in March a campaign urging 60 countries to submit their pledges as soon as possible but analysts said the appeals fell on deaf ears despite the bloc’s combined diplomatic heft. He also said that while governments have increasingly demonstrated the “political will” to reach an agreement, “in the negotiating room progress has been painfully slow.” He added: “The technical negotiations must go faster.” Leading by example The European Union has tried to lead by example. Last October its member states agreed to cut emissions by 40 percent by 2030 over a benchmark of 1990, a binding target that Canete hails as the world’s “most ambitious.” US President Barack Obama set a target for the United States, the world’s second biggest polluter after China, to cut its overall emissions by 26-28 percent from 2005 levels by 2025. The UN Paris conference from November 30 to December 11 will seek to crown a six-year effort by 195 nations with a post-2020 pact on curbing greenhouse gases. “Paris needs to send a credible signal the world is serious about fighting climate change,” Canete warned. According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the global mean temperature could rise by up to 4.8 C this century alone, a recipe for more drought, flood and rising seas. Source: The Jakarta Post Mangroves rooted in Indonesia’s climate target]]>
Balibo media killings widow angry over implicated Indonesian spy chief
Pacific Scoop: Report – By Pacific Media Watch The widow of Australian journalist Greg Shackleton says it is a disgrace that a retired general implicated in the murder of the Balibo Five has been appointed chief of Indonesia’s intelligence agencies. Almost 40 years since the killing of the five journalists in Timor-Leste, Shirley Shackleton fears the appointment of retired lieutenant-general Sutiyoso has dashed hopes of her husband’s remains ever being returned. The 70-year-old Sutiyoso, who President Joko Widodo named in June as the new chief of the Indonesian Intelligence Agency (BIN), was an army captain in charge of a special forces unit in East Timor when the newsmen were killed on October 16, 1975. Sutiyoso has denied being in Balibo at the time of the murders, despite claims he led a force known as “Team Susi” in the attack on the small border town. As the chief of Indonesia’s intelligence agencies, Sutiyoso will be central to arrangements between Australia and Indonesia in terms of sharing of intelligence and other issues of security. It’s unclear if he will be involved in talks with Australian officials in Jakarta this week, understood to include discussions on intelligence sharing, which will be attended by Justice Minister Michael Keenan. ‘It’s a disgrace’ “It’s a disgrace,” Shirley Shackleton said of Sutiyoso’s appointment. “I find it rather strange that he was part of team Susi, but claims he wasn’t there for the biggest attack of many that took place over more than a year near that border.” In 2007, a diplomatic row was caused when police approached Sutiyoso at his Sydney hotel in an attempt to have him appear at the Balibo inquest. Despite being In the middle leading a trade delegation, he returned to Jakarta the following day. “He wouldn’t even go into the witness box to swear he wasn’t there. He wouldn’t allow himself to be questioned in any way,” Shackleton said. “I still want to bring my husband’s remains home, and I don’t know how we would ever get permission with that man there because he is implicated in some way.” The former governor of Jakarta has faced questions over human rights abuses in the past. In June, when he was named BIN chief, students protested in Jakarta over long-standing allegations he ordered a raid on the Indonesian Democratic Party of Struggle headquarters in central Jakarta in July 1996. Five people were believed to have been killed in the incident, while dozens went missing. Greg Shackleton was 29 when he was in East Timor, covering the Indonesian invasion. The group also included Australian sound recordist Tony Stewart, 21; cameraman Gary Cunningham, 27, from New Zealand; and two Britons — cameraman Brian Peters, 24, and reporter Malcolm Rennie, 29. Last year, the Australian Federal Police dropped a war crimes investigation into the murders, citing insufficient evidence. The 2007 New South Wales coronial inquest concluded the men were “shot and or stabbed deliberately, and not in the heat of battle” in order to cover up the Indonesian invasion. Source: Nine News/Pacific Media Watch 9392]]>
Keith Rankin on Countering Spin: The Savage-Corbyn Phenomenon
Analysis by Keith Rankin. This article was also published on TheDailyBlog.co.nz.
The hitherto little known and seemingly uncool Jeremy Corbyn has become a serious contender for the leadership of the British Labour Party. He seems to be a genuine ‘people person’; old enough and calm enough to speak to people directly, unaided by the spin doctors who use the media to mould our thoughts and coach our politicians.
Unsurprisingly, Corbyn is subject to a tirade of negative spin, especially comparisons to the hapless Michael Foot (in the early 1980s) whose main political sin was a naive inappreciation of the forces that were massed against him.
Times are different now, and it’s the transparent niceness of the man that’s attracting a much broader level of support than that of the left of the Labour Party.
[caption id="attachment_6569" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Michael Joseph Savage on the campaign trail. Image: www.teara.govt.nz.[/caption]
The obvious comparison for me is that of Michael Joseph (Mickey) Savage, immigrant from Australia at age 35, and New Zealand prime minister after the 1930s’ great depression. Savage was an avuncular pragmatist with a deep and transparent commitment to social and economic justice. He was by no means the only person who could have become Labour leader after the ‘timely’ passing of Harry Holland. But he had that ability – through his personal sincerity – to reach out to people who were becoming disillusioned with the capacity of democracy to bring about change for the victims of economic malaise. Then, as Corbyn does now, Savage emerged to the fore in an era of poverty amidst plenty; an era of so much need (demand), so much capacity (supply), and so little money actually circulating.
Savage saw that the problem of poor indebted farmers had much in common with that of the income-starved urban working-class, and could reach out to both groups. Not a hint of the divide-and-rule politics which is the staple fare of the political right. Further, inheriting a Reserve Bank and a ‘brains trust’ from the pragmatic Gordon Coates (Finance Minister 1933-35), Savage was able to implement a programme that united the country sufficiently to give Labour an overwhelming second mandate in 1938.
There was no lack of newspaper spin in 1934 and 1935, as it became increasingly likely that Savage would become more than an unlikely Leader of the Opposition. Eventually, in desperation, the frustrated anti-Savage spinners jammed the airwaves, to block Colin Scrimgeour’s Friendly Road broadcasts. Also, thanks to Coates, extreme right-wingers split from the Reform-United ruling coalition, starting their own Democrat Party. It was the split conservative vote, along with the increasingly ham-fisted anti-Savage spin, that handed the 1935 election to Labour.
Savage was 61 when he became Labour’s leader. Unlike Harry Holland, he was no firebrand socialist. He was just a principled man capable of imagining public prosperity, a one-time ‘rationalist’ seeking to apply Christianity in the ways that the poor understood their faith. Jeremy Corbyn comes across to me as a very similar sort of person, with precisely the same kind of broad appeal. The more the spin doctors of fear try to undermine him, the better he looks, at least to the bottom 60 percent. Especially to the young who were turned off by the insincerity of the spin machine.
The spinners’ tactic is to say this or that “will happen” if Corbyn wins. This or that almost never happens. In hindsight, the spinners’ predictions about what would happen if the people of Greece voted ‘no’ in their recent referendum look quite foolish. Ordinary people are learning to not believe the spinners, to move away from the conservative politics of fear. Young people are starting to see an older man whose politics are those of compassion, not of individual aspiration. And they are seeing that the wisdom of age might count for more than ambition for power. (I don’t think I’m old, but, of major world leaders, only Dilma Rousseff is more than a year older than me. I reckon that good leaders are in their prime when in their late 60s. We need more older leaders, though I’m not convinced that Hillary Clinton quite has the Savage touch. Give me Bernie Sanders or the reluctant Elizabeth Warren any day.)
