Founded by Max Farndale 1947 - 2018
Departing Premier Emphasises status as non-professional politician
In the end his trader’s instinct told him that the market for John Key futures had reached its zenith and that it was thus time to quit the position.
It was John Key’s good luck to take up New Zealand’s portfolio of prime minister at the precise time that a baby-boomer backbone electorate tired of an extended doctrinal politics and instead required the stability needed to catapult them into an easy retirement.
John Key anticipated by a decade the dismay with professional politicians that is so evident today and he now brought to the job a solid earlier life as an international investment banker.
In the most effective National Party style he was also an outsider who inserted himself onto the inside track of the nation’s natural party of government.
From an everyday working class background his aw shucks everyman manner plus matching quizzical grin and horrible New Zealand accent were all genuine.
He brought to his decade at the top the professional banker’s ability to take his successes with equanimity and similarly his pratfalls.
He now leaves to his anointed successor finance minister Bill English the interrelated boiling pots of expensive urban housing and immigration.
His centrist instincts made him reluctant to introduce a capital gains tax to cool down the domestic property market. Similarly his businessman background meant he was reluctant to cap immigration which he saw as a priority for economic growth rather than petrol on the fire of the nation’s perennial property Klondike.
He was the first New Zealand leader to get on buddy terms with a United States president and nobody doubts that more golf games will soon be launched from his and similarly retiring president Obama’s Hawaii holiday homes.
The blots on his premiership are mostly made up of the bizarre.
There was the case of the Auckland café meeting photo-op in which coalition boondoggling was revealed by a hidden tape recorder lurking unseen near the tea pot. This incident then became compounded when enforcement authorities ostentatiously went after the tapes,
There was the Dot Com affair in which a North European IT entrepreneur was allowed to settle in New Zealand with a view to gingering up the digital scene, only to become the subject of a US extradition warrant.
The subsequent and continuing series of events presented and continues to present a Keystone Kops style of unwitting entertainment to the nation at large.
Then there was John Key’s personal campaign to change the flag. This was the most bizarre of all because it was so obviously bungled in that Mr Key was unable to advance any clear reason why there should be a flag change in the first place.
Such as, for example, the near universal confusion over the look-alike Australian and New Zealand flags.
Not all his positive efforts fell into the public spotlight.
His deft hand on his exclusive right to dispense patronage was one such example. His ability to conceal what he really thought, notably in dealing with only semi-informed questioners, was another.
Cites Dictator’s emphasis on health, education throughout Latin America
Fidel Castro was a “giant” who saved Cuba from revolving door coups and counter coups declares New Zealander Bernard Diederich who was a close friend of Castro’s since his ascent to power.
Mr Diederich and his wife were on the invitation list for the 10th anniversary of the Cuba revolution.
Had it not been for Castro, emphasises Mr Diederich, Cuba would simply be another “poor and uneducated” Latin nation.
Mr Diederich cites Castro’s intense interest in science and religion as additional, and unrecognised, aspects to the personality of the dictator.
Mr Diederich also emphasises the way in which the Cuban leader deployed his technical people notably doctors throughout Latin America and to the benefit of the poor there.
For many year Mr Diederich ran Haiti's daily paper and was thus eyewitness to the various catastrophes in the region caused by human intervention.
Mr Diederich was for many years in charge of Time Life’s Central America coverage. He was awarded the National Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award two years ago. He is pictured at the event in Martinborough where his New Zealand family is now based.
He hails from Wellington and is considered now to be New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. His odyssey started early in World War 2 when he became a boy sailor on the Pamir, the square rigger seized from the Germans.
Considering this too safe, he went on to sail in tankers across the Atlantic.
After the war he hove-to in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where he started his newspaper and began a tortured relationship with the Duvalier dynasty.
Now a resident in Miami, Mr Diederich was to deal on personal terms with all the Central American dictators over the next half century and his books on them are considered standard reference works.
