At large in the northern hemisphere Brent Marris of Waihopai Valley’s Marisco Vineyards answers Five Questions......
Brent Marris and his family have been part of Marlborough vineyards and wine making since the inception of the terroir and its associated appellation. In recent years the family has focused on developing in the Waihopai Valley its Marisco Vineyards and its marques The Ned & The Kings Series. We caught up with Brent Marris (pictured) in Europe........
What has been the impact of Brexit on your business?
The Brexit effect is huge and is due to the weak pound. Because we trade in UK pounds it has impacted on bottom line. A movement of approx 20%. Our fingers our crossed that it bounces back. Or, prices will have to go up, we fear. .
What are your hopes and/or fears for the in-progress NZ-EU trade agreement?
With the NZ-EU trade agreement it is simply that the closer we can get to reducing tariffs and other such charges the better. The more open freedom to do trade, the better from our point of view.
You have just been notably visible on the trade scene in London, and now we have found you at Prowein in Dusseldorf. How valuable are these trade fairs to New Zealand exporters and as a long time exhibitor can you spell out some dos and don’ts for the benefit of NZ industry at large?
Prowein has proven to be excellent from our point of view especially as both more UK and US trade buyers are attending. If you can afford your own exhibition stand then that of course is the best option. But starting out on a New Zealand shared stand is a good beginning. A tip? Having enough meeting spaces on your stand is vital because it offers more chance of serious discussions, the ones with worthwhile results. This is imperative, incidentally, in our experience in terms of selling in the UK and in the EU.
A problem in your sector has been in actually getting paid by importers. What measures do you take to ensure payment?
Payments have not been an issue for us simply because we deal with large reputable buyers in the UK. In the EU zone we have own warehouse space and staff so everyone we deal with we know personally. Communication is the key here, hardly surprisingly.
You produce Sauvignon Blanc, Chardonnay, Pinot Noir, and Pinot Gris. Define for us current international tastes and preferences?
Consumers happily enough still love our Sauvignon Blanc while Pinot Gris, Rosé and Pinot Noir are gaining traction. In regard to preferences it is our experience that people love stories and if you can attach a good story to your wine brand then you are ahead. In general, we find our brands are seen as good, honest wine brands of quality that have been around for a good length of time therefore are reliable.
|| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Wednesday 22 March 2017 |||
By-product of Marcom build up
Vodafone has joined in the online media gold rush by what it describes as “launching its own news website.”
The New Zealand subsidiary of the British mobiles telco in recent times has swelled its marketing communications force with television, business, and IT sector journalists.
The company’s “news” website meanwhile resembles an online version of the once familiar IT sector marketing support instrument, the house magazine.
The company’s news site hardly surprisingly features Vodafone in its community role.
Notably with emphasis on its participation in the post–earthquake Christchurch reconstruction participation.
Also its ability to deploy helpful rapid support services in Oceania.
The marcom by-product news site at this stage does represent though a potential challenge to the IT trade press.
This is dominated in New Zealand by International Data, a US publishing, survey, and events operator which publishes under licence here with such titles as Computerworld, CIO, and PC World.
According to Vodafone its “Vodafone News will feature behind the scenes video of important developments, offer advice and readable features across a range of topics for consumers as well as insights from leaders in a range of diverse fields.”
A heavily promoted video-voice-words convergence over hand-helds poses a medium to longer term threat to the media at large.
This is because by definition it targets the younger market, the one which increasingly relies exclusively on palm tops of various descriptions as access to news that it can use.
Since the heyday of IT recruitment advertising, as significant in its era as property advertising is now, the print proprietors have pretty much given up on targeted IT news, absorbing it into their general business sections.
Vodafone is not the first retail telco provider to move into the wider news sector.
Telecom was first off the mark with an authentic diversified aggregated news site for its Xtra users. This was then subsumed into Yahoo which expanded the already comprehensive localised curated coverage.
For reasons that remain unexplained this long established open site remains un-ballyhooed.
In this reticence may lie the gap that Vodafone has identified.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' | 19 March 2017 ||
Co-venturing Wellington and Auckland universities will rub collegiate shoulders with world’s major production engineer
General Motors subsidiary Holden’s arrival in Newsroom as founder-backer of the online information enterprise is GM’s second venture into the New Zealand information sector.
