Being prepared is a journey

Three years ago yesterday, on February 14, 2023, two days after Cyclone Gabrielle had left Kirikiriroa-Hamilton behind, we lost power in my neighbourhood, something I mentioned in my treatise post about the cyclone a week later. It turned out that the power was shut off in order to repair a fallen cable, which is why it was only off for a couple hours—though I didn’t know any of that when I made the Facebook post up top.

In the part of my post where I talked about the power outage, I talked about what I did to cope, thinking the power might be off for a couple days. I mentioned going to one of the hardware home centres to buy a shop light that runs on the same 18v batteries I use for my power tools (and that now also powers the stick vacuum I bought last year). I later misplaced that light during one of my millions of failed attempts to tidy the garage, but, fortunately, I haven’t needed it since.

I also mentioned that I got an LPG (propane) bottle for the BBQ so I could cook, and that I couldn’t get it to work. That’s still not working. However, I didn’t mention that I’ve never actually used a gas BBQ, because that had always been Nigel’s job and I never learned). However, I still have the full gas bottle, and now that I’ll be able to actually use the patio I want to get the BBQ going again. Failing that, I also still have an LPG table-top outdoor heater that was the only thing Nigel wanted for his 40th birthday, and it may be more useful to me, particularly with Autumn only two weeks away. Or, not.

At any rate, I blame sleep deprivation three years ago for my lame jokes in the post. Coincidentally, parts of the country, especially the east coast of the North Island, have been experiencing a big (but non-cyclone) big storm, and that includies areas that got hit by a fatal storm three weeks ago. Kirikiriroa-Hamilton’s weather wasn’t too bad, though, fortunately.

In the three years since that cyclone, I haven’t done anything about electricity reslience, like adding a battery bank to my solar power system or getting a battery back-up that I can use to keep my fridge running it the power goes out. I still think a single back-up is a better option than a whole-house battery backup, but it’s a huge topic and researching it has require far more time than I’ve had available. Finding the right solution is still on the agenda, though—alongside so many other things.

New Zealand, like most places, has been experiencing more bad storms more frequently than, say, 30 years ago when I arrived in New Zealand. That trend will only continue in the years ahead, and we all need to do what we cane to prepare doe “severe weather events”. Despite everything, I’m actually better prepared than I was in 2023. That’s a good start.

The non-birthday birthday holiday thing

Today was the first day of the work week for most New Zealanders, as it is every year at this time. That’s because the first Monday in June is the King’s Birthday public holiday, which means this past weekend was a three-day holiday weekend. It used to be the last public holiday until Labour Day at the end of October, but now we have Matariki (also known as “Māori New Year”) which comes between the two, and this year it will be on Friday, June 20

Technically, the holiday is actually the “Reigning Monarch’s Birthday” or some such (that’s what it was called in my various employment contracts), because it’s not their actual birthday. The late Queen of New Zealand, Elizabeth II, was actually born on April 21, and her successor and son, King Charles III, was born on November 14. I have a hunch that while most New Zealanders know that the first Monday in June is just a public holiday, I doubt all that many know when the monarch’s actual birthday is. For some unknown reason, I somehow memorised King Charles’ actual birthday, but I could never remember the exact birthday of our late queen, aside from the fact she was born in April. So, yay me? Yeah, I’ll go with that.

King’s Birthday is one of two pubic holidays on which honours are handed out (the other is New Year’s Day), but it’s a werid process. Technically, anyone can nominate someone (other than themselves) online. The nominations go to a special committee chaired by the Prime Minister of the day (currently the National Party’s Chris Luxon). This year, additional committee members include the leaders of the parties in Luxon’s coalition, Winston Peters of NZ First and David Seymour of Act. The other members of the committee are from all three parties in the coalition.

After the committee reviews the list (according to some sort of process), the prime minister makes a recommendation to the King of New Zealand, and he then approves the honours list, as the saying goes, “on the prime minister’s advice”. Put another way, it’s kind of a rubber stamp. Naturally, there are problems with this system.

First, and most obviously, it’s controlled by the government of the day. Traditional, National Party-led governments reward business people, and Labour Party-led governments tend to reward teachers and union/worker organisers. Both tend to reward community organisers, as well as folks in the arts, and sport, though ratios may vary between the two.

I always read through the entire list of folks getting an honour (Related: This year’s full list of King’s Birthday Honours), and I seldom recognise very many names. Whenever I raise an eyebrow at an honours list, it’s inevitably a National Party-led government that’s created it. This year was no different.

The one that jumped out at me was them honouring Ruth Richardson, a neoliberal’s neoliberal, who was Finance Minister from 1990 to 1993 in the Fourth National Government led by Jim Bolger as Prime Minister. She was the first female to hold the position, which absolutely is notable—or, it would be if she hadn’t been so absolutely awful. Darien Fenton, a former Labour Party Member of Parliament, summed it up well on her Facebook page:

Ruth Richardson did untold damage that our country wears til this day. But 30 years on, she is still boasting about it: "I have always worn those reforms that I championed as a badge of honour, and the restoration of New Zealand's fortunes made it worth it. So I guess this award thirty years down the track is a recognition of that work." Nicola Willis [the current National Party Finance Minister and Deputy Leader of her party] is following in her tradition.

Richarsons’s 1991 "Mother of all Budgets" drastically cut benefits to “encourage employment”, but it led to an explosion in income inequality and poverty, and general hardship for the poorest New Zealanders. It wasn’t until 2016 that there was a small effective increase under National, and then Labour largely restored pre-1991 funding levels 2020-21. Richardson’s policies were so toxic that National barely won re-election in 1993 (they had a one seat majority in those pre-MMP days), and she was fired from the Finance Minister role, so she decided to resign from Parliament rather than accept a different Cabinet position, thus forcing an expensive by-election on NZ taxpayers, which, in my opinion, is the ultimate “fuck you” from a selfish, arrogant, and narcissistic politician.

New Zealand still hasn’t fully recovered from the damage done by the 1991 Budget, nor from the neoliberal takeover of Labour before that which also caused huge damage to New Zealand. The architects of Labour’s awful neoliberal policies natually joined with Richardson to establish the expressly neoliberal Act Party, and neither they not Act have wavered from their war against working people in favour of the rich—leopards really don’t change their spots, apparently.

All of this just underscores why the honours process should never be under the control of the government of the day: Partisanship always gets in the way. I think that a ministerial committee (made up of non-political career ministry workers) should review all nominations and make recommendations to the government of the day that they can either accept or reject. Ideally, that should be it—the politicians shouldn’t be allowed to add strictly partisan nominees, but maybe they could be allowed to add a certain number (5?) of lower-level honours. In my opinion.

While I’m a huge fan of public holidays—especially because they matter in New Zealand—I’m like most New Zealanders in that, for me, the King’s Birthday public holiday is nothing more than a three-day holiday weekend. Honestly, I don’t even care about the Honours List, even when I think one includes people who shouldn’t be honoured. After all, people who have opposite political beliefs from mine probably think the same of lists put out by a Labour-led government. It is the way of things.

So, a three-day holiday weekend was had. Happy us!