Early revolutionary days (top of page): Bernard Diederich, wearing tie, with Fidel Castro.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk
Third Domino tumbles in wipe-out of political class
The decision by France’s president Francois Hollande not to offer himself for re-election for another five year term brings to an end the heyday of client-politics in the western alliance.
Known in France simply as “clientelism” the process is borrowed from industrial consumer merchandising.
It amounts to identifying numerous sector or niche markets. Then tailoring a special approach to each in order to create the desired mass market, in this case of votes
Mr Hollande, known in France as the King of Concensus, brought this whole technique to a fine art.
Anything at all would be tossed back and forth, tested, then tossed back and forth again for further consultation.
It was Mr Hollande’s bad luck that he was in the driving seat when France went through its most tumultuous period in the past half century in the form of islamic insurgency.
It was now that Mr Hollande fell back on his consensus technique which took the form of testing the reaction of his sprawling left constituency to sweeping aside France’s exaggerated code of rights in order to implement the state of the emergency that the situation required.
As was his custom, Mr Hollande sought out acceptable displacement activities such as leading parades to commemorate the slain in these atrocities.
He immersed himself in the Paris climate conference. At any other time France’s ultra-politicised politico-professional liberals would have trumpeted his presence at the high altar of the political class as an example of his mastery of statesmanship.
Instead his absorption by the liberal ritual was construed as still another example of Mr Hollande’s reluctance to bite any bullet for fear of losing votes.
Mr Hollande is a photo-fit of the political class. He started at one of France’s political versions of West Point. In his case ENA, and then zig-zagged his way forward, his pace accelerating during his patronage under the aegis of the regal Francois Mitterand.
Cruelly, and in the Latin tradition, everyone, and from all his niche markets, now has their boot into the hapless outgoing president.
The most vicious kicks in the guts are from his own former proteges whose careers he had so assiduously nurtured in the tradition of the French political class.
Celui qui essaie d'avoir des amis avec tout le monde n'a pas d'amis.
He who tries to be friends with everyone has no friends
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Friday 2 December 206
Earlier MSC article: The end of the Politically Correct
Giggling Gerties are scaring away audiences
Nobody in New Zealand public life has left such a vacuum of such black hole dimensions as television broadcaster Paul Holmes. To television he was truly irreplaceable. This is why they are out on the streets now looking for a replacement.
The word “streets” is important here because this is the location in which is likely to dwell the new talent.
Other search locations have proven to be dry wells.
The broadcasters have tried re-processing broadcasting types from previous eras. Most people only became aware of their particular shows when bearded characters marched down Queen Street in protest against their show being taken off the air.
They will not be sending their talent scouts in the general direction of university media studies departments or J-schools.
They are looking for someone with gravitas, a self-possessed type. A McLuhanesque figure. It will be recalled that Marshall McLuhan codified what works in the media and what does not. In television it was, he stated, that it was the camera that does the work.
The people in front of the camera only needed to stay cool, according to McLuhan. The must not prance around uttering naughty words if they are male. They do not have to nervously giggle in response to anything that can be construed as remotely amusing if they are females.
As with Holmes they should use standard English. Remember the show is for the people at the other end of the camera , not the ones at their end.
So there should be a clampdown on words such as “talkun” for talking “meeer” for mayor, “heed” for had, and so on.
Did anyone ever hear Holmes talkun about a group of, a collective of, a number of “woman?”
Another thing. The bulk of the audience now is in their middle years and over. Manners tends to be a factor here. So add the courtesy title Mr.
If this is too much just use the first name such as referring to the prime minister as John Key.
Anythun’ else? Ah! Yes, or as you might say “yeees”. If you have Key or some such on the other end of the microphone—why not let them get a word in now and then?
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Thursday 1 December 2016
Trust in official employment numbers fades alongside faith in political classes, institutions
In two current events that came to pass but which were not supposed to happen the real mood was disguised by ultra-positive unemployment figures that outcomes indicate were not in fact trusted.
The first upset was Brexit. The second was Trump.
Britain’s unemployment official figures could not have been more favourable to the status quo. At 4.8 percent incredibly even under New Zealand’s which in the English-speaking zone are routinely the lowest.