It was New Zealand’s major data processing proprietor when it owned Databank through another of its subsidiaries, Electronic Data Systems.
Databank at this time was considered the southern hemisphere’s pre-eminent non-governmental data processing operation in terms of capacity.
GM’s return this year to the New Zealand information sector carries value through the early involvement in it also of the University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington.
GM internationally is accelerating its recruitment of information technology graduates and its ground-floor involvement with the two universities will give it a special advantage in talent-spotting.
The auto manufacturer originally entered the information sector when it acquired Electronic Data Systems from Ross Perot of US presidential race fame.
With Electronic Data Systems now came New Zealand’s Databank at that time the world’s first and most successful nationwide cheque-clearing cooperative.
General Motors began to shed its non-core investments such as Electronic Data Systems and thus Databank as Asian manufacturers continued to pour on the competition.
Its new cat’s paw into the public dissemination sector of the information business in New Zealand through the Newsroom co-seeding also presents a valuable opportunity to the two universities involved, the ones in Auckland and Wellington.
This will be to take advantage of the commercial collegiate opportunity of rubbing shoulders as co-venturers with a research and development investing production engineer of this magnitude.
A constant problem for New Zealand universities has been to get on a working level with this category of production engineering multinational.
The indirect solution via the Newsroom joint involvement indicates a working opportunity that has consistently eluded New Zealand universities in the co-development sphere.
If the association looks a fruitful creative mix in automotive/academic terms then the news venture promoters could well find themselves with sufficient additional investment allowing them to take their foot off the paywall accelerator.
New Zealand browsers continue to exhibit a reluctance to pay for a service that they consider part of the free model.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Fidy 17 March 2017 ||
University of Auckland and Victoria University of Wellington have put their academic shoulders to the wheel in backing Newsroom online alternative to print media.
Their other foundation partners include auto company Holden and telecommunications lines outfit Chorus.
The association will allow the US auto manufacturer Holden a fresh opportunity to counter the Japanese auto manufacturers which dominate branding on the free-to-air television channels.
Chorus, which is restricted to wholesale activities only, will benefit from additional use of its telecommunications circuits.
It is unsure at this stage if the two universities will contribute from an investment point of view, supplying content, or both.
The universities have long resented what they see as a failure by the daily newspapers in both Wellington and Auckland to give their universities the coverage that they believe they deserve.
Newspapers have long been disappointed by their circulations in universities. In recent years the dailies have clamped down on publishing learned academic articles. More sensitively still, they have ignored requests from the universities to publish their copious degree allocations lists and other such honoraria.
They have dropped their educational roundspeople as part of general belt tightening, thus exacerbating the resentment
Newroom meanwhile indicates that it will have a full time editorial staff approaching in numbers that of a New Zealand metropolitan daily.
The original Newsroom began as a lunge into vertical markets by the NZX. The high-end web aggregator was then acquired by information technology interests which then in turn aggregated it with Scoop, the pioneering New Zealand online challenge to the dailies.
Results were mixed. Scoop stayed in Wellington. Newsroom gravitated to new parentage in Auckland that groomed it for its current apotheosis as a multi-funded direct challenge to the dailies.
There has been talk of the unflappable family-controlled Dunedin-based newspaper chain centred on the Otago Daily Times being involved. This makes sense because Newsroom will require print pick-up.
The failure of Newsroom Versions: 1&2, and also of Scoop to get print pick up was a signal factor in their struggles.
Newsroom Version 3 must have pick-up disseminated through print to let the public at large know that it exists in the first place.
There is mention of dickering with the Wellington based chain Fairfax in exchanging stories. But whatever the stated reason, the real one will be pick-up.
The new Newsroom is unlikely to get it from NZME’s daily NZ Herald or its radio stations.
NZME which has especially aroused the indignation of its university simply by ignoring it gives all the signs of being the target-in-chief for this curious merger of industry and academia.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk || Friday 17 March, 2017 ||
Will purchase appease shareholders and their class action?
The acquisition by Toronto’s Resolver Inc of assets of Wynyard Group points up the need for an international partner by New Zealand technology companies.