Related: "King's Birthday Honours: Dai Henwood, Tim Southee and Jude Dobson among those recognised" – RNZ

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 384 is now available

AmeriNZ Podcast episode 384, “Winter celebrations”, is now available from the podcast website. There, you can listen, download or subscribe to the podcast episode, along with any other episode.

The five most recent episodes of the podcast are listed on the sidebar on the right side of this blog.

New name, old holiday

New Zealand just observed the newly-renamed public holiday: King’s Birthday. For longer than most New Zealanders have been alive, there was Queen’s Birthday, but that ended when she died. It still seems weird.

The graphic aat left is for New Zealand retail chain Briscoes, which sells homewares—kitchen things, small appliances, manchester (household linen), picture frames, that sort of thing. They have sales for every conceivable holiday, whether real or not, so the fact they were having one for King’s Birthday wasn’t unique for them—or other retailers, either, because there were a lot of such sales and promotions. What struck me about this particular ad was the wording: “First Ever”, it said. Because, it is—sort of.

The company that owns Briscoes (Briscoe Group) originally began in 1781 in the UK, but began expanding in the 19th Century, and in 1862 entered New Zealand. Today, the group is a New Zealand company, but it’s was here when, in 1937, New Zealand’s Sovereign's Birthday Observance Act established the first Monday in June as the official birthday of the sovereign—who was King George VI at that time, meaning that Briscoes was in business when the first King’s Birthday under the 1937 Act was observed. So, technically, this is the “second ever” such holiday for them, though the sort of mercantile exuberance we now see around public holidays was probably not an omnipresent thing like it is now, so, even more technically, it’s certainly the first King’s Birthday Sale in any kind of modern sense.

Aside from retail sales, the holiday is also known for the annual Honours List (there are two: One on New Year’s Day and one on, as it is now, King’s Birthday). I don’t think the vast majority of New Zealanders take much notice of the honours, except maybe for the headline-making honours. There were two of them this year that probably got people’s attention.

This year’s list gave both Queen Camilla and former prime minister Jacinda Ardern top honours—both are now known as “Dame” (the female equivalent of “Sir”), though only Jacinda will be addressed with that (a queen "outranks" a knight, so she's use here "main" title). Like a lot of people, probably, one of my first thoughts was ”Queen Camilla?!” Fortunately for me, Stuff published a piece answering that: “Why is Queen Camilla getting NZ’s top order in the King’s Birthday honours?” Since Prince Phillip had a similar honour, I guess it makes “sense” for Queen Camilla to have one (insofar as the quaint knighthoods make any sense whatsoever, of course).

The bigger thing, though, was when I saw the alert about Jacinda [Related: Queen Camilla and Dame Jacinda Ardern recognised in King Charles Birthday and Coronation Honours”). I decided to stay off of the fetid cesspool that is Twitter, even though I chuckled at the thought of all the exploding heads among the loons, goons, and cartoons who wallow there. Ex-prime minister John Key, who himself was made a knight, wasn’t buying into the negativity, calling it a “right of passage” for former prime ministers.

My own holiday weekend was far less eventful: I did some chores (like laundry), and also rearranged a shelving unit in the garage so I could move the juicer out there. I use it a few times a year and it does a great job, but the machine and its parts took up scarce space in kitchen cupboard I stored it in. With that moved to the garage, I reorganised the cupboard it was in, as well as the drawer I kept all my baking pans, as well as a different cupboard. That reorganising was to keep like-things together, and the things I use the most close to hand (for example, I didn’t want to have to get down on the floor to get my roasting pan from the bottom shelf of the cupboard it was in).

There was a bit of rain on a couple of the days, so I didn’t plan to do anything big, nor go anywhere, either. As appealing as a big “King’s Birthday Sale” may sound, there was nothing I needed, and certainly not enough to brave the probably crowded shops. Instead, I had a nice, relaxing—and productive!—weekend.

This week I have a few things I’d like to get done, but maybe more about that in a round-up next week?

So, the first King’s Birthday public holiday that most New Zealanders have experienced is now over. Our next public holiday is Matariki on Friday, July 14, then Labour Day on Monday, October 23.

Refreshingly different

I’ve seen a lot of videos about New Zealand over the years, and the quality has been—varied. Sometimes the information included is merely dated, sometimes it’s flat out wrong, and other times there are at least some accuracies. The video above has far more hits than misses, and that’s extremely refreshing.

The video isn’t perfect of course—I firmly believe that few things created by humans are—but I’d say that what I mainly have mere quibbles rather than objections. The biggest of those is that there’s a growing consensus among scientists that Māori probably arrived in New Zealand several hundred years earlier than around 1250 CE as the video narration states, so it would’ve been nice if that had been acknowledged, even in passing. More seriously, perhaps, was that the appalling treatment of Māori by the Crown, and especially the colonial government, should have been addressed by itself because it strongly influenced how land use developed in New Zealand, as well as many of the problems that exist to this day. Actually, another quibble is how “Māori” is pronounced throughout the narration: While it’s not a bad approximation, and arguably better than usual for the narrator’s accent, it’s not quite right.

On the other hand, at one point the narrator was talking about food production in New Zealand, and, it seemed to me, was a bit unnecessarily negative. At the time, I was thinking to myself, “yeah, but we produce enough food to feed 40 million people,” and then the narrator said exactly that and the quibble was erased (and it gave me a chuckle).

There haven’t been all that many videos about New Zealand that I’ve shared/recommended over the years, and most of those are ones made in New Zealand by New Zealanders. A lot of the videos I’ve shared have been ones I thought were funny, especially if I felt they showcased the NZ sense of humour and sensibilities. Of course, that, too, is a useful way to explain the country. But it’s nice to be able to share a quite recent video explaining something about New Zealand that many people overseas would almost certainly never think to explore.

All of which makes this video a refreshing change.

A Tip o’ the Hat to my nephew for sharing the video with me; I doubt I’d have run across it otherwise.

Ten years of equality

Ten years ago last night, the New Zealand Parliament enacted marriage equality into law. I remember watching the final debate live on Parliament TV, so I saw the famous speeches and the waiata after the bill passed it’s final reading. It was a wonderful time.

This also means it’s just a bit more than six months until what would have been the tenth anniversary of when Nigel and I were married, what we both called the happiest day of our lives. We passed the 14th anniversary of our civil union back in January, the day we called that the second-happiest day of our lives, largely because, at the time, being able to legally marry was something neither of us expected would ever become reality—until it did. After that, marriage upped the ante of the happiness stakes. Ten years ago last night, the NZ Parliament made it possible for Nigel and me to be able to fulfill a dream.

I think about all that, of course, though not necessarily often or in depth—but I do think about it. I think, first, about how lucky I was to be able to marry my soulmate, which isn’t a gift given to everyone. Our “married life” was far too short, and it only a fraction of our time together.

I also think about what being ABLE to be married meant to me, something I talked about the night it was passed by Parliament in a post I titled, aptly, “Becoming real”, which, I think, is one of the best things I’ve ever published on this blog. Since then, I’ve often talked about how much it meant to me that marriage equality gave us the ability to take on the same commitment and obligations that any heterosexual could do without question. I finally felt part of society in a way I never had before.

