A guest post by David Garrett:

While on holiday in Northland recently, I was present when a friend landed a 273 kg blue marlin. For those who know game fishing, that is a significant fish – if not a record breaker since he was using 37 kg line. I got to thinking about how game fishing – along with duck shooting and other “blood sports” – is increasingly the target of wowsers who decry such traditional blokey past times. So I thought I would pen a defence of the venerable sport of big game fishing, and on the way try to  educate the ignorant on some salient points thereof.

Firstly, is it cruel to the fish? For at least two reasons, I strongly suspect they do not feel pain. Firstly, consider their reaction to being hooked – it is to go like hell, and valiantly  resist to the last  the tension put on the hook by a big game rod and reel with the drag wound up. That is the total opposite of the behavior of a 500 kg bull being led by a ring through his nose – the bull obediently trots along behind whoever is leading him, avoiding even slight pressure on his nose ring.

Secondly, it is quite common for anglers who have tagged and released a fish – now the most common end to a fish vs. man fight – to hook the same fish again minutes after it has been freed. If the fish suffered pain from taking a lure – a brightly coloured plastic thing which doesn’t really look like a fish – is it likely it would immediately  take that same lure again? I don’t know…perhaps some qualified marine biologist could enlighten us. Those without such knowledge should hold their peace.

Is the contest one sided? Again, in my view, not at all. Any honest game fisherman will tell you that the number of “hookups” – when a fish takes a  lure – is about five times as many as  fish which are actually brought to the side of the boat. For a start, the line is usually a fraction of the strength of the fish. The blue marlin I refer to was landed – after a fight of an hour and a half – on line with a breaking strain  not much more  than one tenth of the weight of the fish. One toss of its head could easily break the line.

Most such battles end with the fish winning – either by spitting the hook or breaking the line.  Only if the angler is skilled and the skipper is even better does the contest move to the stage of “fish by boat”. And here’s where knowledge really triumphs over ignorance.

Most game fish these days are tagged and released. The ignorant say “so what, the fish dies anyway”. Not so. There are many stories of fish tagged and released in New Zealand waters being caught again in the Islands, or even as far away as Hawaii. It is not uncommon for a fish to be tagged here, tagged again in Tonga, and tagged a third time back here. Obviously some of the tagged and released fish die. Equally obviously, many don’t, and live to fight another day.

One of the biggest lacuna of knowledge about big game fishing is the rarity and age  of a fish like the one I saw landed last week. Such fish are not like  large snapper, which may be 40 or even 50 years old.  A blue marlin reaches maturity in 5-8 years, and may live to be 25. Let us say 100 mature specimens are taken in New Zealand waters every year; that is a small fraction of much older large snapper which are taken, which any angler worth his salt returns to the water. If for no other reason, (they are breeding stock)  they are not great eating anyway.

Do game fish get eaten? You betcha. I have always been opposed to taking fish of whatever size and then dumping them. There are sad pictures of Zane Grey’s camps in the Bay of Islands in the 1920’s with  ten or more magnificent fish lined up and simply left to rot in the sun. That is bullshit, and to the best of my knowledge rarely happens today.

The fish I am referring to was taken rather than tagged and released because it was the biggest the angler had ever caught, and because he will have a cast of the head made and mounted. The 200 odd kilograms left after the head and guts have been removed will be smoked, and then distributed among his friends. Smoked marlin is really delicious, as anyone who has tried it can attest.

The game fishing industry is a big tourist earner. Our trip cost $200 per person, or $1000 to the skipper for the day. Thanks to the efforts of Zane Grey and other later aficionados, New Zealand is a mecca for those who enjoy the almost sexual thrill of a game rod “going off” when a big fish takes a lure.  It is my honest view that the critics of big game fishing as a sport and past time are largely either ignorant of the things I have covered in this piece, or simply “opposed” regardless.

Notwithstanding all of the above, I do not believe game fishing will survive the next 50 years. The wowsers will eventually convince the ignorant to ban it, along with similar past times. So to those who have never experienced the thrill of a loaded (in the fish’s favour) fight against a giant of the deep, I say go for it,  before the ignorant and the overly sensitive tell you that you are not allowed to.