On TVNZ’s Q+A last week (Farming economy tightening its belt, 16 August 2015) I noted that dairy farmers are saying that each dollar they spend is re-spent “in the local economy eight times”, and that therefore if dairy farming is allowed to retrench, whole provincial economies will be devastated. While the ‘eight times’ may be an exaggeration, nobody refuted the general principle; a principle that applies equally to the government. Each dollar of government spending also recycles up to eight times. Just considering GST only – ignoring income tax – eight spendings at 15% per spending tallies to 120 percent of the initial government spend. It means that governments can reduce fiscal deficits by spending more (not less), especially when the farmers are spending less. And it means that reduced government spending makes the deficit bigger, not smaller.
People like Jeremy Corbyn – and Mickey Savage eighty years ago – can appreciate this simple Keynesian insight in ways that our media-cautious political aspirants cannot. Thanks in large part to ‘fiscal consolidation’ in the United Kingdom – meaning government austerity – British government debt has doubled (relative to GDP) since 2008.
Corbyn is and Savage was austere, but in a modest, personal and unassuming way; clearly not men motivated by making money for themselves. Their simple austerity may be interpreted as a lack of ambition. But Corbyn is (and Savage was) ambitious in a much more important sense than we observe in ego-driven office seekers. Hence our ongoing appreciation of Mickey Savage’s contribution to our collective welfare; revisionist historians have yet to dent his mana. And hence the British establishment’s fear of Jeremy Corbyn.
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]]>NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 21, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 5 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Friday 21st August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle includes an Education Ministry survey showing that school truancy rates reached their highest point in a decade last year , PwC released a survey the top 10 risks facing insurance industries and for the first time tourists visitor arrivals have surpassed 3 million.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: $9.9m Westmere School redevelopment completed;Record 3 million visitors to New Zealand; Young-Cooper named as new Housing NZ Chair; Final section of Western Ring Route a boost for public transport; NZ’s largest snow sport event gets underway
Greens: Govt could save kids’ lives with rentals’ WoF; Supporting smart jobs and exports isn’t a game; ETS still being rorted by polluters while foresters stay away; High Court Basin flyover decision the right one
Labour: Housing NZ must immediately move family; Taxpayers money spent on culling one of our rarest birds; Woodhouse wrong about quarries; Shiny new system leads to record truancy; Come clean on Pasifika education centre; Time for NZTA to work on alternatives to flyover
New Zealand First: Foreign Students Prop Up Industry As NZ Takes Record Number Of Migrants; Kiwi business to kiwi business is good for New Zealand
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS: Nearly half of us get along very well with the people we live with, but one-third of Kiwis say they don’t get enough quality time together, Statistics New Zealand said today. Sharing meals helps. Read the report here: http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/people_and_communities/Well-being/social-connectedness/social-networks/family-relationships.aspx
GREEN’S TRANSPORT PLAN :The Green Party released a fully-costed, practical plan centred on upgrading and expanding rapid public transport, which would make it much easier for people to get around Wellington without getting stuck in traffic. The plan is available at: https://www.greens.org.nz/policy/smarter-economy/fast-tracking-wellington
INSURANCE SECTOR: Technological advances and changing customer behaviours are hitting the insurance industry hard and are reflected in the top 10 risks New Zealand insurers have identified in PwC’s latest report. Read the report here: http://www.pwc.co.nz/insurance-industry-sector/publications/exploring-the-insurance-industry-top-risks-nz-perspective/
LVR RULE CHANGES: The Reserve Bank today published a summary of submissions and final policy positions in regards to changes in the Loan to Value Ratio restriction rules (LVRs), and the asset classification of residential property investment loans in the Capital Adequacy Framework. Read more: http://www.rbnz.govt.nz/news/2015/fsr-13-may-2015.html
MANGAWHAI WASTEWATER SCHEME DECLINED: After careful consideration, the Auditor-General, Lyn Provost, has again declined to make a report under section 44 of the Local Government Act 2002 about any losses that may have been incurred by the Kaipara District Council for the Mangawhai community wastewater scheme. Read more:http://www.oag.govt.nz/media/2015/kaipara-district-council?utm_source=kaipara-44&utm_medium=subs&utm_campaign=kaipara-44
OVERSEAS VISITORS HIT MILESTONE: Visitor arrivals to New Zealand surpassed 3 million for the first time in the July 2015 year. For more information visit :http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/population/Migration/IntTravelAndMigration_HOTPJul15/Commentary.aspx
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Friday 21st August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>byWADE…do you feel different sometimes…?
www.facebook.com/bywade or look at more stuff and buy things in obscene volumes to show how successful and cool you are atwww.iammenotyou.com…]]>
Radio: New Zealand Report – National led Govt Surges in Poll + Rugby World Cup HQ a Stinker!
[caption id="attachment_3755" align="alignleft" width="300"] FiveAA Australia’s breakfast show hosts Dave Penberthy, Mark Aiston, and Jane Reilly.[/caption]New Zealand Report: Evening Report.nz’s Selwyn Manning joins FiveAA.com.au’s Dave Penberthy, Mark Aiston and Alex Ward to deliver New Zealand Report. This week: National led Govt Surges in Poll + Rugby World Cup HQ Twickenham is labeled a Stinker! – Recorded live on 21/08/15.
ITEM ONE
Political Poll
The John Key led National Government has pulled ahead of its opponents in the latest Roy Morgan Poll, despite months of a sinking commodity markets and governance scandals.
The Nationals have notched up 50.5 percent support of those polled. That’s a lift of 7.5 percent support since early July.
The Labour Party has sunk down to just 27 percent, a drop of five percentage points, while the Green Party also shed 2 percent sinking to 11 percent. The centrist New Zealand First party was reasonably steady on 8 percent.
The balance of support is distributed among the minor parties that largely support the government.
The poll result comes as a surprise, especially considering the third term National Government does appear weak, bereft of ideas, and without solutions. Its legislative agenda has largely stalled. And, the Nationals have made an art form out of being a hands off government.
That’s especially true regarding the bloated Auckland housing market, the collapse of the dairy farming sector, the insolvency of once profitable state owned enterprises. When it is hands on, it is flogging off thousands of state houses, dishing out millions to a wealthy Saudi businessman, buying up New York real estate, and schmoozing some elements of the media with the best smile money can buy.
And then there’s the seriously weird health and safety legislation that the Nationals have put before the House. It ranks industries on a scale of how dangerous they are, and according to the Government, worm farms rank as more dangerous than dairy farms, cattle and sheep farms – that despite the latter group representing a third of workplace deaths in New Zealand.
But despite all of that, the Prime Minister’s popular appeal remains supreme.
It goes to show, voters need a strong opposition before they decide to exorcise us all of the John Key magic.
ITEM TWO
Rugby World Cup
If the Trans-Tasman rivalry in sport leaves an occasional bad taste in your mouth, spare a thought for what’s in store for players and spectators at the Rugby World Cup.
Media reports here in NZ suggest England’s Rugby World Cup HQ, Twickenham, is a real stinker… Literally.
Apparently, attempts to sweeten up the London suburb’s sewage processing plant are failing to get rid of an awful pong. The plant neighbours the park. It processes the sewage of around two million Londoners.
While players and spectators from all over the world are preparing to descend on Twickenham, the locals have taken to calling the park Stinkenham!
Despite all that, it’s shaping up as a great tournament, especially if the Wallabies and the All Blacks get to eyeball each other in another World Cup final.