I still believe in the power of love and, for those who choose it, marriage. What I argued for all those years ago was once simple word: Options. All adults ought to have the same legal options, and ten years ago the New Zealand Parliament agreed. It was a momentous day.

The end of more things

The only constant is change, the saying goes, and many times it’s actually changes upon changes. Today a change was officially announced, one that builds on a change I talked about years ago. Like that one, this one doesn’t affect me all that much, but it does make me pause and reflect.

Today, Vodafone New Zealand announced that they’re rebranding as “One New Zealand” (to be stylised “One.NZ”) early in 2023. This change has very little impact on me personally—nothing beyond the carrier designation on my phone changing from “Voda NZ” to “One NZ”. But this isn’t the first time I’ve faced a change made by Vodafone NZ. In fact, this is basically the fourth change.

Nearly five years ago, I talked about one such change, when Vodafone shut down their email services, ending an email address I’d had for some 21 years. That change was the second time they’d done something that affected me, something I mentioned in that 2017 post: They’d acquired the Internet Service Provider we had at the time, The Internet Group in October, in 2006.

The first time that Vodafone affected me, though, was in 1998, when they bought the New Zealand operations of BellSouth (now part of AT&T). BellSouth entered the New Zealand mobile phone market around six years after Telecom New Zealand (now called Spark) began providing cellular phone services. BellSouth introduced pre-pay mobile phones to New Zealand, which meant no expensive monthly contracts. I bought my first cellphone on November 12, 1998, shortly after Vodafone bought BellSouth. I’d been thinking about it for awhile, and moved in case Vodafone changed things too much (they didn’t). I’m still with them to this day, but mainly because they currently suit my needs—I’m not brand loyal.

There were a lot of other things that went on over the years: In 2012, Vodafone NZ acquired TelstraClear (at the time, New Zealand’s second-largest telecommunications company and itself the product of mergers). A failed merger with Sky Television in 2016 was the first hint that the UK-based company wasn’t happy with its New Zealand operations (something I alluded to in my 2017 post). On July 31, 2019, UK-based Vodafone Plc sold the New Zealand operations to a consortium, and it’s been a New Zealand company every since.

The main reason for the change is money: Vodafone NZ was paying an estimated $20-30 million per year merely to license the “Vodafone” brand. That’s on top of business partnerships with the UK company. That savings can be used not just for additional returns to shareholders, but some of the savings can also be used for infrastructure investment—technology never stands still.

The fact is, I couldn’t be more “meh” about the change in name: It doesn’t affect me at all, and the savings may allow the company to innovate here in New Zealand. However, my first reaction was that the new name was stupid. The company says that the name, by incorporating the last three letters of the “Vodafone” name, indicates continuity. Right. Yeah, that was exactly the first thing I thought when I saw it. Still, what they choose to call their company is nothing I actually care about, but it won’t stop me from wondering how much they paid “brand consultants” to help them come up with the name, nor to snicker at the thought of them spending a lot of money to come up with it.

It may not sound like it (because sometimes I’m too sarcastic for my own good…), but I actually like Vodaf—whoops—One New Zealand as a company. As long as I continue to like them, I’ll continue as a customer. All they have to do is earn my business, just like every other company has to do. It’s really that simple. At the moment, they’re doing fine.

However, I can’t promise I won’t use their new name in puns on this blog. It’s just what one does.

Saturday really was pretty super

Yesterday was “Super Saturday” in New Zealand, a major drive to increase the country’s rates for Covid vaccinations. It went well, and even though there’s still a long way to go, there’s hope that we might actually get there.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern had set a Super Saturday goal of 100,000 jabs, and in the end there were a record 130,002 doses given, of which 39,025 were first doses and 90,977 were second doses. It was by far the biggest day for vaccinations since the campaign began earlier this year, and bigger than any single day since the current outbreak began, a period in which we’ve already seen several record-breaking days for vaccinations.

Because Auckland has been the starting point for all our outbreaks after the original one last year, it’s vital that they get to 90% vaccination to help protect the rest of New Zealand. Auckland had their own record-breaking day yesterday, with 8,957 people getting their first doses and 31,686 people receiving their second doses. That means that 89% of the eligible population in Auckland has been vaccinated with at least 1 dose. This is great progress, and it now seems inevitable that Auckland will hit, and hopefully surpass, 90% fully vaccinated.

Yesterday was a record day for Māori people, too: 10,941 got their first doses and 10,874 got their second. However, Māori lag far behind every other group when vaccinations per 1000 people are compared, ranking last among the major ethnic groups. The data hasn’t yet been updated with Saturday's data, but it seems unlikely to have changed dramatically.

There are many reasons why Māori remain unvaccinated in such large numbers, however, what the Super Saturday event showed was that engaging with them in a culturally-aware manner, using Māori health and community agencies, can pay big dividends (the same is true for Pacific communities, of course). As the government has said repeatedly, no one will be left behind in the race to the 90% mark. Super Saturday showed an important part of the way forward.

Yesterday, too, there was an 8-hour live event broadcast on TV and streamed over the Internet. Vaxathon, as it was called, was part of the strategy to energise New Zealanders—especially young people generally and Māori and Pacific peoples—to get the jab. An historical note, the broadcast was a nod to the former Telethon, a televised event raising funds for charities and held in various years from the mid-1970s through to into the 1990s (and one in 2009). The actual Telethon programme faded away when the Lotto New Zealand was introduced in the last 1980s, because 100% of the net proceeds from the NZ Lotteries Commission go to various community and charitable organisations.

Stuff columnist Allison Mau summed up my thoughts about the day, including about Vaxathon, in her column today, ”'You could say this has shifted the dial': How Super Saturday was won”. I watched a lot of the broadcast (though not all of it), and was struck by the emphasis on Māori, from the frequent use of the language through to references to Māori culture, and, like Mau, I knew that was no accident. I can imagine the deep-sighing grumps typing madly in protest about all that as they spewed their comments anywhere that might let them, but they’re an angry (and largely older and white) minority. I can imagine it, but certainly haven't seen it—I mean, seriously, who reads the comments sections of major news sites anymore? Besides, I really don’t care what they think about the broadcast (Special note to such deep-sighing grumps: If you don’t like a broadcast, turn the bloody channel—or even turn the TV off!—and leave everyone else alone).

Yesterday was a pretty super Saturday, and it will hopefully energise people to make the final push to get the entire country past the 90% vaccination rate. Doing so is vital for us all.

Stuff turns 20

Stuff's current logo.

I have to admit that I probably wouldn’t normally comment on a news company’s anniversary, and certainly not the anniversary of its website’s launch. However, this one is something I have a somewhat indirect connection to: Yesterday the Stuff website turned 20.

In 2000, I was working for INL (Independent Newspapers Ltd), the company that launched the Stuff website. I was working for the Auckland division that published the Sunday Star-Times and Sunday News Sunday papers, along with the weekly tabloid/gossip paper, NZ Truth, the racing titles Friday Flash, Best Bets, and Turf Digest, along with some magazines, the biggest of which was NZ TV Guide (there was another Auckland-based division that published a stable of magazines).

When the website launched, we were given some swag (which I still have somewhere), and our own internal company site, Our Stuff, which had, among other things, stuff, as it were, about the company and the industry.

