Nov 2009
Key weak on Copenhagen
30/11/09 16:34 Filed in: News Releases
John Key’s is being weak and indecisive over whether to go to Copenhagen for a global conference on climate change, Progressive Wigram MP Jim Anderton says.
“The prime minister is displaying an absence of leadership. He is saying he will only go if the conference is going to be a success. He is therefore accepting his presence is incapable of making any difference to whether it is a success or not.
“This is a failure of leadership. He should accept his share of responsibility for helping to make a difference.
“Instead, the prime minister is making an art form out of not doing anything.
“If he does flip-flop and decide to go, it will only be to make a photo opportunity out of associating himself with a success he has had nothing to do with.
“But his big subsidies for big polluters make him irrelevant anyway.”
“The prime minister is displaying an absence of leadership. He is saying he will only go if the conference is going to be a success. He is therefore accepting his presence is incapable of making any difference to whether it is a success or not.
“This is a failure of leadership. He should accept his share of responsibility for helping to make a difference.
“Instead, the prime minister is making an art form out of not doing anything.
“If he does flip-flop and decide to go, it will only be to make a photo opportunity out of associating himself with a success he has had nothing to do with.
“But his big subsidies for big polluters make him irrelevant anyway.”
0 Comments
Brash calls for return to failed policies of the past
30/11/09 16:33 Filed in: News Releases
“It’s like the return of Dracula.”
That’s how Progressive Wigram MP Jim Anderton is describing Don Brash’s recommendations released today.
“Don Brash and David Caygill were cheerleaders for the asset sales, deep spending cuts and wage cuts that only worsened the income gap with Australia. When they started New Zealand had parity with Australia and when they finished we were thirty per cent behind.
“Now they want to go back to the failed policies of the past.
“It’s not surprising that when Don Brash heads an inquiry at Act’s behest, he comes up with Act’s policies. Act is playing a very helpful footstool role for the government, where it takes all the hits and helps soften up the public for the National Party.
“More asset sales, deep spending cuts, radical policy change, and higher costs for low and middle income households wouldn’t make New Zealand better off.”
That’s how Progressive Wigram MP Jim Anderton is describing Don Brash’s recommendations released today.
“Don Brash and David Caygill were cheerleaders for the asset sales, deep spending cuts and wage cuts that only worsened the income gap with Australia. When they started New Zealand had parity with Australia and when they finished we were thirty per cent behind.
“Now they want to go back to the failed policies of the past.
“It’s not surprising that when Don Brash heads an inquiry at Act’s behest, he comes up with Act’s policies. Act is playing a very helpful footstool role for the government, where it takes all the hits and helps soften up the public for the National Party.
“More asset sales, deep spending cuts, radical policy change, and higher costs for low and middle income households wouldn’t make New Zealand better off.”
Erebus pilots deserve justice after 30 years
27/11/09 15:38 Filed in: News Releases
After thirty years, Air New Zealand needs to apologise to the families of the pilots of flight TE 901 who were wrongly blamed for the Mt Erebus crash which claimed the lives of 257 passengers and crew.
This Saturday (28 November) will mark the thirtieth anniversary since the crash.
A Royal Commission of Enquiry in 1980, led by Justice Mahon found that “organisational failure” was to blame for the crash. Justice Mahon also said that in his opinion, Air New Zealand had deliberately set out to put the blame on ‘pilot error’.
At the time, Air New Zealand undermined what became known as the ‘Mahon Report’ and its findings have only recently been formally acknowledged.
Thirty years later, the families of the pilots have never received an apology from Air New Zealand, who not only failed to stand by their own pilots, but actively sought to pass the blame onto the pilots, despite evidence which clearly showed they were not to blame.
Here is what the Mahon Report says: “In my opinion..the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible. In my opinion, neither Captain Collins nor First Officer Cassin nor the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”
“It is my hope, and the hope of many New Zealanders, that this injustice will be set right on Saturday, and the families of the pilots of flight TE901 will hear an apology from Air New Zealand,” Jim Anderton said.
This Saturday (28 November) will mark the thirtieth anniversary since the crash.
A Royal Commission of Enquiry in 1980, led by Justice Mahon found that “organisational failure” was to blame for the crash. Justice Mahon also said that in his opinion, Air New Zealand had deliberately set out to put the blame on ‘pilot error’.
At the time, Air New Zealand undermined what became known as the ‘Mahon Report’ and its findings have only recently been formally acknowledged.
Thirty years later, the families of the pilots have never received an apology from Air New Zealand, who not only failed to stand by their own pilots, but actively sought to pass the blame onto the pilots, despite evidence which clearly showed they were not to blame.
Here is what the Mahon Report says: “In my opinion..the single dominant and effective cause of the disaster was the mistake made by those airline officials who programmed the aircraft to fly directly at Mt Erebus and omitted to tell the aircrew. That mistake is directly attributable, not so much to the persons who made it, but to the incompetent administrative airline procedures which made the mistake possible. In my opinion, neither Captain Collins nor First Officer Cassin nor the flight engineers made any error which contributed to the disaster, and were not responsible for its occurrence.”
“It is my hope, and the hope of many New Zealanders, that this injustice will be set right on Saturday, and the families of the pilots of flight TE901 will hear an apology from Air New Zealand,” Jim Anderton said.
National’s third world way to govern
27/11/09 15:18 Filed in: News Releases
It’s hypocritical for the National Party to attack those who criticise its dodgy deal on emissions trading, Progressive MP Jim Anderton says.
“National needs to say if it still supports the concept of full and final Treaty settlements.
“It has gone from declaring an unrealistic timeframe for Treaty settlements, its leader declaring ‘The Treaty did not create a partnership’, and Gerry Brownlee calling a Maori member of parliament a ‘black fella’, to now accusing someone else of playing the race card if they oppose National’s deal.
“National has done a grace and favour deal that cannot be justified on its merit. That is a third world way to govern and has no place in New Zealand.
“Last year I raised in Cabinet my concern about re-opening Treaty settlements from the nineties to compensate for loss of value in forests that had been part of a Treaty settlement. My Labour colleagues agreed with me that if we had compensated in that way, we would never be able to achieve final settlement.
“National has now reversed its position. It did so to get a deal with the Maori Party on an emission trading scheme, and now its trying to label as racist anyone who criticises the deal. That is dishonest and comes from a party that has done more than any other party in recent years to whip up racial tensions.”
Examples of Gerry Brownlee’s record on race relations;
“Why is the Government continuing to negotiate with a group that will not accept the Crown’s ownership of the foreshore and seabed?” - In parliament, on Tuesday, May 31, 2005, about negotiations with Ngati Porou:
“National would change the foreshore law to prevent the Maori Land Court hearing customary rights cases and investigate axing the court altogether.” - NZ Herald, 18 April 2005.
“What I think is that there is a large amount of worry – considerable amount of worry among people about where all this is heading and where we fit into it, and much of that is about someone at some point proclaiming what it is to be a New Zealander.” - Agenda, 6 November 2004.
Called John Tamihere ‘black fella’ - 10 February 2004.
“National needs to say if it still supports the concept of full and final Treaty settlements.
“It has gone from declaring an unrealistic timeframe for Treaty settlements, its leader declaring ‘The Treaty did not create a partnership’, and Gerry Brownlee calling a Maori member of parliament a ‘black fella’, to now accusing someone else of playing the race card if they oppose National’s deal.
“National has done a grace and favour deal that cannot be justified on its merit. That is a third world way to govern and has no place in New Zealand.
“Last year I raised in Cabinet my concern about re-opening Treaty settlements from the nineties to compensate for loss of value in forests that had been part of a Treaty settlement. My Labour colleagues agreed with me that if we had compensated in that way, we would never be able to achieve final settlement.
“National has now reversed its position. It did so to get a deal with the Maori Party on an emission trading scheme, and now its trying to label as racist anyone who criticises the deal. That is dishonest and comes from a party that has done more than any other party in recent years to whip up racial tensions.”
Examples of Gerry Brownlee’s record on race relations;
“Why is the Government continuing to negotiate with a group that will not accept the Crown’s ownership of the foreshore and seabed?” - In parliament, on Tuesday, May 31, 2005, about negotiations with Ngati Porou:
“National would change the foreshore law to prevent the Maori Land Court hearing customary rights cases and investigate axing the court altogether.” - NZ Herald, 18 April 2005.
“What I think is that there is a large amount of worry – considerable amount of worry among people about where all this is heading and where we fit into it, and much of that is about someone at some point proclaiming what it is to be a New Zealander.” - Agenda, 6 November 2004.
Called John Tamihere ‘black fella’ - 10 February 2004.
1000 people die because of heavy drinking each year
26/11/09 15:21 Filed in: News Releases
When over 300 leading doctors and nurses and the heads of police in New Zealand and Australia agree that we face an urgent and serious issue with alcohol abuse, then we know we have a problem, says MP for Wigram and Progressive Party leader Jim Anderton.
He welcomed the release today of a joint statement from New Zealand doctors and nurses, calling for the Law Commission to recommend reducing the marketing and advertising of alcohol; lowering the purchase age; increasing the price of alcohol; reducing the availability of alcohol; and doing more to counter drink-driving.
New Zealand and Australian police commissioners met recently to talk about the culture of binge drinking in both countries, and to agree to a series of crackdowns against alcohol-fueled crime and antisocial behaviour this Christmas.
“This is our chance to do something about binge drinking. The legislation must be changed, and the Law Commission is looking at that right now,” says Jim Anderton.
75% of people who show up in emergency rooms on a Friday or a Saturday night will have injuries related in some way to alcohol. 60% of people arrested by the police are under the influence of alcohol.
“25% of New Zealand drinkers are heavy drinkers. That’s equal to the combined population of both Wellington and Christchurch.
“To put this national crisis into perspective, each year less than ten people die as a result of using the drug commonly known as ‘P’. Twenty people died from swine flu this year.1000 people die from alcohol related problems each year.”
“But it’ll take more than legislation to change our attitude to binge drinking. What we need is a culture change. We need to stop romanticising heavy drinking.
“That’s why I want to see alcohol sponsorship, particularly for sports events banned, and the marketing of alco-pops to our teenagers stopped. Evidence shows that every advertisement seen by a young person (15-24 years) increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life and the liquor industry banks on it,” says Jim Anderton
He welcomed the release today of a joint statement from New Zealand doctors and nurses, calling for the Law Commission to recommend reducing the marketing and advertising of alcohol; lowering the purchase age; increasing the price of alcohol; reducing the availability of alcohol; and doing more to counter drink-driving.
New Zealand and Australian police commissioners met recently to talk about the culture of binge drinking in both countries, and to agree to a series of crackdowns against alcohol-fueled crime and antisocial behaviour this Christmas.
“This is our chance to do something about binge drinking. The legislation must be changed, and the Law Commission is looking at that right now,” says Jim Anderton.
75% of people who show up in emergency rooms on a Friday or a Saturday night will have injuries related in some way to alcohol. 60% of people arrested by the police are under the influence of alcohol.
“25% of New Zealand drinkers are heavy drinkers. That’s equal to the combined population of both Wellington and Christchurch.
“To put this national crisis into perspective, each year less than ten people die as a result of using the drug commonly known as ‘P’. Twenty people died from swine flu this year.1000 people die from alcohol related problems each year.”
“But it’ll take more than legislation to change our attitude to binge drinking. What we need is a culture change. We need to stop romanticising heavy drinking.