United States employment figures remain equally rosy at 4.9 percent and which again remain on a par with New Zealand’s
The institutions charged with analysing and articulating public moods we can see now were fixated on these figures which falsely radiated the impression of the naturalness of the conventional wisdom which was that Britain would stay in the EU and that the Democrats would stay in the White House.
How wrong.
These institutions now resemble a group of indulged children whose hands have been found in the cookie jar. They are unable to admit they were wrong, and why they were wrong. They decline still to learn from their mistake
Nothing illustrates this more than the revealing verbatim conference between the New York Times, once the most highly regarded of these institutions, and their in-house conference with the obliging drop-by president-elect Donald Trump.
The received impression is of a group of doctrinal dilettantes foppishly unwilling to countenance the way in which they misled the people who trusted them.
The sole New York Times representative present who acquitted themselves with any dignity was the proprietor Arthur Sulzberger (pictured) who gave the impression of understanding the failing of his own institution..
So why are people, ordinary people, not responding to these statistics?
The simple answer is that they do not believe them. Instead they believe now:-
The impression now conveyed by these once revered employment statistics centres on the cynicism surrounding the nature and reward of the actual jobs.
This devolves onto the once high-paying jobs in coal and steel especially being replaced by low paying jobs, often part time, in the service industries that have sprung up in their place. This includes janitorial type employment more suitable voters tend to believe for women than for males.
President-elect Trump’s message is for those in the once economic engine room states of the United States who find their high-paying jobs have evaporated.
The people who once worked in coal and steel and in production engineering have now seen their well-padded pay packets migrate into the hands of the service sector, notably the East Coast banking one.
This cynicism now compounded when the banking sector was revealed to have lost immense amounts of the nation’s s wealth accumulated by this very same productive sector.
Anger and disbelief now compounded when it became clear that the highly rewarded financial practitioners were to suffer no consequence in what amounted to embedded institutional bungling of the type that would have cost productive sector employees their jobs- --perhaps forever .
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk
Cites Dictator’s emphasis on health, education throughout Latin America
Fidel Castro was a “giant” who saved Cuba from revolving door coups and counter coups declares New Zealander Bernard Diederich who was a close friend of Castro’s since his ascent to power.
Mr Diederich and his wife were on the invitation list for the 10th anniversary of the Cuba revolution.
Had it not been for Castro, emphasises Mr Diederich, Cuba would simply be another “poor and uneducated” Latin nation.
Mr Diederich cites Castro’s intense interest in science and religion as additional, and unrecognised, aspects to the personality of the dictator.
Mr Diederich also emphasises the way in which the Cuban leader deployed his technical people notably doctors throughout Latin America and to the benefit of the poor there.
For many year Mr Diederich ran Haiti's daily paper and was thus eyewitness to the various catastrophes in the region caused by human intervention.
Mr Diederich was for many years in charge of Time Life’s Central America coverage. He was awarded the National Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award two years ago. He is pictured at the event in Martinborough where his New Zealand family is now based.
He hails from Wellington and is considered now to be New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. His odyssey started early in World War 2 when he became a boy sailor on the Pamir, the square rigger seized from the Germans.
Considering this too safe, he went on to sail in tankers across the Atlantic.
After the war he hove-to in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where he started his newspaper and began a tortured relationship with the Duvalier dynasty.
Now a resident in Miami, Mr Diederich was to deal on personal terms with all the Central American dictators over the next half century and his books on them are considered standard reference works.
Early revolutionary days (below): Bernard Diederich, wearing tie, with Fidel Castro.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk
Pacific Partnership union Presidential sinking welcomed---but public displays of globalisation grief still mandatory
The pending collapse of the Trans Pacific Partnership trade union will be secretly welcomed by New Zealand traders and policymakers alike.
One reason is that New Zealand offers no finished goods challenge to United States manufacturers.
The other reason is that the Trump Exit evaporates dangers to still flourishing trade with China which would have been tarnished by New Zealand belonging to what is in effect an anti-China bloc.