New Zealand Report broadcasts live on FiveAA.com.au and webcasts on EveningReport.nz LiveNews.co.nz and ForeignAffairs.co.nz.
–]]>
Why does democracy matter? This is what democracy looks like
Opinion by Carolyn Skelton. In part one I expressed my concern that our so-called ‘democracy’ is being undermined and began considering the nature of democracy. On history and liberal or left wing forms of democracy The original form in ancient Athens was more like direct or participatory democracy, at least for adult males. All adult male citizens could attend and vote in the assembly of the governing body. The main daily decision-making body, the Boule, was selected randomly by lot (like pulling names out of a hat), rather than by an election – which seems a good way to counter the dominance by the wealthy and powerful. The kind of democracy that developed in Western countries is often labelled ‘liberal democracy’ – a version that accepts capitalism, but also claims to be for freedom and rights of the individual, and a fair society. In the course of the 20th century left wingers and/or ‘progressives’, have tended to favour ‘social democracy’: this includes state run public and social services and either accepts a modified capitalist structure, or aims for a peaceful, gradual shift towards socialism Others embraced ‘democratic socialism’ that combines democratic processes with the “social ownership of the means of production”, and aims for an end to capitalism. US presidential candidate Bernie Sanders defines the latter as occurring in countries where:
…health care is the right of all people. And in those countries, college education, graduate school is free. In those countries, retirement benefits, childcare are stronger than in the United States of America. And in those countries, by and large, government works for ordinary people and the middle class, rather than, as is the case right now in our country, for the billionaire class.Neoliberalism: Undoing the Demos These versions of democracy have taken something of a beating in the last few decades, as so-called ‘neoliberalism’ has risen to ascendancy. ‘Neoliberalism’ is more of a process of social and cultural dominance by the wealthy elites, than a coherent or consistent political prescription. It poses as an economic theory championing open markets, individualism, financial services, competition, rewards for those that earn them, and small government. It is portrayed as something to which there is (allegedly) no alternative (TINA). It promotes values that have deeply infiltrated culture, society and popular culture – where wealth is applauded as success, and the poor are to blame for their own misfortunes. In political practice, it’s anything that works for the powerful elites (see David Harvey on this). Wendy Brown provides an excellent account of the slippery and flexible nature of ‘neoliberalism’, and of the diverse understandings of ‘democracy’. She whittles democracy down to the most fundamental element: one that is crucial for all those who want a caring, humane society, and in which those with political power are effectively held to account. In the end it goes back to that slogan most often used to define democracy: ‘government of the people, by the people for the people’. So, it’s the PEOPLE, stupid! Brown’s latest book focusing on the way ‘neoliberalism’ has undermined democracy, has the title Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Dictionaries define ‘The Demos’ as ‘the common people’ and ‘the populace’. In Salon’s interview of Brown, she defines the root of ‘democracy’ as “demos kratia” meaning “people rule”. The ancient Greek philosopher Plato was more in keeping with our current government: he reckoned governing should be done by a highly educated and knowledgeable elite who knew what was best for everyone else. According to Wendy Brown in Undoing the Demos (p.19), he defined democracy as chaos. Aristotle, on the other hand, is more like those on the 21st century left/progressive wing of politics: he defined democracy as being rule by the people, including the poor (Brown p19).
As Jane Kelsey also says, there is an alternative to ‘neoliberalism’, and it is a system that puts ‘people (ALL the people) at the centre, not some slippery, smoke and mirrors politicisation of economic theory; a politicised theory that makes everyone and everything the servant of financial and economic wizardry. Kelsey has been very critical of the TPPA: TPPA stands for the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement – but some have re-defined it as “Taking People’s Power Away.”
This is what democracy looks like
– it’s close to Aristotle’s idea of the common/poor people as seen in Micky Savage’s images of the anti-TPPA protest in Auckland last weekend, and it especially looks like this photo by Micky.
It looks like this photo by Frank Macskasy. As Macskasy outlines in his report on the Wellington protest, there are major concerns that the secretly negotiated TPPA will have a negative impact on PHARMAC, meaning medicines will not be accessible for many New Zealanders.
There are also concerns that multinational corporations will benefit from the agreement, while many of ‘the people’ will be likely to suffer.
Democracy doesn’t look like this:
Tim Groser telling the protesters he (and the rest of the powerful politicians and corporations) know better than the protesting public.
Trade Minister Tim Groser says yesterday’s national rallies against the Trans-Pacific Partnership negotiations will not change the Government’s approach to the international deal.or this:
Prime Minister John Key says protesters against a Pacific-wide free trade deal were misinformedGroser and Key are closer to Plato’s anti-democratic idea of rule by an (allegedly) knowledgeable elite. But the danger with such powerful elites is that they serve only in their own interest. They are likely to have limited knowledge, understanding or concern for the struggles of ordinary people, especially those with the least power, wealth or resources. As the August 19 2015 a Dominion Post editorial says, such reactions by groser and Key look like the arrogance of a government that has been in power too long. A government that is not listening to the people.]]>
NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 20, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 8 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Thursday 20th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle includes the 2015 Thirty Year Infrastructure Plan released by Government in response to the infrastructure challenges to be faced over the next three decades, Police face a $20 million bill for technology to support the Government’s new child sex offenders register and Meridian Energy says New Zealand might have to to develop another power station by 2019.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Thirty Year Infrastructure Plan Released;Tertiary Education Institution council members reappointed; Broadband rollout supporting regional growth; Commerce appointments announced; Bus Interchange building now complete; Foss welcomes reduction in licence wait times; Stronger air services between NZ and Cambodia; Motorcycle Safety Advisory Council appointments; Solid, sustainable growth as economy adjusts; SPEECH: Gerry Brownlee – New Zealand Council for Infrastructure Development (NZCID) Building Nations Symposium
Greens: National’s 30-year plan 30 years out of date
Labour: Government’s Health and Safety legislation a joke; Education must provide real world skills; Another bridges bribe from Simon Bridges; Cash strapped DHBs struggling to find cuts; Genesis-Solid Energy contract debacle another oversight failure
New Zealand First: Repair Failure Rate So Bad Brownlee Should Go; Minister Fails To Take WINZ Assaults Seriously; Short-sighted Government costing New Zealand lives; NZ First Makes Lone Stand For Small Business
NZ National Party: More surgery assessments and more operations for the Hutt
United Future Party: Dunne Speaks- What does the Labour Party stand for now?