Not long afterward, our division was rebranded “INL Sundays” (which, we joked, made us sound like an ice cream shop). The company began internal reviews that resulted in job losses at other divisions, so when it was out turn, my teammates and I joined a union (I mentioned that in a post about unions back in 2014).

Not long after that, in June 2003, the company was sold to Australian media conglomerate Fairfax Media. I transferred to another division shortly afterward (which I’d planned ahead of time), and left the company altogether the end of that year.

In July 2018, Fairfax merged with Australian media conglomerate Nine Entertainment Co. (which had once owned New Zealand TV channel Prime). Nine made it clear it intended to sell its New Zealand assets, by then branded under the “Stuff” name, and that finally happened—after the lockdown—with a management buyout (for “one dollar”). Stuff now owns the Stuff website and all the surviving papers—the weeklies, Sunday Star-Times and the Sunday News, along with daily newspapers Dominion Post (Wellington), Christchurch Press (Christchurch), Waikato Times (Hamilton), plus a bunch of regional papers.

I basically stopped reading Stuff several years ago because so much of its content was shallow clickbait. I returned when the country’s biggest newspaper, The New Zealand Herald put up a paywall because I thought the paywall was a very bad deal, and its existence meant I could never be sure whether the Herald story I saw a link to was free or not, so I just stopped following links to the paper’s website. Instead, I started checking our other New Zealand news sites, including Stuff, among others.

Like most NZ mainstream news organisations, Stuff’s journalism is varied, especially when it comes to covering New Zealand politics, leading some to claim it has a rightward tilt—though not nearly as much so as the Herald. Maybe so—such things are mostly a matter of opinion. However, many of the company’s journalists are very good. For example, I think Henry Cooke is the best political reporter in New Zealand, an opinion I came to after reading his reports on US politics and election campaigns—the first NZ journalist I’d ever seen get it right. Given how complicated and labyrinthine US politics is, anyone who gets that right is bound to do well covering NZ politics, and he has. If only the politics journalists at competing major media companies were half as good, we’d have a decent newsmedia overall.

My connection to Stuff, then, is only that I worked for the corporation that started it, and in an entirely different division and city than where the site was born. Even so, I was keenly aware of its launch, and I relied on it for a long time. Then, it changed, I changed, and then we both did that some more, and now I’m back to checking them out frequently—though not every day. Another thing that’s changed over these 20 years is that I often need a break from all news, and I’m certainly not alone in that feeling.

Here’s to another 20 years of stuff from Stuff.

See also:

“Stuff turns 20: From unwanted child to biggest NZ website, the story of how Stuff grew up” – Stuff

Striking fear

There are some professions that are vital to keeping our civilisation going, and among them is education. They teach the basic knowledge that makes every other profession possible, and they reinforce our civilisation. I have a lot of respect for teachers and the work they do. I don’t think they’re paid enough, not by a long shot, and they should have better working conditions. I’m also now strongly pro-union. But I’m also a pragmatist, and this week’s teachers strike in New Zealand is skating closer to making things worse.

The 50,000 primary school teachers and principals and post-primary teachers went on strike this week, and it was about conditions as much as pay. It was not only the biggest teachers strike in New Zealand history, it was also the biggest strike of any kind (the second largest was the 1951 waterfront dispute, which had 22,000 people on strike at its height. Last year, a total of around 70,000 people went on strike, the highest number since the 1980s.

Times have changed, though. Unlike the five-month long 1951 waterfront strike, modern strikes last a single day. Moreover, it’s illegal for them to strike except during their bargaining period, and they cannot engage in wildcat or solidarity strikes, nor strikes for political reasons (they can still hold rallies for such things, of course—as long as they’re held on their own time).

Unions represent only about 17% of waged workers, most of which are white-collar jobs, especially in government agencies (which includes schools and hospitals). And therein lies the problem.

Government workers are at the whim of the government of the day, and for decades both major parties have pursued basically neoliberal economic policies that avoid public spending and encourage lower taxes and free markets. There are differences in priorities, with the National Party favouring business (big business in particular), and Labour favouring social spending (health and education in particular). Over the nine years that National was in government, it spent so little on education and health that the sectors had effective budget cuts. The current Labour-led coalition government had been trying to fix those issues, health and education in particular.

This raises an obvious question: Considering the virtual pay cut that teachers and nurses endured during National’s time in government, why are they striking now, with a sympathetic government, instead of when National was in power and causing the problems? The heads of the teachers’ unions gave disingenuous answers to that, but it’s nevertheless true that, publicly, the unions did nothing for nine years.

This matters because they’re wearing out the patience of New Zealanders. Overall, people have enormous sympathy for teachers, but if they keep striking—and secondary teachers are striking again next week—that patience will run out. And if New Zealanders then blame Labour for these strikes, then the unions will get to deal with a National-led government in 2020—and they will lose, just like always. Is that really the outcome they want?

To be clear, I don’t think the current government has gone far enough with teachers. I think they should have decided on a smaller budget surplus and instead invested the money in education and health. But Labour is sensitive to the charge they can’t handle the economy; even though the economy does better under Labour than under National, the myth (fuelled by Rightwing propaganda) persists that Labour Governments are profligate. That, combined with a neoliberal economic consensus (maybe Neoliberal Ultra-Lite, in the case of Labour…), it was probably inevitable that this government would go too slowly to fix the problems that the previous National government created.

However, it is what it is: The budget is focused on some sorely needed social spending (like on mental health, for example), and they’ve chosen to run a large budget surplus. But, who knows? If the current occupant of the USA’s White House manages to utterly destroy the world economy through his ignorance, then we may be glad that the current NZ Government has run surpluses. Teachers, however, may feel differently.

I hope teachers get what they want, and that it can happen sooner than next year. But unions have to think long and hard if their strike actions are really helping their goals, or only making a National Party-led government more likely in 2020. If they switch to rallying on their own time, rather than closing schools and inconveniencing parents, they may get away with it. But if they keep pushing so hard, they could end up making sure they’ll have to wait much longer for what they want.

The most successful unions work with management (in this case, the government) to find solutions. I don’t see that happening at the moment, and both sides seem to be digging in their heals. They need to find a way forward, but I just don’t se how continual strike action can possibly bring that about—but it could make things much worse.

Update: "Minister intervenes in teachers' pay dispute, calls forum" – RNZ (Radio New Zealand)

Internet Wading: Numbers, words, food, and art

Another month has passed, and the links to random, interesting, and randomly interesting things have piled up. The list is varied, as always, with numbers, words, food, and art. And history, of course. Gotta have some of that.

I’ve often said that these posts are the catch-all for things I see on the Internet over a month that will never make it into their own post, but I realised recently that making a list of such things may imply something about me, and it does: I’m as random in what I find interesting as this list is.

But sometimes I find things interesting that I don’t even fully understand, like the video above, or the article, “Numberphile Explains the World's Most Evil Number Named After One of Hell's Princes”. What I don’t understand is anyone thinking numbers are creepy, or the whole devil thing. Maybe one has to believe in hell and satan and all that to see creepiness in the numbers.

Well, maybe some numbers we can all hate: Time. “A brief history of (New Zealand Standard) time” tells the story of how New Zealand was the first to adopt a universal time for the entire country. New Zealand has always been ahead of time. You’re welcome.