“That’s why I want to see alcohol sponsorship, particularly for sports events banned, and the marketing of alco-pops to our teenagers stopped. Evidence shows that every advertisement seen by a young person (15-24 years) increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life and the liquor industry banks on it,” says Jim Anderton
Opening the new Rodger Wright Centre
20/11/09 19:00 Filed in: Speeches
I am very happy to be here today to witness this blessing, and the opening of the new Rodger Wright premises.
It’s normal practice at a house-warming to bring a present or flowers, and I’m sorry I’ve come empty handed. But giving the wrong present at an opening can be worse than giving nothing at all.
I heard of a new school that opened recently, and a supporter wanted to send flowers for the occasion. The flowers arrived and the staff read the card; it said ‘Rest in Peace.’ The supporter was furious, and he phoned the florist to complain.
After he’d told the florist of the obvious mistake and how angry he was, the florist said: ‘Sir, I’m really sorry for the mistake, but rather than getting angry, you should imagine this; somewhere there is a funeral taking place today, and they have flowers with a note saying, ‘Congratulations on your new location.’
I was pleased to be able to launch the free-to-users, one-for-one Needle Exchange Programme (NEP) in 2004, and it’s wonderful today to know it has made the difference we knew it would.
Most people know that I am strongly anti-drugs. To some, it still seems like a contradiction to be anti-drugs, but to have funded a free needle exchange service to drug users.
But anyone who has watched a loved one use drugs knows that the fear that they are sharing needles is almost as bad as the fear that they are taking dangerous drugs.
You are always anxious that someone you love will not just suffer the after effects of drug use, but that they may pick up HIV or Hepatitis C from sharing needles.
The NEP has very positive results to show. New Zealand has the lowest number of people with the H.I.V. virus in the world, there has been a marked reduction in those with Hepatitis C, and visits to the Accident and Emergency department in Christchurch have declined by 30 per cent for drug using related incidents.
It was the evidence that drove me to introduce the free ‘needle-exchange programme’.
Back in 2002 when I was the minister responsible for drug policy, I received an independent review which told me that the needle exchange programme saved lives, and back then, it was saving $35 million in treatment costs since it had been established.
It would be saving even more today.
The report told me that the programme back then had prevented twenty deaths from AIDS, and reduced by more than 2000 the cases of Hepatitis C and HIV.
When you get a report like that in government, you sit up and take notice.
The report also came up with some strong recommendations. One was a recommendation to remove a legal anomaly around the possession of needles and syringes.
As a result of this report, I took a Bill to parliament in 2004, changing the Misuse of Drugs Act. The Bill did other things too, like bringing in much tougher rules controlling methamphetamines.
It also recommended a law change regarding the possession of needles. The amendment I brought in at the time was a technical one that reversed the onus of proof on a person found with needles in their possession. It was meant to make the needle exchange programme work better.
Tony Ryall - then an opposition MP - called it “political correctness by a liberal Government.”
He’s now the Minister of Health, and has responsibility for the needle exchange programme. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was sneering about political correctness as a reflex action, rather than because he is genuinely misguided.
But there you have some insight into the battle you have to face if you want to do the right thing to minimise the harm caused by drug use.
Just because an idea is good, and just because it works, doesn’t mean we can take for granted that it will be supported.
We later introduced the one-for-one programme that made needles available freely. I made (and succeeded with) a budget bid for $4 million dollars to fund the programme and I did it as part of the coalition agreement that the Progressive Party had with Labour at the time – for which my Labour colleagues here today deserve thanks for their support.
There were people who sneered at that as liberal political correctness. I can tell you from personal experience that there aren’t many votes in being wise or liberal about drug abuse.
But it was the right thing to do.
I am proud to have contributed to it. I am proud to have played a part in saving many lives.
I am also pleased we have saved many millions of dollars in treatment costs that our heath system would otherwise have incurred.
Most of all I would like to congratulate the people here today who have made such an effort to make this programme a success. And these new premises are evidence of the work you have done.
As a politician, I know that to make a difference to peoples’ lives, more often than not, means going the extra mile. I thank you for your commitment.
I wish we didn’t need this programme. I wish we didn’t have drug use causing the harm it does, wrecking the lives of many people, and wrecking many communities. But it does happen. It will keep happening.
And if we care about vulnerable victims then our responsibility is to reduce the harm to them as much as we can. The needle exchange programme does just that and I continue to support it for that reason.
It’s normal practice at a house-warming to bring a present or flowers, and I’m sorry I’ve come empty handed. But giving the wrong present at an opening can be worse than giving nothing at all.
I heard of a new school that opened recently, and a supporter wanted to send flowers for the occasion. The flowers arrived and the staff read the card; it said ‘Rest in Peace.’ The supporter was furious, and he phoned the florist to complain.
After he’d told the florist of the obvious mistake and how angry he was, the florist said: ‘Sir, I’m really sorry for the mistake, but rather than getting angry, you should imagine this; somewhere there is a funeral taking place today, and they have flowers with a note saying, ‘Congratulations on your new location.’
I was pleased to be able to launch the free-to-users, one-for-one Needle Exchange Programme (NEP) in 2004, and it’s wonderful today to know it has made the difference we knew it would.
Most people know that I am strongly anti-drugs. To some, it still seems like a contradiction to be anti-drugs, but to have funded a free needle exchange service to drug users.
But anyone who has watched a loved one use drugs knows that the fear that they are sharing needles is almost as bad as the fear that they are taking dangerous drugs.
You are always anxious that someone you love will not just suffer the after effects of drug use, but that they may pick up HIV or Hepatitis C from sharing needles.
The NEP has very positive results to show. New Zealand has the lowest number of people with the H.I.V. virus in the world, there has been a marked reduction in those with Hepatitis C, and visits to the Accident and Emergency department in Christchurch have declined by 30 per cent for drug using related incidents.
It was the evidence that drove me to introduce the free ‘needle-exchange programme’.
Back in 2002 when I was the minister responsible for drug policy, I received an independent review which told me that the needle exchange programme saved lives, and back then, it was saving $35 million in treatment costs since it had been established.
It would be saving even more today.
The report told me that the programme back then had prevented twenty deaths from AIDS, and reduced by more than 2000 the cases of Hepatitis C and HIV.
When you get a report like that in government, you sit up and take notice.
The report also came up with some strong recommendations. One was a recommendation to remove a legal anomaly around the possession of needles and syringes.
As a result of this report, I took a Bill to parliament in 2004, changing the Misuse of Drugs Act. The Bill did other things too, like bringing in much tougher rules controlling methamphetamines.
It also recommended a law change regarding the possession of needles. The amendment I brought in at the time was a technical one that reversed the onus of proof on a person found with needles in their possession. It was meant to make the needle exchange programme work better.
Tony Ryall - then an opposition MP - called it “political correctness by a liberal Government.”
He’s now the Minister of Health, and has responsibility for the needle exchange programme. I am going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he was sneering about political correctness as a reflex action, rather than because he is genuinely misguided.
But there you have some insight into the battle you have to face if you want to do the right thing to minimise the harm caused by drug use.
Just because an idea is good, and just because it works, doesn’t mean we can take for granted that it will be supported.
We later introduced the one-for-one programme that made needles available freely. I made (and succeeded with) a budget bid for $4 million dollars to fund the programme and I did it as part of the coalition agreement that the Progressive Party had with Labour at the time – for which my Labour colleagues here today deserve thanks for their support.
There were people who sneered at that as liberal political correctness. I can tell you from personal experience that there aren’t many votes in being wise or liberal about drug abuse.
But it was the right thing to do.
I am proud to have contributed to it. I am proud to have played a part in saving many lives.
I am also pleased we have saved many millions of dollars in treatment costs that our heath system would otherwise have incurred.
Most of all I would like to congratulate the people here today who have made such an effort to make this programme a success. And these new premises are evidence of the work you have done.
As a politician, I know that to make a difference to peoples’ lives, more often than not, means going the extra mile. I thank you for your commitment.
I wish we didn’t need this programme. I wish we didn’t have drug use causing the harm it does, wrecking the lives of many people, and wrecking many communities. But it does happen. It will keep happening.
And if we care about vulnerable victims then our responsibility is to reduce the harm to them as much as we can. The needle exchange programme does just that and I continue to support it for that reason.
Does the law support sustainability of our fisheries?
19/11/09 13:52 Filed in: Speeches
Speech Notes prepared for Hon Jim Anderton, at A Law, Policy and Science Symposium, Otago University Stadium Centre, Wellington
Has anyone here eaten fish and chips recently?
Because apparently I’m the minister who took the fish out of fish and chips.
The fact that someone could even say that shows you how far we are from having a rational debate about the right of a minister to protect our fishing resource. Last time I looked, there was still fish in my fish and chips.
What I actually did, as Minister of Fisheries was introduce new rules in an effort to save the world's rarest and smallest dolphin from extinction. What I tried to do was pass an amendment to the 1996 Fisheries Act which would have struck the right balance between sustainability and the need to use and fish our oceans. It would have made it clear that the most important part of the minister’s job, on behalf of all New Zealanders, is to protect the sustainability of our fishing resource.
As the law stands today, it remains vague about when a minister can err on the side of caution, and act to protect a species like Orange Roughey (let alone endangered mammals like the Hector and Maui dolphins.)
Without this amendment, the Act bucks international best practice. It makes it almost impossible to come down on the side of sustainability. Because before a minister can do anything, the Act insists that the information and the science prove beyond doubt that a fish stock is at risk of catastrophic depletion.
In reality, the information we get is often incomplete and flawed. It’s very hard to follow the behaviour of a fish stock. It’s an imperfect science.
That’s why internationally, there is consensus that where information is uncertain or flawed, ministers should adopt a precautionary approach, and should not use the uncertainty of the information as a reason for postponing or failing to take measures to protect species.
This lack of clarity in the New Zealand law has allowed the fishing industry to take ministers to court when they come down on the side of protection, because they can claim that the proof is not absolute.
I couldn’t get the support across the House to get this amendment passed. This was a surprise to me, because when it had its first reading in parliament, I seemed to have the support of most political parties. Certainly the comments in the house were positive!
National MP Phil Heatley said he supported the Bill because it “provided a clearer direction to the minister..to take a cautious approach”. But between then and when the Bill was taken to Select Committee, something happened. The National Party, the Maori Party and NZ First all miraculously changed their minds. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened - certain lobby groups in the industry spoke to those MPs. The industry got to them.
And so here we are today, with nothing changed.
It’s ironic; this week, New Zealand was rated by a leading ocean studies journal as “the world’s top performing country for managing its marine and fishery resources.” The same Phil Heatley who back in 2007 allowed the industry to tell him what to do, the same Phil Heatley who made sure the Bill to improve the legislation didn’t make it out of select committee, is now the Fisheries Minister.
He couldn’t wait to tell everyone the good news about this award. What he didn’t say in his press release is that he is responsible, along with others, for the fact that we can’t implement those policies that helped us get the award, because he and others let the industry get to him before we could amend and clarify the law.
I want to make something very clear; commercial fishing is good for New Zealand. It creates jobs, and it creates exports, which help to grow our economy. But it must be done sustainably.
When I was asked to make the decision to close some of the in-shore fisheries to protect the Maui dolphin in particular and also the Hector dolphin, one of the first things I asked was - what effect would this have on the livelihoods of the fishermen affected? I felt that the economic analysis I was presented with wasn’t satisfactory. So I decided to get a full analysis done.