Looking back through an old INZ annual report I found these Neilsen stats for May 2004. The most popular sites were:

1. XtraMSN 2,553,126 xtramsn.co.nz and xtra.co.nz
2. Trade Me 707,853 trademe.co.nz
3. NZ Herald 469,563 nzherald.co.nz
4. White Pages 339,816 whitepages.co.nz
5. Stuff 333,338 stuff.co.nz
6. ASB Bank 291,850 asbbank.co.nz
7. Westpac 290,878 westpac.co.nz
8. Yellow Pages 282,952 yellowpages.co.nz
9. TVNZ 279,165 tvnz.co.nz
10. Telecom 252,428 telecom.co.nz
11. Vodafone 234,520 vodafone.co.nz
12. NZCity 206,852 nzcity.co.nz
13. NZDating 184,543 nzdating.com
14. ANZ 180,635 anz.co.nz
15. Seek 180,195 seek.co.nz
16. Traderpoint 142,271 traderpoint.co.nz
17. Ticketek 129,452 ticketek.co.nz
18. UBD 119,590 ubd.co.nz
19. Old Friends 119,475 oldfriends.co.nz
20. Wises 113,709 wises.co.nz

How things change. Xtramsn is dead. The white and yellow pages are a shadow of what they once were. Telecom is now Spark. NZ City and NZ Dating are faded. Wises has been overtaken by Google Maps. Old Friends has closed.

Some interesting results from a ResearchNZ poll:

• 56% support showing ID in order to vote and 40% opposed
• 34% support compulsory voting and 59% opposed
• 37% are satisfied with MMP and 37% dissatisfied
• 47% agree MMP results in a more representative Government and 32% disagree
• 28% agree MMP Governments are less effective than FPP Governments and 52% disagree
• 47% agree it is not a concern the largest party did not form Government and 42% disagree
• 41% would vote to retain the Maori seats and 44% would vote to abolish them

The Herald reports:

A family paid $17,000 for an Airbnb rental only to arrive at the doorstep with their suitcases to discover the listing was fake.

Police are investigating but say their hands are tied because the family paid by an international bank transfer to a third party.

The family is one of several who’ve lost substantial amounts of money through the scam which lures victims through the popular booking website but then asks guests to veer from the usual payment system.

Amaia Ros, 19, and her family are echoing calls for Airbnb to improve host vetting after their family lost years of savings while on a sabbatical from their native Barcelona, in Auckland.

It’s awful for the family, but blaming AirBNB is unfair. It is impossible for AirBNB to verify every listing, just as it is impossible for EBay to verify everything listed with them.

The trick is to follow the rules. If you only pay through AirBNB, then you can’t get ripped off as they hold your money for you. And when you pay a purported host directly you are in fact ripping off AirBNB because direct payments mean they don’t get their commission.

When Ros’ parents Gabriel and Anabel tried to book the Takapuna home they were told their credit card details were invalid and asked to transfer funds to a Spanish bank account instead. When they arrived at the house they discovered the listing was fake.

Again never pay direct and especially don’t pay to an overseas account. Also look for the history of any person listing.

Quickly an army of parents and community members rallied to donate a house full of furniture and a discounted rental home organised by Harcourts agent Rachael Bridger.

Parents took turns cooking and dropping off dinners for the grateful family, who have recently returned to Spain.

Great Kiwi hospitality.

The HoS editorial blames AirBNB for people not following its rules:

The company cannot afford too many of these incidents. It clearly needs better systems to ensure everyone offering accommodation on its site has the property they claim to own.

And it needs to develop a way to automatically jettison any offering that involves payment to or through any agency except itself.

 

That is how the family from Barcelona were scammed. When they booked the Takapuna house they were told to pay through a Spanish bank account.

That is already against Airbnb’s rules but how many users know it?

If they pay through a third party rather than Airbnb they violate its terms and are not eligible for refunds.

They’re not eligible for refunds as Airbnb doesn’t have the money to refund it.

If you pay a host directly you are actually ripping off AirBNB, so expecting them to refund you for ripping them off is rather unrealistic.