Resolver has taken over a slew of products from the Wynyard Group which went into liquidation. In doing so the Canadian company also acquires a user base, notably in the public sector.
Resolver’s activities in the crime-fighting, counter insurgency, and security IT application sector mirrored those of Wynyard.
The failure of Wynyard much earlier to acquire a big league international collaboration is all the more strange bearing in mind that Wynyard sprang out of Jade which achieved its global market share through an initial tie up with Unisys, and then with the UK’s Skipton Building Society.
Even so, collaboration poses a special threat for risk systems producers.
The less people in on the codes, the better. The less diluted their allegiance, the less the risk of leaks.
These systems require input from law enforcement authorities. Tolkien buff and New Zealand resident Peter Thiel’s Palantir is an example.
It is not known if the acquisition by Resolver of the Wynyard Group product line is sufficient to appease the formerly NZX main board company’s shareholders with their class action.
Meanwhile, the transaction reinforces a long tradition of Canadian IT involvement in this country which started with the introduction of the first PC portable, as they were then known, the Hyperion, then the Commodore, and much more recently the BlackBerry, long the Parliamentary standard.
Canadian manufacturers that played a big part in the telecommunications ramp-up included Mitel, Norpak, and Brian Tolley’s Bell Block cable extrusion process factory Canzac.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Wednesday 15 March 2017 ||
Story So Far---Newspaper Managers Ironical and Touching Failure to Cooperate
The extra month of unexpected additional breathing space allowed before the promulgating of the final verdict of the Commerce Commission in the matter of the proposed merger of the two newspaper chains, NZME and Fairfax, will allow all interested parties more time to study the implications of the word deceive.
Deceive features in the Commerce Commission’s own glossary of words, the ones that fall into heavy use in its own jurisdictional bailiwick.
Indeed, as a helpful compendium this technique might well be used by other such official authorities.
The Commerce Commission defines it thus:-Deceive:-
To cause to believe what is false, to mislead as to a matter of fact, to lead into error; to delude, take in:
We may use this crisp definition to parse it in the case of the two supplicant chains requiring the approval of the Commerce Commission to bring about their desired amalgamation.
Therefore does the desired merger cause New Zealanders:-
To believe what is false? Not at face value – the chains are overwhelmingly in the print business which is shrinking rapidly. A diminishing marketplace requires diminished fixed costs which requires economy of scale such as might be achieved by merging.
To mislead as a matter of fact? The chains have been candid. They want to merge. They are not, for example, seeking to establish a cartel, fix prices. Both of which are difficult anyway in a severely over-supplied market and one with no bar to entry.
To lead into error? The Commerce Commission in its earlier draft verdict seemed to indicate that it had in fact defined an error. Namely that the erring is in the elimination of editorial diversity represented by having one proprietorship instead of two, leading to a contraction in the diversity of opinion.
To delude? Here we must answer this one with another question. Would the “reasonable” person, so beloved of, for example, by libel lawyers, be “deluded” more or less by one single amalgamated chain, instead of two? The increasingly widespread distrust of journalists, not to say, contempt, might indicate that the reasonable person today already sceptically applies two pinches of salt, instead of just the one.
To take in? See “To delude.” See also bundling (below)
We may now refer in this context to the Commission’s own underpinning objective also clearly and prominently displayed on its web site. The Commission’s purpose, it proclaims is:-
Achieving the best possible outcomes in competitive and regulated markets for the long-term benefit of New Zealanders.
It is the three words “long term benefit,” that carry the freight in the merger context.
Without the merger, can the two chains sustain their score or so of subscription daily newspapers?
A curious element of the journalistic makeup, and one which cross-infects their management is an inability to explain their own case whatever it is with any degree of concision at all.
Another and a trait which has been notably on display in this matter is an inability to see something from the point of view of the other person.
Therefore one cannot take for granted that the two chains have explained to the Commission that should they have to close their provincial dailies then they will also have to close scores of rural free sheets that distribute agribusiness information gleaned by their subscription stable mates
Now to the matter of bundling.
This is an information technology term which refers to a provider rolling out a product which can only be connected with and used with parts and other add-ons from that same supplier which are said to be “bundled” with the original product.