Plenty of people were telling me not to; they said it would only provide ammunition for the fishing industry. But I wanted all of the facts.
The economic analysis showed that 380 jobs would be lost. That to me made the decision agonising. I certainly didn’t go into politics to destroy jobs. And therefore I was very careful to minimise the impact on people affected, by taking as hard a line as I could on which areas would be protected.
In the end, the rules I introduced were not the most severe of the options proposed to me. I had to strike the best achievable balance between fishing activity and the protection of two iconic species.
We ended up with a variety of regional bans and other restrictions on set netting, trawling and drift netting in coastal waters. Set netting was banned around much of the South Island's coast, and there were new trawl restrictions close to shore on the east and south coasts.
On the upper North Island's west coast existing set net bans were extended, and new trawling and drift netting bans were introduced.
We had to do something. Alongside the economic analysis I had, the other piece of advice I was given was that we were facing the imminent extinction of these species of dolphin. At the time there were fewer than 8,000 Hector dolphins, mostly around the South Island. And the North Island Maui's dolphin was estimated to number only around 111 dolphins. It was classified as "nationally critical" by the Department of Conservation.
In all of the discussion about my decision to protect the dolphin I am yet to hear anyone say that it’s a good idea to be blasé about making an entire species - let alone a species of mammal - extinct on our watch.
Instead those who thought I was wrong claimed they’d never seen dolphin in the area of the fishery that I closed. That’s plainly because the number of dolphin has significantly reduced; there are hardly any Maui dolphins left! So of course you’re not going to see, let alone, catch them very often. But you only have to catch one in five years to risk the entire future of the Maui dolphin species.
Therefore, it was shocking to me that the law allowed the industry to use the courts to override my decision to reduce the risks to such an iconic species of mammals - native only in New Zealand.
It’s hard to understand why the fishing industry won’t see that taking a cautious approach in the short term is best for the industry too. We all benefit in the long run, when the resource grows.
That’s why the Act needs amending. It must be clear, so that lawyers and judges can’t fill the gap where there is any uncertainty. While the Act has two purposes - to provide for the utilisation of the oceans, while preserving sustainability, its paramount obligation must be to protect any species of fish or mammal where ever there is a need, even when the information is uncertain or limited.
After the courts overturned parts of my decision to close certain areas to commercial fishing, the industry seemed to think they’d won a victory. Of course this was only an interim decision, and we are still waiting for a final ruling from the High Court. I still hope that commonsense will prevail.
But at the time, I still got a letter from the fishing industry gloating that no dolphin had been recorded as caught during the interim moratorium. The letter was signed off - smugly- “We all make mistakes don’t we Jim...?”
We do all make mistakes - but this was not one of mine. The smug arrogant attitude of the fishing lobby clearly shows in how much peril the dolphins remain.
I had another letter from a commercial fisherman that was written in a different tone. The fisherman wrote to tell me that he had once caught a dolphin, and not declared it. He had felt guilty ever since, and he wanted the minister of fisheries to know that dolphins and other endangered species do end up in the nets of commercial fishermen.
To be fair, the parts of the coast that the judge kept open were areas where the evidence of peril to the dolphin was weakest. On the other hand, I’d already made my decision to exclude from the closure some areas where a case existed for closure to protect the dolphins. I did that because I wanted to reduce the affects of job losses as much as possible.
For that, I was vigorously attacked by sections of the conservation movement. Their attacks were not wholly unjustified because there certainly was some small risk. But in my view it is unacceptable that the law allowed a greater risk to be taken than the one I’d already accepted; because I’d already pushed the boundary back as far as I considered reasonable and balanced.
The policy that the law allows today is a grotesque abdication of parliamentary responsibility and, in my view, was never intended to be the outcome when parliament passed the Act in 1996.
Section 10 of the original Act fails to make it clear that when the information about a fish stock is incomplete, but on balance the evidence points to a looming crisis in stock numbers, the minister must not use that flawed information as a reason to delay or fail to protect that species.
That failure to spell out the priorities clearly has meant that nearly every minister of fisheries in recent history has ended up being taken to court by the industry. The fuzziness around priorities has been a field day for lawyers.
If we decide that our priorities surrounding sustainability of our fisheries are important to us, then parliament should make that policy very clear in the law. The risk of extinction is not a risk we should take by mumbling obfuscation in the statute. Therefore the act needs to make protection from extinction explicit and not leave it to interpretation by the Courts.
This point is obscured by the case a lot of people seem to make that marine mammals should enjoy absolute protection.
Instead we should focus on protecting a mammal from extinction. This is much more clear cut than shielding a species from any potential harm at all.
No-one wants dolphins to be caught and killed and we can pass various rules about fishing practice that ensures that we minimise the dolphin by-catch. It’s reasonable to have a debate about the balance between those rules and the need to enjoy our ocean resource.
It is not reasonable to simplify the issue to a choice between utilisation of the resource on the one hand, or the complete extinction of a species on the other. Not all mammals need absolute protection.
Let me give you the example of sea lions on Auckland Island. I know there are a range of views on the sea lions, and I didn’t have any advice that they were endangered. I became very familiar with these sea lions, because for much of my term as fishing minister, I received postcards from cute little baby sea lions, that read “Dear Jim, please don’t kill my mother”!
I can tell you definitively - my receptionist received no item of correspondence more frequently each morning than these heart-felt pleas, many of them from school children insisting it would be heartless, matricide were I to authorise the slaughter of these defenceless mothers.
I’m sure these postcards were great revenue raisers for sections of the conversation movement, and for NZ Post! I have no doubt the donations poured in. I am a little more doubtful that the recipients of these generous donations were making it clear that the sea lion population in this area was not endangered; in fact it was growing satisfactorily.
On the other hand, the fishing industry does itself few favours. When I was minister we put observers on 4% of all fishing boats. That’s one out of every twenty-five fishing boats. What a coincidence it is that 100% of all reported by-catch of birds, seals or dolphins occurs only on these boats with the observers aboard!
No-one ever reports catching a dolphin, a sea lion, an albatross or any other protected species when they don’t have an observer on-board. Perhaps the fishing industry has a point and these observers are the real threat to endangered species.
Or perhaps there’s another explanation. We’re left today with a situation where the law does not clearly support the sustainability of our fisheries.
The industry should take a good hard look at itself before it takes another minister to court. Because a fish in the sea is a fish in the bank. Many fish are long lived, and if not they are generally prolific breeders. We all benefit from a cautious approach.
My story with the Maui and Hector's dolphins is a good example of why the Fisheries Act continues to need changing. The requirement for the minister to keep allowing fishing to continue until he or she can PROVE beyond doubt that the environment or an entire species is in peril - must go.
We all know that the information gathered about the state of fish stocks is rough and anecdotal, as it was when we were trying to establish exactly how many hector dolphins remain.
The industry pays for much of the research, and it should think twice before it continues to insist that we spend more money on gathering yet more information. If they give us no choice, we might just have to do that.
A minister must be able to take a precautionary position and decide to lean towards the protection of a species where there is a risk. It is our parliamentary obligation to do so.
A judge, as an interpreter of the law, should not be expected to choose between sustainability and utilisation. Sustainability should, in law, be our most important objective in fisheries management. If our fish stocks become unsustainable there will be no fish for the industry - or anyone else - to catch.
This must surely change, and I will continue to fight for that change.
Has anyone here eaten fish and chips recently?
Because apparently I’m the minister who took the fish out of fish and chips.
The fact that someone could even say that shows you how far we are from having a rational debate about the right of a minister to protect our fishing resource. Last time I looked, there was still fish in my fish and chips.
What I actually did, as Minister of Fisheries was introduce new rules in an effort to save the world's rarest and smallest dolphin from extinction. What I tried to do was pass an amendment to the 1996 Fisheries Act which would have struck the right balance between sustainability and the need to use and fish our oceans. It would have made it clear that the most important part of the minister’s job, on behalf of all New Zealanders, is to protect the sustainability of our fishing resource.
As the law stands today, it remains vague about when a minister can err on the side of caution, and act to protect a species like Orange Roughey (let alone endangered mammals like the Hector and Maui dolphins.)
Without this amendment, the Act bucks international best practice. It makes it almost impossible to come down on the side of sustainability. Because before a minister can do anything, the Act insists that the information and the science prove beyond doubt that a fish stock is at risk of catastrophic depletion.
In reality, the information we get is often incomplete and flawed. It’s very hard to follow the behaviour of a fish stock. It’s an imperfect science.
That’s why internationally, there is consensus that where information is uncertain or flawed, ministers should adopt a precautionary approach, and should not use the uncertainty of the information as a reason for postponing or failing to take measures to protect species.
This lack of clarity in the New Zealand law has allowed the fishing industry to take ministers to court when they come down on the side of protection, because they can claim that the proof is not absolute.
I couldn’t get the support across the House to get this amendment passed. This was a surprise to me, because when it had its first reading in parliament, I seemed to have the support of most political parties. Certainly the comments in the house were positive!
National MP Phil Heatley said he supported the Bill because it “provided a clearer direction to the minister..to take a cautious approach”. But between then and when the Bill was taken to Select Committee, something happened. The National Party, the Maori Party and NZ First all miraculously changed their minds. What happened? I’ll tell you what happened - certain lobby groups in the industry spoke to those MPs. The industry got to them.
And so here we are today, with nothing changed.
It’s ironic; this week, New Zealand was rated by a leading ocean studies journal as “the world’s top performing country for managing its marine and fishery resources.” The same Phil Heatley who back in 2007 allowed the industry to tell him what to do, the same Phil Heatley who made sure the Bill to improve the legislation didn’t make it out of select committee, is now the Fisheries Minister.
He couldn’t wait to tell everyone the good news about this award. What he didn’t say in his press release is that he is responsible, along with others, for the fact that we can’t implement those policies that helped us get the award, because he and others let the industry get to him before we could amend and clarify the law.
I want to make something very clear; commercial fishing is good for New Zealand. It creates jobs, and it creates exports, which help to grow our economy. But it must be done sustainably.
When I was asked to make the decision to close some of the in-shore fisheries to protect the Maui dolphin in particular and also the Hector dolphin, one of the first things I asked was - what effect would this have on the livelihoods of the fishermen affected? I felt that the economic analysis I was presented with wasn’t satisfactory. So I decided to get a full analysis done.
Plenty of people were telling me not to; they said it would only provide ammunition for the fishing industry. But I wanted all of the facts.
The economic analysis showed that 380 jobs would be lost. That to me made the decision agonising. I certainly didn’t go into politics to destroy jobs. And therefore I was very careful to minimise the impact on people affected, by taking as hard a line as I could on which areas would be protected.
In the end, the rules I introduced were not the most severe of the options proposed to me. I had to strike the best achievable balance between fishing activity and the protection of two iconic species.
We ended up with a variety of regional bans and other restrictions on set netting, trawling and drift netting in coastal waters. Set netting was banned around much of the South Island's coast, and there were new trawl restrictions close to shore on the east and south coasts.
On the upper North Island's west coast existing set net bans were extended, and new trawling and drift netting bans were introduced.
We had to do something. Alongside the economic analysis I had, the other piece of advice I was given was that we were facing the imminent extinction of these species of dolphin. At the time there were fewer than 8,000 Hector dolphins, mostly around the South Island. And the North Island Maui's dolphin was estimated to number only around 111 dolphins. It was classified as "nationally critical" by the Department of Conservation.