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
BROADBAND: High speed broadband and mobile connectivity is supporting regional growth and innovation across New Zealand. For regional updates click here: http://goo.gl/6q8pZX or broadband map here:www.broadbandmap.co.nz\
CONSUMER CONFIDENCE AUGUST 2015: Consumer sentiment has fallen to its lowest since mid-2012 – still not weak but heading in a weaker direction, according to the ANZ-Roy Morgan New Zealand Consumer Confidence report. Read more: http://www.anz.co.nz/resources/d/b/db1eab2e-af44-4c03-9a35-004c8a0e8805/ANZ-ConsumerConfidence-20150820.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
DYSLEXIA LABEL CONSIDERED HARMFUL: A controversial author’s claim that the term dyslexia should be abandoned is disappointing and misleading. That’s the view of SPELD NZ, a not-for-profit organisation that has assisted people with dyslexia and other specific learning disabilities for the last 40 years.Click here for more:http://www.speld.org.nz/downloads/Pilot%20NZJESarticle.pdf
EMISSIONS TRADING SCHEME REPORT: The Environmental Protection Authority has issued the latest annual data reports on the New Zealand Emissions Trading Scheme on its website. Click here for EPA report:http://www.epa.govt.nz/e-m-t/reports/ets_reports/annual/Pages/default.aspx
EXCESSIVE FORCE BY POLICE OFFICER: An Independent Police Conduct Authority report released today has found that the use of force by an Auckland Police officer as he assisted in the arrest of a man suspected of burglary was excessive and contrary to law. The report summary can be found at : http://www.ipca.govt.nz/Site/media/2015/2015-Aug-20-Excessive-force-during-arrest.aspx
INFRASTRUCTURE PLAN RELEASED: The Thirty Year New Zealand Infrastructure Plan 2015 sets out New Zealand’s response to the infrastructure challenges we to be faced over the next three decades. Go here for more:http://www.infrastructure.govt.nz/plan/2015
INTERNATIONAL VISITOR SURVEY 2015: The International Visitor Survey (IVS) for the year ending June 2015 was released today by the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE). Further information on the latest release can be found on the MBIE website: http://www.med.govt.nz/sectors-industries/tourism/tourism-research-data/international-visitor-survey
JOB ADVERTISEMENTS: Employers are becoming more cautious about taking on new staff, though the fall in labour demand seen in recent months has stopped for now, according to the latest ANZ job advertising data. Read more here:http://www.anz.co.nz/resources/0/5/058ec89f-8a5e-4c3e-a7d7-b1472caff3a9/ANZ-JobAds-20150820.pdf?MOD=AJPERES
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Thursday 20th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>Radio: Across The Ditch – Bizarre Saudi Sheep Deal Under Official Investigation + Prep for Rugby World Cup
[caption id="attachment_1205" align="alignleft" width="300"]
Peter Godfrey and Selwyn Manning.[/caption]
EveningReport.nz’s Selwyn Manning and FiveAA.com.au’s Peter Godfrey deliver this week’s Across The Ditch bulletin: This week we talk about how Melbourne, Adelaide, Sydney, Perth and Auckland all feature in the top ten of the world’s most liveable cities. We also discuss the bizarre Saudi Sheep Deal Under Official Investigation + Prep for Rugby World Cup – Recorded live on 20/08/15.
ITEM ONE Saudi Sheep Deal Fallout from the bizarre Saudi sheep farm deal just won’t go away, and this week the Government’s auditor watchdog, the Auditor General, initiated an official inquiry into the scandal. The background to this weird scandal is:- In 2007, the Labour Government banned the export of live animals for slaughter.
- in 2008 the National Party won the elections and became Government.
- In 2009, Agriculture Minister David Carter (who is now NZ Parliament’s speaker) began negotiations with Saudi Arabia for a resumption of live-sheep exports.
- In 2010, the National Government extended the ban of live exports.
- February 2013, the Cabinet approved Foreign Minister Murray McCully’s deal to pay $4 million to Hmood Al Khalaf’s business to secure it to run an agri-hub to promote New Zealand agriculture in Saudi Arabia and as a settlement of a long-running dispute over the ban on live-sheep exports.
- Also in 2013 Cabinet approved $6 million be paid to NZ businesses to deliver their services and help set-up the Saudi farm.
- And the Government also paid $1.5 million for 900 pregnant ewes to be flown to the Saudi farm, onboard Singapore Airlines! (end of summary)
- the amount of public money budgeted and spent on this Partnership, how it has been used, and the outcomes achieved with it;
- whether the expenditure on services was within the appropriations of Vote Foreign Affairs and Trade, as authorised by Parliament;
- the procurement and contract management practices used by the Ministry and New Zealand Trade and Enterprise to purchase services relating to the Partnership;
- whether the services received were in keeping with the business case and contract specifications; and
- any other related matter that I consider it desirable to inquire into and report on.
NewsRoom Digest: Top NZ News Items for August 19, 2015
This edition of NewsRoom_Digest features 9 resourceful links of the day and the politics pulse from Wednesday 19th August.
NEWSROOM_MONITOR
Top stories in the current news cycle includes some relief for dairy farmers as the price of whole milk powder jumped up by more than 19% at the overnight Global Dairy Trade auction, Government’s Workplace Health and Safety legislation being further debated in Parliament this afternoon and the launch of a review of fisheries management announced at the Seafood New Zealand 2015 conference today.
Note: As well as providing a precis of leading broadcast bulletins each day, our NewsRoom_Monitor service does a daily paper round with succinct ‘news picks’ from the main metropolitan papers emailed by 9am each morning. If you’re interested in a free trial please email monitor@newsroom.co.nz
POLITICS PULSE
Media releases issued from Parliament by political parties today included:
Government: Healthy lifestyle initiative helping more diabetics; PM acknowledges passing of George Gair; Speech to the Seafood New Zealand 2015 conference; Extra ACC hearing loss support well received; Dairy diversification opportunities in SE Asia; Access to medicines continues to improve; One month left for councils to get digital enablement plans sorted
ACT Party: Avoid another Solid Energy – sell Landcorp farms now
Greens: PM must stand down McCully to protect NZ’s reputation; Greens Urge Government MPs To Support Health And Safety Bill Amendments; Govt must come clean on real cost of Landcorp’s conversions; Green Party Initiates Inquiry Into Education Special Needs
Labour: Parties must drop the politics over Health and Safety; Maori Party should stand up for workers; Prime Minister hiding from his sell-out of New Zealand; Brownlee warned over EQC repairs but ignored them; Saudi tender process reeks of SkyCity approach; National’s backdoor attempt to keep asset sales alive
Māori Party: Poroporoaki – Stuart Panapa QSM; Amendments to the Health and Safety Bill and list of high risk industries anticipated; Poroporoaki for Putiputi O’Brien QSM
New Zealand First: Reducing volume for sale assisted dairy price rise; Groser and Key at war over Russia; Army’s rifle choice positive sign for defence procurement; NZ First MP shares parliamentary knowledge with Tuvalu MPs
NZ National Party: Record international student numbers great news for the Hutt
United Future Party: Health & Safety Bill A Better Bill, Thanks To UnitedFuture
LINKS OF THE DAY
Links of the day have been a feature of NewsRoom_Digest since we first started production in August 2014 at newsroom-nz.tumblr.com. We are currently building an archive of these at:http://newsroomplus.com/resources/resourceful-links/
CANTERBURY RESIDENTIAL REPAIRS: The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) has released a report into the Building Code compliance of earthquake repairs to Canterbury homes. The Home Inspection Survey Report, and the full list of recommendations, together with FAQs, are available on the MBIE website:http://www.mbie.govt.nz/news-and-media/news-from-around-mbie/report-into-canterbury-residential-repairs-released
CHILD HARDSHIP BILL: Child Poverty Action Group has urged the Social Services Select Committee to remember New Zealand’s obligations under UNCROC to look after the best interests of the child ahead of other objectives like incentivising work. CPAG’s written submission on the Support for Children in Hardship Bill can be found at: htttp://www.cpag.org.nz/assets/Submissions/150629Submissionsupportforchildrenhardship.pdf
DIGITAL PLANS: Local authorities have four more weeks to submit a digital enablement plan outlining how they will take advantage of new investment from the Government’s broadband extension. Further information on digital enablement plans can be found at: www.med.govt.nz/sectors-industries/technology-communication/fast-broadband/new-initiatives
EMA EMPLOYERS SURVEY: New Zealand’s business outlook is expected to stay the same over the next six months, according to employers surveyed by the EMA (Employers and Manufacturers Association). Click here for the EMA survey: https://www.ema.co.nz/resources/EMA%20Reports%20and%20Documents/Advocacy/Employers-Survey-2015.pdf
MILK PRICES: Producer prices fell in the June 2015 quarter, due to lower farm-gate milk prices says Statistics New Zealand. Business Price Indexes for the June 2015 quarter is available at:http://www.stats.govt.nz/browse_for_stats/economic_indicators/prices_indexes/BusinessPriceIndexes_HOTPJun15qtr.aspx
NZ BANKS CONTINUE TO PERFORM: New Zealand’s five major banks have continued to show good growth in the first half of their 2015 financial years according to PwC’s New Zealand Banking Perspectives publication released today. The publication is available at: http://www.pwc.co.nz/banking-capital-markets-industry-sector/publications/nz-banking-perspectives/august-2015/
PATIENTS TO BE SURVEYED: Patients from over 20 general practices across New Zealand will be asked about their care outside of hospital, in a trial of an online survey taking place from July to October by the Health Quality & Safety Commission. See the Commission’s website for more information: http://www.hqsc.govt.nz/our-programmes/health-quality-evaluation/projects/health-quality-and-safety-indicators/patient-experience/primary-care-patient-experience/
SEAFOOD CONFERENCE 2015: Find out what was discussed at the confrence, here:http://www.seafoodconference.org.nz/programme/
TENANTS GET RELIEF: Trade Me property says New Zealand tenants have reason to smile as the pressure on the rental market eases. View the Rent Price Index for Trade Me property here:http://www.trademe.co.nz/property/price-index/for-rent/
And that’s our sampling of “news you can use” for Wednesday 19th August 2015.