The Commission’s veto of the Vodafone – Sky marriage turned on the notion that Vodafone’s subscriptions would become part of a bundled subscription package that contained Sky also.
For Sky, think sports broadcast rights.
If anyone is still in doubt about the significance of sport in relation to what the Commerce Commission might postulate as being “for the long-term benefit of New Zealanders” then they might contemplate its priority treatment by, for example, the free-to-air television broadcasters.
Any moral backsliding by anyone with any profile at all in a moving ball sport moves into the narrow early bulletin time band still allowed for authentic news, as opposed to the pre-orchestrated, or contrived version of which leisure/sport is the mainstay.
Any such similar behaviour by a member of a once revered calling, let us say by a lawyer or a cleric, is interpreted as being of little surprise value and is thus shunted, if it appears at all, into the tail end of the news hour.
The Commission in its veto of the Vodafone – Sky marriage took this singular benefit into account, the one of access to real time sporting rites of passage, and decided that it should not be bundled into mobile telecommunication subscriptions.
Bundling, customer capture, is another word for leverage. Is there any leverage bundled seen or unseen into the NZME- Fairfax nuptials?
One area of such coercion could be levering Fairfax subscribers into NZMEs radio stations.
But the NZME stations are free to listen to anyway.
In the heyday of the Newspaper Proprietors Association, the 42 daily newspapers of that era happily worked together shuffling news and advertising back and forth to mutual advantage.
This happy state of affairs reached its zenith when Reuters, in which the newspaper proprietors held 12 percent of the global value went public and generated a windfall which saw the retirement of the last of the benign old newspaper families.
Since this triumphal hour the ensuing professional managers displayed a touchingly innocent absence of cooperation.
This culminated in their failure to join forces in the purchase of TradeMe and thus allowing it to be sold at an international value instead of a local one.
If there are two less conniving, two less cunning mercantile institutions in Oceania, then they should be revealed. Ideally, prior to the Commerce Commission’s final verdict on the NZME-Fairfax merger.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Monday 13 March 2017 ||
Quai D’Orsay and Lambton Quay share a nightmare
The New Zealand Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade must now begin the difficult and counter-ideological process of accepting that Marine Le Pen’s National Front Party might win the pending Presidential Election in France.
The reason is that Miss Le Pen has pledged to extricate France from both the EU and also the eurocurrency.
Miss Le Pen (pictured) and her party according to the polls is now the front runner to take over the Presidency and thus the government of France.
The former Prime Minister Francois Fillon has dropped in the polls following revelations that the leader of the Republican (i.e. Conservative) Party had while serving President Sarkozy put most of his family on the parliamentary payroll for performing duties that still remain unclear.
The second-line Republican Party candidate Alain Juppe has ruled himself out from succeeding the beleaguered Mr Fillon, partly because Mr Juppe, also a former premier, had also been mixed up in what the French describe as “fictitious employees.”
This leaves Miss Le Pen, followed by Emmanuel Macron the youthful former economics minister under President Francois Hollande.
Mr Macron in exiting the government of President Hollande did not wait to become adopted by an existing party. He simply formed his own France En Marche—France on the Move.
The Socialist Party led by Mr Hollande is simply not in the running, and does not feature in any of the polls as a realistic winner.
All this is bad news of course on Quay D’ Orsay and equally on Lambton Quay. On the quays the fervent hope was that while Miss Le Pen’s National Front might win the first round in the election, the once solid-seeming Mr Fillon would wash her away in the second round.
If the current polls hold water also washed away will be two years worth of negotiations in formal support of the EU-New Zealand trade liberalisation agreement.
Also swept aside will be the European Commission’s mandate to put the trade deal into action.
The reason is that France’s departure from the EU, and it is likely to be abrupt if Miss Le Pen takes charge, will invalidate the central axis of the union which is the German-French one.
France is the link between the Nordic/ Teutonic zone and the Mediterranean member countries.
It is uncertain if New Zealand’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade has charted a contingency plan in the now likely chance that Miss Le Pen and her party will emerge victorious from the imminent general election in France.
But given last year’s upsets in the US and the UK a suitable such contingency scheme would be to have ready a shrink-wrapped substitute deal with the EU’s northern nations.