In all of the discussion about my decision to protect the dolphin I am yet to hear anyone say that it’s a good idea to be blasé about making an entire species - let alone a species of mammal - extinct on our watch.
Instead those who thought I was wrong claimed they’d never seen dolphin in the area of the fishery that I closed. That’s plainly because the number of dolphin has significantly reduced; there are hardly any Maui dolphins left! So of course you’re not going to see, let alone, catch them very often. But you only have to catch one in five years to risk the entire future of the Maui dolphin species.
Therefore, it was shocking to me that the law allowed the industry to use the courts to override my decision to reduce the risks to such an iconic species of mammals - native only in New Zealand.
It’s hard to understand why the fishing industry won’t see that taking a cautious approach in the short term is best for the industry too. We all benefit in the long run, when the resource grows.
That’s why the Act needs amending. It must be clear, so that lawyers and judges can’t fill the gap where there is any uncertainty. While the Act has two purposes - to provide for the utilisation of the oceans, while preserving sustainability, its paramount obligation must be to protect any species of fish or mammal where ever there is a need, even when the information is uncertain or limited.
After the courts overturned parts of my decision to close certain areas to commercial fishing, the industry seemed to think they’d won a victory. Of course this was only an interim decision, and we are still waiting for a final ruling from the High Court. I still hope that commonsense will prevail.
But at the time, I still got a letter from the fishing industry gloating that no dolphin had been recorded as caught during the interim moratorium. The letter was signed off - smugly- “We all make mistakes don’t we Jim...?”
We do all make mistakes - but this was not one of mine. The smug arrogant attitude of the fishing lobby clearly shows in how much peril the dolphins remain.
I had another letter from a commercial fisherman that was written in a different tone. The fisherman wrote to tell me that he had once caught a dolphin, and not declared it. He had felt guilty ever since, and he wanted the minister of fisheries to know that dolphins and other endangered species do end up in the nets of commercial fishermen.
To be fair, the parts of the coast that the judge kept open were areas where the evidence of peril to the dolphin was weakest. On the other hand, I’d already made my decision to exclude from the closure some areas where a case existed for closure to protect the dolphins. I did that because I wanted to reduce the affects of job losses as much as possible.
For that, I was vigorously attacked by sections of the conservation movement. Their attacks were not wholly unjustified because there certainly was some small risk. But in my view it is unacceptable that the law allowed a greater risk to be taken than the one I’d already accepted; because I’d already pushed the boundary back as far as I considered reasonable and balanced.
The policy that the law allows today is a grotesque abdication of parliamentary responsibility and, in my view, was never intended to be the outcome when parliament passed the Act in 1996.
Section 10 of the original Act fails to make it clear that when the information about a fish stock is incomplete, but on balance the evidence points to a looming crisis in stock numbers, the minister must not use that flawed information as a reason to delay or fail to protect that species.
That failure to spell out the priorities clearly has meant that nearly every minister of fisheries in recent history has ended up being taken to court by the industry. The fuzziness around priorities has been a field day for lawyers.
If we decide that our priorities surrounding sustainability of our fisheries are important to us, then parliament should make that policy very clear in the law. The risk of extinction is not a risk we should take by mumbling obfuscation in the statute. Therefore the act needs to make protection from extinction explicit and not leave it to interpretation by the Courts.
This point is obscured by the case a lot of people seem to make that marine mammals should enjoy absolute protection.
Instead we should focus on protecting a mammal from extinction. This is much more clear cut than shielding a species from any potential harm at all.
No-one wants dolphins to be caught and killed and we can pass various rules about fishing practice that ensures that we minimise the dolphin by-catch. It’s reasonable to have a debate about the balance between those rules and the need to enjoy our ocean resource.
It is not reasonable to simplify the issue to a choice between utilisation of the resource on the one hand, or the complete extinction of a species on the other. Not all mammals need absolute protection.
Let me give you the example of sea lions on Auckland Island. I know there are a range of views on the sea lions, and I didn’t have any advice that they were endangered. I became very familiar with these sea lions, because for much of my term as fishing minister, I received postcards from cute little baby sea lions, that read “Dear Jim, please don’t kill my mother”!
I can tell you definitively - my receptionist received no item of correspondence more frequently each morning than these heart-felt pleas, many of them from school children insisting it would be heartless, matricide were I to authorise the slaughter of these defenceless mothers.
I’m sure these postcards were great revenue raisers for sections of the conversation movement, and for NZ Post! I have no doubt the donations poured in. I am a little more doubtful that the recipients of these generous donations were making it clear that the sea lion population in this area was not endangered; in fact it was growing satisfactorily.
On the other hand, the fishing industry does itself few favours. When I was minister we put observers on 4% of all fishing boats. That’s one out of every twenty-five fishing boats. What a coincidence it is that 100% of all reported by-catch of birds, seals or dolphins occurs only on these boats with the observers aboard!
No-one ever reports catching a dolphin, a sea lion, an albatross or any other protected species when they don’t have an observer on-board. Perhaps the fishing industry has a point and these observers are the real threat to endangered species.
Or perhaps there’s another explanation. We’re left today with a situation where the law does not clearly support the sustainability of our fisheries.
The industry should take a good hard look at itself before it takes another minister to court. Because a fish in the sea is a fish in the bank. Many fish are long lived, and if not they are generally prolific breeders. We all benefit from a cautious approach.
My story with the Maui and Hector's dolphins is a good example of why the Fisheries Act continues to need changing. The requirement for the minister to keep allowing fishing to continue until he or she can PROVE beyond doubt that the environment or an entire species is in peril - must go.
We all know that the information gathered about the state of fish stocks is rough and anecdotal, as it was when we were trying to establish exactly how many hector dolphins remain.
The industry pays for much of the research, and it should think twice before it continues to insist that we spend more money on gathering yet more information. If they give us no choice, we might just have to do that.
A minister must be able to take a precautionary position and decide to lean towards the protection of a species where there is a risk. It is our parliamentary obligation to do so.
A judge, as an interpreter of the law, should not be expected to choose between sustainability and utilisation. Sustainability should, in law, be our most important objective in fisheries management. If our fish stocks become unsustainable there will be no fish for the industry - or anyone else - to catch.
This must surely change, and I will continue to fight for that change.
The law stops us saving dolphins
19/11/09 13:50 Filed in: News Releases
The Fisheries Act must be amended so that ministers have a clear mandate to protect our oceans as a priority, when fish stocks are low or a species is threatened with extinction, says MP for Wigram and Progressive Party leader Jim Anderton.
The Act is unclear about when the minister can favour sustainability over commercial use, and act to protect a species like Orange Roughy for example, or endangered mammals like the Hector and Maui dolphins.
“It demands that a minister prove beyond doubt that a species is threatened. But in reality, the information we get is often incomplete and flawed. It’s very hard to follow the behaviour of a fish stock. It’s an imperfect science.
“That’s why internationally, there is consensus that where information is uncertain ministers should adopt a precautionary approach, and protect a species as a priority.”
In 2008 Jim Anderton, then Fisheries Minister, introduced new rules and closed certain areas to commercial fishing in an effort to save the world's rarest and smallest dolphin from extinction - the Maui dolphin. The fishing industry took the government to court because they claimed that the proof was not absolute. The court is still to make a final ruling on the case.
As minister, Jim Anderton introduced a Bill to amend the Act to make it clear that the most important part of the minister’s job, on behalf of all New Zealanders, is to protect the sustainability of our fishing resource.
“I couldn’t get the support across the House to get this amendment passed. National MP Phil Heatley said in parliament that he supported the Bill because it “provided a clearer direction to the minister..to take a cautious approach.
“But between then and when the Bill was taken to Select Committee, the fishing industry got to him, to the Maori Party and to NZ First. Their support was subsequently withdrawn.
“Now that Phil Heatley is the Minister of Fisheries, he is still refusing to do something about this toothless fisheries act. The industry would do well to consider that a fish in the sea is a fish in the bank, and we all benefit when we protect the resources in our oceans,” says Jim Anderton.
Jim Anderton's speech notes at a marine mammals symposium are here.
The Act is unclear about when the minister can favour sustainability over commercial use, and act to protect a species like Orange Roughy for example, or endangered mammals like the Hector and Maui dolphins.
“It demands that a minister prove beyond doubt that a species is threatened. But in reality, the information we get is often incomplete and flawed. It’s very hard to follow the behaviour of a fish stock. It’s an imperfect science.
“That’s why internationally, there is consensus that where information is uncertain ministers should adopt a precautionary approach, and protect a species as a priority.”
In 2008 Jim Anderton, then Fisheries Minister, introduced new rules and closed certain areas to commercial fishing in an effort to save the world's rarest and smallest dolphin from extinction - the Maui dolphin. The fishing industry took the government to court because they claimed that the proof was not absolute. The court is still to make a final ruling on the case.
As minister, Jim Anderton introduced a Bill to amend the Act to make it clear that the most important part of the minister’s job, on behalf of all New Zealanders, is to protect the sustainability of our fishing resource.
“I couldn’t get the support across the House to get this amendment passed. National MP Phil Heatley said in parliament that he supported the Bill because it “provided a clearer direction to the minister..to take a cautious approach.
“But between then and when the Bill was taken to Select Committee, the fishing industry got to him, to the Maori Party and to NZ First. Their support was subsequently withdrawn.
“Now that Phil Heatley is the Minister of Fisheries, he is still refusing to do something about this toothless fisheries act. The industry would do well to consider that a fish in the sea is a fish in the bank, and we all benefit when we protect the resources in our oceans,” says Jim Anderton.
Jim Anderton's speech notes at a marine mammals symposium are here.
‘Full and final’ Waitangi settlements?
18/11/09 16:55 Filed in: News Releases
If the government reopens the Treaty settlement with Ngai Tahu because of the ETS, there will never again be any such principle as ‘full and final’ settlements, Progressive MP Jim Anderton says.
“The government is heading down a very damaging path by doing a special deal that revisits the 1990s settlement with Ngai Tahu.
“This issue was raised with the previous government, when Ngai Tahu questioned the effect of an ETS on its Treaty settlement. When Cabinet considered this issue I personally raised the issue of principle that was at stake. If we reopened a settlement because of a subsequent new policy, it would be never-ending. On that basis, Cabinet decided not to reopen the settlement.
“To reopen it now makes a mockery of Treaty settlements.
“Governments make lots of decisions that affect assets like land and forests. It changes tax law, influences exchange rate policy and changes laws around land use, as well as changing environmental legislation, such as emissions.
“If the government has to compensate over ETS, then it has to compensate over any change of policy that might negatively affect valuation.
“I notice no one wants to revisit the settlement when governments make decisions that subsequently increase the value of the asset.
“What the Government is doing is creating a new class of assets that are former Treaty settlement assets, and they would never stop being Treaty assets. They would always be liable for compensation.
“Crown Law received an independent legal opinion that refutes suggestions there was bad faith or any breach of obligation in the settlement. The government should not be exposing the taxpayer to this unlimited risk particularly as a result of an expedient political deal with the Maori Party,” says Jim Anderton.
“The government is heading down a very damaging path by doing a special deal that revisits the 1990s settlement with Ngai Tahu.