Brought to EveningReport by Newsroom Digest. –]]>Why does democracy matter? ‘Don’t it always seem to go…’
Opinion by Carolyn Skelton. I am one of those who have concerns about its endangered state of democracy in Western-European (so-called) democracies. Democracy requires the media playing a key role in enabling a wide public debate of diverse opinions, and, thus providing a mechanism whereby those with political (and economic) power can be held to account. These days this role seems to have been compromised by the corporate-dominated media, and the profit motive. (For an in-depth explanation of this perspective, see Nicky Hager’s 2012 Bruce Jesson lecture). Lately I have been pondering an underlying question: “Why does democracy matter?” When I see the PM and Murray McCully dancing on a pin, spinning lines that mislead and divert (as with the #sheepgate saga), and seeming to get away with it, I despair about the state of our democracy. The attempts to hold John Key and Murray McCully to account seem to have the impact of shooting at passing clouds (see Bryce Edwards’ round up on this. When I see the continuing presence of homeless sitting quietly in Auckland’s streets with signs asking for a few cents; when I see the unaffordable housing crisis continuing to escalate, while the government continues to pander to speculators and the housing profiteers; when I see the government claiming all is OK, average incomes have not deteriorated, and the economy is fine, using statistics of averages that fail to expose the big gaps in wealth and income of the wealthiest and poorest…. I wonder how we came to be dominated by such cynical, calculating, self-focused, and uncaring methods. But, what has this to do with democracy, or lack of it thereof? After all, we are a parliamentary representative democracy; we can all vote, protest, state our views, and the opposition can hold the government to account in parliament? But that has become more surface than deep substance – the outer trappings of a hollowed out ….”democracy”. J M Balkin explained back in 1998, how this happens. ‘Democracy’ is a grand word. Who can disagree with something sounding so noble and hard fought for over the centuries? And when I try to pin it down, I find there it is not one thing, but different things to different people. ‘Representative democracy’ (where people can vote for members of government to represent them) is the most narrow form. And it has become degraded by money, and slick propaganda machinery that too often meshes seamlessly with our corporate dominated media. See for instance how John Key refused to accept a view expressed by many journalists, that there is no evidence that Labour was the cause of the #sheepgate debacle. Susie Ferguson on Wednesday 12 August 2015, kept challenging Key, and he continually repeated his “blame Labour” lines, probably hoping that, if he says it enough, enough voters will accept it. Donald Trump inadvertently showed just how much he is part of a US political process degraded by big money. Lee Fang reports that “Donald Trump Says He Can Buy Politicians, None of His Rivals Disagree.“ He quotes Trump as saying:
“I was a businessman. I give to everybody. When they call, I give. And you know what? When I need something from them, two years later, three years later, I call them, and they are there for me.” He added, “And that’s a broken system.”NZ has gone some way down that route, with political parties’ electoral fortunes being too dependent on raising funds from vested corporate interests. If a government can no longer be held to account in the House (with the speaker too often allowing Key and his ministers to continue with their slick game of avoidance, diversion, attack and misrepresentation), how democratic is representative politics? All governments and politicians do such things, but Key’s government has taken it to a whole new, slick and brazen level. Unfortunately, our elections of representatives has become hi-jacked by a fight for the middle ground of popular opinion, while the marginalised poor, the young and otherwise powerless, tend not vote any more. Vernon Small reported last year, that a Statistic’s NZ survey shows:
The young, the poor and recent migrants were less likely to turn out for parliamentary elections than other voters, a survey has found.But, as George Monbiot argues, the “middle ground” is an impossible dream: a
..magic mountain that retreats as you approach. The more you chase it from the left, the further to the right it moves.
And the grand notion of DEMOCRACY also seems to be on the retreat. More on this in part 2.
Featured image is from Occupy London: chanceprojects on flickr with a creative commons license.
For now, I am reminded of this song written by Joni Mitchell quite a while ago. It’s still relevant and a reminder of the endangered state of democracy, with the chorus,
Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you got til it’s gone…”Counting Crows ft Vanessa Carlton’s version of Mitchell’s “Big Yellow Taxihttps://youtu.be/tvtJPs8IDgU ]]>
WEST PAPUA: Mote presses for Pacific human rights fact-finding mission – PMW
MIL OSI Analysis – Pacific Media Watch’s Alistar Kata reports on West Papua and Octo Mote’s visit to New Zealand. Video: PMC
AUCKLAND (Pacific Media Watch): The Pacific Island Forum (PIF) leaders meeting in Papua New Guinea is a few weeks away and the secretary-general for the United Liberation Movement for West Papua (ULMWP), Octovianus Mote, has visited New Zealand to lobby the government to support human rights. The Indonesian-ruled region of West Papua is now on the agenda at the PIF and Mote says the ULMWP wants Pacific leaders to set up a fact-finding mission. “West Papua has had 53 years of human rights violations and there is an ongoing genocide. There are so many academic reports and human rights reports about it,” he says. “We are really calling for the Forum to form a fact-finding commission and to conduct a human rights assessment of West Papua.” Earlier this year the liberation movement was granted observer status to the Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG). Despite not gaining full membership, Mote said it was a victory for West Papua. This year’s Forum is on September 7-11 in Port Moresby.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 New Zealand Licence.