The victory of President Donald Trump in the United States indicated that the New Zealand apparatus did not lay any groundwork, notably alternatives, for an event that it most ardently hoped would not in fact happen.
To an only slightly less extent the Brexit development is a similar indicator in an antipodean belief in the status quo.
| From the MSCMewsWire reporters' desk | Thursday 9 March 2017 ||
Other countries that are not even “clean-green” have dealt with the tyre problem
Governmental public hand-wringing over the rural mountains of old tyres must be tempered with the understanding that central and local government was quite literally upto its neck in creating the detritus, noted the nation’s foremost developer of tyre remediation machinery.
Ken Evans (pictured) of Tekam Closed Loop is responsible for the New Zealand’s first all-size tyre granulator which converts discarded tyres into a variety of paving products.
Neither central nor local government encouraged the use of these granulated paving products and in some cases even discriminated against their use.
Government in all its forms had long failed to understand that the allocation of national and district contracts also militated against the use of granulated composition in roading and also in amenities surfacing.
Tekam Closed Loop’s tyre granulator is dual function in that it granulates the tyres in toto complete with their radial steel bands, or extracts the bands prior to granulation.
One of the reasons that surplus New Zealand tyres were being shipped to China was that the Chinese routinely used granulated tyre paving as a standard roading application.
Rubber roads are now standard in China, Brazil, Spain and Germany. The technique has been found to cut traffic noise by about 25 per cent, he noted.
Other applications in these countries convert tyres into ground rubber or rubber shreds, used to create ground cover for playgrounds, backfill for civil engineering projects, garden mulch, erosion control barriers or drainage foundations around buildings.
Low shock industrial surfaces such as those required for stock handling was another such example.
In his experience, Mr Evans noted, district and regional councils simply talked about installing granulation systems.
Though stockpiling old tyres in land dumps was now banned in the EU simply because they are not bio degradable, the practice continued unabated in this country, and showed every signs of continuing to do so once the current round of crocodile tears had dried up.
The technology existed in converting old tyres into asphalt, yet it was ignored in favour of instead formulating directives and policies instead of dealing with a problem that countries which do not even market themselves as being clean-green had long eliminated.
Another problem in New Zealand he said was that district authorities tended to consult on the problem with their roading contractors who had a vested interest in ensuring the continuation of the status quo, and thus doing nothing about the tyre problem.
Tekam Closed Loop developed the granulation system in conjunction with Napier Engineering and Contracting.
| From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Monday 6 March 2017 ||
Five Questions for Dr Don Brash..............................
Nobody today in so many different roles and for quite so long has stood at the centre of public life so enduringly as Don Brash. Economist, businessman, banker, politician, the former Governor of the Reserve Bank and leader of the National Party has defied typecasting. At one and the same time severe yet extravagant, austere yet colourful, scholarly yet populist, he has contrived always to reconfigure himself around the times. Now he has stridently intervened in institutionally-fuelled separatism. Shrouded in a protective veneer of high-minded fashionable purpose that makes ordinary people fearful to question it, Dr Brash vehemently, unequivocally declares the voguish syndrome as ultimately destined to tear the nation apart......
You are often considered to be at heart primarily concerned with matters economic and their corresponding data. Yet here you are now immersing yourself in what many might consider a socio-ethical issue?
Yes, most of my career has been about monetary policy, banking, and economic issues more generally. But my interest in economics has always been because of my interest in the well-being of society more generally. I have long felt, for example, that it will be difficult or impossible to maintain a broadly egalitarian society in New Zealand – the kind of society in which I was brought up – if average living standards fall too far below those in Australia because of the ease with which skilled New Zealanders can cross the Tasman for very much higher incomes in Sydney or Melbourne.
If we want the kind of healthcare which those in advanced developed countries take for granted, we have to have the living standards to support that healthcare. A few years ago, there was a big debate about whether Pharmac should subsidize the provision of Herceptin for the treatment of certain kinds of breast cancer, and it was noted that Australia did so. The fact of the matter was that at that time virtually all the countries which subsidized access to Herceptin had higher living standards than New Zealand did; those which did not provide a subsidy, had lower living standards – we were right on the cusp. For me, interest in economics has always been about the implications of economic policy for the well-being of society.