“This issue was raised with the previous government, when Ngai Tahu questioned the effect of an ETS on its Treaty settlement. When Cabinet considered this issue I personally raised the issue of principle that was at stake. If we reopened a settlement because of a subsequent new policy, it would be never-ending. On that basis, Cabinet decided not to reopen the settlement.
“To reopen it now makes a mockery of Treaty settlements.
“Governments make lots of decisions that affect assets like land and forests. It changes tax law, influences exchange rate policy and changes laws around land use, as well as changing environmental legislation, such as emissions.
“If the government has to compensate over ETS, then it has to compensate over any change of policy that might negatively affect valuation.
“I notice no one wants to revisit the settlement when governments make decisions that subsequently increase the value of the asset.
“What the Government is doing is creating a new class of assets that are former Treaty settlement assets, and they would never stop being Treaty assets. They would always be liable for compensation.
“Crown Law received an independent legal opinion that refutes suggestions there was bad faith or any breach of obligation in the settlement. The government should not be exposing the taxpayer to this unlimited risk particularly as a result of an expedient political deal with the Maori Party,” says Jim Anderton.
Jim's E-News, November 2009
16/11/09 15:00 Filed in: Newsletters
DENTAL CARE ISSUES FOR NEW ZEALANDERS
I am involving myself in a project to raise the profile of, and extend the services for, dental treatment in New Zealand.
The cost of dental treatment is a significant barrier to lifetime dental care and as a result, neglected teeth and gums are a hidden but critical problem for New Zealand’s healthcare system which needs to be urgently addressed.
It is my strongly held view that a high quality, accessible and affordable dental system should be part of the general medical health system in New Zealand. This would provide a public-private partnership which would enable all of our citizens from their earliest years right through to their last, to have their teeth cared for by qualified dental professionals at an affordable cost.
From one end of New Zealand to the other I have been made aware of the importance of this issue to a large number of our citizens, young and old, and it is well beyond time when action rather than words was seen and heard to be taking place.
I would be grateful to hear from you by email, fax or letter about your thoughts on this vital issue.
Contact me here.
ACC IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD - BIKERS RALLY, CHRISTCHURCH
Let’s be clear about one thing; New Zealand has the best accident compensation scheme in the world. It’s not broken, so why try and fix it; and no matter what Nick Smith tries to tell you - it’s not broke. It has reserves of money. It has over $11 billion of reserves, and last year it collected $1 billion more in levies, than it spent on claims.
Bikers are being unfairly targeted – Nick Smith wants them to pay three times as much in ACC levies as they are paying today.
Today motorcyclists are paying about $252. Tomorrow they will be paying $735.
This is outrageous. And it is completely unnecessary - because ACC can pay its bills without making them pay three times as much.
ACC was set up as a no-fault system to be run by a government-owned company so that everyone who has an accident gets looked after, and at a lower cost than overseas.
It was never intended to penalise certain groups that it saw as ‘high risk’ - otherwise where do you stop? If its bikers today, why not old people who are more likely to fall over than anyone else; why not 6 year boys who play rugby and are more likely to get hurt than kids playing chess?
The point of the scheme was to avoid this situation, and draw on the overall resources of the whole community. So we all pay a bit, and no one is disadvantaged. Every one avoids the very large lawyers’ bills and insurance company profits that have to be paid under a private insurance system.
We gave up the right to sue under this system, in return for the fair treatment of injured people.
The National-led government is playing dirty with the figures. It’s insisting that all imagined accidents in the future should be paid right now by people like the bike riders. But this wasn’t what ACC was set up to do. It was always intended to be a ‘pay as you go’ scheme.
That means the levies received in any one year, pay for the accidents in that year. And that system has been working fine - in fact ACC has even managed to put aside significant resources.
The real agenda here, is to set up ACC for a gradual return to a privately run insurance scheme. Scaremongering about costs is just the Trojan horse. And inside the Trojan horse is a bunch of lawyers and foreign insurance companies, licking their lips and looking forward to getting their hands on your levies!
I am entirely opposed to any private scheme. And I totally reject the National government’s attempt to make bikers pay three times as much.
URGENT INQUIRY INTO MONETARY POLICY NOW
We should put party politics aside and come up with a new approach to monetary policy which supports people in New Zealand who produce tradeable goods, rather than those who speculate on property and take the profits off-shore.
The National-led government and its coalition partners refused to take part in the inquiry, with the PM cynically calling it a ‘stunt’ from the opposition parties.
I don’t believe in the “nothing we can do” stance of this government. We could be looking to remove the incentives for those buying investment properties. Banks need to be encouraged to lend to businesses; and we need to review our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable export goods sector.
We need to look at regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make excessive profits.
With the National-led government complacently sitting on the sidelines, New Zealanders will be the losers for it.
To download the banking inquiry report, go here, or get in touch with my office.
BANKING INQUIRY BACKGROUNDER AND FINDINGS
The ‘big four’ Australian banks control nearly 90% of banking assets in New Zealand. The three New Zealand owned banks have 4% of banking assets.
Have the Banks made a profit?
The combined profits of the ‘big four’ Australian owned banks now exceed the combined profits of all other companies listed on the stock exchange NZX 50 series.
In 2008 Banks earned $3.26 billion; the earnings of the NZX 50 were $2.89 billion.
Did the Banks pass on the cut to the Official Cash Rate (OCR)?
The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high of 8.25 % in mid 2008, to only 2.5% today.
But the overseas owned banks reduced interest rates by less than the fall in the OCR. 1% margin in interest rates was not passed on to bank customers. 1% extra interest added $787 million to costs for New Zealand businesses; and 1% higher margin on loans added $460 million to the net interest costs to the farming sector.
The biggest cost was in the housing sector: 1% extra interest cost added over $1.6 billion to mortgage repayments.
New Zealand businesses are suffering
In 2009 bank lending for home loans rose about $3.2 billion (to $164.8 billion). Meanwhile business lending fell by about $3 billion (to $78 billion.)
The effects on the farming sector have been negative
Federated Farmers interest rates survey in June 2009 found that farm business overdraft interest rates had fallen an average of 2.68 % since December 2008. Meanwhile the OCR was cut by 4%.
Ordinary New Zealanders had problems paying their mortgages
In five years, Budgeting and Family Support Services has only seen one family lose their house in a mortgage sale. But in the first three months on 2009, fifteen families had already lost their home.
Have the Banks contributed to overseas debt and a housing bubble?
In the last ten years, personal lending has almost doubled, from $60 billion to $105 billion; most of the lending has been for housing.
Home loans now make up 55% of bank lending, up from 35% ten years ago. The banks borrowed more money to fund property price increases which contributed to a rise in overseas debt.
Between 2003 and 2009 net overseas liabilities rose from $100.6 billion to $176.3 billion; that’s a rise from 76.8% of GDP to 98%.
What have the banks got to do with our volatile exchange rate?
High overseas borrowing has impacted on the exchange rate which is subject to high volatility. The export sector makes up roughly 30% of GDP - about $40 billion per year but suffers the most from currency instability which means uncertain returns.
PROGRESSIVE SUBMISSION ON THE LAW COMMISSION PAPER: ‘ALCOHOL IN OUR LIVES’ I am under no illusion about the challenge involved if we are to seriously reduce the harm caused by alcohol. But doing nothing is not an option.
Alcohol is by far the most damaging drug in the country. It causes between $2-$3 billion dollars worth of economic and social harm each year. The personal cost to families and loved ones is incalculable. How can we measure the cost of a family tragedy?
One of the most damaging drugs we face right now is not even illegal; our kids can buy it in the local dairy; they play sports and have it promoted to them all the time; they see it on TV, on billboards and hear about it on the radio.
The abuse of alcohol amongst our young people is on the rise and it’s destroying lives.
I have been working with others like Dr Doug Sellman of the Otago School of Medicine to raise awareness of the damage that alcohol is causing. We have a unique opportunity right now to do something, through the Law Commission’s review of the legislation to do with the drinking age, the availability and the advertising of alcohol.
Did you know that every advertisement seen by a young person increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life. And people like you end up picking up the pieces.
Currently, $200,000 per day is spent on marketing and advertising alcohol. About half the marketing is spent on sponsorship.
I welcome the Law Commission’s issues paper which gives New Zealanders a unique opportunity to reform the legal framework in which alcohol is sold, advertised and promoted.
It gives us a chance today to do more to protect New Zealanders from the harm caused by the abuse of alcohol.
The Progressive Party submission calls on the Law Commission to do more in its final recommendations to guide law makers on how to further curb alcohol advertising, particularly to the most vulnerable New Zealanders - the young. I would like to see more options put forward by the Law Commission on how we can greatly reduce the availability of alcohol to young people. I have also given my opinions and made comments on every option put forward in the Law Commission’s paper, ‘Alcohol in our Lives’.
For the full submission: go here.
For my speech to the National CAYAD hui, go here.
"Ten things the alcohol industry won't tell you about alcohol"
Alcohol Action are holding their last two last meetings this week with presenter Dr. Doug Sellman.
The meetings are at: CHRISTCHURCH: Art Gallery Theatre, Tuesday 17th November, 7.30-9pm PORIRUA: Helen Smith Community Room, Wednesday 18th November, 7.30-9pm
There is still time to get in a late submissions to the Law Commission.
Use milk payout to farmers to strengthen industry
It's important that the increase in Fonterra's payout to farmers is used to strengthen the industry, and not squandered.
The increased pay out is very timely for a large number of farmers who have been struggling with higher input prices and enormous costs for financing. Interest rates for many farmers have not come down.
But the risk is that the higher payout will lead to higher farm valuations and in turn to yet more farm indebtedness. That's what happened too often when the milk payout reached $7 a kilo. When the price then dropped, it left a lot of farmers under mortgage stress.
Banks should be careful about getting into the same position of lending against valuations based on favourable milk payouts.
The payout shows New Zealand is well positioned as a food producer to continue to earn a living when global conditions are less than favourable.
When payouts increase as much as this one has, the extra earnings need to be used to strengthen the industry, for example by stronger investment in research and development, and strenthening balance sheets to reduce our exposure to rapacious overseas owned banks.
A generation of kids will be lost – New Zealand must do more
Launch of the Mutima Project in Christchurch
16,000 children are dying from hunger every day because food aid is now at its lowest level in twenty years, but the National government remains determined not to use our aid for ‘poverty reduction.
The head of the United Nation’s World Food Programme recently announced that tens of millions of the world’s poor will have their food rations cut or cancelled in the next few weeks because some OECD countries have slashed aid after the financial crisis.
The Mutima project is a volunteer organisation and will send a team of cardiac surgeons to Zambia to perform life-saving heart surgery on young adults.
I commend them for the strength of their personal commitment and their determination to serve. We are a stronger and more caring community because of people like these Christchurch surgeons. Because of them, a hundred young Zambians will have a second chance at life.
About 60% of the Zambian population are living on less than a $1 per day.
But where is the urgency from the National government to save a generation of children who will die from starvation if the world does nothing?
The National government has recently announced that it will abolish the goal of ‘poverty reduction’ for our aid, and replace it with a goal of ‘economic development’.
I am a strong champion of economic development but you can’t do much business development if people don’t have enough to eat or clean water to drink.
I want to see the National government do more about bad governance and corruption in some of the poorest countries and see New Zealand get behind a new international Natural Resource Charter which sets out ‘best practice’ in countries with natural resources like oil (or copper in Zambia), so proceeds of those resources go to the poorest people and don’t end up in the pockets of the corrupt.
