Ξ High-flying McCully prepares for life on firm ground
Ξ Trump's border tax would hit NZ exporters
Ξ Angel funds invest record $69m in 2016
Ξ Dunedin's Tuapeka Print expanding space
Ξ Northland iwi turns family pastime into multi-million dollar manuka honey operation
Ports of Auckland has bought out its joint venture partner in the Nexus Logistics entity set up just two-and-a-half years ago to provide logistics and distribution services around the country.
The Auckland Council-owned port operator today acquired the 50 percent stake in Nexus owned by the privately held transport and logistics firm Netlogix, it said in a statement. The company didn't disclose the price but the port valued its 50 percent share at $2.6 million as at June 30, 2016, and had extended a $2.7 million loan to the joint venture at the time. The acquisition brings the port operator's Wiri inland port manager Conlinxx back under its control, having poured the division into the joint venture when it was set up.
"We are grateful to Netlogix for working alongside us as we have developed our capability in this area," general manager supply chain Reinhold Goeschl said. "We are now at a point where we can take Nexus forward on our own while continuing to work in partnership with Netlogix to serve our existing joint customers and develop future opportunities."
Ports of Auckland's share of profits from the joint venture was $1.2 million in the 2016 financial year, down from $2 million a year earlier. It received $2.1 million in dividends that year but also recognised a $2.6 million impairment charge on the investment.
Netlogix chief executive Chin Abeywickrama said the sale lets both parties "accelerate the investment and growth in their targeted supply chain strategies" and they will keep working together in a "strategic alliance".
| A POL release || May 01, 2017 |||
Transport and logistics company, Mainfreight, has ranked at number eight on the New Zealand Annual Corporate Reputation Index, an annual listing produced by research consultancy, AMR.
The Index measures how New Zealanders view the nation’s top 25 companies across seven reputation drivers, and then ranks them according to people’s overall emotional reaction using more than 6,000 ratings.
The 25 companies included in the New Zealand Reputation Index are sourced from the Deloitte Top 200 list, which ranks companies by revenue.
"It is a great achievement for Mainfreight to be listed in the top 10 of the AMR NZ Annual Corporate Reputation Index in our first year of inclusion," Mainfreight said in a statement.
"Our culture has been key to this achievement shaping the way we operate. A 100 Year Vision keeps us focused on the company we want to be now and in the future."
Air New Zealand ranked first, while Toyota ranked second on the listing.
| A Trailer Magazine relese || May 01, 2017 |||
Engineering Students Must Rub Shoulders with their Workforce
Canterbury University’s dining firewall between its students and its campus site construction force personnel represents the most valuable control experiment into the causes and effects of the nation’s quality control and productivity problems which is the separate development of management and those who actually do the work.
Canterbury University in the middle of the last century was a crucible of engineering science, notably seismic science.
A series of earthquakes which coincidentally began in Christchurch demonstrated that the post World War 2 surge in seismic technology has somehow tapered off and that there has been for quite a few years a chasm between theory and practice
In other words the gap between what is taught and assimilated in degree courses and what is actually installed, notably in buildings.
Many point to the problem having its roots in the cultural void between those who emerge from a university background and those who emerge from a technical and hands-on apprentice background.
So why did the university with its large investment in engineering degree courses allow to be discarded the opportunity in the form of shared canteen facilities for its undergraduates to rub shoulders with the very people responsible for realising the very plans that they are being educated to produce?
This alarm appears to have been sounded over this bizarre, contradictory, yet indicative situation by the canteen operators themselves. They saw an immense volume of their potential income being diverted from their established canteens and being diverted into segregated mobile worker-only canteens
The students and their tutors appeared to have accepted the discarding of an opportunity to rub shoulders with these technical implementers of the theory for which they sought academic degrees.
The existence was referred to of individual identification markings, beyond that of high-viz, on each construction worker’s attire.
The matter was left to dangle. Yet it is hard not to draw the conclusion that such identification was/is in place so that should any nuisance be created, then the source can readily be pin-pointed.