]]>Protecting the safety of all workers
NewsroomPlus.com Contributed by Adam James Ring. With the Health and Safety Reform Bill soon to have its third reading in Parliament, family members of workers killed in the workplace arrived in Wellington yesterday to appear at a Parliamentary hosted event. Representatives from Labour, NZ First, the Greens and the Maori Party were there to show their support, as were the Council of Trade Unions, who have helped organise both this event and the previous ‘white cross’ vigils that moved across the country. All who spoke made clear their frustration and disappointment at a bill that was supposed to deliver significant reform and protection for New Zealand workers, but has been significantly watered-down since its original conception in the wake of the Pike River Mine disaster of 2010. Parliament’s legislative chamber provided a suitably sombre atmosphere for what was an emotionally charged gathering. Five family members spoke, all struggling to hold back tears when speaking of those they lost, the signs of grief still evident and confronting. The overwhelming message from the families was of the heavy and corrosive touch of human loss. Sarah Kane, whose brother Michael died after falling and suffering a head injury at work, spoke of her brother’s three children and how they struggled to accept that their father would never come home. Their frequent wonderings of ‘if he had his birthdays in his coffin’ provide a stark reminder of the human cost behind workplace statistics. Bernie Monk, the father of Pike River miner Michael, held up a book about the disaster showing the photos of the 29 men killed, ‘How can we move on when we have no one to bury?’ He spoke of the promises made to the families after Pike River and said if the bill passed in its current form, there would be ‘no justice, no accountability.’ Capturing the feeling of the event and showing how much Pike River still resonates, he finished by declaring ‘they murdered our men’. If the mood was sorrowful, the statistics also make for sad and disturbing reading. A full third of workplace deaths since 2010 have been in our agricultural industry; 35% of all workplace deaths happen in small businesses; New Zealand workers are 8 times more likely to die in the workplace than in England. The current changes to the Health and Safety Reform Bill remove the requirements for small businesses – those with less than 20 employees – to assign an employee health and safety representative when requested by workers. But as the families so succinctly pointed out, their loved ones died working for small businesses, as did the miners at Pike River. The bill was to have its third reading last night – after this gathering – but was postponed by Workplace Safety Minister Michael Woodhouse due to apparent ‘technical difficulties with minor parties.’ It will be discussed and voted on today in Parliament as will the amendments proposed by Labour and the Greens which, if supported by the Maori Party and United Future, would reinstate the changes, making the requirements applicable for all businesses regardless of size. It is clear where the families sit on this issue – they want the safety of all workers in New Zealand protected. This is how the memory of those they lost can be best honoured. In their bravery and dedication they help to highlight how the cost of human life is truly measured – without compromise and through definitive action. –]]>
Cindy Baxter on Coal, climate change, and the New Zealand economy: winners, losers, and long-term users
MIL OSI – Source: Hot Topic – By Cindy Baxter – Analysis published with permission of Hot-Topic.co.nz Cross-posted from Coal Action Network Aotearoa As the country reeled with the news last week that Solid Energy had gone into administration with a $300m debt, another event was happening in the Pacific that puts the debate in a context that it too seldom receives in New Zealand. On Thursday, Kiribati Prime Minister Anote Tong wrote to world leaders calling for a moratorium on new coalmines. “Kiribati, as a nation faced with a very uncertain future, is calling for a global moratorium on new coal mines. lt would be one positive step towards our collective global action against climate change and it is my sincere hope that you and your people would add your positive support in this endeavour,” he wrote. “The construction of each new coal mine undermines the spirit and intent of any agreement we may reach, particularly in the upcoming COP 21 in Paris, whilst stopping new coal mine constructions NOW will make any agreement reached in Paris truly historical.” UK Economist Sir Nicholas Stern agreed: “The use of coal is simply bad economics, unless one refuses to count as a cost the damages and deaths now and in the future from air pollution and climate change,” he told Reuters (Stern’s full statement here). In June, Pope Francis said in his encyclical that the use of “highly polluting fossil fuels needs to be progressively replaced without delay.” Has John Key received his letter from President Tong? How will he reply? His Government has done nothing to try to reduce our coal production in an effort to reduce emissions because of concerns about climate change. Its mismanagement of Solid Energy is testament to its ongoing faith in the coal industry. Only last month Energy Resources Minister Simon Bridges told a West Coast meeting “we can have confidence that in the medium to long term, [coal] demand will return.” Right now, Solid Energy’s assets are being eyed by national and international buyers, including the permits Solid has for as-yet-undeveloped new mines.
What are the options for Solid Energy’s assets?
There are rumours that Indian coal giant Adani might buy the West Coast coking coal mines, but Adani is not in the business of coking coal. Its proposed (thermal) Carmichael mine in Queensland’s Galilee Basin is in trouble, as both the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, and British bank Standard Chartered, have walked away from the project, which would threaten the Great Barrier Reef where a new coal terminal is planned. There’s talk that the Stevenson Group may be interested in some of Solid’s domestic thermal coal assets. This is the company that lost its contract operating for Bathurst Resources in Takitimu, Southland, because of Worksafe health and safety concerns, and is looking at opening a new mine on the West Coast. Ironically, Bathurst Resources itself is also reported to be interested in Solid Energy’s Southland mines. It is desperately trying to keep itself afloat through domestic coal sales, while it waits in vain for the coking coal prices to rise again so it can sell its coal from the Denniston mine.International coal: a dismal future
But while the vultures circle Solid Energy, what’s happening around the world? Banks have been hit by a failing coal industry from which an increasing number of financial institutions – such as the huge Norwegian Sovereign Fund – are walking away – divesting itself of $8bn of investments in coal. The Fund already divested from Bathurst Resources last year. Some may scoff that this is merely “activist” divestment, but struggling US coal giant Peabody Energy is serious about it. In its 2014 annual report (page 30), the company says: “The impact of such efforts may adversely affect the demand for and price of securities issued by us, and impact our access to the capital and financial markets.” Last Thursday, Goldman Sachs sold the last of its coal investments, exiting the coal business altogether. This week Goldmans has backed a new, $1 billion renewable energy venture with SunEdison. Back in NZ, TSB, stung by its Solid Energy hit, appears to think its investments in SOEs needs to be reviewed – perhaps it would be wiser to review its investments in coal. In Queensland, Australia, a mothballed coalmine previously worth AUD$624m recently changed hands for a dollar. This recent Bloomberg graphic shows the sorry tale of how a global glut of coking coal and slowing steel demand in China is hammering the coking coal industry. The market may never pick up as the downturn in China’s steel use continues (and Chinese steel floods the internataional market) and it turns to its increasing stockpile of scrap steel. In the US, coal companies are in dire straights, with the share prices of its biggest companies: Peabody, Arch, and Alpha coal at rock bottom, with Alpha filing for a “chapter 11” bankruptcy status, following the way of dozens of smaller companies.Genesis Energy uses the get-out clause
It’s not regulation that’s killing King Coal, to quote former Mayor of New York Michael Bloomberg: “But the fact remains that King Coal is dying of natural causes: Market forces, technological advances, and public demands for clean air and climate action have combined to make alternative sources of energy more financially attractive.” That’s definitely the case for Genesis, which has now announced it’s going to shut down the dirty old coal-fired units at Huntly (something it forecast in 2009). This was a no-brainer for the company – the units were built in the 70s and, with the price of renewables coming down further, they don’t need to burn coal any more. Genesis is somewhat cynically capitalising on the clause in its contract with Solid Energy to get out of its future contracts with the company. It doesn’t need any more coal – it has a 700,000 tonne stockpile to burn, and renewables and gas are cheaper.The climate warms, the seas rise, but Fonterra keeps digging
At that West Coast meeting last month, Simon Bridges was upbeat about coal’s use in New Zealand. He said:“Coal is still a major source of energy for industry in the South Island, including being used to heat schools and hospitals. The demand for coal to fuel more dairy processing has strengthened our domestic market.”Given that Fonterra’s coal use has risen 38% since 2008, he is not wrong about that being the source of strength in the domestic market. And the Government hasn’t lifted a finger to slow this use on behalf of the climate, and will no doubt soon be reporting increased emissions from coal use in New Zealand. We have no cap on our ETS and the Government subsidises any big emitters for their emissions – including Fonterra, which, in the absence of Huntly, will “step up” to become New Zealand’s second largest coal user. The climate change impacts that Kiribati President Tong is talking about are not limited to Kiribati. We’re heading into a monster El Nino, and the impacts are already being felt around the planet. Ocean temperatures in the Western Pacific are at an all time high. Last month, 1000 people died in an Indian heatwave; in Myanmar, they’re bracing for further floods after 1.3 million people were displaced last week. Whanganui is just beginning to recover from its terrible floods, and Agriculture Minister Nathan Guy just added $100,000 to the Government’s assistance for drought-ravaged North Canterbury farmers, and extended the drought declaration through until February.