Hence, I was strongly opposed to inflation in part at least because of the totally capricious effects which inflation has on wealth distribution – those who save in fixed interest instruments being thoroughly gutted by inflation, while those who borrow heavily to invest in, say, property, make huge and totally untaxed gains with little or no effort. That has always seemed to me to be grossly unjust.
Will the Hobson’s Pledge Movement become a force in the pending general election?I certainly hope so. I find it very depressing that the National Party has moved such a long way from its roots in this policy area. In 2002, Bill English gave a lengthy and very thoughtful speech, demonstrating clearly that Maori chiefs had ceded sovereignty in signing the Treaty and arguing that the only way for a peaceful future for New Zealand was a “single standard of citizenship for all”.
In May 2003, he pledged that a future National Government would scrap separate Maori electorates, as the Royal Commission on the Electoral System had recommended in the late eighties if MMP were adopted. I made similar commitments when I was Leader of the National Party, as did John Key in the election campaign of 2008. And yet we’ve seen the National-led Government retreat a very long way from that position.
I applaud the fact that the current Government has accelerated the resolution of historical grievances, but utterly deplore the fact that too often resolution has involved not just financial redress but also “co-governance”.
We see the proposed amendment to the RMA requiring all local councils to invite their local tribes into so-called “iwi participation agreements”, involving co-governance on a grand scale. We saw the legislation establishing the Auckland super-city requiring an Independent Maori Statutory Board, with the Auckland Council giving members of that unelected Board voting rights on most Auckland Council committees.
We see the Government negotiating behind closed doors with the so-called Iwi Leaders Group to give tribes some form of special influence over the allocation of water, despite pretending to believe that “nobody owns water”. We see a proposal to make half the members of the Hauraki Gulf Forum tribal appointees.
The myth that the Treaty of Waitangi created some kind of “partnership” between Maori on the one hand (or more accurately, those who can claim at least one Maori ancestor, always now along with ancestors of other ethnicities) and the rest of us on the other is increasingly accepted as Holy Writ, subscribing to which is becoming essential for many positions in the public sector.
So I’m very much hoping that Hobson’s Pledge can help to substantially reverse this highly undemocratic drift after the next election.
You say that the National government is “pandering” to “separatist demands.” Which of these demands do you consider the most dangerous?
Where do I start? I’ve just listed some of the specific policies which are totally inconsistent with any reasonable definition of democracy. Most of those specific policies stem from the underlying myth that the Treaty established some kind of “partnership” between those with a Maori ancestor and those of us without, as I’ve just mentioned. But as David Lange said in the Bruce Jesson Memorial Lecture in 2000, “the Court of Appeal once, absurdly, described [the Treaty] as a partnership between races, but it obviously is not. The Treaty itself contains no principles which can usefully guide government or courts.... To go further than that is to acknowledge the existence of undemocratic forms of rights, entitlements, or sovereignty.”
All the specific examples I gave in answer to the previous question stem from the underlying nonsense that there are two (and only two!) distinct groups of New Zealanders, those with preferential constitutional rights and those without them. This is leading New Zealand to disaster with a whole generation of part-Maori believing that they really do have superior constitutional rights to the rest of us.
To what degree would you ascribe this separatist development agitation as being primarily a project of the political class from whatever background?
Certainly, I think what you call the “political class” is the main driver of this separatist agitation, together with arguably most of the educational establishment, where adherence to so-called “Treaty principles” seems to be an absolute prerequisite for appointment to any teaching or leadership position.
The same is true in the public healthcare sector. But there is plenty of evidence that large numbers of the “general public” do not support the separatist agenda but are literally cowed into silence on the issue.
I regularly get people sidle up to me in the street and, after looking furtively up and down the street lest they are recognized by friends or acquaintances, tell me that they strongly agree with me. One university professor did this recently, but swore me not to mention his name or university department. And some of these people are Maori.
Of course, Hobson’s Pledge has two official spokespeople, one of whom is me and the other is Casey Costello, a woman of Ngapuhi and Anglo-Irish ancestry. But two of our very strongest supporters (though not members of our council) are Maori – one a prominent member of the Ngapuhi tribe and the other Ngati Porou.