Well, maybe some art: “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture” talks about what it sounds like, and I’d heard all this before, the pictures were helpful.

Talking about the real colour of Greek sculpture is moving into science, so may as well talk about real science, what archaeologists have been up to. For instance, “Archeologist Discovered Evidence Of Ancient Chemical Warfare”. People being cruel in warfare is nothing new, apparently. And speaking of warfare, “Archaeologists Discovered vast medieval Buildings buried under prehistoric fortress at Old Sarum, England”. It may have been built by Henry I.

Food—or, food history: “Great Depression Grub – 5 Makeshift Meals People Made when Food was Scarce”. My mother made the first one all the time. It was okay. She also made green bean casserole: “Dorcas Reilly, 92, New Jersey woman who invented green bean casserole, is dead”.

More specifically contemporary history also came my way this past month. For example, “They were a gay, interracial couple in an age of relentless bigotry. The two Harolds didn’t flinch.”. This was a nice story of a sort not told often enough.

Contemporary life also features a lot in posts that I find. For example, “How to write the perfect sentence”, which looks at what famous writers thought about sentences. Probably interesting mostly to the writer hidden inside me somewhere or other. The blogger in me found this list interesting when I was double-checking a quote: “The Top 10: Misattributed Quotations”.

Recently, anthropologist David Graeber spoke to Radio New Zealand on “Why bullshit jobs are booming”. There’s audio at the link, but the article is pretty thorough.

Finally, a problem we don’t have in New Zealand: “Discarding Halloween pumpkins adds to greenhouse effect, so take advantage of drop-off site or a Pumpkin Smash”. I applaud the effort—and it’s certainly not something anyone worried about when I was a kid, though clearly we should have. New Zealand doesn’t have the orange pumpkins, and what they apply that name to are what Americans call squash. The remains are are usually put in home compost, and the stereotype is the plants growing out of some gardener’s compost heap. I should add, I don’t now how common that really is. We’ve certainly never had that happen, but, we’ve always had bins, not heaps.

Well, that’s it, so it’s time to pumpkin catapult this month’s Internet Wading post.

A non-labouring day

Yesterday was the Labour Day holiday in New Zealand, a date set aside to commemorate the eight-hour workday. Or, as NZ History Online put it:

Labour Day commemorates the struggle for an eight-hour working day. New Zealand workers were among the first in the world to claim this right when, in 1840, the carpenter Samuel Parnell won an eight-hour day in Wellington. Labour Day was first celebrated in New Zealand on 28 October 1890, when several thousand trade union members and supporters attended parades in the main centres. Government employees were given the day off to attend the parades and many businesses closed for at least part of the day.”

The Labour Day public holiday now observed on the fourth Monday in October, which was yesterday. So, why didn’t I post about it then? I was resting from my labours!

Actually, we did a lot around the house over the weekend, including yesterday. On Sunday, we planted our tomato plants, which are doing well, thank you. We also cleared a lot of weeds. I also put a couple big numbers on our recycling bin so I can see the numbers from the footpath, which will make it easier when I go to collect the bin. I found out that each number was part of a pair—should I use them on the side of the bin on the side I’ll approach it from, or should I save them for the rubbish bin Auckland Council will give us in the next year? Decisions, decisions.

Yesterday was about removing the last of the weeds and finishing up some more on our household “to do” list (something we really do have). The gardens are (mostly) ready for summer, though I still want to increase the area we have for vegetable gardens. A work in progress.

All of that left me tired, but yesterday evening I felt kind of sick—sort of flu-like. It crossed my mind that I’d taken my garden trowel to loosen stuff in our tumbling compost bin—and I hadn’t worn a dust mask. Oops! I felt yucky enough that I decided against blogging yesterday, and I went to bed somewhat earlier than usual. So, I really did rest from my labours.

Another trip to a different home centre tomorrow for some more bits and pieces, and then I should be (mostly) done with the yards for awhile and can concentrate on the inside? Well, that’s y hope. I have plenty of projects for that, too.

The graphic above was posted on Facebook by Kiwibank (owned by New Zealanders through the government). They said:

Can you imagine working a 14 hour day? Samuel Parnell couldn’t, so in 1840 he took a stand and won New Zealand workers the right to an 8 hour day. Today commemorates that victory! So whatever you’re up to on your day off, remember it was this guy who made it happen. Cheers Sammy!

Indeed. We were able to enjoy the day thanks to “Sammy”. It’s good to know why we get to enjoy good times and holidays, I think.

125 Years of Votes for Women

125 years ago today, New Zealand became the first self-governing nation in the world to grant women the right to vote. It seems almost quaint now to think there was a time when women couldn’t vote, but that was once universal. Until New Zealand changed that.

The video above was made by TVNZ’s 1 News team for release on the Internet. It provides some details—especially voices of some of the first women to vote—not always accessible to people interested in the topic. They did a really good job.

Gaining the right to vote was only the first step: It wasn’t until 1919 that women won the right to stand for Parliament, but it wasn’t until 1940 that the first woman—Elizabeth McCombs—was elected. In the most recent Parliamentary elections, a year ago this month, a record number of women—46—were elected, which is 38% of the 120-member Parliament.

We’ve had three female prime ministers, but all three of them have been since 1997, when Jenny Shipley rolled then-Prime Minister Jim Bolger as National Party leader, becoming New Zealand’s first female prime minister. Two years later, the Labour Party won the election and party leader Helen Clark became prime minister, the first to become prime minister by election. In December 1993, she became New Zealand’s first female Leader of the Opposition, when she replaced then Labour Party leader, Mike Moore, who’d just lost that year’s parliamentary elections. Ironically, when she succeeded Shipley as Prime Minister, Shipley succeeded her as Leader of the Opposition. So, both were a first and a second.

Our current Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern, was the first Prime Minister to give birth while in office. She won’t be the last.

So much has changed in the past 125 years, but there’s so much left to address: The wage gap, violence against women, lack of women in the boardrooms of corporations, lack of respect for traditionally “female” professions. But if New Zealand could be the first nation to grant women the right to vote, it can find solutions to all those problems. Anything’s possible

Coverage from RNZ (Radio New Zealand):


…And their site has printed coverage, too.

Happy Women’s Suffrage Day!

Previous posts:
Women’s Suffrage Day (2012)
Women’s Suffrage Day at 120 (2013)

Internet Wading: Devices, aliens, and a birth

Time to wade into the wonderful warm waters of the Internet for some more interesting, quirky, or annoying things I ran across this month, things that would never make a blog post of their own. If, you know, I was actually blogging regularly. Still, here we go with anotgehr outbreak of worryitis.

There was a lot of hoopla in the news in NZ recently, as there is from time to time, about device addiction. Much of it comes across as the news media obsessing about some health condition they just heard about (or, maybe, made up?) or sinply forgot they already obsessed about that same topic many times before. The graphic up top about “America’s device addiction” clearly represents survey data, but it also nevertheless carries the feeling of the original survey’s silent handwringing and pearl-clutching, the sort of thing the newsmedia feeds off of.