As you know Labour and the Greens are voting to allow Winston the power to expel MPs from his party from Parliament who he falls out with. Why does he want this power? Because he falls out with most of his colleagues eventually.

This first happened as a National MP. Of the 50+ National MPs he was in caucus with in the 1980s and 1990s, only around four still get on with him. But you might say that is to be expected as he left National.

So lets look at the NZ First MPs. These are MPs he personally chose. They joined a party led by him. You’d expect say only 10% or so of his former colleagues to have fallen out with him. RIght? Well no, actually over half of his former NZF colleagues had serious fall outs with him. The ones I know of (there may be more) are:

1. Tau Henare
2. Tuku Morgan
3. Rana Waitai
4. Tu Wyllie
5. Tuariki Delamere
6. Ann Batten
7. Peter McCardle
8. Jenny Bloxham
9. Deborah Morris
10. Neil Kirton
11. Robyn McDonald
12. Gilbert Myles
13. Dail Jones
14. Andrew Williams
15. Richard Prosser
16. Brendan Horan
17. Denis O’Rourke
18. Asenati Taylor

This is why he wants the power to expel MPs. Because he always falls out with his MPs. Loyalty is one way, not two ways.

Stuff reports:

It’s the No 1 women’s sport in NZ, but some elite netballers aren’t making enough to live.

Leading Silver Ferns are earning $130,000 a year, about a 10th of the salary of millionaire All Blacks’ captain Kieran Read.

New Zealand’s premier netballers have never enjoyed a higher profile. They’re on our TV screens three days a week during winter, playing in a new domestic competition where the tagline screams, “Made from more”. Away from the glitzy team photoshoots, the majority of elite players, outside the flagship Silver Ferns, are doing it tough.

The Silver Ferns get paid less than the All Blacks because they generate less revenue. The All Whites get paid less for the same reason.

Former Steel and Mystics chief executive Julie Paterson, now Tennis New Zealand’s boss, says the ongoing conundrum is how to generate greater money in netball.

NNZ earned $5.2 million in sponsorship in 2016, compared with New Zealand Rugby’s $55 million.

If you generate more revenue, you’ll get paid more. There are basically three forms of revenue for sports”

1. Ticket sales
2. TV advertising rights
3. Sponsorship

The All Blacks get paid a lot because their games are sold out, the TV rights are very valuable and they have a lot of sponsorship.

The Herald reports:

With more oil reserves than anywhere else in the world, Venezuela should be drowning in riches.

Instead, the country, and its 30 million inhabitants are on the brink of collapse: financially, and, for many, physically.

In Caracas, the capital, men scavenge daily in the putrid Guaire River.

They pour down from the barrios, raking their hands through stinking, toxic mud in the hopes of finding the tiniest bit or metal, jewellery — anything of value — that they could sell for food.

Nearly two decades of socialist rule during which food and oil production have plummeted amid poor management of state resources and a drop in world crude prices have driven many Venezuelans into desperation and bloody civil unrest.

Maduro’s leftist government has cut food and medicine imports by more than 70 per cent since 2013 to preserve limited resources for debt payments.

In a bid to hold onto his power, President Maduro last week decreed a 40 per cent increase in the minimum wage to try to contain the crisis, in the wake of the food protests.

Last weekend, the government forced more than 200 supermarkets in Caracas to lower prices, causing huge lines to form outside as Venezuelans jumped at the chance to stretch their scant funds.

USA Today reports:

It may soon be a criminal offense to be an atheist in Egypt.

Shortly before New Year’s Day, the Egyptian Parliament considered enacting a law that would make it illegal to profess no belief in God. It is already against Egyptian law to “insult” or “defame” religion, and blasphemy arrests are on the rise. A conviction can bring up to five years in prison.

The new measure would criminalize the act of not believing in God — no insults or defamation of another faith required.

The legislation was proposed Dec. 24 by Amro Hamroush, head of the Parliament’s committee on religion.

“It must be criminalized and categorized as contempt of religion because atheists have no doctrine and try to insult the Abrahamic religions,” Hamroush said in announcing the proposed law.

How insanely repressive. You must believe in a supreme being or we’ll send you to jail.

Can’t think of a better way to ensure tourism to Egypt plummets to near zero.