The latter was a member of our council when we first established Hobson’s Pledge but, because he is closely associated with a political party, withdrew lest his membership of Hobson’s Pledge raise a question about whether we are a front for the political party he is closely associated with.
He resents the separatist agenda because he believes strongly that it is patronizing, implying that Maori aren’t quite good enough to make it successfully without these constitutional preferences.
Bearing in mind your underpinning career in banking, economics and looking now at the broader picture: where is the country now in your view in terms of nuts and bolts things such as balance of payments and foreign debt?
Compared with some other countries, we are in a good spot, with the economy growing, unemployment fairly low and government debt modest relative to GDP. Our banking sector is in reasonable shape. Even the extent of the country’s (public and private sector) total net external indebtedness is somewhat better than it was a decade ago, though still high by developed country standards.
But there are significant problems just below the surface of that apparently rosy picture. Yes, the economy is growing, but that is largely because the number of people in the workforce is growing strongly because of a high level of net immigration: productivity, and thus per capita income, is growing very slowly indeed, and the Government’s initial objective of closing the income gap with Australia by 2025 is not only not going to be achieved, the gap hasn’t reduced materially over the last eight years.
The ratio of government debt to GDP is modest by the standards of many other developed countries, but the Key Government did absolutely nothing to prepare the population for the need to adjust, for example, the age of eligibility for New Zealand Superannuation if government debt is not to explode, relative to GDP, over the next few decades. (Mr English, to his credit, has refused to renew Mr Key’s pledge on this issue.)
And while the country’s net external indebtedness, relative to GDP, has improved somewhat in recent years, that external indebtedness remains at a high level, the consequence of New Zealand’s running a current account balance of payments deficit every year since 1974. Much of that deficit has been funded by banks borrowing on the international markets to fund the explosion of private sector housing debt, the result in turn of another serious policy failing, the failure to deal with the enormous increase in the price of housing (or more accurately, of residential land).
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Friday 3 March 2017 |
Will alert environmentalists, Greens, to renewable value , emissions reduction, organics
Napier advanced agri process technology specialist TEKAM is bringing to New Zealand Peter Franke a world leader in turning agricultural waste into electricity and in the process ridding farms of the effluent which increasingly threatens drinking water.
Mr Franke is the founder of Germany’s Bio Ost which is a leading developer of closed loop systems which collect effluent, notably the dairy version, and convert it into energy for refrigeration and other milking systems, and also for distribution into the national grid.
These closed loop effluent-to-power systems are commonplace in Germany where installers are offered generous subsidies to install them.
The other Baltic nation leading in closed loop effluent-to-power is Denmark.
The Danish government has set a short term target of up to 50% of livestock manure to be made into this green energy supply.
Power derived from biogas and fed into the national grid is exempt from taxation in Denmark.
Mr Franke will advise on the installation and commissioning of on-farm plants and will outline returns to users in terms of energy recovery and in obtaining fertiliser by-products.
He is expected also to talk to local government officials about the value of the plants in reducing runoff contamination threats and also how the plants reduce methane emissions.
Similarly he will outline the benefit in which weed seeds and pathogens are killed during the biomass digestion process, thus lessening the farm need for synthetic herbicides and pesticides.
Ken Evans of TEKAM said that in his New Zealand visit Mr Franke will focus exclusively on discussing the technology and the cost-benefits of the on-farm bio gas installations.
Mr Evans’ TEKAM organisation is working in conjunction with Napier Engineering & Contracting on introducing the effluent-to-energy technology to New Zealand.
He noted that he did not anticipate any discussion of introducing state incentives, subsidies for these plants such as exist in Europe.
Mr Franke instead he said would focus on the practical evidence of his company’s world wide effluent-to-energy installations.
The problem in New Zealand of effluent finding its way into ground water would though be a priority topic, he said.
According to Mr Evans, New Zealand had been an early developer of dairy waste into energy conversion systems. But these early plants along with their associated research and development had been abandoned when the millennialist energy crisis scare failed to materialise.
| From the This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. | Monday 27 February 2017 ||