The NZ Herald held up a moral champion in a story “Teen's smartphone addiction: 'I only slept three hours a night'”. The Herald gives us a warm, fuzzy anti-device ending to the story. Whew! But hey, we mustn’t worry about phones and tablets alone! “Gaming addiction declared a mental disorder”. The bottom line, though, is that some people do, indeed, struggle with over-dependence on electronic devices and technology of one sort or another. But the newsmedia seems incapable of separating them from people who may use technology “too much”, but who can just as easily move on. An honest discussion of the issues is good, moral panics are not, and neither is demonising people because someone somewhere thinks they use their electronic device “too much”.

Now on to some real science: “New Scientific Theory For Origin Of Octopuses: They’re Aliens”. Well, of course they are. Duh! Or, how about “NASA Releases 4K Video Of The Moon Ending The Moon Landing Conspiracy”, because nothing stops a conspiracy theory as effectively as facts and evidence, right?

On to the Arts! “21 Books You’ve Been Meaning To Read”, because who doesn’t need to feel inadequate about something else in their lives? On the other hand, “Ivan Albright’s meticulous attention to the human body continues to be an inspiration to young artists” talking about a painter and his works. Fascinating, even though I’d personally never heard of him before.

This one defies categories, really. It’s just kinda interesting-ish: “27 Perfect Coincidences That Were Luckily Captured on Camera”.

June is LGBT+ Pride Month in the Northern Hemisphere, with all the related talk about history and culture, such as this article about Baron Von Steuben: “The American Revolution’s Greatest Leader Was Openly Gay”. What fascinates me about such stories is the extent to which historians will work hard to downplay the reality of historic figures’ lives and the reality—or even possibility—of their homosexuality. I first became aware of that when I was reading about Walt Whitman and saw that historians denied the obvious homoeroticism in his poetry, or the evidence about Whitman’s sexuality.

There were others, too. For example, many years ago I saw a workshop of a play about England’s King Edward II and his relationship with Piers Gaveston. It was the first time I’d ever heard of any gay kings. Since then, I’ve read about King William II, King James I (who was also James VI of Scotland), and others. Related: “The secret history of the gay Kings and Queens of England”.

What all these people have in common is the need that some heterosexual scholars have to “de-gay” people in the past. It denies LGBT+ people our history and our culture, but, worse, by erasing us from history, it also perpetuates the political myth that LGBT+ people are something new, and it’s some sort of fad.

Some politicians clearly don’t get it. In New Zealand, Judith Collins, widely expected to challenge Simon Bridges for the leadership of the National Party sooner or later, got in trouble for “liking” a Tweet that mentioned gays as a negative thing: “Judith Collins apologises for liking 'hugely disappointing' tweet about Labour's 'gays'”. Thing is, Judith has a history: She voted in favour of marriage equality, but she also voted against all three readings of the Civil Unions Act in 2004. In March, 2005, she voted to re-legalise discrimination against LGBT+ New Zealanders. In December of that year, she voted to define marriage as being one man/one woman (I talked about the 2004/5 votes in a post in 2011). She appears to have evolved in recent years, which is great—sincerely. But this incident suggests she’s not all the way there yet.

But forget all that, the biggest news of the month (Year? Millennium?) is that Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has had her baby! “'Welcome to our village wee one': PM Jacinda Ardern gives birth to a baby girl”. The way things are going in the world, and especially certain parts of it, it’s nice to have something nice to focus on, if only for a moment. [See also: “Birth of PM's baby makes international headlines”].

So, with the Prime Minster’s (and New Zealand’s) waiting over, that’s enough wading, too.

The graphic up top is a "Chart of the Day" infographic from Statista.

50 years after the Wahine Disaster

Today is the 50th Anniversary of New Zealand’s worst modern maritime disaster, the sinking of the ferry Wahine, which capsized in Wellington Harbour on April 10, 1968. The video above from RNZ describes the tragedy. There were 736 people on board, and according to History New Zealand, “Fifty-one people lost their lives that day, another died several weeks later and a 53rd victim died in 1990 from injuries sustained in the wreck.”

This video from Archives New Zealand is of photos from that fateful day:


According to the video’s YouTube description:

This video was created by Archives New Zealand in 2013 for the 45th anniversary of the disaster. It shows a number of images and documents on the 'Wahine' from our holdings, including onboard photographs, images of the rescue effort, and underwater shots.

The final video, which aired yesterday on TVNZ’s Seven Sharp programme, tells the story of two people who were brought together and linked together by the tragedy:


Shirley Hick’s son, Gordie, is the one who died in 1990 because of the brain damage he suffered that day.

When I arrived in New Zealand in 1995, the tragedy had happened only 27 years earlier, so a huge number of New Zealanders had personal memories of the tragedy. I heard about it many times in my early years in the country, and then, over time, I started to hear about it less often. It’s the way things go as historic events begin to fade from living memory and become the stuff of history books and dark, grainy archival film. That particular inevitability adds another layer of sadness, I think, but that, too, will fade as the event continues to disappear from living memory. Then, as it disappears from living memory altogether, only the tragedy will remain, and it will be remembered in a different way.

The important thing, though, is that it will be remembered.

Small treasures

I found treasure! Going through boxes in the garage, I found a basket with coins, shopping lists, receipts, etc., I’d taken out of my pocket & tossed in there years ago. It added up to $15.30, which isn’t nothing. I also found (not in the photo) NZ coins that were discontinued in 2006 (would’ve added up to $4.60 back then, but they’re just scrap metal now). There were also two Aussie 20¢ pieces, and one US penny (1956 D, to be precise). I wish I’d put notes aside instead of coins… 😉

A post shared by arthur_amerinz (@arthur_amerinz) on Mar 12, 2018 at 8:06pm PDT

Going through things stored away can yield many surprises, from ephemera that stir up long forgotten memories, to accidental “over purchases”, to lost “I’ve been looking for that!” items. Sometimes, we find treasure.

The photo above shows the current New Zealand coins I found recently when going through boxes in the garage. It was part of my garage reorganisation project, but it was also accidental: I opened a lightweight box to see if I could combine the contents with another, and I found the basket I mentioned.

The basket was mostly junk—EFTPOS receips, old grocery lists, that sort of thing. They’d all actually come from a drawer in my bedside cabinet, but when we changed cabinets some years ago to ones with one less drawer, I had to clean out the old drawers. Except—and this is shockingly unusual for me—I was so busy that I just didn’t have time. So, stuff ended up in that basket. Then, I topped it up with new stuff. And then I forgot about it entirely.

Yesterday, while I was on the phone with the customer service people for the company that hosts my AmeriNZ Podcast website, I decided to go through the basket (I talked about that phone adventure on my latest podcast episode). It was probably the only way I’d have gotten to that task so soon, actually, so it turned out well.

As I said in the Instagram caption, I also found discontinued NZ coins that had a face value of $4.60, though their only value now is as scrap metal, as I said above, or to collectors. Or to John Green.

And then there was that stray US penny. I have no idea why it was there, but I have a few US coins, mostly left over from holiday trips, or even a few I had with me when I arrived in New Zealand way back when (well, 1995, actually). They’re not of a whole lot of use in this country, oddly enough.