For the speech, go here.
Who owns the ASB? Not us.
The ASB has been an Australian owned bank for the last two decades, and it is misleading the public when it pretends to be a ‘Kiwi Bank’.
The ABS is running promotional ads claiming ‘We’ve been a Kiwi Bank since 1847’.
The truth is we don’t really know who owns the ASB. We know it is owned 100% by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), but who owns the Commonwealth Bank?
It used to be owned by the Federal Government of Australia but it was privatised in stages beginning in 1991.
Almost half of the current owners of the Commonwealth Bank are ‘nominee’ companies.
That means their identities are hidden behind other well-known companies, like the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).
We don’t really know who owns ASB. All we know for sure is that New Zealand doesn’t.
For the release, go here.
An ‘unfortunate arrangement’
The Auditor General’s findings about Bill English’s accommodation arrangements go significantly further than findings that caused Marion Hobbs and Phillida Bunkle to stand down from ministerial office in 2001. This makes Mr English’s position as finance minister very difficult. I have been in the same position as Mr Key, in having to make a decision on the future of the Minister. A precedent for the right thing to do has been set.
I wrote to the Auditor-General saying Mr English’ arrangements needed scrutiny. The report finds Mr English’s arrangements were not within the rules. The Auditor General’s report states:
The result was that the Crown was renting a property for Mr English from a trust in which he had an interest, and the arrangement was explicitly based on a view that he did not have an interest. Clearly, this was unfortunate.
The report discloses Mr English went to some lengths to arrange his affairs around the accommodation allowance entitlement. That is not a good look for a Minister of Finance.
The Auditor-General’s advice does not even mention other issues that the Prime Minister still needs to consider: that Mr English was giving his Wellington address as his home for the purpose of being a director of a company (incidentally, the company that owns his Dipton investment), but claiming to live in Dipton for the purpose of receiving an accommodation allowance.
A prudent minister might have noticed the contradiction between those two claims.
I have always welcomed the idea of Mr English having his family with him in Wellington. That is not the issue. The question is whether he was right to claim entitlements for doing so. It would not have been in any way objectionable if Mr English had lived in Wellington with his family and claimed an out of town allowance for his occasional trips to Dipton.
For the release, go here.
I am involving myself in a project to raise the profile of, and extend the services for, dental treatment in New Zealand.
The cost of dental treatment is a significant barrier to lifetime dental care and as a result, neglected teeth and gums are a hidden but critical problem for New Zealand’s healthcare system which needs to be urgently addressed.
It is my strongly held view that a high quality, accessible and affordable dental system should be part of the general medical health system in New Zealand. This would provide a public-private partnership which would enable all of our citizens from their earliest years right through to their last, to have their teeth cared for by qualified dental professionals at an affordable cost.
From one end of New Zealand to the other I have been made aware of the importance of this issue to a large number of our citizens, young and old, and it is well beyond time when action rather than words was seen and heard to be taking place.
I would be grateful to hear from you by email, fax or letter about your thoughts on this vital issue.
Contact me here.
ACC IS THE BEST IN THE WORLD - BIKERS RALLY, CHRISTCHURCH
Let’s be clear about one thing; New Zealand has the best accident compensation scheme in the world. It’s not broken, so why try and fix it; and no matter what Nick Smith tries to tell you - it’s not broke. It has reserves of money. It has over $11 billion of reserves, and last year it collected $1 billion more in levies, than it spent on claims.
Bikers are being unfairly targeted – Nick Smith wants them to pay three times as much in ACC levies as they are paying today.
Today motorcyclists are paying about $252. Tomorrow they will be paying $735.
This is outrageous. And it is completely unnecessary - because ACC can pay its bills without making them pay three times as much.
ACC was set up as a no-fault system to be run by a government-owned company so that everyone who has an accident gets looked after, and at a lower cost than overseas.
It was never intended to penalise certain groups that it saw as ‘high risk’ - otherwise where do you stop? If its bikers today, why not old people who are more likely to fall over than anyone else; why not 6 year boys who play rugby and are more likely to get hurt than kids playing chess?
The point of the scheme was to avoid this situation, and draw on the overall resources of the whole community. So we all pay a bit, and no one is disadvantaged. Every one avoids the very large lawyers’ bills and insurance company profits that have to be paid under a private insurance system.
We gave up the right to sue under this system, in return for the fair treatment of injured people.
The National-led government is playing dirty with the figures. It’s insisting that all imagined accidents in the future should be paid right now by people like the bike riders. But this wasn’t what ACC was set up to do. It was always intended to be a ‘pay as you go’ scheme.
That means the levies received in any one year, pay for the accidents in that year. And that system has been working fine - in fact ACC has even managed to put aside significant resources.
The real agenda here, is to set up ACC for a gradual return to a privately run insurance scheme. Scaremongering about costs is just the Trojan horse. And inside the Trojan horse is a bunch of lawyers and foreign insurance companies, licking their lips and looking forward to getting their hands on your levies!
I am entirely opposed to any private scheme. And I totally reject the National government’s attempt to make bikers pay three times as much.
URGENT INQUIRY INTO MONETARY POLICY NOW
We should put party politics aside and come up with a new approach to monetary policy which supports people in New Zealand who produce tradeable goods, rather than those who speculate on property and take the profits off-shore.
The National-led government and its coalition partners refused to take part in the inquiry, with the PM cynically calling it a ‘stunt’ from the opposition parties.
I don’t believe in the “nothing we can do” stance of this government. We could be looking to remove the incentives for those buying investment properties. Banks need to be encouraged to lend to businesses; and we need to review our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable export goods sector.
We need to look at regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make excessive profits.
With the National-led government complacently sitting on the sidelines, New Zealanders will be the losers for it.
To download the banking inquiry report, go here, or get in touch with my office.
BANKING INQUIRY BACKGROUNDER AND FINDINGS
The ‘big four’ Australian banks control nearly 90% of banking assets in New Zealand. The three New Zealand owned banks have 4% of banking assets.
Have the Banks made a profit?
The combined profits of the ‘big four’ Australian owned banks now exceed the combined profits of all other companies listed on the stock exchange NZX 50 series.
In 2008 Banks earned $3.26 billion; the earnings of the NZX 50 were $2.89 billion.
Did the Banks pass on the cut to the Official Cash Rate (OCR)?
The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high of 8.25 % in mid 2008, to only 2.5% today.
But the overseas owned banks reduced interest rates by less than the fall in the OCR. 1% margin in interest rates was not passed on to bank customers. 1% extra interest added $787 million to costs for New Zealand businesses; and 1% higher margin on loans added $460 million to the net interest costs to the farming sector.
The biggest cost was in the housing sector: 1% extra interest cost added over $1.6 billion to mortgage repayments.
New Zealand businesses are suffering
In 2009 bank lending for home loans rose about $3.2 billion (to $164.8 billion). Meanwhile business lending fell by about $3 billion (to $78 billion.)
The effects on the farming sector have been negative
Federated Farmers interest rates survey in June 2009 found that farm business overdraft interest rates had fallen an average of 2.68 % since December 2008. Meanwhile the OCR was cut by 4%.
Ordinary New Zealanders had problems paying their mortgages
In five years, Budgeting and Family Support Services has only seen one family lose their house in a mortgage sale. But in the first three months on 2009, fifteen families had already lost their home.
Have the Banks contributed to overseas debt and a housing bubble?
In the last ten years, personal lending has almost doubled, from $60 billion to $105 billion; most of the lending has been for housing.
Home loans now make up 55% of bank lending, up from 35% ten years ago. The banks borrowed more money to fund property price increases which contributed to a rise in overseas debt.
Between 2003 and 2009 net overseas liabilities rose from $100.6 billion to $176.3 billion; that’s a rise from 76.8% of GDP to 98%.
What have the banks got to do with our volatile exchange rate?
High overseas borrowing has impacted on the exchange rate which is subject to high volatility. The export sector makes up roughly 30% of GDP - about $40 billion per year but suffers the most from currency instability which means uncertain returns.
PROGRESSIVE SUBMISSION ON THE LAW COMMISSION PAPER: ‘ALCOHOL IN OUR LIVES’ I am under no illusion about the challenge involved if we are to seriously reduce the harm caused by alcohol. But doing nothing is not an option.
Alcohol is by far the most damaging drug in the country. It causes between $2-$3 billion dollars worth of economic and social harm each year. The personal cost to families and loved ones is incalculable. How can we measure the cost of a family tragedy?
One of the most damaging drugs we face right now is not even illegal; our kids can buy it in the local dairy; they play sports and have it promoted to them all the time; they see it on TV, on billboards and hear about it on the radio.
The abuse of alcohol amongst our young people is on the rise and it’s destroying lives.
I have been working with others like Dr Doug Sellman of the Otago School of Medicine to raise awareness of the damage that alcohol is causing. We have a unique opportunity right now to do something, through the Law Commission’s review of the legislation to do with the drinking age, the availability and the advertising of alcohol.
Did you know that every advertisement seen by a young person increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life. And people like you end up picking up the pieces.
Currently, $200,000 per day is spent on marketing and advertising alcohol. About half the marketing is spent on sponsorship.
I welcome the Law Commission’s issues paper which gives New Zealanders a unique opportunity to reform the legal framework in which alcohol is sold, advertised and promoted.
It gives us a chance today to do more to protect New Zealanders from the harm caused by the abuse of alcohol.
The Progressive Party submission calls on the Law Commission to do more in its final recommendations to guide law makers on how to further curb alcohol advertising, particularly to the most vulnerable New Zealanders - the young. I would like to see more options put forward by the Law Commission on how we can greatly reduce the availability of alcohol to young people. I have also given my opinions and made comments on every option put forward in the Law Commission’s paper, ‘Alcohol in our Lives’.
For the full submission: go here.
For my speech to the National CAYAD hui, go here.
"Ten things the alcohol industry won't tell you about alcohol"
Alcohol Action are holding their last two last meetings this week with presenter Dr. Doug Sellman.
The meetings are at: CHRISTCHURCH: Art Gallery Theatre, Tuesday 17th November, 7.30-9pm PORIRUA: Helen Smith Community Room, Wednesday 18th November, 7.30-9pm
There is still time to get in a late submissions to the Law Commission.
Use milk payout to farmers to strengthen industry
It's important that the increase in Fonterra's payout to farmers is used to strengthen the industry, and not squandered.
The increased pay out is very timely for a large number of farmers who have been struggling with higher input prices and enormous costs for financing. Interest rates for many farmers have not come down.
But the risk is that the higher payout will lead to higher farm valuations and in turn to yet more farm indebtedness. That's what happened too often when the milk payout reached $7 a kilo. When the price then dropped, it left a lot of farmers under mortgage stress.
Banks should be careful about getting into the same position of lending against valuations based on favourable milk payouts.
The payout shows New Zealand is well positioned as a food producer to continue to earn a living when global conditions are less than favourable.
When payouts increase as much as this one has, the extra earnings need to be used to strengthen the industry, for example by stronger investment in research and development, and strenthening balance sheets to reduce our exposure to rapacious overseas owned banks.
A generation of kids will be lost – New Zealand must do more
Launch of the Mutima Project in Christchurch
16,000 children are dying from hunger every day because food aid is now at its lowest level in twenty years, but the National government remains determined not to use our aid for ‘poverty reduction.