We need to reduce our reliance on coal, both in the export markets and domestically. We need to listen to our Pacific neighbours. And if the New Zealand coal industry’s losers and long-term users won’t listen, then they need to be made to hear.
]]>Keith Rankin’s Chart for this Week: Financial Balances of New Zealand 1991-2014
Economic analysis by Keith Rankin.
Last week my financial chart for Germany showed how Germany (especially its private sector) since the advent of the Euro has run its economy by consistently (since 2002) producing more than it consumes, selling more than it buys, and accumulating monetary credits with the rest of the world (shown in green) that it will probably never spend. For Germany to be able to do this, then some other countries must be doing the opposite; the non-German world is running the deficits that match Germany’s domestic surpluses.
Financial balances are a zero-sum game. Two weeks ago I showed how advanced economies‘ private sectors have been, like Germany, running large surpluses, especially after the global financial crisis. In this case it is the combined governments of the advanced economies that are accommodating the private surpluses by running public-sector deficits (shown in red). Government deficits have become the solution to the problem of private surpluses; that is, the solution to the problem of uninvested savings.
Where does New Zealand fit into the process? While it is an advanced economy, it is very different to the general pattern for advanced economies. In New Zealand’s case, since 1993 (except 2010-11) it has been the private sector – not the government – that has helped to accommodate the private surpluses of countries in Europe and Asia. New Zealand’s financial signature this century is opposite that of Germany.
New Zealanders face a conundrum. If they do accommodate other countries’ surpluses by selling existing assets to those countries, then their economies stand to become insolvent. (While these private deficits mainly represent the foreign purchase of existing assets, some of the inflow is genuine investment in new assets.) New Zealand asset ownership is transferred to the Germanies and Chinas of the world economy, creating ever larger long-term outflows of interest, profits and rents. If countries like New Zealand (and there are no longer very many of these) do not accommodate other countries’ private surpluses, then the world economy itself grinds itself into depression. Germany’s financial profile is of the type that in the 1920s and 1930s was called ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’, with New Zealand being like one of the beggared neighbours.
It’s a strange kind of imbalance. Germany sees itself as benefitting, making lots of money. New Zealand also benefits, getting to enjoy lots of imported goods on foreign credit; imports that haven’t actually been paid for and probably never will. (When these situations have occurred in the past, depressions, inflations, and wars have eventually intervened; indeed, the Americans whose trade surpluses paid for most of World War 1 and World War 2, for the most part were not repaid. And the Chinese who indirectly financed the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan will never agree to run the huge trade deficits that would constitute repayment.)
What is it in New Zealand that creates our kind of ‘spendthrift’ financial signature? It is not fiscal policy. Government in New Zealand is very debt-averse, and has been ever since the 1994 Fiscal Responsibility Act.
It is monetary policy, not a spendthrift culture, which drives New Zealand’s financial profile. By offering the rest of the world interest rates that look high to people in other countries (ostensibly as an anti-inflation policy), and by accepting all foreign money no questions asked, New Zealand has become the exemplar of an accommodating economy with an excellent credit rating. So far, very few foreigners have lost money through buying New Zealand assets on secondary markets. Some have gained very large financial returns through their $NZ denominated asset purchases, so they come back for more.
The huge financial surpluses of the advanced economies are accommodated overall by their increasingly resistant governments. Within that, the private sectors of some – especially households in English- and Spanish-speaking countries – accommodate the massive private (mainly corporate) surpluses, for example through large mortgages. In New Zealand’s case we might add dairy-farm debt to this accommodating mix.
The global process of financial imbalance appears to be accelerating. We live in interesting times.
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]]>Tony Alexander’s Economic Analysis: Undervalued Regional Housing Markets
Analysis by BNZ Chief Economist, Tony Alexander.
Sporadic 17
[caption id="attachment_3709" align="alignleft" width="150"]
Tony Alexander, BNZ economist.[/caption]
Back in 2008 my warning was that NZ house prices would not collapse even as they fell over 30% in some other countries, because we entered the GFC with a shortage and interest rates were plummeting. Prices on average fell just 11%. Then from mid-2009 whenever anyone asked me whether they should buy a house in Auckland or wait for prices to fall my reply has been that I personally would buy – and I remain of that view. But I definitely did not pick that prices would rise 85% from 2009 levels. In October 2012 when Auckland house prices had risen over 40% people were again strongly worried about price declines. I pointed out that price rises had to date occurred in spite of weak migration flows (-1,300 during 2012), and that once the migration cycle with Australia turned prices would receive a whole new boost.
That turning of the cycle with Australia has been hugely greater than I anticipated. I thought maybe the overall net migration inflow across all countries would push toward 35,000. But it is over 58,000 and still slightly rising. Since late-2012 Auckland house prices have risen another 39%.
The other substantial comment I have been making is that as with previous housing cycles, eventually buyers would view Auckland as not so much over-priced, but simply too expensive. Wariness of the debt one would have to take on to buy a property would lead investors, first home buyers, and people looking to free up cash to look outside of Auckland.
This regional investment phase is now well underway. My BNZ Business Confidence Survey results released two weeks ago contained plenty of anecdotes regarding Aucklanders showing up in regional locations such as Hamilton and Tauranga most obviously, but also Nelson, Napier, and Dunedin. Not Christchurch, where prices are more likely to fall than rise in the near future, and not yet Invercargill.
Many years ago I produced a set of graphs comparing regional house price levels with the NZ average. They gave insight into the extent to which regions were being under or over-priced depending upon whether or not you felt there was a tendency for prices to revert to a long run average ratio with the country as a whole.
In this Sporadic I repeat the graphs. Using them may give you some insight into which parts of the country are most due for a period of catch-up price gains. Auckland is due for a plateauing and I expect that a couple of years from now. (Click here to view the graphs)
We can also use the REINZ data to get a feel for which parts of the country may be most gaining at the moment from people focussing their attention out of Auckland. The graph below looks at the days to sell data for each region in the form of average days to sell in the past three months versus the average for that period of time in the past ten years. Thus in Northland on average in the three months to this July it took 61.4 days to sell a dwelling which was nine days faster than average.
Noteworthy points are Southland lagging (maybe too far away for most investors, only minor Asian population base to which newer Asian migrants and investors would feel affiliated and be attracted, Tiwai smelter uncertainty, dairy downturn, fingers burnt waiting for the Great South Basin oil boom – which will now never come given the structural decline in oil prices – and the little graph above suggesting prices not as out of line with their long-term average versus the country as many other regions.)
In Central Otago Lakes turnover is running much, much faster than average. Lower NZD attracting offshore buyers, booming tourism, aging boomers seeking mountain views, yet prices not really out of long-term whack.