The Australian coins used to be another matter. It used to be common to get Australian coins in change, since their 20¢ coin was the same size as ours (they get their $1 and $2 coin sizes backwards, however; ours are right). Since we changed to new, smaller coins, that stopped Australian coins circulating in New Zealand: No one confuses them anymore.

I’d like to think that some box somewhere has a stack of banknotes waiting to be discovered, but that will only happen in an alternate universe: I never put aside bank notes because, unlike coins, they’re useful.

Coins just arent very useful anymore. I no longer buy candy from the corner dairy, so having a few coins in my pocket isn’t at all necessary (which is how they eneded up being dumped in a basket in the first place). Time was, you could take coins to any bank branch and deposit them, but a lot of branches now are mainly offices to meet with loan officers or whatever, and they send coins away to be cointed—and for a fee, of course.

There are actually plenty of things that an ordinary person might buy with coins, but New Zealand is rapidly moving to a cashless society, so finding a use for coins is becoming harder. In fact, I don’t actually know what I’ll do with the $15.30. Maybe I’ll put it in my car for when I want a soft drink.

This process of tidying up the garage has meant going through a lot of things. I haven’t found much cash, but I’ve found a lot of useful stuff, ncluding stuff I bought, forgot about, and bought again, and other stuff I’ve forgotten about. Some of the stuff has remined me of things from my past, and that’s been interesting to me. Not all the small treasures I’ve found have been monetary.

The garage reorganisation project has been difficult, and mostly extremely ordinary. Sometimes, though, I find treasure. Those are good days. Coins, however, are optional.

Bill English resigns

Bill English (Photo NZ National Party)

Today Bill English, Leader of the Opposition, announced his resignation as Leader of the National Party, effective February 27. He will also leave Parliament at the beginning of March. This move wasn’t expected, but also wasn’t a shock as the resignation of John Key was back in 2016. Clearly it was time, and on his terms.

For the past few weeks, there’d been a lot of speculation in the newsmedia about a leadership challenge. All MPs publicly pledged loyalty, as always happens, but who knows what they were saying behind the scenes? All we know is that they didn’t force him out. But this sort of intense media speculation happened every time there was about to be a change of the Labour Party leader, so I thought there was probably something to it. I was also glad to see the shoe on the other foot for a change.

Be that as it may, English clearly left on his terms, which is the best result any political leader can hope for. I was never a supporter of his because, as a Labour Party supporter I obviously disagreed with National Party policies. I felt that many of their policies, under both Key and English, did terrible harm to the country, and nothing has convinced me to revisit those opinions. Indeed, they’ve been solidified with the publication of information the National-led government did not release.

I well remember when English rolled Jenny Shipley to take leadership of his party. She’d lost the 1999 election to Labour’s Helen Clark, and English sought to reverse that. He moved his party to the centre, and I was very sceptical of his sincerity because I knew he was a social conservative, and I just didn’t trust him. He ended up leading the party to its worst-ever election defeat in 2002.

English was rolled by the openly racist Don Brash, who lurched the party to the hard right before leading the party to yet another defeat in 2005. Brash was then rolled by John Key in November 2006, and he went on to win the 2008 elections—yanking the party back toward the centre, aided by his deputy leader, Bill English.

English then became Prime Minister when John Key resigned, choosing Paula Bennett as his deputy. Despite my suggestion back then that Bennett’s selection “could be an opportunity for her to redeem herself, and to become a better MP—and human being”, it didn’t happen, and she did, indeed, help elect a Labour-led Government.

Today I watched Bill English’s announcement live, and that part was classy and pretty good (even if some of his answers to reporters’ questions weren’t). But after he said thank you and he and his entourage left, Bennet suddenly appeared at the podium, after the mics were already turned off, and offered her thanks “on behalf of the entire caucus”. If there’s been a more self-serving, attention-seeking moment in NZ politics, I can’t remember it. If she really has leadership aspirations, then she’s clearly delusional: Nobody actually likes her, especially not the voters of New Zealand.

What of Bill himself? Despite my initial distrust of him, and my my ongoing disagreement with his party’s policies, he nevertheless never tried to impose his personal conservative (largely Catholic religion-based) social views on everyone else. Put another way, he was true to his word, which is a pretty remarkable thing in itself for a politician of any stripe.

The fact that Key and English led government for nine years is a testament to the fact that they understood that the majority of New Zealand voters are in the centre, something those on both the Right and the Left often fail to understand or admit, as the case may be. Policies notwithstanding, even though their polices were far too conservative and/or cautious for ME, that’s still something worth noting.

I also think it’s important to note that while English was personally socially conservative, he did evolve on some of his views, particularly on marriage equality, as all rational politicians have. Despite everything—his own conservative nature, and the hard push from the Right in his own party, he always held steady on the course of a more centrist National Party. The fact he did that is really pretty remarkable, and it has to be acknowledged as being as being pretty special and unique.

Bill has done his dash. He’s been in Parliament for 27 years, and there really was nothing left for him. If he contested the 2020 election, he’d probably have lost again, given the fact New Zealand voters generally like to give governments at least two terms. His vague hope that the current government would come unstuck are likely to go unfulfilled, just as they were the last time Labour led government. And, given National’s inability to foster strong allied parties on the centre-right (or even right), it would be difficult for them to find a path to government when forming government requires forming a coalition. Given all that, and given all the time and effort he’s put in, why would he stay?!

I wasn’t a supporter, but I nevertheless think that Bill English served his party well. The fact I opposed him in the elections, and his party in government, doesn’t change the fact that he was a good leader of his party, and he seemed to be a decent person overall. I wish him well for whatever his next ventures are.

In which John Green is stunned by Kiwi kindness

In this video, John Green talks about how Kiwis’ expression of kindness meant a lot to him by gathering and sending him “thousands and thousands” of the now discontinued New Zealand 5 cent coins, all because of the tuatara that was on that coin. And from this story, dear reader, we learn that we should never underestimate the power and effect of helping someone with something small, because it can be quite big to them. Even when it’s a small denomination discontinued coin that means so much more—to them.

Related
Change for the better – my 2006 post on the end of the five cent piece and other currency changes

Polls apart

If a week is a long time in politics, then this past week has been a year for New Zealand politics. This week the NZ Labour Party and its leader, Jacinda Ardern, soared in the latest opinion poll from the same company whose poll helped to seal the fate of the previous party leader. Labour’s position now is dramatically different from what it was a week earlier, and it is now within striking distance of changing the government. It’s a dramatic turnaround in only one week.

Labour’s turnaround IS dramatic. In the Newshub/Reid Research from the end of July, Labour was on 24.1%. That was less that Labour received in the 2014 election (25.13%) and in 2011 (27.48), both of which were considered disastrous at the time.

Reid’s August 8 poll, however, had Labour soaring to 33.1%. National, which was on 45.2% in the earlier poll, dropped to 44.4%. The 0.8 point fall for National would be statistically insignificant by itself, but this is the lowest point for National since Reid Research started polling for 3 News/Newshub back in February 2009 (for the 2011 election). In poll analysis, trends matter as much or more than actual numbers, and if National continues to drop, even if only slight amounts at a time, that could spell real trouble for them.

