Applied management training The Ministry of Works was a prime mover in further education and this especially applied to ensuring that its engineers were given practical management training. Throughout the 1960s, for example, its chief training officer G.P. Rabey with the Institute of Management conducted applied training sessions throughout the country. In your anonymous communique “Do you Want Another Ministry of Works?” Your correspondent defines the problem which was becoming discernible in the 1960s of the government being the major operator, in this case of public works, while at the same time being civil engineering sector regulator. As was pointed…

An ex-employee reader responds to the question “Do you want another Ministry of Works?” For a while in the 1960s I worked as a labourer at the Ministry of Works Benmore dam site. It has been fashionable now for an entire generation to deride the MoW, everything it stood for, and everything it did. Yet I believe that the MoW is now worthy of some impartial scrutiny and especially so in the way in which it routinely went about its business in what are now viewed as critical spheres of activity in the productive sector. Among them:-     *  …

Since 1990 Dairy Production almost Double But Waste Water Treatment Capacity Unchanged Agri process threat to rural drinking water deliberately ignored You claim that pastoral pollution is first, foremost and always New Zealand’s top environmental priority?Let us look at dairy production. Since 1990 dairy output has increased 85 percent. So during this time we can say that the output of waste has similarly almost doubled. Yet waste treatment capacity has hardly increased at all during this time. What is your advice?Fifty years ago urban New Zealand faced the same problem and in much the same percentage growth. The cities were…

France’s English-speaking colony The Franco-German investment in New Zealand is just as extensive in its way as the British presence was in its heyday prior to UK membership of the EU. This is the main reason why the New Zealand/EU (sans Britain) trade deal is regarded with such favour by the two pillars of the EU. The scope of the French presence in New Zealand is especially pervasive encompassing as it does so many industrial sectors. It is one reason why New Zealand premier John Key seen here on the reviewing stand with French cabinet members was accorded such a…

New Zealand’s beleaguered developer ready with major global tech breakthroughs Kim Dotcom might have faded in New Zealand, his adopted country that wants to evict him. But he is on fire in Europe with his Megaupload2 product which threatens to introduce a startling new tech innovation in the form of the marriage of file and money handling. His new Megaupload2 product devolves into BNK2TheFuture (banking in the future) and Bitcache which is under the co-development of Englishman Simon Dickson of Bitcoin, writes our European correspondent.New Zealand’s latest information technology product takes the global IT industry into an entirely new sphere…

A set back internationally for New Zealand Progressives António Guterres (picture), the former prime minister of Portugal, will lead the United Nations after a rare show of unity between the two most powerful security council members, the US and Russia. This appointment due to be announced at any moment dashes the single most ardent hope of New Zealand progressives who sincerely believed that former premier Helen Clarke would be appointed. Helen Clarke, a campaigner of Clintonesque proportions in her long campaign also sincerely believed that she had more than a fighting chance. Even in spite of The (Manchester)Guardian in an…

Island State is Running Out of Patience. Geopolitics penetrated Wellington last night when at the Republic of China’s national day celebrations there was let rip from the podium a scathing condemnation of Beijing’s veto of Taiwan’s right to participate in the International Civil Aviation Organisation conference. The veto was calculated to hit the island state’s sensitive spot. Beijing’s official reason was that the veto was the response to Taipei’s recent political developments, writes our diplomatic roundsman. In effect the ICAO veto snub was calculated to hit Taiwan in one of its newest and most important economic areas – tourism. In…

  1. You predicted pre-BREXIT the end of the EU. But did you envisage at this time anything like the Deutsche Bank crisis?      Yes, Deutsche Bank has been in crisis for many years. I did write about it late last year in November in the Australian Financial Review. I put my thoughts down this      way:-      “Bankers are overpaid, bonus payments are useless and there is an inflation of fancy job titles in banking      “That was the essence of a speech recently delivered at Frankfurt’s Goethe University.      “Had the speaker been…

Campaign will boost house prices –Depress Competitive Edge. Napier industrialist Ken Evans is cautioning Come-to-Live in Hawkes Bay promoters that they run the risk of creating the very problems that their target market of Auckland residents are fleeing to escape. This is a property prices spiral along with associated pressure on education and health services. Mr Evans warns that Napier especially is one of the nation’s leading repositories of engineering and technical skills and that this was sustained by affordable housing and the presence of high grade education along with health care. “Competition for housing will make it hard for…

From an act of thuggery and violence (one at the upper end of the scale) once again a no-consequence scenario has come out of the court system  for the perpetrator.  Just a slap on the hand with a wet flannel.   Add to this a report in today's news that he gladly told one of his victims that he had won the case!     Well the reality is 'you ain't won nothing' - in  fact with the assistance of the judge this person has done the rugby fraternity in Wellington a lot of damage.   One wonders if the judge…

Management School Techniques are camouflaged under exhibitionist Barbarity The common sense in merging New Zealand’s dual main national security agencies, Communications and the Security Intelligence Service has been more than proved during the intervening months. The reason is that the terror problem since then has been clearly demonstrated to be more unstructured than anyone, notably security specialists, had dared to believe. The burden of evidence now points to individuals being under the direction of a corporate style client-management process with the manager-controller issuing instructions via the messaging services, writes our European Correspondent. The client management process in which terror perpetrators…