New Zealand exports to the United States are overwhelmingly raw materials for further processing.The president-elect vows to restore United States pre-eminence in manufactured goods of all description.
Mr Trump claims that over the past 20 years that the United States has financed the rise of the Chinese middle class.
This he claims has been at the cost of the careers and jobs of the United States whose own middle class has been relegated in many states to low paying jobs, if they have jobs at all.
Mr Trump’s overwhelming loyalty is to the productivity of United States rust belt states, as they are known, which saw him through to the presidency.
Mr Trump is pledged to revive specific United States industries. They are in:-
None of these compete with anything coming from New Zealand. Indeed, New Zealand can claim common cause with the United States in seeing its own textile industry shrink in the face of exports from the Orient.
In the last analysed statistical year New Zealand was the United States’ 57th largest supplier of imports.
The main categories were: Meat (frozen beef), albumins, modified starch and glue (mostly caseins), wine dairy, eggs, and honey, along with milk protein concentrate .
The one challenge in the process finished consumer product category is wine (USD296 million.)Wine though is focussed on the West Coast, notably California. None of these wine states are by definition rust belt states.
They overwhelmingly voted for Hillary. They can expect no favours in protective tariffsfrom the incoming administration.
On the president-elect global hit list meanwhile are countries such as Malaysia, Mexico, Singapore, and Vietnam, and Japan. These all compete in manufactured products with the United States.
They are all members of the Trans Pacific Partnership Trade Agreement and nations which the Trump Doctrine blames for taking away manufacturing jobs from his American constituency.
January 21 next will be the first day in office for President Trump with the proclaimed cancellation of the Trans Pacific Partnership as his first executive priority.
From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk - Monday 28 November 2016
Work dispersal contingency now needs priority over social engineering
| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - Earthquake damaged and currently uninhabited government buildings in New Zealand’s capital Wellington indicate a practical reappraisal of implementing a distributed or cottage workforce contingency.
This especially applies for the stricken government buildings in the defence and emergency services category.
These structures house people who are in information business and who do not need to be in the buildings in the first place, regardless of how safe or unsafe their condition.
Most of the staff are in fact candidates for remote working, meaning that they can just as easily do their job from their place of residence.
After a promising start in the remote working sphere which was characterised by such things as glide time and hot desking, the departmental scene in Wellington reverted to its literally time-honoured custom of bottoms-on-seats 9-to-5.
In spite of its intense susceptibility to other social trends in this same era the government employment scene after dabbling in things such as flexi-hours clung to traditional time/place work practices.
The sector clung to established practices with a singular determination, and has done so in the face of the infrastructure consequences so visible in the working week day rush hour traffic jams.
Remote working was taken up by the Arthur D Little management consultancy in the late 1980s. The underpinning facilitator was the technology of networked personal computers. This merged with the concept of the paperless office.
The demonstrable result was that the bureaucrat could just as easily fulfill their functions from their home, or anywhere else, as from their place of work.
This early official enthusiasm now gathered force as it coincided with the property Klondike which saw public service-grade office space literally spiral through the roof in cost terms.
Another factor in the early enthusiasm for remote working was that it now became legislatively and thus expensively necessary to house public servants in modern or retro-fitted buildings because of the threat of claims resulting from things like frayed linoleum (falls), rickety furniture (falls +internal anatomical injury) and poor ventilation (general ailments.)
The subsequent property bust and a huge new public building administration construction scheme, especially in what became known as the Parliamentary “precinct,” (pictured) dampened down office costs and it was now that the emphasis slid away from remote working.
The recent round of earthquakes and the vulnerability of this same precinct to seismic activity now indicates that remote working will have to be re-considered. If not as an integrated reality, then as a well-rehearsed contingency response.
Our foreign correspondent forecast the Trump victory, and now previews the fall of France’s Francois Hollande ....
| Napier, MSCNewsWire, Nov 24, 2016 | - The predicted fall of France’s president Francois Hollande in next year’s election will bring to a close the initial era of political correctness. He is scheduled to become the third big-economy leader victim within less than a year of the accelerating electoral power of the non-political class.
Mr Hollande is known as the King of Consensus. His determination prior to any decision to canvass every opinion and nuance in his own Socialist Party and also in the string of other French leftward parties conveyed an impression of dithering in the face of islamic insurgency.
Instead of being seen to be heading a tough reaction Mr Hollande’s nature lead him to be more at home leading candle lit marches, vigils and uttering trite panaceas in the face of the emergency. It was left to his prime minister Manuel Valls to express the public mood about the threat throughout France of rampant religious extremism.
Worse still, Mr Hollande was viewed as being over-preoccupied by the star studded Paris climate conference with its breathtaking ritual insights into the blindingly obvious instead of with the much more visible and immediate terrorist threat
The most visible manifestation of Mr Hollande’s pending loss of the presidency is the number of his own hand-picked cabinet members who are deserting the sinking ship. The “frondeurs” as the rebels are known are setting themselves up, they are still in their 30s and 40s, for the 2022 election.
There is though in the anticipated disappearance of Mr Hollande a signal point of difference with those other landmark scupperings of the political classes, Brexit and Trump. The difference is that this time everyone is expecting it.
The winner of the French Republican Party primaries is now looked to as the winner of the presidency. This is looking, in fact, increasingly like former premier Francois Fillon.Mr Hollande’s political career has been an inch-by-inch bureaucratic progression characterised by a reverse Clinton-effect process.
His life-mate Segolene Royale (pictured above with Hollande) with whom he has four children was the glamorous one. Her attempt to crack the French version of the glass ceiling was more spectacular than anything attempted by Hillary.
In the event she lost to Sarkozy.
It was now that that the blander Francois entered the lists and in doing so streamlined his approach by parting from Segolene. The go-it-alone Francois now beat the unpopular Nicolas Sarkozy and the ElyseesPalace was his and his Socialist Party’s.
Four and a half years later he looks like a president who knows he can’t win. He is unlikely to hand over to the rather more decisive figure of his prime minister Manuel Valls.
No major economy leader, not even President Obama, personifies so closely as does Francois Hollande the twin pillars of diversity and multiculturalism which in France’s case are supercharged by the Revolutionary code of the Rights of Man.
Few doubt his sincerity of purpose. It is just that as with the other casualties of this new wave politics, the Clintons, he found himself reading from an out-of-date script
Personally wheeled in drinks trolley to New Zealand dealer employees
Gentlemen
Your news of the deal that Henry Ford 11 sought to make with New Zealand prime minister Keith Holyoake in Wellington in the mid 1960s has the ring of truth. Mr Ford, and it was always “Mr” Ford, was like his grandfather the founding Henry Ford (pictured) in that he was a production and marketing genius. He saw opportunities in terms of great simplicity. He had also the gift of the common touch.
When he and his Detroit group came to Wellington they stayed at the White Heron Lodge in Kilbirnie. The White Heron was the first of the modern hotels in the capital.
I was employed by one of the Ford regional franchisees in New Zealand and Mr Ford had stated that he wished to spend time with as many franchise representatives as possible including those at a junior level such as myself.
Mr Ford enjoyed fine living and was a connoisseur of wine, especially red. He traveled with his own cellar. At the conclusion of the formal dinner at the White Heron it was made known to our group that Mr Ford was allowing guests overnighting at the White Heron Lodge access to this personal cellar.
All we had to do, we were told, was to ring an internal hotel number for access to the private cellar and its contents. A steward would be on duty there until late, very late.
As our own company party gathered after the formal dinner in our manager’s suite there was at first a certain shy reluctance to avail ourselves of this offer.
Time wore on. We got bolder. Eventually someone took courage and rang the number of Mr Ford’s own cellar room. A voice answered and asked exactly what sort of wine we had in mind?
Whatever you recommend came the response from our side “and bring plenty of it.”
The party resumed. A few minutes after the call there was a knock at the door. In came a substantial bottle-laden trolley being pushed by Mr Ford.
Yours faithfully
S. GibbonsPalmerston North
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
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