One thing I haven’t seen any news outlet mention is that the current split between Labour and National is almost exactly the same as the general election result in 2008, when National won government from Labour. That year’s result was 33.99% for Labour and 44.93% for National, who went on to form a minority government. This means that Labour is closer to being able to win government than at any time since the 2005 election (when Labour won re-election to government with 41.1% to National’s 39.1%).

The votes that Labour gained came primarily from the Greens, who lost more than a third of their support (from 13% down to 8.3%), and New Zealand First, who lost nearly a third of theirs (from 13% to 9.2%). The minor parties all stayed basically the same.

The dramatic rise in Labour’s fortunes is clearly the result of changing leaders. We know this, first, because disaffected Labour voters tend to go primarily to the Greens and NZ First, and they’re “coming home”. This is especially seen in the “preferred prime minister” beauty contest in which Jacinda Ardern polled 26.3%, a huge rise of 7.6 points. That’s impressive all in its own, but she’s now statistically in a dead heat with National Party leader Bill English, who is on 27.7%. NZ First leader Winston Peters, who has been the second most preferred prime minister for months, is now in third place, down 1.9 points to 10%. This is the highest poll rating for a Labour Party Leader in years, higher than any leader since Helen Clark was Prime Minister, prior to the 2008 general election.

All of that is why it’s simplistic to suggest that Labour is doing well only because of the troubles the Green Party had in recent weeks. The Greens certainly were hurt by co-leader Metiria Turei’s admission of having committed benefit fraud a couple decades ago, followed by her resignation as co-leader of her party this week [see: “Timeline: Green Party co-leader Metiria Turei's downfall” from RNZ]. However, because Labour also took a large amount of support from NZ First (and a tiny bit from National), and because Jacinda Ardern’s personal popularity soared, this is a case of Labour doing well, with the Greens’ troubles possibly expanding the growth in support beyond what Labour would have had anyway.

However, in order to win Government, Labour needs to take votes from National, not from the Greens or NZ First, both of whom are potential coalition partners. In other words, the centre-left needs to grow its share of the vote, not just rearrange it. In 2002, National’s vote collapsed as its voters just stayed home, giving it its worst-ever election defeat (Bill English was the leader at that time, too). There’s no evidence that National could face that sort of shellacking this year, however, continuing questions about its handling of their MP Todd Barclay’s mistreatment of a worker have the potential to weaken National’s vote, and the fact it’s been in government for nine long years means that some voters will be bored with National and wanting change.

The main job here is for Labour and the Greens. Labour needs to focus on taking votes from National, some of which are definitely winnable (actually, NZ First could do this, too). The Greens need to regroup and recover from Metiria Turei stepping down as co-leader. For a coalition government to be left-leaning, the Greens must be stronger than NZ First. Labour can’t do that for the Greens—they have to prove themselves to the electorate. It's important to note that even now, at 8.3%, the Greens are polling significantly higher than their results in 2002, 2005 or 2008 (7%, 5.3%, and 6.2%, respectively). So, this a definitely doable.

It’s 40 days until the 2017 General Election, and the real campaign hasn’t actually begun yet (and won’t until after Parliament rises). The campaignING, however, is in full swing, and as it picks up pace, and when the TV commercials begin, we’ll probably see more movement in the polls. I doubt they’ll be as volatile as we saw over the past week, but movement is inevitable—and we can’t rule out big changes.

One week is a long time in politics. The election is six weeks from tomorrow: Not all that long, but with the week we’ve just been through, right now that sounds like an eternity.

50 years of the NZ dollar

Fifty years ago today, on July 10, 1967, New Zealand made the switch from Pounds, Shillings, and Pence to Dollars and Cents. The video above is one of several commercials used to promote the change.

Wikipedia has a good summary of the change:

Prior to the introduction of the New Zealand dollar in 1967, the New Zealand pound was the currency of New Zealand, which had been distinct from the pound sterling since 1933. The pound used the £sd system, in which the pound was divided into 20 shillings and one shilling was divided into 12 pence, which by the 1950s was considered complicated and cumbersome.

Switching to decimal currency had been proposed in New Zealand since the 1930s, although only in the 1950s did any plans come to fruition. In 1957, a committee was set up by the Government to investigate decimal currency. The idea fell on fertile ground, and in 1963, the Government decided to decimalise New Zealand currency. The Decimal Currency Act was passed in 1964, setting the date of transition to 10 July 1967. Words such as "fern", "kiwi" and "zeal" were proposed to avoid confusion with the word "dollar", which many people at the time associated with the United States dollar. In the end, the word "dollar" was chosen anyway, and an anthropomorphic dollar note cartoon character called "Mr. Dollar" became the symbol of transition in a huge publicity campaign.

On Monday 10 July 1967 ("Decimal Currency Day"), the New Zealand dollar was introduced to replace the pound at a rate of two dollars to one pound (one dollar to ten shillings, ten cents to one shilling, 5⁄6 cent to a penny). Some 27 million new banknotes were printed and 165 million new coins were minted for the changeover.

The thing that strikes me about the old system is how complicated it was. I’m sure growing up with it made it easier, but I know I’d have struggled with that system if it had still been in place when I emigrated. In fact, I very nearly experienced that system before then.

In July of 1971, my parents took me with them on a trip to the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland. The UK had decimalised in February 1971, and when we got there we found coins marked “New Pence”, something that wasn’t discontinued until 1981. However, the old coins were still in circulation, which made things a bit confusing—pounds, shillings and old pence alongside pounds, and New Pence. It helped that there were still signs in shops telling people how much their old coins were worth in the new coins.

What astounds me is that at the time New Zealand decimalised, there were people who actually argued that the new system would be “too complex” and would “confuse shoppers” and that shopkeepers would use the switch to secretly raise prices (according to a thorough look back in the Sunday Star-Times, via Stuff). Apparently, complainers have always been around and will complain about pretty much everything. Who knew?

The doomsayers and staunch imperialists lost, and New Zealand now has a thoroughly modern and useful currency system. Most recently, the new “Brighter Money” series of notes, which use better anti-counterfeiting measures as well as being literally brighter, entered circulation. That began in 2015 with the $5 and $10 notes, and finished in 2016 (the $20, $50, and $100 notes. Apparently, the $5 note won an award for best banknote of the year in 2015, after being chosen out of 40 designs from 20 countries. You go, Sir Ed!

Money isn’t really the root of all evil (that’d be the human carrying the money…), and even in this age of Internet Banking and debit cards, cash is still really useful. And I’m sooooooo glad I never had to learn pounds, shillings, and pence—one might need a little £sd to cope with learning it.

Happy birthday, New Zealand Dollar!


Here are some related videos, first up – “Mr. Dollar helps you shop with dollars and cents”:



Next is “Shopping with Decimal Currency”:



“Pictorial Parade No. 194 (1967)” describes the secret story behind Decimal Currency Day (first four minutes of the newsreel):



And finally in this tale of New Zealand money, “The life of a bank note”, which is about the Brighter Money and the life and "reincarnation" of New Zealand banknotes:



On more video for comparison: “Decimal Currency, 14 February 1966” which has TV ads for Australia’s decimalisation about 18 months before New Zealand’s. These ads and New Zealand’s are obviously basically prettyt much the same: