That’s the trees, but the it’s the whole ecosystem. Stoats, rats and other predators are decimating the wildlife populations too.
When you take key elements out of an ecosystem the whole thing is affected and not necessarily in ways that nature can accommodate well. Evolution is a thing, and where species have co-evolved, you get climax forests and stable systems. When you introduce elements that intervene in that outside of the evolutionary processes, you potentially get collapse. If even we thought that evolution will sort that out over the next centuries or millenia this is not something we want happening in the age of climate change.
Those Northland forests could be protected with the knowledge and skill we have now. Political choices from National mean they’re not.
Trapping could reduce numbers enough to save the forest, sure. It’s not lack of traps or knowledge that’s the problem, it’s funding. Personally I’d prefer trapping over poisoning (including job and small business creation in the context of kaitiakitanga) but we have the poisoning tech too.
Trapping could reduce numbers enough to save the forest, sure. It’s not lack of traps or knowledge that’s the problem, it’s funding.
How many thousands of people out there minding how many millions of traps?
Should we give them guns and ammo to shoot the pests if they see any?
It’s not funding either, it’s actual physical capability. If we want to eradicate the pests that were introduced then it’s going to have to be a major concerted effort across the whole country over a short period of time and make sure we get the whole damn lot of them. And the chances are that we’d miss some which means that in a few short years we’d bee doing it all again.
Me, I’m hoping that our scientists will develop a way to sterilise them all. Then we may have a chance to eradicate them. Unfortunately, this governments been cutting research through the stupidity of competition.
We’re never going to eradicate those pests on the mainland (at least not in the foreseeable future). In order to save the forests, we don’t need eradication, we just need to keep the numbers down low enough for species and systems to thrive above reproduction level.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time around trappers and in country more difficult than Northland forests. It takes surprisingly little to control a population in a given area. DOC and other govt organisations will have the research on this, but often even just having trap lines every x kms that get checked once a month can bring populations down enough for bird species to increase. You need to do extra in mast years. 1080 every decade or two if you have to. That research would have been done with a close eye on budgets (ie what’s the least amount of trapping we can do for the most effect), so giving them a decent budget instead of a minimal one would increase benefit substantially.
Put together small teams of people who are self employed, who love spending time in the bush, let them live in the forest with a caretaking contract so they can do other work there too. They can make a living from the possum fur and a bounty on the stoat and rats. Huge potential. We already have volunteer networks in NZ doing trapping, so co-ordinate and increase that eg DOC or Landcare or whoever put in the lines and registered volunteers who are already in the area (trampers, fishermen, climbers etc) do the line checks. These aren’t difficult things, they just need vision and funding.
my auntie was a possum trapper, one of my cousins partners and another cousin are full time possum trappers in the deep south, I have been a part time possum trapper – it is hard work.
It can be done but you have to be very fit, smart, dedicated and basically not have any qualms about killing stuff.
Could be that those qualities are in abundance out there with the not-employed – but it ain’t a video game and it is hard work even on easy country let alone hills.
Yeah, the biggest obstacle after funding and will is that we don’t have the same numbers of young guys coming through who go out and learn the trade. I guess I envisage us as a population having more physical lives in a post-carbon world, so may as well start now 🙂
At least some of the people I know that do it love being in the bush. I think that would be key. Getting to live in the wilderness would be a pretty big attraction.
That’s one of the major reasons we now have the luxury of pest free islands and some of our native birds haven’t become extinct.
It would be nigh on impossible to cover the Northland forests with traps, due to the number needed and there would be large chunks of area you wouldn’t be able to access on foot creating permanent reinfestation spots.
I’m not a great fan of 1080, but it is pretty effective in restoring bird populations where it’s used appropriately.
The comparison with the 50s is not that useful because how, where and when 1080 is used has changed so much.
Spread of pests is complex. Possums and deer will spread faster and more where you open up areas with tracks and roads. Some of it is just time. It takes time for a population to expand out of its range.
If you 1080 every 3 or 4 years in the same place, those areas end up with a low levels of pests. We only do 1080 on a tiny fraction of the DoC estate, so it could clearly be increased by a lot.
“It would be nigh on impossible to cover the Northland forests with traps, due to the number needed and there would be large chunks of area you wouldn’t be able to access on foot creating permanent reinfestation spots.”
You do selected ridgelines, and you do the line once a month. I don’t know Northland but I’m guessing it’s not harder than country down south.
1080 is useful, but it’s also got problems. I think it’s a mistake to rely on it as the main approach indefinitely across all native ecosystems (and increasingly across farmland).
I think that was the issue with possum trapping historically is that trappers would do the easy country all the time. It got rid of some possums, but the issue was that it wasn’t getting conservation benefits on the whole as there was plenty of country that still wasn’t getting pest control. I’ve been involved in pest control work and bait lines are about 50-100m apart with each bait station on the line about the same distance apart.
With bait stations you only have to check/refill every six months, and they contain a couple of hundred pellets in each one – I’m not sure how many rats/possums that kills, probably a lot. And you get complete coverage of an area so long as they’re laid out in a grid over the land.
With trapping, I’m assuming we’re talking leg-hold traps you’re only targetting possums as they’re the only thing of value. Rats are at least as big a problem as possums and they’re missed out. DoC does have the new Goodnature self-reseting traps that can kill 24 rats before they need a new gas cannister. That could be a way forward. Have they been used successfully in a large area like a Regional Park? Not sure.
In a post carbon world, 1080 is probably not possible (using helicopters). Or maybe if helicopter use was prioritised for critical things like conservation we could carry on for another 50-100 years, who knows. In the long term I think we’re looking at only being able to manage pests in critical areas and close to population centres where people can access on foot using basic traps. The rest of the country might be unmanageable. Hope I’m wrong, but that could be the reality.
Any reason you can’t put out kill traps for the mustelids and rodents at the same time as doing the possum line? The Goodnature traps sound good, and I’m sure if there was more of a will there would more tech like that developped.
Let people live in the parks. It changes the ratios hugely.
Yeah that would be a good way to work it. The Goodnature people happened to be the right people (industrial designers) looking at the problem of an archaic trap that DoC was using – the Doc 200 trap is still in use and it looks as if it was designed in the 1800s. The company got some grants a long the way, but it doesn’t appear it was targetted research. So yeah I think we’re just scratching the surface really without proper research funding.
I’m with you on having people living in Forests, Parks. The european approach has been to lock these places these up and people are only allowed to look, not touch. Contrary to what native cultures do, which is to actually live in the environment.
In a post carbon world, 1080 is probably not possible (using helicopters).
In a post carbon world you’d probably shift to using airships for the aerial drops of 1080. Bio-fuel and helium would mean that they’d still be practical.
There are some pretty interesting regulations around experimental aircraft above a trivial mass. Additionally, with airships the basics are easily done, but the control issues are pretty severe (especially for smaller blimps). Large sail area compared to mass/momentum. Sort of sucks in windy mountainous terrain.
It’s definitely a feasible idea – I immediately went to a sort of blimp roomba, dropping 1080 on a regular GPS run and returning to an automatic hopper station to refill/refuel. Payload a few times the size of a helicopter.
Whether that works for anyting approaching NZ weather and terrain, on the other hand… that’s what R&D is for 🙂
Great idea Pat. As Gareth says, who has the balls to sell and action an idea. It would cost Gareth and Key so are they for it?
The top 10% have the power to block and humiliate any possible proposers. And yet 90% of the people would benefit as would the Economy.
Deceitful fucks. Is all I call it DT. Peters said same thing it’s deceitful.
He sells assets and tells the nation it will be used for, then doesn’t give too shits about sticking to his promises and does what the fuck he likes.
Imagine if an agent sold your car for 5k, had instructions to use the money for another car but spent half the money on himself and only paid a deposit on the car you wanted.
When are these jerks hitting the road to campaign.
Now Bennetts admitted she lied about the sally visit.
Oh come on, time for a snap election or the dissolution of parliament , governor general stepping in. this has become absolutely ridiculous. Bordering insighting anarchy and civil unrest.
I bloody sick of this, and ready to act I can assure you.
The troops are advancing into NATO member Lithuania for the operation, but are heading in the general direction of the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad, a clear message that the operation is a simulation of a NATO invasion of Russian territory.
Anyone would think that the West wanted a war with Russia.
Oh, and then there’s this bit:
The biggest concern among NATO officials is the involvement of Poland’s “territorial army,” a makeshift paramilitary force built of gun club members and soccer hooligans. Two brigades of such forces are to “assist” in the operation.
National 48% (down from 50)
Labour 29% (up from 28)
Greens 12% (up from 10)
NZ First 9%
Maori Party 0.7% (down from 1.1)
Conservative Party 0.7% (up from 0.3)
ACT Party 0.3% (down from 0.7)
Other 0.6% (up from 0,2)
Polling was done between 28th of May and 2nd of June, the MoU announcement part way through so can’t take much from that.
Preferred Prime Minister:
John Key 39%
Winston Peters 12% (up from 10)
Andrew Little 7%
Colmar Brunton has frequently had LAB + GR at the low to mid 40’s several times recently, this poll basically returns to that recent ‘norm’ after the prior poll went a bit low on the LAB/GR block:
This poll, together with the last 3 Roy Morgans reinforces my hunch that the latest (April 2016) Colmar Brunton was a bit of an Outlier / Rogue.
All 10 of the Reid Research and Colmar Brunton Polls carried out since May 2015 have placed the Oppo Bloc ahead of the Govt … except for the April 2016 CB which swung from a 2 point Oppo lead in February to a 5 point Govt lead in April. The other 4 polls since February (3 RMs / 1 RR) have all placed the Opposition Bloc ahead by between 2 and 8 points.
All of which means … I await the next Colmar Brunton with interest.
This latest poll just solidifies that result i.e. LAB + GR are sitting at low to mid 40s.
Low to mid forties this far out is all good . if it starts to shift to the mid 40s and higher in the new year we might see key go for an early election.
The finer print of the poll separates the results into pre and post MoU, and post MoU it shows Labour support increasing by 5.2%, Greens dropping by 3.5%, Nat increasing by 1.9% and NZF dropping by 4.1%. So pretty much break even between Lab/Gr and Nat post MoU. NZF took a big hit though. Shown on page 9 of the report:
the big Australian storm hit Tassie today, more loss of life, catastrophic floods, evacuations. As in the Sydney storm, rescue crews are saying that too many people are doing daft things which diverts workers away from other work to rescue them. I wonder if this is an emerging extreme weather phenomena. People getting caught out more because of the severity, more people not knowing what are good decisions, and just a higher percentage of wrong place wrong time.
They need something like an electronic anti-rescue beacon bracelet. If something happens to them while adventuring during an extreme weather event no-one has to come to the rescue if shit goes south.
very much like the geezers in their four wheel drives. Innit?
I would assume that the security and first emergency team is privately employed. Each team comes with their own first response team. At the end of the day the guys that do the sport will not care, and at this level of skill and danger you need a specialised team to do rescue work.
Not really. Pretty sure the 4WD dudes were just regular people, not extreme sportspeople. And they didn’t go out to adventure in an extreme weather event that was a civil emergency, they got caught out by a fairly normal weather pattern (just like motorists and the NZTA elsewhere that day)
Sorry weka, but I wouldn’t have called the weather pattern that day fairly normal, and somewhere “regular people” would have prudently gone. What happened was pretty much to my reading of the forecast. What happened elsewhere, like on Crown Range was resolved from a personal safety perspective within minutes. There’s absolutely no comparison there.
RIght, but just a fairly normal storm for Central. Not a climate change extreme weather event like Australia has just experienced?
The sub thread is that I commented that extreme sportspeople who intentionally go out to play during a civil emergency could cede their right to rescue services that are needed elsewhere (I support their right to play). Sabine then said it was the same as the 4WD dudes. I think the situations are completely different, for multiple reasons, some of which I’ve explained. I don’t really need to rehash the 4WD situation (you and I will probably have to agree to disagree on their degree of idiocy and culpability there, my main point in the past has been that they shouldn’t be charged for the rescue). I was just clarifying that that was a normal weather even for May in Central.
Sorry, and thanks for the clarification. I took your comments to mean conditions were benign.
But in the same way that those conditions weren’t unusual for Central Otago, the south east coast of Australia is very exposed to high energy air masses from Coral Sea interacting with stuff from Southern Ocean. That’s how the sandstone cliffs along that coast have formed. They are relatively infrequent events, so the bold build their mansions out onto the sand dunes….
What is common between the two situations is inappropriate decisions people make in the actual or possible danger, as you pointed out in your original post. And the difficulty the same people have in taking responsibility for their poor decisions. It’s intriguing that the same people tend to inhabit the right of the political spectrum.
It’s this disconnect that makes meaningful discussion on pre-emptive actions to avert climate change almost impossible. I await the awarding of the Darwin Award to a denier for demise due to climatic events.
It does seem like a good opportunity to talk about changing risk assessment in a climate change world. I think there is the modern problem of people taking risks because they have 4WDs and cell phones, risks they wouldn’t have taken back in the day. And people who think they know how to do something because they’ve read about it on the internet and we live in a culture where you learn how to use tools from reading a Mitre10 tutorial instead of in the past when we learnt from people who knew how to actually do things. All that is a potent mix for people doing stupid shit.
When I read through some of the Sydney reports the emergecny crews were saying again and again how often they had to go and rescue people from stupid situations when they were needed elsewhere. We’ve always had people who do stupid or ignorant things (been there myself), but I think the numbers are greater now. And more people are less experienced at dealing with nature.
I remember floods and snow storms from the 60’s to 80’s, and they were real rippers, like delivering milk and bread in a jet boat, and Invercargill under water. People took responsibility for themselves and helped others, and got on with it.
Today it’s all the fault of someone or something, come and rescue me. The media narrative around Global Warming feeds this to an extent by narrowing what is “normal” and defining events with statistical return periods of 50 years as abnormal. And since weather records in this part of the world are so short, only a couple of hundred years, we have no idea what the extremes are on a millennial scale.
I’m not saying that global warming isn’t a very real thing, but that the appreciation and respect of our weather’s variability and power is being eroded responsibility put to “someone else”
And since weather records in this part of the world are so short, only a couple of hundred years, we have no idea what the extremes are on a millennial scale.
Wrong. Those are just the day by day records of weather. But any exceptional weather is pushed into the geology and the living organisms. That is literally what causes flood plains and erosion. Normal weather doesn’t do that much. Exceptional weather does.
We have accurate climate records for extreme weather about the last 20 thousand years for most of the world with an accuracy down to about a 20-50 year level depending of area, and moderately inaccurate for about the last couple of million years. It gets pretty inaccurate (ie about 50k years) after that.
Basically we haven’t seen anything like this since the Eocene about 34 million years ago, and we only have an accuracy in the order of 100k years then. This looks freakingly fast climate change.
Get used to it. At the current rate we’re looking at about 6 degrees C this century. That is something that we last saw happen over 250k years – more than 34 million years ago…
Get used to it. At the current rate we’re looking at about 6 degrees C this century. That is something that we last saw happen over 250k years – more than 34 million years ago…
As far as I can tell, we are going to beat 2 deg C warming over the pre-industrial baseline, in the next 10 years.
If Global Dimming particulate solar shielding effects disappeared, we would already be there.
And now we are consistently over 400ppm CO2, we have basically gone back 15M years. During the mid Miocene. And the temp then was way hotter than 2 deg C over the pre-industrial baseline.
The thermal inertia of the system means we won’t feel the full heat of today’s 405ppm for half a generation. Fun times.
a. we don’t have enough full time emergency staff to cope with the increase of natural emergencies, and all services are having a hard time finding volunteers.
b. we don’t have a population that is prepared to a. look after themselves in case of an emergency or b. be able to volunteer and help the emergency services.
c. check for auckland – i.e. emergency shelters – we will be told where to shelter when the emergency is ongoing – does that make you feel safer? The same can be said for anywhere else in NZ>
As i said in another thread, these are not free services, we are not well prepared here or anywhere else on the planet
I am not saying this to be uppity or aggravating, but as I have stated it before, we – the civilians – are pretty much fucked if we were to have a proper storm/flood/tsunami etc.
As for idiots needing saving …..we don’t need a storm for that, we already have them on any given sunday, see last discussions we had.
I’m pretty much on board with all that. I expect a certain amount from civil defence but generally assume they will be overwhelmed by a big event. If it’s s traumatic event like a quake expect some of them to be traumatised too.
I am curious about the number of people in Sydney that got into trouble and how many were just caught out and how many were trying to save possessions or thought they’d just get through that bit of flood so they didn’t have to spend a night away from home, that kind of thing.
Great. Hollywood has decided it will make a film about the Persian poet, mystic and scholar Rumi to address Muslim stereotypes in film, by casting Euro-Americans in the lead roles (not that that will be the limit of their imperialism).
“Politicians keep saying they are concerned but their actions, or lack of them, drown out their words. Any one of the analyses of how the latest budget failed the reef is enough to confirm this. Perhaps most astonishing in this shameful chapter in reef guardianship, the federal government tried to cover up what was happening by removing reef-related observations from a UN report.”
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Appealing To The Past: Action Zealandia, like so many of the organisations springing up on the far-Right, across what they call the “Anglosphere”, is born out of the profound confusion over what a man is supposed to be in the twenty-first century and, more importantly, what he is supposed to do.THE STATUE OF ...
The attempts of anti-democratic transactivists to (often violently) disrupt women’s rights organising is largely ignored by those sections of the left most prone to misogyny and authoritarianism in New Zealand. In Britain, however, scores of trade union and left activists added their names to a letter in July, defending ...
The Justice Committee has reported back on the Criminal Cases Review Commission Bill. The Bill would establish an independent, quasi-judicial body to investigate and review potential miscarriages of justice, and refer them back to the Court of appeal if required. It would be a vital backstop to our judiciary, help ...
by The Spark On September 14, a total of 22 drones and cruise missiles struck two oil installations in Saudi Arabia, the Abqaiq processing facility and the Khurais oil field. Abqaiq is the largest oil production facility in the world. For a few days afterwards, Saudi Aramco, the Saudi national ...
How much will NeoLiberal irregulation of the building sector and subsequent leaky homes crisis cost us? $47 billion, according to a new book:The total cost to fix all of New Zealand's leaky homes would be $47 billion, probably. The estimate comes from a new book, Rottenomics written by journalist Peter ...
Below is the start of another excellent article on the Freer Lives blog. Click onto the link at the end of this extract to read the full article. The punch-a-terf, kill-a-terf message pervades social media, always righteously delivered, chin held high. By contrast, the dehumanised “terfs” themselves, that is gender-critical ...
The Reserve Bank is currently planning tighter banking regulation, requiring banks to hold enough local capital to survive a 1-in-200 year financial crisis in order to protect consumers. The big Aussies banks, those foreign leeches who suck $5 billion in profit out of our economy every year, don't like that, ...
Its the usual story: a police officer beats a handcuffed suspect so hard they break one of their own fingers. The IPCA investigates and concludes that the use of force was unlawful. And the police refuse to do anything about it:A man punched repeatedly in the face by a police ...
From time to time we add links to our blogroll. The latest blog we have added is Freer Lives. This is a Marxist gender-critical blog, based in Melbourne, Australia. On it you will find a bunch of excellent articles which use the tools of Marxist analysis to critique the rise ...
Last Friday say the largest protest in a generation, as 170,000 people joined the school strike and marched to demand real action on climate change. The demands of the school strike were simple and clear: declare a climate emergency, set a climate target of net-zero by 2040, impose a total ...
Labour is a rather middle of the road capitalist party and earlier this year we discussed how far from being ‘transformative’, Ardern’s government is. An article published this week in the Guardian, by Bryce Edwards (political scientist and commentator at Victoria University), looks at Ardern’s business as usual performance. Where ...
In the hours since my last interminable wittering about the possibility of a Government of National Unity (GNU) in Britain, there has been a slight maybe development:A Corbyn-led caretaker government could then sit for several months while it enacted and delivered a referendum with the support of smaller parties and ...
Jeremy Clarkson says much like Greta Thunberg, Anne Frank “didn’t like what was going on”, but “she didn’t have a tantrum about it.” Former Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has offered praise to historical figure Anne Frank, comparing her favourably to 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, who he attacked in ...
Press release by Speak Up For Women Lesbians from women’s rights group Speak Up For Women are furious at reports that Rainbow Tick are threatening Massey University with the removal of their ‘tick’ if they let the group’s event go ahead. The group has been under attack from trans ...
By Duncan Garner Before you jump down my throat, nobody cares about the environment more than me. I have a garden, and since my wife and I broke up, I’ve let it grow wildly out of control, so please don’t tell me I’m not doing enough for plants. They’re ten ...
Local government elections are upon us again. It is a fair bet that, when they are over, we will have all the usual complaints that, despite their undoubted importance, the turnout was depressingly low. So, why do local elections attract so little attention and involvement from the general public? I ...
Yesterday the High Court released its decision in Moncrief-Spittle v Regional Facilities Auckland Limited, on the (alleged) decision by the Auckland Council and Mayor Phil Goff to deny use of a public venue to a pair of visiting nazi grifters. Based on the information available back then, I said that ...
Image credit:45 Things I Wish I Knew Before Starting a Blog I notice a few regulars no longer allow public access to the site counters. This may happen accidentally when the blog format is altered. ...
So, more on the possibility of a Government of National Unity (GNU) in Britain.Two things, first. The numbers in parliament make things very difficult. And anyone who is saying X will happen or Y is impossible is spinning. We can not tell and will not know until votes are actually ...
The government is promising tough action against climate change via the Zero Carbon Bill and a strengthened ETS. Meanwhile, the Overseas investment Office is granting foreign coal companies permission to expand coal mining:Coal Action Network Aotearoa has slammed a decision by the Overseas Investment Office to allow Bathurst Coal to ...
Don't You Dare Let Them Down, Jacinda! Many New Zealanders, especially young New Zealanders, continue to believe that change – real change – is possible. Do we have criticisms about the way in which Jacinda’s government has gone about “transforming” New Zealand? Of course we do. But the very fact ...
. . With some historical and present context, it should become readily apparent to Pakeha that the occupation at Ihumātao is not a free-for-all conflict for any and everyone to become involved in. First, some important dates: . 1840 . The year in which the Treaty of Waitingi was signed. ...
Forestry Minister Shane Jones is considering reining in on conversions of farmland to forestry, and also issued a warning to foreign-owned forestry companies that make up nearly 75 per cent of the industry. He said too many foreign companies had not provided enough access for domestic processors to get timber. ...
Speaking to Radio NZ, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters said the tightening of the parental category visa is a direct result of the Party’s coalition negotiations with the Labour Party. He said the new changes switch the financial onus from the parent moving to New Zealand to the child ...
The Coalition Government is set to cut red tape in the building and construction sector in an effort to allow more houses to be built, including prefabricated houses. The changes will enable the mass factory production of "high quality" buildings, slash the likely number of building inspections for factory produced ...
Since coming into Government, we’ve worked hard to tackle homelessness and make sure everyone has a warm, dry home. And today, on World Homeless Day, we want to report back and update you on our progress so far. ...
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters has hit back at National Party leader Simon Bridges who criticized the Coalition Government’s approach to crime, and said that the latter isn't credible in his attack on the Government over gang recruitment. "We've got as massive drug problem in this country. It is ...
New Zealand Mānuka honey exporters have welcomed an initiative by the Coalition Government to help secure the term “mānuka honey” to be used exclusively by Kiwi exporters, ensuring that our multimillion-dollar industry is protected. Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones had recently announced that a Provincial Growth Funding of $5.7 ...
Political commentator Mike Hosking has labelled New Zealand First leader Winston Peters as “the voice of reason in a government soft on drugs”, for the Party’s stance on drug testing at music festivals. “If common sense is worth a vote, Winston Peters is quids in,” Mr Hosking said. The Labour ...
Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau has announced Provincial Growth Funding to ensure work opportunities in Turangi and Whanganui, through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi. A fund of $500,000 will go to Rafting NZ in Turangi for a 16-week river guide training course to train ...
Treasury has shown that the Coalition Government has a $7.5 billion surplus, which is $4 billion higher than what was expected in the 2019 Budget unveiled last May. It is also $2 billion higher than the actual surplus unveiled this time last year, and at a size that has not ...
Official Information Act figures released to NZME show there were 350 assaults on officers in the year to the end of June, 79 more than the year before. The increase in attacks have sparked calls for more legal protection for first responders to be enacted. The assaults included officers being ...
“Nobody wants to see babies uplifted”, this was the pronouncement of Minister for Children Hon. Tracey Martin as her department, Oranga Tamariki, faces multiple inquiries into the number of babies being taken from their families. “But a baby can die with a single punch, “the Minister continued. “So sometimes, Oranga ...
We're making progress on tackling the long-term challenges: from homelessness, to strengthening border security, to bringing banking back New Zealand's small towns. ...
Associate Transport Minister Shane Jones has backed the ambitious plan to move Auckland’s port to Northport, at Whangarei harbour, which he says will be the “King Kong of infrastructure”. The plan is part of the recommendations of a six-person independent working group, which has recommended the Ports of Auckland be ...
A six-member independent working group selected the option of moving Auckland’s port to Northport, in Whangarei, ahead of other options. In what could be New Zealand’s most ambitious infrastructure project yet, a major expansion of the Marsden Point port could happen within 15 years. The project, officially called the “Upper ...
The final Electricity Price Review recommended prohibiting prompt payment discounts but allowing “reasonable” late fees. The findings of this review was welcomed by the Coalition Government, but they hope companies will follow through with its recommendations without regulations needed to be passed. Meridian Energy had already stopped prompt payment discounts, ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Parliamentary Under-Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF)through its skills and employment programme, Te Ara Mahi,will invest nearly $600,000 to ensure work opportunities for locals in Turangia and Whanganui, Parliamentary Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced today. “I’m pleased to announce the PGF ...
An export-led economy is one of New Zealand First’s key principles, and our commitment to achieving this is shown by the continuing skyrocketing demand for our beef and sheep meat exports. Beef + Lamb New Zealand's New Season Outlook 2019-20 report forecasts beef, lamb and mutton prices to lift from ...
Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today in Gisborne an investment of $17.27m into bringing “world-leading” food-growing technology and the creation of more than 100 new jobs in the East Coast city. The funding comes from the Provincial Growth Fund, and included a $15 million loan to LeaderBrand, a ...
Hon Shane Jones, Minister for Regional Economic Development More than 100 people in Tairāwhiti’s Tolaga Bay will benefit from two employment initiatives supported by the Provincial Growth Fund, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones and Employment Minister Willie Jackson announced today. “Tolaga Bay is an incredibly tight-knit community, but one in ...
Hon Shane Jones, Minister for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) is supporting Gisborne business Leaderbrand to produce salad vegetables year round and create more jobs in the Tairāwhiti region, Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones announced today. “Our support for Leaderbrand will help them build large greenhouses ...
“Nobody wants to see babies uplifted”, this was the pronouncement of Minister for Children Hon. Tracey Martin as her department, Oranga Tamariki, faces multiple inquiries into the number of babies being taken from their families. “But a baby can die with a single punch, “the Minister continued. “So sometimes, Oranga ...
Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones has praised the promise by New Zealand’s biggest banks not to close any provincial branches while the Coalition Government trials regional banking hubs across the country. The Minister said the announce was the “first sign of hope for regional communities”, many of which have ...
Rt Hon Winston Peters, New Zealand First Leader New Zealand First is proud to have delivered an upgrade of the SuperGold Card website and a new smartphone app, which will help unlock the full benefits of the SuperGold Card for 750,000 New Zealand seniors.Party Leader Rt Hon Winston Peters, ...
Delivering a key election campaign promise, New Zealand First is proud to have accomplished a long overdue upgrade of the SuperGold Card today. At an event in Auckland, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters joined Minister for Seniors Hon. Tracey Martin in unveiling the new website and smartphone app which ...
Another busy week, from speaking with world leaders on the world stage about climate change, to equipping our school leavers with everything they need to get ahead in life. ...
New Zealand First MP Shane Jones says Air New Zealand has "an obligation to look after Kiwis", and urged the national carrier not to hike up their prices after Jetstar airline announced their withdrawal from regional flights this week. The Provincial Champion also expressed his disappointment at Jetstar’s decision on ...
Fletcher Tabuteau, Under Secretary for Regional Economic Development The Provincial Growth Fund (PGF) will help fund a new dredge for the Port of Greymouth to ensure the regional fishing fleet have a reliable and productive harbour, Parliamentary Undersecretary for Regional Economic Development Fletcher Tabuteau announced today “Last year the movements of ...
Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones said he was "immensely disappointed" at the withdrawal of the Jetstar airline from regional routes. He has also warned national carrier Air New Zealand not to capitalise on the Australian budget airline’s decision by “gouging” regional air travellers. "Air New Zealand has historically challenged ...
International credit ratings agency Moody's gave a glowing assessment of New Zealand’s economy in its latest report, which ranks the country’s economic strength as "very high" while saying growth remains "robust". The report says it's expected New Zealand's economy will grow between 2.5 and 3 percent in the next few ...
The Coalition Government is allocating nearly $6 million to a campaign to stop Australian beekeepers marketing their products as "mānuka" honey. This move comes after Regional Economic Development Minister Shane Jones accused Australian honey producers of trying to steal what was indigenous to New Zealand. "The Aussies are trying to ...
The Provincial Growth Fund has provided $400,000 to Great South to help the agency drive Southland's regional economic development aspirations. The funding will allow Great South, which is Southland's economic development agency, to appoint a portfolio manager and a project support adviser, who will provide project management expertise and support ...
Hon Shane Jones, Minister of Forestry The One Billion Trees Fund has just hit two significant milestones that will create more than 7,500 hectares of new forest cover, Forestry Minister Shane Jones says. Speaking at a celebratory dinner at Parliament to mark 100 years of the New Zealand Forestry Service, Minister ...
The Government is moving swiftly to change the law to improve the welfare and pastoral care of students living in university halls of residence and other tertiary hostels. Cabinet has agreed to several changes, including creating a new mandatory Code of Practice that sets out the duty of pastoral care ...
The Minister for Conservation Eugenie Sage has launched a new comprehensive trapping guide for community trappers to help them protect our native birds, plants and other wildlife, at Zealandia in Wellington today. ‘A practical guide to trapping’, has been developed by the Department of Conservation (DOC), and was launched during ...
Associate Health Minister Julie Anne Genter welcomes PHARMAC’s move to improve access to long-acting reversible contraception (LARCs). PHARMAC has today announced it will fund the full cost of Mirena and Jaydess for anyone seeking long term contraception, lifting previous restrictions on access to Mirena. “I welcome women having greater choices ...
The Government has approved the next stage of a major redevelopment of Taranaki Base Hospital, which will deliver new and improved facilities for patients. Health Minister Dr David Clark has announced details of a $300 million dollar project to build a new East Wing at the New Plymouth hospital. It ...
Extra funding will allow Rural Support Trusts to help farming families, says Minister for Rural Communities and Agriculture Damien O’Connor. “I know that rural families are worried about some of the challenges facing them, including the ongoing uncertainty created by the Mycoplasma bovis outbreak. “Those concerns sit alongside ongoing worries ...
Thank you for the opportunity to be here to present certificates to the 16 graduates who have completed a beekeeping course delivered by the Howard League. Let us start by acknowledging Auckland Prison’s Deputy Prison Director Tom Sherlock, and Acting Assistant Regional Commissioner of Corrections Northern Region Scott Walker - ...
Finance Minister Grant Robertson leaves this weekend to attend the APEC Finance Ministers meeting in Santiago, Chile. Discussions between APEC Finance Ministers at the meeting will include the effects of the current global economic uncertainty, risks for APEC economies and sustainable development of the region. While at APEC Grant Robertson ...
The Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio says for Pacific people, language can be a source of strength. It can help ground us and give us confidence. When we speak them, our languages provide us with an immediate and intimate access to our identity and our story - and ...
The Coalition Government has announced an action plan to improve the wellbeing of disabled New Zealanders by addressing inequalities in play, active recreation and sport. The initiative includes training to develop a workforce that understands the needs of children and young people with a range of impairments, advocacy for fit ...
The construction sector is being freed up to allow more homes to be built more quickly as the Government cuts through some of the red tape of the Building Act. “Every New Zealander deserves a warm, dry, safe home and old inefficiencies in the Building Act make building slow and ...
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has welcomed further details on the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall’s visit to New Zealand next month. Their Royal Highnesses will visit New Zealand from 17-23 November – their third joint visit to New Zealand and first in four years. They arrive in Auckland ...
Minister of State for Trade and Export Growth and Minister of Agriculture, Damien O’Connor, heads to Thailand today to attend the final Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) Ministerial meeting, as negotiations enter their final stages. “The RCEP Agreement would anchor New Zealand in a regional agreement that covers 16 countries, ...
Pacific young people living in the Hawke’s Bay, Southland and Otago regions will have access to support services that have proved successful in helping young people find new earning and learning opportunities. “Tupu Aotearoa is about changing Pacific young peoples’ lives. Our young people are talented, they are smart, they ...
Introduction As the Minister for ACC I thank you all for the work that you do supporting New Zealanders in their literally most vulnerable moments. From those who hold people’s lives in their hands, to the people who research technique, technology and trends, your work is highly valued. A special ...
Notes prepared for speeches in Christchurch – Wednesday 9 October 2019 Today’s topic, “trends and opportunities for the New Zealand economy,” is certainly one getting a great deal of commentary at the moment. Looking across the media landscape lately you’ll notice we aren’t the only ones having this discussion. There ...
Minister of Health Dr David Clark and Associate Minister of Health Peeni Henare say this year’s World Mental Health Day theme is a reminder of why the Government’s work on mental health is so important. “This year the World Federation for Mental Health has made suicide prevention the main theme ...
Associate Arts, Culture and Heritage Minister Carmel Sepuloni will represent the government at Australia’s Meeting of Cultural Ministers in Adelaide this week. “This year’s meeting is special because New Zealand is expected to become an International Member of the Meeting of Cultural Ministers at this Australian forum,” Carmel Sepuloni said. “The meeting is an opportunity to ...
The Greater Christchurch Claims Resolution Service has resolved 608 insurance and EQC claims in its first year in operation, Minister Megan Woods has announced. The government service, which celebrates its first birthday today, provides a one stop shop to help Cantabrians still battling to get their homes repaired or rebuilt ...
Today’s topic, “trends and opportunities for the New Zealand economy,” is certainly one getting a great deal of commentary at the moment. Looking across the media landscape lately you’ll notice we aren’t the only ones having this discussion. There has been an increasing amount of attention paid to the outlook ...
The Government is acting swiftly to strengthen NZTA’s regulatory role following a review into the Transport Agency, and Ministry of Transport’s performance as its monitor, Transport Minister Phil Twyford said today. An independent review by Martin Jenkins has found NZTA failed to properly regulate the transport sector under the previous ...
The Netherlands and New Zealand have a long-standing and close relationship based on many shared interests and values. We value the rule of law, our democracies, and multilateralism. And we value our environment – at home and globally. Right now there are major global challenges in all of these areas – ...
The Government is putting right a decade’s worth of underpayment to nurses, doctors and other health workers, says Health Minister Dr David Clark. Initial sampling of District Health Boards payroll records has found that around $550-$650 million is owed to DHB staff to comply with the Holidays Act. It’s expected ...
A strong surplus and low debt show the economy is performing well, and means the Government is in a good position to meet the challenges of global economic uncertainty. “The surplus and low levels of debt show the economy is in good shape. This allows the Government to spend more ...
New applications from mining company OceanaGold to purchase land in Waihi for new tailings ponds associated with its gold mines have been approved. Minister of Finance Grant Robertson and Associate Minister of Finance David Parker considered the applications under the Overseas Investment Act. Earlier this year, applications from OceanaGold to ...
New Zealanders in Tūranganui-a-Kiwa / Poverty Bay will witness Māori, Pākehā and Pacific voyaging traditions come together today as the Tuia 250 Voyage flotilla assembles for the first time, Māori Crown Relations: Te Arawhiti Minister Kelvin Davis says. “Tuia 250 is a national commemoration and an opportunity for honest conversations ...
Minister for Trade and Export Growth David Parker leaves tomorrow for Dubai, London and Berlin for a series of meetings to advance New Zealand’s trade interests. In Dubai he will visit New Zealand’s Pavilion at Expo 2020 where construction is underway. There he will meet Minister of State for International Cooperation, Her ...
Confirmation that PHARMAC will fund two new cancer drugs is further evidence of the good progress the Government is making to improve the treatment of New Zealand’s leading cause of death, Health Minister David Clark says. From 1 December PHARMAC will fund alectinib (Alecensa) for ALK positive advanced non-small cell ...
An additional $2.7 million has been announced for the Government Strategy for Women and Girls in Sport and Active Recreation on the first anniversary of the strategy’s launch. Sport and Recreation Minister Grant Robertson gave the opening address to the first Sport NZ Women + Girls Summit in Wellington today, ...
As part of its work to ensure businesses can get the skilled workers they need, the Coalition Government is re-opening and re-setting the Parent Category visa programme, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. The move will: support skilled migrants who help fill New Zealand’s skills gaps by providing a pathway for ...
Minister of Defence Ron Mark has today announced Major General Evan Williams of the New Zealand Defence Force has been selected as the commander of a significant, longstanding peacekeeping mission in the Middle East. In December, Major General Williams takes over as Force Commander for the Multinational Force and Observers ...
A record number of nurses are now working to deliver health services to New Zealanders as the Government’s increased funding and new initiatives rebuild key workforces start to show results, Health Minister Dr David Clark says. • 1458 more DHB nurses since the Government took office • 106 more midwives ...
Farmer and former Nuffield scholar Mel Poulton has been appointed New Zealand’s Special Agricultural Trade Envoy, Minister for Trade and Export Growth, David Parker, and Minister of Agriculture, Damien O’Connor, announced today. The position supports key Government objectives, including raising the value of New Zealand agricultural goods and services. Mel is ...
New Zealand’s Pacific and Māori voyaging heritage is acknowledged and celebrated today as waka of the Tuia 250 voyage flotilla arrive in Tūranga / Gisborne. “Today we celebrate Tangata Whenua, the first people of Aotearoa, and the triumphs of the voyaging tradition that brought our ancestors here from Polynesia 1000 ...
“Fijian Language Week starts on Sunday and the theme reminds us how important it is that we each have something to anchor ourselves to, something that can help us pause and feel in control in a rapidly changing world,” says Minister for Pacific Peoples Aupito William Sio. “Family, culture, faith, ...
The Government is establishing an Airspace Integration Trials Programme to support the safe testing and development of advanced unmanned aircraft and accelerate their integration into the aviation system, Research, Science and Innovation Minister Megan Woods announced today. The Government will work with leading, innovative aviation industry partners to test and ...
Transport Minister Phil Twyford today welcomed the NZ Transport Agency’s decision to fund urgent safety improvements and confirm the designation of the Ōtaki to North of Levin highway. Safety upgrades will be made along 23.4km of the existing state highway, running along SH1 from the end of the Peka Peka ...
New Zealand playing its part in Asia-Pacific and globally are behind changes announced today to the Coalition Government’s three year refugee quota policy, Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway says. “We are proud to be a welcoming and inclusive nation committed to supporting some of the world’s most vulnerable people to rebuild ...
Creating thriving regions and inclusive local communities is the aim of the Welcoming Communities programme being rolled out across the country, says Immigration Minister Iain Lees-Galloway today. A successful pilot of the scheme ran over the last 2 years led by Immigration New Zealand and involved ten councils across five regions ...
Takahē may be flightless but their population is flying high with the official count reaching 418 after a record breeding season that produced an estimated 65 juveniles, the Minister of Conservation Eugenie Sage announced today. “The population reaching a high of 418 is great news for takahē which were considered ...
New Zealand is today taking action to reduce the potent global warming hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) gases, Climate Minister James Shaw and Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage announced today. “The global agreement to reduce these potent greenhouse gases is another step in New Zealand’s commitment to reduce global warming. It is estimated ...
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: A pair of polls put pressure on the Labour Party, a wild night of weather in the North Island, and Shane Jones snapped brandishing a semi-automatic.Parliament resumes today after a fortnight recess, and MPs were given a welcome-back present in ...
Mandy Hager, the newly elected head of the New Zealand Society of Authors, is lobbying the government to improve the lot of writers - to no avail, despite the Prime Minister's championing of the arts. ...
Given the vast impacts that poor diet have had on global health, a deficit in nutrition education in medicine represents a big problem, writes Dr Jennifer Crowley. ...
Any time Olympian Luuka Jones needs advice or encouragement in her pursuit of more canoe slalom success, she doesn’t have to look far. Jones’ coach, Campbell Walsh, is also her partner. ...
Competition for the rights to broadcast sports matches involving NZ’s top teams has produced a bonanza for the sporting bodies, forcing media companies to be a lot more innovative. ...
The Wellington suburb’s successful opposition to a proposed Bottle-O shows how the system is biased towards communities with the organisation, capacity and resources to protest effectively, says Jenesa Jeram.For those unfamiliar with Wellington geography, Khandallah is a Very Nice place to live (Aucklanders: think Remuera). So when it was reported ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Mark Humphery-Jenner, Associate Professor of Finance, UNSW The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission conducted an inquiry into mortgage pricing as recently as last year. Now Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has asked it to do another, broader one, in order to ensure the banks’ ...
Dr Bryce EdwardsThe results of the local government elections appear to show that New Zealanders are generally supportive of a more diverse range of representatives, having voted in greater numbers for candidates from traditionally under-represented groups. The elections have therefore modernised our councils in a small but very significant ...
The Inquiry has today published Minute No 21. This Minute sets out how the Inquiry intends to proceed given that the Attorney-General the Hon David Parker has agreed to extend the Inquiry’s reporting date by three months to 31 March 2020. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Grace Skrzypiec, Senior Lecturer, Flinders University Many Australian students don’t know the difference between banter and bullying, with some saying they joke about wishing their friend would “drown” or “die in a car crash”. More than 800 Australian students aged 11-16 took ...
But he did play a crucial role in helping journeyman Andy Foster knock over Justin Lester. Team Gone By Lunchtime size up the local elections, gaze plaintively at the dramas in the NZ First Party, and ask how bad the new poll is for Jacinda Ardern.Annabelle Lee-Mather, Ben Thomas and ...
In the fifth episode of Actually Interesting, The Spinoff’s monthly podcast exploring the effect Artificial Intelligence has on our lives, Russell Brown speaks to Ben Reid, executive director of the AI Forum, about the role of government in embracing and regulating AI.Subscribe to Actually Interesting via iTunes or listen on the player below.To ...
Editor’s Note: Here below is a list of the main issues currently under discussion in New Zealand and links to media coverage.New Zealand Parliament Buildings, Wellington, New Zealand.Today’s content by Dr Bryce Edwards.Local government Henry Cooke (Stuff): How to lose an election: Over-promise or under-deliver Simon Collins ...
By RNZ Pacific A Solomon Islands province has agreed to lease a large island to a Chinese developer to develop into a special economic zone, weeks after the country opened diplomatic ties with China. But already cracks abound; there has been no official announcement and the provincial premier says the ...
The New Zealand First MP and Minister Shane Jones is still backing the firearms ban, despite being pictured with what appears to be an AR-15 semi-automatic while holidaying in Asia. ...
Everyone needs to be concerned about the draft National Policy Statement on Urban Development that the Ministry for the Environment has released. It is incompatible with the spirit of transparency and inclusiveness. ...
Prodigal Son is a new crime procedural coming hot and fresh to TVNZ 1 on Mondays at 8.30pm.Jean Sergent has a few reasons why you should be watching it. If you like serial killer shows, Michael Sheen, dark drama, Michael Sheen, twisted family dynamics, or Michael Sheen – strap yourself ...
Voters in the 2019 local elections have elected the largest number of new mayors in 30 years, with 26 candidates set to don mayoral chains for the first time later this month. ...
A team of investigators dedicated to stamping out violent extremism online is being set up with the government announcing $17 million in funding over four years. ...
In a major boost to efforts to counter violent extremism on the internet, the Government has promised $17m over four years to the Censorship Compliance Unit. ...
The final dinner party on Married at First Sight NZ brought an ugly misogyny to light. But it was far from the first time sexism reared its head this season, writes Alex Casey.It began with a man being edited out of the show after his domestic violence charges came to ...
The Council of Licenced Firearms Owners (COLFO) is recommending members hold on to potentially illegal shotgun shells containing steel shot until the law banning certain types of ammunition is clarified. ...
New collaborative gifting platform Joyable is looking to shake up how we group-purchase gifts. Co-founders (and sisters) Rochelle Sheldon and Kimberley Crossman explain how their latest venture works. Joyable (not to be confused with the social anxiety-reducing app of the same name) is a somewhat left-field move for co-founder Rochelle ...
The extraordinary battle for the Tron has ended in a way no one quite saw coming, with the city relinquishing its stranglehold on the title of New Zealand’s most embarrassing council. Angela Cuming reports.The Spinoff local election coverage is entirely funded by The Spinoff Members. For more about becoming a ...
On the eve of the announcement of the winner of the 2019 Booker prize, Spinoff books editor Catherine Woulfe outs herself as a giant know-nothing. Booker time. Tomorrow morning I will sit there refreshing Twitter like the drinking bird on The Simpsons. A winner will be announced. And I’ll be gripped ...
National's claim that things only went south when Phil Twyford took charge of transport is not supported by us at CEAC and we see that this begun in 2008 as we witnessed the change then while working as a partnership group with NZTA then. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brendan Churchill, Research Fellow in Sociology, University of Melbourne There’s an old maxim: not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted. But there are some things we should count, and gender and sexual diversity are ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Jonathan Pollock, Climatologist, Australian Bureau of Meteorology Northern Australia is likely to see fewer cyclones than usual this season, but hot, dry weather will increase the risk of fire and heatwaves across eastern and southern Australia. The Bureau of Meteorology today released ...
We are in The Good Time for avocados. Alex Casey talked to an expert on how to make the most of it. It’s the most wonderful time of the year. A time when a new avocado headline is published somewhere in New Zealandeverysingleday. A time when it is ...
Sexual harassment and assault are an issue in all walks of life, but addressing the problem is particularly difficult when the perpetrator holds public office. Today campaigner Carrie Buckmaster launches a parliamentary petition calling for more transparency on the issue.The ongoing Labour Party scandal around handling of sexual harassment allegations ...
Dunedin’s new mayor Aaron Hawkins is the first official Green Party mayor in NZ and, arguably, the first to represent the city’s student population as much as its older residents. Josie Adams, who guessed he would win, asked him ten questions about his win.The Spinoff local election ...
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (F&P) has upgraded its full year guidance again after gaining the right to sell its new full face mask in the United States. ...
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Michelle Grattan, Professorial Fellow, University of Canberra Shadow foreign minister Penny Wong says Australia needs to “define the boundaries” of its engagement with China now the relationship between the two countries is in a new phase. Focusing on China policy in a ...
Canon Rugby in Focus: Ireland awaits an All Blacks team that will be well-rested. Perhaps too well-rested. Rested and ready, or a game short and not match fit. Those are the two scenarios that will have All Blacks fans fretting this week ahead of ...
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For the people who think nature should be left to sort itself out, forests in Northland are on the verge of collapse from possum damage,
http://www.forestandbird.org.nz/stopforestcollapse
That’s the trees, but the it’s the whole ecosystem. Stoats, rats and other predators are decimating the wildlife populations too.
When you take key elements out of an ecosystem the whole thing is affected and not necessarily in ways that nature can accommodate well. Evolution is a thing, and where species have co-evolved, you get climax forests and stable systems. When you introduce elements that intervene in that outside of the evolutionary processes, you potentially get collapse. If even we thought that evolution will sort that out over the next centuries or millenia this is not something we want happening in the age of climate change.
Those Northland forests could be protected with the knowledge and skill we have now. Political choices from National mean they’re not.
Just another day in John Key’s neo-liberal nightmare.
We have become a cruel, selfish, uncaring and selfish nation under his wretched leadership.
DOC’s funding being cut and nature dies.
What knowledge and skill?
And don’t say traps because traps aren’t enough. If they were we would have sorted out the pests decades ago.
Trapping could reduce numbers enough to save the forest, sure. It’s not lack of traps or knowledge that’s the problem, it’s funding. Personally I’d prefer trapping over poisoning (including job and small business creation in the context of kaitiakitanga) but we have the poisoning tech too.
How many thousands of people out there minding how many millions of traps?
Should we give them guns and ammo to shoot the pests if they see any?
It’s not funding either, it’s actual physical capability. If we want to eradicate the pests that were introduced then it’s going to have to be a major concerted effort across the whole country over a short period of time and make sure we get the whole damn lot of them. And the chances are that we’d miss some which means that in a few short years we’d bee doing it all again.
Me, I’m hoping that our scientists will develop a way to sterilise them all. Then we may have a chance to eradicate them. Unfortunately, this governments been cutting research through the stupidity of competition.
We’re never going to eradicate those pests on the mainland (at least not in the foreseeable future). In order to save the forests, we don’t need eradication, we just need to keep the numbers down low enough for species and systems to thrive above reproduction level.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time around trappers and in country more difficult than Northland forests. It takes surprisingly little to control a population in a given area. DOC and other govt organisations will have the research on this, but often even just having trap lines every x kms that get checked once a month can bring populations down enough for bird species to increase. You need to do extra in mast years. 1080 every decade or two if you have to. That research would have been done with a close eye on budgets (ie what’s the least amount of trapping we can do for the most effect), so giving them a decent budget instead of a minimal one would increase benefit substantially.
Put together small teams of people who are self employed, who love spending time in the bush, let them live in the forest with a caretaking contract so they can do other work there too. They can make a living from the possum fur and a bounty on the stoat and rats. Huge potential. We already have volunteer networks in NZ doing trapping, so co-ordinate and increase that eg DOC or Landcare or whoever put in the lines and registered volunteers who are already in the area (trampers, fishermen, climbers etc) do the line checks. These aren’t difficult things, they just need vision and funding.
my auntie was a possum trapper, one of my cousins partners and another cousin are full time possum trappers in the deep south, I have been a part time possum trapper – it is hard work.
It can be done but you have to be very fit, smart, dedicated and basically not have any qualms about killing stuff.
Could be that those qualities are in abundance out there with the not-employed – but it ain’t a video game and it is hard work even on easy country let alone hills.
Still, the possums have to go.
Yeah, the biggest obstacle after funding and will is that we don’t have the same numbers of young guys coming through who go out and learn the trade. I guess I envisage us as a population having more physical lives in a post-carbon world, so may as well start now 🙂
At least some of the people I know that do it love being in the bush. I think that would be key. Getting to live in the wilderness would be a pretty big attraction.
Full respect to you and your family for that commitment.
Helluva a lot more than I do for saving the forest.
Need a sexually transmitted disease that induces sterilization.
pretty good possibility – and farmers are unlikely to screw this one up.
lol hey hey there farmers aren’t THAT bad and remember they only love animals when it is really cold…
The news item I saw a few years ago was looking at that type of thing – yes.
Quite a few years ago and in the meantime we can use the tools we have to hand.
Hi weka, amen to trapping over poisoning.
No animal should die in such a cruel painful way as 1080 poison.
Put a bounty on possum ears $2, $4,$10…
There is enough money, just a lack of priorities.
A helicopter and buckets of 1080.
That’s one of the major reasons we now have the luxury of pest free islands and some of our native birds haven’t become extinct.
It would be nigh on impossible to cover the Northland forests with traps, due to the number needed and there would be large chunks of area you wouldn’t be able to access on foot creating permanent reinfestation spots.
And we’ve been dropping 1080 since the 1950s. In that time the pests have spread throughout NZ.
I’m not a great fan of 1080, but it is pretty effective in restoring bird populations where it’s used appropriately.
The comparison with the 50s is not that useful because how, where and when 1080 is used has changed so much.
Spread of pests is complex. Possums and deer will spread faster and more where you open up areas with tracks and roads. Some of it is just time. It takes time for a population to expand out of its range.
If you 1080 every 3 or 4 years in the same place, those areas end up with a low levels of pests. We only do 1080 on a tiny fraction of the DoC estate, so it could clearly be increased by a lot.
“It would be nigh on impossible to cover the Northland forests with traps, due to the number needed and there would be large chunks of area you wouldn’t be able to access on foot creating permanent reinfestation spots.”
You do selected ridgelines, and you do the line once a month. I don’t know Northland but I’m guessing it’s not harder than country down south.
1080 is useful, but it’s also got problems. I think it’s a mistake to rely on it as the main approach indefinitely across all native ecosystems (and increasingly across farmland).
I think that was the issue with possum trapping historically is that trappers would do the easy country all the time. It got rid of some possums, but the issue was that it wasn’t getting conservation benefits on the whole as there was plenty of country that still wasn’t getting pest control. I’ve been involved in pest control work and bait lines are about 50-100m apart with each bait station on the line about the same distance apart.
Are trap lines done the same as bait lines?
Trappers doing the easy country is a management issues, it’s solvable.
With bait stations you only have to check/refill every six months, and they contain a couple of hundred pellets in each one – I’m not sure how many rats/possums that kills, probably a lot. And you get complete coverage of an area so long as they’re laid out in a grid over the land.
With trapping, I’m assuming we’re talking leg-hold traps you’re only targetting possums as they’re the only thing of value. Rats are at least as big a problem as possums and they’re missed out. DoC does have the new Goodnature self-reseting traps that can kill 24 rats before they need a new gas cannister. That could be a way forward. Have they been used successfully in a large area like a Regional Park? Not sure.
In a post carbon world, 1080 is probably not possible (using helicopters). Or maybe if helicopter use was prioritised for critical things like conservation we could carry on for another 50-100 years, who knows. In the long term I think we’re looking at only being able to manage pests in critical areas and close to population centres where people can access on foot using basic traps. The rest of the country might be unmanageable. Hope I’m wrong, but that could be the reality.
Any reason you can’t put out kill traps for the mustelids and rodents at the same time as doing the possum line? The Goodnature traps sound good, and I’m sure if there was more of a will there would more tech like that developped.
Let people live in the parks. It changes the ratios hugely.
Yeah that would be a good way to work it. The Goodnature people happened to be the right people (industrial designers) looking at the problem of an archaic trap that DoC was using – the Doc 200 trap is still in use and it looks as if it was designed in the 1800s. The company got some grants a long the way, but it doesn’t appear it was targetted research. So yeah I think we’re just scratching the surface really without proper research funding.
I’m with you on having people living in Forests, Parks. The european approach has been to lock these places these up and people are only allowed to look, not touch. Contrary to what native cultures do, which is to actually live in the environment.
In a post carbon world you’d probably shift to using airships for the aerial drops of 1080. Bio-fuel and helium would mean that they’d still be practical.
we should start using them now – where can you get them? can you build them?
There are some pretty interesting regulations around experimental aircraft above a trivial mass. Additionally, with airships the basics are easily done, but the control issues are pretty severe (especially for smaller blimps). Large sail area compared to mass/momentum. Sort of sucks in windy mountainous terrain.
It’s definitely a feasible idea – I immediately went to a sort of blimp roomba, dropping 1080 on a regular GPS run and returning to an automatic hopper station to refill/refuel. Payload a few times the size of a helicopter.
Whether that works for anyting approaching NZ weather and terrain, on the other hand… that’s what R&D is for 🙂
Draco the world is almost out of recoverable helium.
[citation needed]
helium is a bit of an issue, but for a drone airship dropping 1080 there’s no reason to not use hydrogen.
I just have the (incorrect) Hey hey my my lyric “and once they’re gone, they won’t come back…” going round my head about this…
Morgon Foundation gets it…..
http://www.radionz.co.nz/national/programmes/checkpoint/audio/201803600/gareth-morgan-calls-for-tax-reform
watch the attacks now.
Great idea Pat. As Gareth says, who has the balls to sell and action an idea. It would cost Gareth and Key so are they for it?
The top 10% have the power to block and humiliate any possible proposers. And yet 90% of the people would benefit as would the Economy.
“who has the balls to sell and action an idea?”….. labour/green coalition perhaps
Nice article on Stuff about the slush fund . TV3 picked it up.. Shocking. Pitch fork time. Seriously.
Link?
http://www.newshub.co.nz/politics/asset-sales-cash-used-as-govt-slush-fund–peters-2016060713#axzz4AsLB1NRV
Bugger, so many news links, it was newshub surprisingly not stuff nor has Herald picked it up yeti.
The most beautiful woman in NZ the lovely Sam Hayes did a opening on TV3 news about Bill and his lies about our asset sales money.
Paraphrasing Blinglish:
Well, we didn’t have to borrow that money to pay for things…
How much has he borrowed so far due to the tax cuts?
And, of course, no government ever has to borrow money as they can, and should, just create it.
Deceitful fucks. Is all I call it DT. Peters said same thing it’s deceitful.
He sells assets and tells the nation it will be used for, then doesn’t give too shits about sticking to his promises and does what the fuck he likes.
Imagine if an agent sold your car for 5k, had instructions to use the money for another car but spent half the money on himself and only paid a deposit on the car you wanted.
When are these jerks hitting the road to campaign.
and in the news today…National Gov caught in a lie (yet again)……and in other news……
LMFAO, you were so right, then appears..
http://www.newshub.co.nz/politics/bennett-owns-up-to-misinformation-2016060719#axzz4AsLB1NRV
Now Bennetts admitted she lied about the sally visit.
Oh come on, time for a snap election or the dissolution of parliament , governor general stepping in. this has become absolutely ridiculous. Bordering insighting anarchy and civil unrest.
I bloody sick of this, and ready to act I can assure you.
If it wasn’t so damaging it would be funny….it certainly defies belief that they haven’t been dismissed as the bad joke they are ….as yet.
Surprise surprise, billy and johnny doing what they do best.
Wow 167 mil for membership for two international banks. Nice work if you can get it.
30,000 Troops Kick Off NATO’s Largest Eastern Europe War Game Ever, Will Practice Invading Russia’s Kaliningrad
Anyone would think that the West wanted a war with Russia.
Oh, and then there’s this bit:
Someone invited the gun nuts along for the ride.
One News Colmar Brunton poll for June 2016:
National 48% (down from 50)
Labour 29% (up from 28)
Greens 12% (up from 10)
NZ First 9%
Maori Party 0.7% (down from 1.1)
Conservative Party 0.7% (up from 0.3)
ACT Party 0.3% (down from 0.7)
Other 0.6% (up from 0,2)
Polling was done between 28th of May and 2nd of June, the MoU announcement part way through so can’t take much from that.
Preferred Prime Minister:
John Key 39%
Winston Peters 12% (up from 10)
Andrew Little 7%
http://colmarbrunton.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/160607-ONE-News-Colmar-Brunton-Poll-report-28-May-2-June-2016-prelim.pdf
Doesn’t the Colmar-Brunton poll always have National 4+ percentage points above their actual support?
Yes
Trend is good. National down 2 Labour+Greens up 3.
Colmar Brunton has frequently had LAB + GR at the low to mid 40’s several times recently, this poll basically returns to that recent ‘norm’ after the prior poll went a bit low on the LAB/GR block:
Swordfish from a few weeks back:
This latest poll just solidifies that result i.e. LAB + GR are sitting at low to mid 40s.
Low to mid forties this far out is all good . if it starts to shift to the mid 40s and higher in the new year we might see key go for an early election.
I think the election is 14 months out any way.
The finer print of the poll separates the results into pre and post MoU, and post MoU it shows Labour support increasing by 5.2%, Greens dropping by 3.5%, Nat increasing by 1.9% and NZF dropping by 4.1%. So pretty much break even between Lab/Gr and Nat post MoU. NZF took a big hit though. Shown on page 9 of the report:
http://colmarbrunton.co.nz/wp-content/uploads/160607-ONE-News-Colmar-Brunton-Poll-report-28-May-2-June-2016-prelim.pdf
the big Australian storm hit Tassie today, more loss of life, catastrophic floods, evacuations. As in the Sydney storm, rescue crews are saying that too many people are doing daft things which diverts workers away from other work to rescue them. I wonder if this is an emerging extreme weather phenomena. People getting caught out more because of the severity, more people not knowing what are good decisions, and just a higher percentage of wrong place wrong time.
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-06-07/woman's-body-found-latrobe-tasmania-major-flooding-wreaks-havoc/7483726
Some people had a great time doing daft things.
http://www.redbullcapefear.com/
They need something like an electronic anti-rescue beacon bracelet. If something happens to them while adventuring during an extreme weather event no-one has to come to the rescue if shit goes south.
very much like the geezers in their four wheel drives. Innit?
I would assume that the security and first emergency team is privately employed. Each team comes with their own first response team. At the end of the day the guys that do the sport will not care, and at this level of skill and danger you need a specialised team to do rescue work.
Not really. Pretty sure the 4WD dudes were just regular people, not extreme sportspeople. And they didn’t go out to adventure in an extreme weather event that was a civil emergency, they got caught out by a fairly normal weather pattern (just like motorists and the NZTA elsewhere that day)
Sorry weka, but I wouldn’t have called the weather pattern that day fairly normal, and somewhere “regular people” would have prudently gone. What happened was pretty much to my reading of the forecast. What happened elsewhere, like on Crown Range was resolved from a personal safety perspective within minutes. There’s absolutely no comparison there.
and no comparison with extreme sportspeople either.
What was out of the ordinary about the weather that day?
The storm was forecast, a heavy snow warning for Otago high country, and it looked like shit from late the day before.
They have also almost admitted that the poor conditions where the reason they went up there, for the challenge.
RIght, but just a fairly normal storm for Central. Not a climate change extreme weather event like Australia has just experienced?
The sub thread is that I commented that extreme sportspeople who intentionally go out to play during a civil emergency could cede their right to rescue services that are needed elsewhere (I support their right to play). Sabine then said it was the same as the 4WD dudes. I think the situations are completely different, for multiple reasons, some of which I’ve explained. I don’t really need to rehash the 4WD situation (you and I will probably have to agree to disagree on their degree of idiocy and culpability there, my main point in the past has been that they shouldn’t be charged for the rescue). I was just clarifying that that was a normal weather even for May in Central.
Sorry, and thanks for the clarification. I took your comments to mean conditions were benign.
But in the same way that those conditions weren’t unusual for Central Otago, the south east coast of Australia is very exposed to high energy air masses from Coral Sea interacting with stuff from Southern Ocean. That’s how the sandstone cliffs along that coast have formed. They are relatively infrequent events, so the bold build their mansions out onto the sand dunes….
What is common between the two situations is inappropriate decisions people make in the actual or possible danger, as you pointed out in your original post. And the difficulty the same people have in taking responsibility for their poor decisions. It’s intriguing that the same people tend to inhabit the right of the political spectrum.
It’s this disconnect that makes meaningful discussion on pre-emptive actions to avert climate change almost impossible. I await the awarding of the Darwin Award to a denier for demise due to climatic events.
It does seem like a good opportunity to talk about changing risk assessment in a climate change world. I think there is the modern problem of people taking risks because they have 4WDs and cell phones, risks they wouldn’t have taken back in the day. And people who think they know how to do something because they’ve read about it on the internet and we live in a culture where you learn how to use tools from reading a Mitre10 tutorial instead of in the past when we learnt from people who knew how to actually do things. All that is a potent mix for people doing stupid shit.
When I read through some of the Sydney reports the emergecny crews were saying again and again how often they had to go and rescue people from stupid situations when they were needed elsewhere. We’ve always had people who do stupid or ignorant things (been there myself), but I think the numbers are greater now. And more people are less experienced at dealing with nature.
I remember floods and snow storms from the 60’s to 80’s, and they were real rippers, like delivering milk and bread in a jet boat, and Invercargill under water. People took responsibility for themselves and helped others, and got on with it.
Today it’s all the fault of someone or something, come and rescue me. The media narrative around Global Warming feeds this to an extent by narrowing what is “normal” and defining events with statistical return periods of 50 years as abnormal. And since weather records in this part of the world are so short, only a couple of hundred years, we have no idea what the extremes are on a millennial scale.
I’m not saying that global warming isn’t a very real thing, but that the appreciation and respect of our weather’s variability and power is being eroded responsibility put to “someone else”
Wrong. Those are just the day by day records of weather. But any exceptional weather is pushed into the geology and the living organisms. That is literally what causes flood plains and erosion. Normal weather doesn’t do that much. Exceptional weather does.
We have accurate climate records for extreme weather about the last 20 thousand years for most of the world with an accuracy down to about a 20-50 year level depending of area, and moderately inaccurate for about the last couple of million years. It gets pretty inaccurate (ie about 50k years) after that.
Basically we haven’t seen anything like this since the Eocene about 34 million years ago, and we only have an accuracy in the order of 100k years then. This looks freakingly fast climate change.
Get used to it. At the current rate we’re looking at about 6 degrees C this century. That is something that we last saw happen over 250k years – more than 34 million years ago…
As far as I can tell, we are going to beat 2 deg C warming over the pre-industrial baseline, in the next 10 years.
If Global Dimming particulate solar shielding effects disappeared, we would already be there.
And now we are consistently over 400ppm CO2, we have basically gone back 15M years. During the mid Miocene. And the temp then was way hotter than 2 deg C over the pre-industrial baseline.
The thermal inertia of the system means we won’t feel the full heat of today’s 405ppm for half a generation. Fun times.
Want more economic growth, people?
Another day at the office with their own safety/rescue crews.
not infallible though presumably.
a few things that i have raised before
a. we don’t have enough full time emergency staff to cope with the increase of natural emergencies, and all services are having a hard time finding volunteers.
b. we don’t have a population that is prepared to a. look after themselves in case of an emergency or b. be able to volunteer and help the emergency services.
c. check for auckland – i.e. emergency shelters – we will be told where to shelter when the emergency is ongoing – does that make you feel safer? The same can be said for anywhere else in NZ>
As i said in another thread, these are not free services, we are not well prepared here or anywhere else on the planet
I am not saying this to be uppity or aggravating, but as I have stated it before, we – the civilians – are pretty much fucked if we were to have a proper storm/flood/tsunami etc.
As for idiots needing saving …..we don’t need a storm for that, we already have them on any given sunday, see last discussions we had.
I’m pretty much on board with all that. I expect a certain amount from civil defence but generally assume they will be overwhelmed by a big event. If it’s s traumatic event like a quake expect some of them to be traumatised too.
I am curious about the number of people in Sydney that got into trouble and how many were just caught out and how many were trying to save possessions or thought they’d just get through that bit of flood so they didn’t have to spend a night away from home, that kind of thing.
Great. Hollywood has decided it will make a film about the Persian poet, mystic and scholar Rumi to address Muslim stereotypes in film, by casting Euro-Americans in the lead roles (not that that will be the limit of their imperialism).
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/06/jalaluddin-al-rumi-film-muslim-stereotypes-gladiator-david-franzoni
“Politicians keep saying they are concerned but their actions, or lack of them, drown out their words. Any one of the analyses of how the latest budget failed the reef is enough to confirm this. Perhaps most astonishing in this shameful chapter in reef guardianship, the federal government tried to cover up what was happening by removing reef-related observations from a UN report.”
we could replace the word ‘reef’ with ‘river’……….
http://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/jun/07/as-a-worker-on-the-great-barrier-reef-im-ashamed-to-look-my-children-in-the-eye
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/video/2016/jun/07/great-barrier-reef-diving-in-the-stench-of-millions-of-rotting-animals-video