A charter school supporter sent me this late last year, in response to comments in Parliament on charter schools.

Jacinda:

1. Partnership Schools can transition to a state school: In reality there is no transition right. Partnership Schools have been told by the Ministry of Education that there is no transition to one of the recognised (Designated Character, State Integrated, Private) forms of state school, rather that they must close as Partnership Schools, they must then make application to open as a State School, and that the Minister / Ministry will consider that application. None of these options for Partnership Schools provide the key enablers outlined under ‘Background’ below that have been so essential to the early success of Partnership Schools
2. Partnership Schools don’t follow the NZ Curriculum: without exception they all do.
3. Partnership Schools don’t employ registered teachers: well even a population of registered teachers have failed to address the decline in New Zealand reading, writing, maths standards (TIMMS, PISA, PIRLS) for the last decade. All the Partnership Schools have to meet contractual (they have a contract with the Crown) targets for registered teachers, and all seek to maximise the percentage of registered teachers … some are at 100%.
4. Partnership Schools are funded better than state schools: The Ministry of Education confirm that Partnership Schools are funded on an equivalent basis to comparable State Schools … in fact the reality is that they receive a salaries grant based on averaged teacher salaries that disadvantages them, and they receive funding to lease premises rather than being provided with land / buildings which disadvantages them. Without exception these Partnership Schools have to work hard at balancing their budgets, and they all do. A comparison with the recent audit results of Satate Schools makes for an interesting compoarison.
5. We believe mainstream education can achieve what Partnership Schools do: Clearly not. Maori and Pasifika educational success has persistently lagged that of NZ European / Asian for decades. Mainstream education has been unable to make any headway against this deficit. Clearly it is early days, but Ministry of Education data shows that Partnership Schools are succeeding in (re)engaging children from deprived backgrounds in education, and that these students are succeeding educationally.

Winston:

1. Partnership Schools are elite: This claim has no basis. Partnership Partnership Schools were established to serve New Zealand’s priority Learners (Maori, Pasifika, Decile 1-3 pupils), deprived families. The contract they have with the Crown requires that 75% of their students meet that criteria. These are students that mainstream education has failed, and here is a Government that is now telling our deprived families that they are going to close the schools that are leading them to success, A Government that is intent on addressing social and economic deprivation, and that is now telling these students that they will be sent back to a mainstream education, to a system that failed them in the first place.

So how exactly are these schools elite?:

• Are they making huge profits? No. They have to work hard at making ends meet.
• Are they helping the kids of the rich? No. They are focused on deprived students.
• Are they paying their teachers huge salaries? No. Most are paying to State Scales.

Former Green MP Keith Locke writes:

The bill before Parliament to stop party-hopping has been misnamed. The Electoral (Integrity) Amendment Bill should be called the Party Conformity Bill because it threatens MPs with ejection from Parliament if they don’t conform to party dictates.

Personal political integrity will be constrained, except on a few selected “conscience” issues, like the assisted dying legislation, where MPs are free to vote as they want.

The bill contravenes the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act provisions guaranteeing freedom of speech. The idea that individual MPs should be legally restrained in what they say is abhorrent in a parliamentary democracy.

Yep. Vote against the majority of the caucus, and you can be expelled from Parliament under this bill.

No other Western democracy has laws to stop party-hopping. In fact West Germany has a constitutional provision that once elected MPs are “representatives of the whole people, not bound by orders and instructions, and subject only to their conscience”.

Much better.

It is common in the British Parliament to see MPs “crossing the floor” and it can serve a useful function. Recently several Conservative MPs crossed the floor to provide a majority for a Labour Party amendment requiring that the final Brexit deal be brought back to Parliament for a vote.

So this law will be about making sure all Government MPs vote for every Government bill – or face expulsion if they do not.

In 1999, speaking against an earlier party-hopping bill, Green co-leader Rod Donald reminded the House that “had this bill existed prior to the last [1999] election, we [Donald and Fitzsimons] would have been removed from this House and denied our opportunity to stay here for the full parliamentary term”.