Hawkes Bay, ManawatuWanganui and Wellington are not really registering as diverging from average yet. But look at how out of line the prices are with long-term averages versus all NZ. And could it be simply that the average days to sell measure is being kept high by a rise in sales clearing out the old most heavily discounted stock?
Maybe this is the case in Hawkes Bay, but not Wellington and Nelson. So if you gave me $10mn and said go forth and buy a bunch of houses you reckon will produce the best capital gains in the next five years where would I look? Not ManawatuWanganui because when times get tough ability to liquidate assets becomes very constrained. I’d sink it into Wellington, Hamilton, Tauranga and a tad in Nelson. I expect to see a lot of talk soon about the good city life which Wellington offers, the ability to buy a reasonably priced house to raise a family, the fact few head offices are planning to shoot north now, the coming long-term benefits of the Transmission Gully Motorway, IT sector, culture, runway lengthening, film sector and so on.
I would be happy maintaining and even growing my holding in Auckland. But the easy gains from the repricing of Auckland’s housing stock have probably already been made, official efforts to stem the market are likely to be increased, and the country’s net migration gain will likely start to turn downward before the end of the year.
If I Were A Borrower What Would I Do?
As mentioned in the last Sporadic of July 30 the BNZ 4.69% two year rate is good enough for me.
All issues at ……. http://tonyalexander.co.nz/topics/sporadic/
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NZ needs to help Pacific ‘little brother’ on climate, says Tuvalu cleric
Pacific Media Centre
Tuvalu is in grave danger of completely disappearing in the next 30 years, but New Zealand is turning a blind eye, according to the country’s Reverend Tafue Lusama. Asia-Pacific Journalism reports.
Pacific Scoop:
Report – By Chelsea Armitage
New Zealand has been told it’s not doing enough to help its “little brother” Tuvalu to fight climate change, in a desperate call to action.
Tuvalu’s Reverend Tafue Lusama is currently on a tour of New Zealand’s main centres in an effort to highlight the urgency of tackling climate change effects in the Pacific.
He is calling for New Zealand – which he refers to as “Tuvalu’s big brother” – to take the lead in climate change action and help to save the sinking country.
“I’ve always regarded New Zealand as Tuvalu’s big brother,” Rev Lusama said in his address at the Love Your Neighbour event earlier this month, which was co-ordinated by Oxfam.
“But we have been waiting and listening to hear what our big brother will do for us as we suffer these consequences of climate change.”
The reverend, who is also the founder of the Pacific Islands Climate Action Network, said he believes New Zealand could be doing “far better” than its current efforts, not only to mitigate climate change effects, but also implement long-term emission strategies.
A 2012 Pacific Islands Regional Climate Assessment (PIRCA) report predicted many negative impacts of climate change on Tuvalu over the coming years, including depletion of freshwater supplies, an increase in coastal flooding, erosion, coral bleaching, ocean acidification, ocean patterns and rising sea levels.
At its highest point, Tuvalu sits four metres above sea level and is facing these effects today, only three years on from the PIRCA report.
The nation of 11,000 inhabitants has already watched at least three of its islands disappear, with no sign of slowing down unless significant climate action is taken globally.
WWF senior campaigner Alex Smith said that while Tuvalu looked to New Zealand for help, the nation was part of a “small gang” of developed countries which had yet to commit to climate targets and reduced emission schemes – in fact, he claimed New Zealand’s emissions were rising.
“We’re a regional leader and at the moment we’re blocking progress in international negotiations and letting down our neighbours,” said Smith.
The director of environmental studies at Victoria University, Ralph Chapman, said New Zealand had been running a “reactive” policy position on climate change and the Pacific rather than thinking of long-term solutions.
“It’s not unusual for this government. It has been really unwilling to take a forward-looking view on climate change.
“The net impact on vulnerable Pacific Islands like Kiribati, Vanuatu and Tuvalu – particularly the low-lying ones – is pretty clear. What’s not clear is that the government is doing enough to mitigate climate change, which would be my main concern, or to address the impacts of climate change.”
Trish Tupou, a postgraduate student in Auckland University’s Pacific Studies programme, spoke at the event about how easy it was to feel overwhelmed and powerless living in New Zealand.
“However, part of our privileges of living here in New Zealand is being able to be vocal on these issues of land erosion, rising sea levels and cyclones.”
‘Not an option’
Suggestions of relocating Tuvalu’s population are plentiful, but Rev Lusama said evacuating Tuvalu isn’t an option in the short-term.
“Relocation to us carries a lot of risks. It means we have to throw in the towel. If we relocate, we put our identity in question, because you cannot create a country within another country.
You cannot create a Tuvalu within New Zealand or Australia or anywhere else,” he said.
Tuvalu has been told it only has 30 years until it sinks. When the time comes, Rev Lusama said the country won’t go down without a fight, in an effort to stop other countries suffering the same fate.
“Even if Tuvalu goes down tomorrow, we will still keep fighting. We don’t want to go down for nothing, because if we do nothing now, then Tuvalu goes down, Kiribati the next day, and Bangladesh the following day.
“Then millions of people will be homeless, and that will create a big problem for our Earth.”
But Rev Lusama is not oblivious to the reality of the situation. He said his people, when presented with no other option but to leave Tuvalu, will prefer to be called “forced climate migrants” rather than “climate refugees”.
“It’s always good to migrate, to go somewhere else, as long as there is somewhere you can go back to and point at and say ‘I belong to that space’,” said Rev Lusama.
“But what happens when you are relocated, and then you have no space to refer to? We will become roaming homeless people on the face of the planet. I don’t want my children, my grandchildren, to carry that identity with them.”
WWF’s Alex Smith said that where possible, New Zealand needed to help make sure that Pacific communities could stay on the islands where they have lived for thousands of years.
“Unfortunately in some cases that’s not possible, but we really need to start taking action where we can, to save some of the countries that can still be saved.”
Victoria University’s director of environmental studies Ralph Chapman said “Mr [John] Key in particular has been trying to create the impression this was something we could put off for a decade or two, but I think the evidence is abundantly clear now that the impacts are already starting to affect the Pacific Islands quite dramatically.”
Lobby for change
Tupou, who is also a Green Party nominee for Manurewa, believes part of the solution lies in New Zealanders rallying Australasian banks to pull out of fossil fuel investments.
“Our banks are funding the fossil fuel projects that are sinking the Pacific. As customers, our banks care about what we have to say and we have the power to stop them,” said Tupou.
Since 2008, four Australian banks that dominate New Zealand’s banking – Westpac, Commonwealth, National Australia Bank and Australia New Zealand Banking Group (ANZ) – have loaned over $20 billion to new coal and gas projects in Australia and New Zealand, said Tupou.
“These investments threaten our climate and precious ecosystems. At the same time, these banks also have strong sustainability policies, but they are literally funding climate change and contributing to the impacts of climate change on our Pacific people.”
Tupou noted that none of New Zealand’s locally owned banks have any fossil fuel investments – yet.
Rev Tafue Lusama’s closing address referred to climate change effects in the Pacific as an injustice.
“We live very sustainable lifestyles, taking very good care of our environment and our surroundings.
“I always look at this as a punishment of the innocent, we are being punished for being innocent.”
Chelsea Armitage is a postgraduate student journalist at AUT University.
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byWADE…much worse than drugs…
don’t use one if you have one….take it out, wrap it in newspaper and bury it in your neighbours yard and you will live a happy life. You can follow WADE (from a safe digital distance) at www.facebook.com/bywade or look at more stuff and buy things in obscene volumes to show how successful and cool you are atwww.iammenotyou.com…]]>