The proportion of females who are part of the university construction force remains to be specified.
No mention was made of Canterbury University’s ample law faculty. Should any such occasion arise for such litigation then such an in-house resource might similarly use the doubtless horrifying experience to enhance the practical experience of its many students?
We are left though with the impression of the academics and with their refined sensibilities and their discomfort while dining of being quite literally within coo-eee of people who actually work and do so in the classical sense propounded by mathematical philosophers of “moving material in relation to the surface of the Earth.”
The university canteen operators did not appear to be worried about any mud or such debris brought into their premises by the university construction workforce.
The university is well-known for its extensive academic arts faculties and again an opportunity has been passed over for its students to study at close hand the people whose wealth-generating skills lie at the base of their hoped-for subsequent incomes.
The incident might well become the subject of a thesis, perhaps a doctoral one? This would emerge from Canterbury University’s Sociology faculty – and shared perhaps by its Psychology Department too?
Canterbury University’s Anthropology Department meanwhile may find the matter of interest in regarding to the disquieting emergence of hierarchies that is introducing under official guise these unnecessary and damaging ruptures in society?
Ones that impede the information exchange between the academics and the applied practical people who implement their plans.
| from the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Sunday 30 April 2017 |||
Emirates will provide an all-A380 service from Melbourne when it upgrades its third daily flight from the Australian city from a Boeing 777-300ER to an A380 operation.
The move will add 945 seats per week to the Australian city from 25 March 2018, representing a 10% increase in capacity. This means Emirates customers can enjoy even more seamless “A380 to A380” connections via its hub in Dubai to 18 points in the UK and Europe.
New Zealand already has an all-A380 service to Dubai and beyond, with four of the Emirates double-deckers flying daily from Auckland and another from Christchurch. One of the Auckland services flies to Dubai via Melbourne, providing a stopover option en route.
The additional weekly seats on the Melbourne-Dubai route will support more business and leisure travel between the cities and together with Qantas’ new Melbourne, via Perth, London Boeing 789 Dreamliner service beginning on 24 March 2018, offers Melbourne customers more options to London and Europe under the joint partnership.
The popular Emirates A380 has 489 seats in a three-class cabin configuration, with 14 private suites in First Class, 76 flat-bed seats in Business Class and 399 spacious seats in Economy.
Passengers in all classes can enjoy over 2,500 channels of the latest films, TV shows, music, and games on Emirates’ ice Digital Widescreen, which has been named World’s Best Inflight Entertainment at the prestigious Skytrax World Airline Awards for a record 12 years running.
| An emirates release || April 27, 2017 |||
Only age and hemispheres separate the identical twins of Social Democracy
Slight of build and with their perma-grins they even look alike. The two clever sticks share similar backgrounds, give a zig-zag or two.
Both are outsiders who put themselves on the inside – and both entered party politics at the same age
Mr Macron is from a wealthy professional family and he went into the Socialist Party.
Mr Key is from a working background and he went into the conservative National Party.
Both made their name and fortunes in big name investment banking, Mr Macron with Rothschild. Mr Key with Merrill Lynch.
Both displaced in their upward trajectory seemingly permanent institutional figures.
Mr Macron has swept away France’s underpinning centrist conservative party, and its leader Francois Fillon.
Both seem from a very early to have seen their destiny in politics. Both in their different ways are dedicated family men.
Both established strong institutional careers in finance prior to public life and thus boast that they are not professional politicians
A notable difference here being that Mr Macron did not have to wait for acceptance by an established party, and simply unwrapped his own, En Marche.
Mr Macron entered party politics in the same year that Mr Key handed in his prime minister’s warrant and quit party politics
Both Mr Key and Mr Macron are anything but dreamers. Their ascent is a product of their ability in the sphere of risk assessment: constantly calculating and weighing up the probabilities in the options before them.
Both understood the value in Napoleon’s dictum to the effect that those of high ambition and ability ascending the ranks do well to conceal their field marshal’s baton.
Mr Macron pulled out his baton a year ago when he suddenly resigned as President Hollande’s economics minister and went out on his own with his own party France En Marche which is best translated as France on the Move.
His calculation was that all the existing parties had lost their appeal and he has just been proved right as the Republicans were swept aside and the ruling Socialist Party hardly figured at all.
France’s left of the left, gauche de la gauche, was similarly swept from France’s variegated political board.
Mr Macron’s calculation can now be viewed for what it is. He has cleared away the clutter of parties from the landscape and has left the electorate with two clear options in the form of the National Front or his own En Marche.
En Marche is essentially a Gallic version of Tony Blair or John Key’ middle way, with its accompanying flexible and inclusive policies.
Like his Oceania avatar John Key, Mr Macron keeps his options open, preferring to give the impression that he will deal with the problems as they are encountered instead of sweeping them away with a ruthless doctrinal broom.
In Mr Macron’s inclusiveness will be his biggest operational problem. In sticking to the EU he must also adhere to the Euro currency.
This collective single currency contains 19 different public debts, 19 interest rates, 19 tax rates. All free to speculate in.
The shackling effect of this uniform currency is often considered to be the chain that binds and which explains why the Eurozone is taking so long to recover from the United States-induced bank bust.
Mr Macron might now be putting a probe into Mr Key’s stewardship of his economy which recovered so quickly from the same event that it seems a miracle that the nation did not succumb to a collective bends.
Mr Key personifies an entire anthology of French proverbs to the effect that the cleverest thing a clever person can do is to conceal how clever they in fact are.
He has simply quoted the Economist’s “rock star” economy value judgement on the success of his government.
Mr Macron meanwhile being from a Mediterranean nation does not have this need for public modesty and can let his light shine forth.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. || Friday 27 April 2017 |||
Primary Industries Minister Nathan Guy says there is a limit to further dairy intensification in New Zealand and growing exports in the future will depend more on increasing the value of products rather than the volume.
The number of dairy cattle in New Zealand has surged as farmers were lured by higher prices for dairy products while demand for sheepmeat and wool waned. The latest agricultural statistics for 2016 show New Zealand had 6.5 million dairy cattle, up from just 2.9 million four decades ago. Dairy products are the country's largest commodity export worth $11.3 billion in the year through February, and the government aims to double the value of primary sector exports to $64 billion by 2025 from $32 billion in 2012.
However, a recent string of reports has singled out dairy intensification as one of the key factors, alongside urbanisation, putting pressure on the country's environment, valued for its pristine natural wilderness.
"It will be challenging for the dairy industry to grow," Guy said. "There's no way that we can double the number of cows in New Zealand. One big opportunity the dairy industry does have is about increasing the value, not the volume."
In the past two months, New Zealand's worsening environmental record has come under the microscope of the OECD, Vivid Economics and the Prime Minister's chief science adviser Peter Gluckman, adding weight to previous reports by the Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment Jan Wright. That's prompted a slew of editorials and opinion pieces in the country's major newspapers and a new freshwater policy from the government which aims to improve the 'swimmable' rating of lakes and rivers.
Today, New Zealand published its first Fresh Water report under the Environmental Reporting Act which showed urban areas have the biggest problem with polluted freshwater, but rural areas are showing a faster-declining trend in the quality of fresh water in lakes, rivers and streams. The environmental reports come ahead of a general election this September and Guy acknowledged they had heightened awareness going into the campaign.
He said farmers were working to improve their environmental standards, having voluntarily added about 26,000 kilometres of fencing over the past decade to exclude dairy cattle from waterways, and investing about $1 billion over the last five years to meet environmental obligations such as upgrading effluent systems, fencing, riparian planting and monitoring fertiliser usage. He said new technological advancements, such as more affordable nitrate probes and new cow breeds which produce fewer nitrates would assist farmers in the future.
"We realise that agriculture does have an impact on the environment. What has been lost in the recent debate has been the focus that farmers have on their environmental performance," Guy said. "What farmers and growers want is scientific tools in the toolbox that can help them address these challenges. There are moves afoot to allow farmers to make the changes that they need to make on farm."
He said the government was assisting the industry through putting extra funding into growing international trade, and its primary growth partnership and national science challenge initiatives, however he noted the focus was on "adding value as opposed to volume".
The debate should focus on what was the appropriate land use for the different catchments in the country, rather than what was the appropriate number of cows, and science would help inform those decisions.
"Those are decisions that regional councils will make on behalf of their community when it gets down to understanding their different water bodies and also they can place conditions on consents which they do do."
Guy said there was a "disconnect" between rural and urban communities, which the government and industry were trying to address by getting more urban children to understand farming.
"It's an ongoing challenge that anyone that's involved in the primary sector is very aware of," he said. "In the past, often children had the opportunity to get on their grandparents' farms and that has probably changed over time. If we can get more young pupils to understand where their milk comes from and where their meat comes from then that has got to be a good thing."
| A Beehive release || April 27, 2017 |||
The Our Fresh Water 2017 report released today confirms the direction of the Government’s reforms for improving the management of fresh water, Environment Minister Dr Nick Smith says.
“This is the first comprehensive and independent report on the state of New Zealand’s fresh water and arises from the Government’s Environmental Reporting Act that came into effect last year. The issues identified in respect of nutrients, E. coli, sediment and fresh water ecology are not new and are being addressed as part of the Government’s fresh water improvement programme. The value of the report is in providing a robust, independent baseline so future progress can be independently verified every three years.
“The report highlights that New Zealand’s fresh water challenges vary significantly across the country and that the problems have arisen due to agricultural and urban development over many decades. The overall picture is that pollution from nitrates is increasing, from phosphates is decreasing, from E. coli is stable and that water clarity had been deteriorating but has improved over the past decade.
“It confirms New Zealand’s most significant fresh water quality challenge is diffuse nitrate pollution. The problem is worst in urban environments but the negative effects impact on a greater number of rivers and lakes in rural, pastoral environments. The first caps on nitrates were set in 2011 in Taupo and now 18 catchments have limits, as the Government’s National Policy Statement on Fresh Water is implemented. This progress will need to continue if these long-term negative trends on nitrates are to be reversed.
“This report is also a strong endorsement of the Government’s direction in improving the swimmability of our rivers and lakes. It confirms the validity of the recently announced grading system, levels of risks of the swimmability categories and that the current level of swimmability of our rivers at 65-70 per cent. The Government’s plan to improve 1000km of river and lake margins per year to achieve 90 per cent by 2040 is ambitious but achievable, with initiatives like national regulations excluding stock from waterways.
“The Government’s programme of work includes tighter regulation of nutrients, new provisions for protecting water ecology and the development of good management practice for farmers and other water users, as well as a record $450 million investment in fresh water quality initiatives. Our programme is about openly reporting the problems and a practical plan of initiatives which will improve water management.
“This report gives improved information but not a complete picture of New Zealand’s water management. Our new national regulations on water metering that took full effect last 1 November will ensure the next report provides far more comprehensive information on water use. The other area where more data is required is in respect of sediments. Fresh water is one of New Zealand’s most valuable resources, and this three-yearly independent stocktake will become a critical reporting document for ensuring positive progress.”
| A Beehive release || April 27, 2017 |||
Palace of the Alhambra, Spain
By: Charles Nathaniel Worsley (1862-1923)
From the collection of Sir Heaton Rhodes
Oil on canvas - 118cm x 162cm
Valued $12,000 - $18,000
Offers invited over $9,000
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242
Mount Egmont with Lake
By: John Philemon Backhouse (1845-1908)
Oil on Sea Shell - 13cm x 14cm
Valued $2,000-$3,000
Offers invited over $1,500
Contact: Henry Newrick – (+64 ) 27 471 2242