The head of the United Nation’s World Food Programme recently announced that tens of millions of the world’s poor will have their food rations cut or cancelled in the next few weeks because some OECD countries have slashed aid after the financial crisis.
The Mutima project is a volunteer organisation and will send a team of cardiac surgeons to Zambia to perform life-saving heart surgery on young adults.
I commend them for the strength of their personal commitment and their determination to serve. We are a stronger and more caring community because of people like these Christchurch surgeons. Because of them, a hundred young Zambians will have a second chance at life.
About 60% of the Zambian population are living on less than a $1 per day.
But where is the urgency from the National government to save a generation of children who will die from starvation if the world does nothing?
The National government has recently announced that it will abolish the goal of ‘poverty reduction’ for our aid, and replace it with a goal of ‘economic development’.
I am a strong champion of economic development but you can’t do much business development if people don’t have enough to eat or clean water to drink.
I want to see the National government do more about bad governance and corruption in some of the poorest countries and see New Zealand get behind a new international Natural Resource Charter which sets out ‘best practice’ in countries with natural resources like oil (or copper in Zambia), so proceeds of those resources go to the poorest people and don’t end up in the pockets of the corrupt.
For the speech, go here.
Who owns the ASB? Not us.
The ASB has been an Australian owned bank for the last two decades, and it is misleading the public when it pretends to be a ‘Kiwi Bank’.
The ABS is running promotional ads claiming ‘We’ve been a Kiwi Bank since 1847’.
The truth is we don’t really know who owns the ASB. We know it is owned 100% by the Commonwealth Bank of Australia (CBA), but who owns the Commonwealth Bank?
It used to be owned by the Federal Government of Australia but it was privatised in stages beginning in 1991.
Almost half of the current owners of the Commonwealth Bank are ‘nominee’ companies.
That means their identities are hidden behind other well-known companies, like the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation (HSBC).
We don’t really know who owns ASB. All we know for sure is that New Zealand doesn’t.
For the release, go here.
An ‘unfortunate arrangement’
The Auditor General’s findings about Bill English’s accommodation arrangements go significantly further than findings that caused Marion Hobbs and Phillida Bunkle to stand down from ministerial office in 2001. This makes Mr English’s position as finance minister very difficult. I have been in the same position as Mr Key, in having to make a decision on the future of the Minister. A precedent for the right thing to do has been set.
I wrote to the Auditor-General saying Mr English’ arrangements needed scrutiny. The report finds Mr English’s arrangements were not within the rules. The Auditor General’s report states:
The result was that the Crown was renting a property for Mr English from a trust in which he had an interest, and the arrangement was explicitly based on a view that he did not have an interest. Clearly, this was unfortunate.
The report discloses Mr English went to some lengths to arrange his affairs around the accommodation allowance entitlement. That is not a good look for a Minister of Finance.
The Auditor-General’s advice does not even mention other issues that the Prime Minister still needs to consider: that Mr English was giving his Wellington address as his home for the purpose of being a director of a company (incidentally, the company that owns his Dipton investment), but claiming to live in Dipton for the purpose of receiving an accommodation allowance.
A prudent minister might have noticed the contradiction between those two claims.
I have always welcomed the idea of Mr English having his family with him in Wellington. That is not the issue. The question is whether he was right to claim entitlements for doing so. It would not have been in any way objectionable if Mr English had lived in Wellington with his family and claimed an out of town allowance for his occasional trips to Dipton.
For the release, go here.
‘Big four’ banks failed farmers in recession year
16/11/09 09:00 Filed in: Columns
It’s official; the ‘big four’ Australian owned banks failed to pass on the Reserve Bank’s cut in interest rates (the Official Cash Rate or the OCR) and farmers, New Zealand businesses and home owners paid heavily during the worst recession this country has seen since the 1930s.
If you’re a farmer, you already know this because this has been a tough year; not only are you a farmer running your own business, but you’re likely to be a home owner too with a mortgage. You know what it felt like personally. Here’s what the numbers looked like for 2009:
The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high in mid 2008 of 8.25 per cent, to only 2.5 per cent today. But a one per cent margin in interest rates was not passed on by the big banks to their customers, to farmers, businesses and home owners. The banks kept it for themselves.
One per cent extra interest added $787 million in costs for New Zealand businesses; and $460 million extra to the cost of loans in the farming sector.
The biggest cost was in the housing sector: home owners paid an extra $1.6 billion in mortgage repayments thanks to the banks holding back that one per cent for themselves.
This tells us it doesn’t matter what the Reserve Bank does with interest rates; the big Australian-owned banks will do whatever they want. Changing the OCR rate to try and help businesses or home owners during hard times hasn’t worked.
All New Zealanders should be worried about that. At the moment the banks have every incentive to borrow more money from overseas so that they can keep lending to anyone wanting to invest in property. They don’t care that this will likely kick start another housing boom and increase New Zealand’s debt, and possibly lead to another recession. It’s not their job to care.
It is the job of the government to care.
I was part of the Banking Inquiry, along with my colleagues in the Labour Party and the Greens. The parliamentary parties who weren’t there should be ashamed. It’s not good enough to say ‘there’s nothing we can do’ to support those who trade with the world and are at the whim of volatile exchange rates and high interest rates at the banks.
We have to find new tools and new ways to support exporters -to support people who produce things rather than those who speculate on properties and take their money off-shore. Otherwise our overseas debt will continue to grow and our quality of life will slip while the property investors get rich.
I want to see an urgent multi-party review of monetary policy. And this time, the government must be there, along with the Reserve Bank. The National Party, Act, The Maori Party and United owe it to New Zealanders to look at the ideas that came up during the Banking Inquiry - from Federated Farmers, the Council for Trade Unions, the Manufacturers and Exporters Association and many others.
We need to look at how we can remove incentives to invest in property, and instead encourage banks to lend to businesses. This could mean a review of our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable good export sector.
We need to look at ways of regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make a profit and take the money off-shore.
It will not be good enough for the government to stand on the side-lines next time, and say “There’s nothing we can do”. There’s always more we can do. We just need the political will to do it.
If you’re a farmer, you already know this because this has been a tough year; not only are you a farmer running your own business, but you’re likely to be a home owner too with a mortgage. You know what it felt like personally. Here’s what the numbers looked like for 2009:
The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high in mid 2008 of 8.25 per cent, to only 2.5 per cent today. But a one per cent margin in interest rates was not passed on by the big banks to their customers, to farmers, businesses and home owners. The banks kept it for themselves.
One per cent extra interest added $787 million in costs for New Zealand businesses; and $460 million extra to the cost of loans in the farming sector.
The biggest cost was in the housing sector: home owners paid an extra $1.6 billion in mortgage repayments thanks to the banks holding back that one per cent for themselves.
This tells us it doesn’t matter what the Reserve Bank does with interest rates; the big Australian-owned banks will do whatever they want. Changing the OCR rate to try and help businesses or home owners during hard times hasn’t worked.
All New Zealanders should be worried about that. At the moment the banks have every incentive to borrow more money from overseas so that they can keep lending to anyone wanting to invest in property. They don’t care that this will likely kick start another housing boom and increase New Zealand’s debt, and possibly lead to another recession. It’s not their job to care.
It is the job of the government to care.
I was part of the Banking Inquiry, along with my colleagues in the Labour Party and the Greens. The parliamentary parties who weren’t there should be ashamed. It’s not good enough to say ‘there’s nothing we can do’ to support those who trade with the world and are at the whim of volatile exchange rates and high interest rates at the banks.
We have to find new tools and new ways to support exporters -to support people who produce things rather than those who speculate on properties and take their money off-shore. Otherwise our overseas debt will continue to grow and our quality of life will slip while the property investors get rich.
I want to see an urgent multi-party review of monetary policy. And this time, the government must be there, along with the Reserve Bank. The National Party, Act, The Maori Party and United owe it to New Zealanders to look at the ideas that came up during the Banking Inquiry - from Federated Farmers, the Council for Trade Unions, the Manufacturers and Exporters Association and many others.
We need to look at how we can remove incentives to invest in property, and instead encourage banks to lend to businesses. This could mean a review of our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable good export sector.
We need to look at ways of regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make a profit and take the money off-shore.
It will not be good enough for the government to stand on the side-lines next time, and say “There’s nothing we can do”. There’s always more we can do. We just need the political will to do it.
Urgent inquiry into monetary policy now
11/11/09 10:08 Filed in: News Releases
We must put party politics aside and come up with a new approach to monetary policy which supports people in New Zealand who produce tradeable goods, rather than those who speculate on property and take the profits off-shore, says MP for Wigram and Progressive Party leader, Jim Anderton.
The Report from the Parliamentary Banking Inquiry was released today.
The inquiry was held by the Progressive Party, The Labour Party and the Greens. The National-led government and its coalition partners refused to take part in the inquiry.
The report proves that the ‘big four’ Australian owned banks did not pass on all of the cut in the OCR (Official cash Rate). The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high in mid 2008 of 8.25 per cent, to only 2.5 per cent today. But the banks kept a one per cent margin in interest rates for themselves. One per cent extra interest added $787 million in costs for New Zealand businesses; $460 million extra to the cost of loans in the farming sector; and $1.6 billion to the cost of mortgage repayments.
“This tells us it doesn’t matter what the Reserve Bank does with interest rates; the big Australian-owned banks will do whatever they want. Changing the OCR rate to try and help businesses or home owners during hard times isn’t working.”
“Fifty organisations and individuals made submissions - from the New Zealand Manufacturers and Exporters Association to the Council of Trade Unions. Each of them asked the inquiry to put pressure on the New Zealand parliament and the Reserve Bank to review monetary policy now.
“The government can no longer sit on the side-lines and say ‘there’s nothing we can do’.
“We need to look at how we can remove incentives to invest in property, otherwise we’re headed for another boom and bust cycle in property prices, and another recession. Banks must be encouraged to lend to businesses; and we need to review our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable good export sector.
"We need to look at regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make excessive profits.
“There’s always more we can do. We just need the political will to do it,” says Jim Anderton.
Download the banking inquiry report here. [Pdf, 3.2 Mb]
Visit the banking inquiry website here.
The Report from the Parliamentary Banking Inquiry was released today.
The inquiry was held by the Progressive Party, The Labour Party and the Greens. The National-led government and its coalition partners refused to take part in the inquiry.
The report proves that the ‘big four’ Australian owned banks did not pass on all of the cut in the OCR (Official cash Rate). The Reserve Bank cut the OCR from its high in mid 2008 of 8.25 per cent, to only 2.5 per cent today. But the banks kept a one per cent margin in interest rates for themselves. One per cent extra interest added $787 million in costs for New Zealand businesses; $460 million extra to the cost of loans in the farming sector; and $1.6 billion to the cost of mortgage repayments.
“This tells us it doesn’t matter what the Reserve Bank does with interest rates; the big Australian-owned banks will do whatever they want. Changing the OCR rate to try and help businesses or home owners during hard times isn’t working.”
“Fifty organisations and individuals made submissions - from the New Zealand Manufacturers and Exporters Association to the Council of Trade Unions. Each of them asked the inquiry to put pressure on the New Zealand parliament and the Reserve Bank to review monetary policy now.
“The government can no longer sit on the side-lines and say ‘there’s nothing we can do’.
“We need to look at how we can remove incentives to invest in property, otherwise we’re headed for another boom and bust cycle in property prices, and another recession. Banks must be encouraged to lend to businesses; and we need to review our tax system which at the moment encourages unproductive property investment and discourages investment in the productive tradeable good export sector.
"We need to look at regulating the banking sector so that ordinary New Zealanders don’t pay (in interest rates or hidden bank fees) while the Australian-owned banks make excessive profits.
“There’s always more we can do. We just need the political will to do it,” says Jim Anderton.
Download the banking inquiry report here. [Pdf, 3.2 Mb]
Visit the banking inquiry website here.
CAYAD conference
10/11/09 12:00 Filed in: Speeches
A note from Jim Anderton to the National CAYAD conference
Hine Rupe Marae, Paikea St, Te Araroa, 9 – 11 November 2009
Firstly, I would like to thank my friend and colleague Denis O’Reilly for reading this to you. Just tell him to stick to the script!
I am disappointed not to be with you today, and if it wasn’t for the doctor’s orders, I would be standing with you now, spreading my flu germs, and probably reducing the short term effectiveness of CAYAD across the country because you’d all be sick next week!
Talking of the flu - here’s an interesting fact for you:
And yet you’d think that swine flu was the biggest epidemic to hit New Zealand in decades.
All of you here today know that the biggest health crisis in New Zealand is actually drug abuse, including and increasingly, alcohol abuse.
I’m going to say more about alcohol in a moment, but first my gratitude goes out to all of you here today - the co-coordinators from each CAYAD site from across the country, and the people and organisations that work so closely with you.
One of the successes of CAYAD is the way in which you have brought communities, the health and education sectors, local government, and many others, together. That is not an easy thing to do. But you have kept everyone focused on the urgency of the problem we face with drugs and alcohol abuse, and you have kept believing that: “We can make a difference”.
This is the first major CAYAD hui that I have missed in many years. By now, you should know how much I respect your work and how proud I am of your dedication achievements over the years.
You are on the front line. You are saving lives everyday. And by doing that you are making this country a better place to live and a more hopeful place for our children to live and grow.
To do this job, you have to have an extraordinary level of skills; you have to be a social worker, a community organiser, a health expert, a politician, a teacher, a leader and a best friend - all in the same day. I know from meeting many of you, that CAYAD has been lucky to attract such highly skilled and committed people.
We know that the social cost to New Zealand of illicit drug use is over $1 billion per year. The cost of alcohol abuse is closer to $3 billion. The personal cost to families and loved ones is incalculable. How can we measure the cost of a family tragedy?
You know as well as I do that one of the most damaging drugs we face right now is not even illegal; our kids can buy it in the local dairy; they play sports and have it promoted to them all the time; they see it on TV, on billboards and hear about it on the radio.
The abuse of alcohol amongst our young people is on the rise and it’s destroying lives.
I have been working with others like Dr Doug Sellman of the Otago School of Medicine to raise awareness of the damage that alcohol is causing. We have a unique opportunity right now to do something, through the Law Commission’s review of the legislation to do with the drinking age, the availability of alcohol and the advertising of alcohol.
Did you know that every advertisement seen by a young person increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life. And people like you end up picking up the pieces.
Currently, $200,000 per day is spent on marketing and advertising alcohol. About half the marketing is spent on sponsorship.
I would like to see the alcohol sponsorship of sports games banned. It can be done; who sponsors netball these days? New World Supermarkets; and Rothmans cigarettes no longer sponsor cricket - the National Bank does. We might not always like the big Banks, but at least they’re not peddling drugs to our young people!
I know that CAYAD will be active in raising awareness of the problems of alcohol as we review the legislation. Doing nothing is not an option. What we need is a culture change.
All Black’s games and the Black Caps Summer Cricket series drip in alcohol promotion. Yet we act surprised when leading sportsmen like cricketer, Jesse Ryder and rugby star, Jimmy Cowan get into trouble for drinking too much.
I want to see the legal drinking age raised; I would like to see the price of alcohol increased; accessibility, advertising and marketing of alcohol greatly reduced; and drink-driving counter-measures increased.
A final word on ‘P before I let Denis sit down; I want to see the horror of ‘P’ gone from our communities. The truth is the National government’s ban on cold remedies at the chemist isn’t going to make that much difference.
If we’re serious about stopping the flow of methamphetamine and other amphetamine type stimulants, we have to do it at the border. Police and customs officers know that the majority of the main ingredients in ‘P’ come across our borders from countries like China, India and Indonesia.
So it’s a great shame that the National-led government has cut fifty-nine frontline staff at our borders; they could be monitoring more passengers and shipping containers to prevent more ‘P’ ingredients arriving here.
You are dealing with these issues everyday, and you are doing it with a kaupapa Māori approach because too many of our young people who fall victim to drugs are Māori. What you do works.
We all know - its common sense - that drug problems are most serious when young people feel they don't have a future - that's when widespread drug problems take root.
So we must continue to do everything we can to create a future for our young people. After all these years, those of you involved with CAYAD continue to give us hope for the future. I wish you a successful hui, and you will always have my support and respect. Kia ora.
Hine Rupe Marae, Paikea St, Te Araroa, 9 – 11 November 2009
Firstly, I would like to thank my friend and colleague Denis O’Reilly for reading this to you. Just tell him to stick to the script!
I am disappointed not to be with you today, and if it wasn’t for the doctor’s orders, I would be standing with you now, spreading my flu germs, and probably reducing the short term effectiveness of CAYAD across the country because you’d all be sick next week!
Talking of the flu - here’s an interesting fact for you:
- Twenty people died in New Zealand from Swine Flu this year.
- 1000 people in New Zealand die each year from alcohol.
And yet you’d think that swine flu was the biggest epidemic to hit New Zealand in decades.
All of you here today know that the biggest health crisis in New Zealand is actually drug abuse, including and increasingly, alcohol abuse.
I’m going to say more about alcohol in a moment, but first my gratitude goes out to all of you here today - the co-coordinators from each CAYAD site from across the country, and the people and organisations that work so closely with you.
One of the successes of CAYAD is the way in which you have brought communities, the health and education sectors, local government, and many others, together. That is not an easy thing to do. But you have kept everyone focused on the urgency of the problem we face with drugs and alcohol abuse, and you have kept believing that: “We can make a difference”.
This is the first major CAYAD hui that I have missed in many years. By now, you should know how much I respect your work and how proud I am of your dedication achievements over the years.
You are on the front line. You are saving lives everyday. And by doing that you are making this country a better place to live and a more hopeful place for our children to live and grow.
To do this job, you have to have an extraordinary level of skills; you have to be a social worker, a community organiser, a health expert, a politician, a teacher, a leader and a best friend - all in the same day. I know from meeting many of you, that CAYAD has been lucky to attract such highly skilled and committed people.
We know that the social cost to New Zealand of illicit drug use is over $1 billion per year. The cost of alcohol abuse is closer to $3 billion. The personal cost to families and loved ones is incalculable. How can we measure the cost of a family tragedy?
You know as well as I do that one of the most damaging drugs we face right now is not even illegal; our kids can buy it in the local dairy; they play sports and have it promoted to them all the time; they see it on TV, on billboards and hear about it on the radio.
The abuse of alcohol amongst our young people is on the rise and it’s destroying lives.
I have been working with others like Dr Doug Sellman of the Otago School of Medicine to raise awareness of the damage that alcohol is causing. We have a unique opportunity right now to do something, through the Law Commission’s review of the legislation to do with the drinking age, the availability of alcohol and the advertising of alcohol.
Did you know that every advertisement seen by a young person increases the number of drinks they consume by 1%. They become customers for life. And people like you end up picking up the pieces.
Currently, $200,000 per day is spent on marketing and advertising alcohol. About half the marketing is spent on sponsorship.
I would like to see the alcohol sponsorship of sports games banned. It can be done; who sponsors netball these days? New World Supermarkets; and Rothmans cigarettes no longer sponsor cricket - the National Bank does. We might not always like the big Banks, but at least they’re not peddling drugs to our young people!
I know that CAYAD will be active in raising awareness of the problems of alcohol as we review the legislation. Doing nothing is not an option. What we need is a culture change.
All Black’s games and the Black Caps Summer Cricket series drip in alcohol promotion. Yet we act surprised when leading sportsmen like cricketer, Jesse Ryder and rugby star, Jimmy Cowan get into trouble for drinking too much.
I want to see the legal drinking age raised; I would like to see the price of alcohol increased; accessibility, advertising and marketing of alcohol greatly reduced; and drink-driving counter-measures increased.
A final word on ‘P before I let Denis sit down; I want to see the horror of ‘P’ gone from our communities. The truth is the National government’s ban on cold remedies at the chemist isn’t going to make that much difference.
If we’re serious about stopping the flow of methamphetamine and other amphetamine type stimulants, we have to do it at the border. Police and customs officers know that the majority of the main ingredients in ‘P’ come across our borders from countries like China, India and Indonesia.
So it’s a great shame that the National-led government has cut fifty-nine frontline staff at our borders; they could be monitoring more passengers and shipping containers to prevent more ‘P’ ingredients arriving here.
You are dealing with these issues everyday, and you are doing it with a kaupapa Māori approach because too many of our young people who fall victim to drugs are Māori. What you do works.
We all know - its common sense - that drug problems are most serious when young people feel they don't have a future - that's when widespread drug problems take root.
So we must continue to do everything we can to create a future for our young people. After all these years, those of you involved with CAYAD continue to give us hope for the future. I wish you a successful hui, and you will always have my support and respect. Kia ora.
Use milk payout to farmers to strengthen industry
09/11/09 15:00 Filed in: News Releases
It's important that the increase in Fonterra's payout to farmers is used to strengthen the industry, and not squandered, Opposition agriculture spokesperson Jim Anderton says.
He is welcoming Fonterra's 95 cent increase in the forecast payout to $6.05 per kilogram of milk solids.
"The increased pay out is very timely for a large number of farmers who have been struggling with higher input prices and enormous costs for financing. Interest rates for many farmers have not come down.”
"But the risk is that the higher payout will lead to higher farm valuations and in turn to yet more farm indebtedness. That's what happened too often when the milk payout reached $7 a kilo. When the price then dropped, it left a lot of farmers under mortgage stress.”
"Banks should be careful about getting into the same position of lending against valuations based on favourable milk payouts.”
"The payout shows New Zealand is well positioned as a food producer to continue to earn a living when global conditions are less than favourable.”
“When payouts increase as much as this one has, the extra earnings need to be used to strengthen the industry, such as stronger investment in research and development, and stronger balance sheets to reduce our exposure to rapacious overseas owned banks," Jim Anderton said.
He is welcoming Fonterra's 95 cent increase in the forecast payout to $6.05 per kilogram of milk solids.
"The increased pay out is very timely for a large number of farmers who have been struggling with higher input prices and enormous costs for financing. Interest rates for many farmers have not come down.”
"But the risk is that the higher payout will lead to higher farm valuations and in turn to yet more farm indebtedness. That's what happened too often when the milk payout reached $7 a kilo. When the price then dropped, it left a lot of farmers under mortgage stress.”
"Banks should be careful about getting into the same position of lending against valuations based on favourable milk payouts.”
"The payout shows New Zealand is well positioned as a food producer to continue to earn a living when global conditions are less than favourable.”
“When payouts increase as much as this one has, the extra earnings need to be used to strengthen the industry, such as stronger investment in research and development, and stronger balance sheets to reduce our exposure to rapacious overseas owned banks," Jim Anderton said.