Fitzsimons and Donald had been elected as Alliance list MPs in 1996 but left the Alliance Party in 1997 along with the rest of the Green Party. If these two MPs had been excluded from Parliament in 1997 it is unlikely the Greens would have reached the 5 per cent threshold for parliamentary representation in the 1999 election, or that Fitzsimons would have won the Coromandel seat.

This is something for the current Green caucus to ponder before continuing to support the current party hopping legislation.

So how low the Greens are going for a share of power. They’ll vote for a law that would have stopped the Green Party from ever being elected!

Previously, the Green Party and its co-leaders have been strongly opposed, in principle, to party-hopping legislation. As Donald said in the 1999 speech to Parliament, MPs are not “party robots”, “MPs must retain the right to be answerable to their own consciences, and political parties must not be allowed to take away from voters the power to unelect Members of Parliament.” As a Green MP at the time I made similar points in the debate on that bill.

What is a worry is this isn’t something the Greens agreed to do in their confidence and supply agreement. They’re backing it imply to appease Winston.

Stuff reports:

Auckland has officially become a property buyer’s market, according to industry website realestate.co.nz.

The website calculated that last month it would have taken 24 weeks to sell all the houses for sale in Auckland, if no other listings were added to it.

The city’s long-term average is 23 weeks, meaning the market has technically turned the corner from a seller’s to a buyers market – the first time since February 2011, nearly 7 years ago.

The signs have been there for the past year that the market was stabilising.

Stuff reports:

The death of Jim Anderton gives a special twist to the argument over the waka-jumping bill. Anderton rightly claimed when he split from  Labour in 1989 that “I did not leave the Labour Party; the Labour Party left me.”

Under the new waka-jumping law, an MP like Anderton could be expelled from Parliament by Labour leader Jacinda Ardern if she was backed by at least two-thirds of her caucus. The problem with the law is that it would punish the honourable dissident as well as the bad.

This would put far too much power in the hands of the party leader.

Think of a Muldoon using this proposed law. It’s an authoritarian piece of legislation designed to benefit authoritarian leaders.

The great irony of Anderton’s career was that he championed the right to dissent when he was a dissenter, and the right of a party leader to punish dissenters when he became a party leader himself.

Yep, as did Peters.

The Greens’ new face-saving clause – brought in to cover their about-face over waka-jumping – requires expulsion to comply with party rules. In their case this would require party consensus or a supermajority.

But even super-democratic parties like the Greens are all too likely to turn on party MPs if they seem to show “disloyalty”, especially to the leaders. Two Green MPs who rightly decried former co-leader Metiria Turei’s defence of welfare fraud got no mercy.

Yep under this law Turei could have forced Graham and Clendon out of Parliament because they disagreed with her support of welfare fraud.

In the end, the verdict on dissenting MPs should be made by the voters themselves, at the following election.

Yep. Trust the voters.

Stuff reports:

Minutes after giving a rousing speech at the Golden Globes Awards that promised “a new day” for women, minorities and the downtrodden, Oprah Winfrey said she has no ambitions to run for the US presidency.

In a brief interview backstage at the event, Winfrey was told that “Oprah 2020” was circulating on Twitter, and asked whether she planned to run. “I don’t – I don’t,” the 63-year-old billionaire said.

The drumbeat was well underway. “She. Is. Running,” said John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary magazine. “Oprah. 2020,” said Shaun King, the Black Lives Matter activist. 

I’m not sure who will run, but my gut instinct is that the Democrat’s best chances are not with a career politician such as a Senator or Governor.

If Zuckerberg runs, that would be fascinating. Likewise Bloomberg.

I’m not sure anyone from Hollywood would do well, as it is seen as such a liberal elite place. But Oprah has a +29% favourability rating so if anyone could do it from Hollywood, she could.

As most will know by now, Jim Anderton has died aged 79. He was Deputy PM to Helen Clark for three years and the leader of New Labour, the Alliance and Jim Anderton’s Progressive Party.

Anderton first stood for elected office before I was born, in 1965. He last stood in 2010. He was one of the most energetic politicians of his time, and carried this energy into retirement. I agreed with him on little, but admired his tenacity and energy.

It was sad to see him so frail in the last year, and my thoughts are with his close friends and family.

The Herald reports:

Tesla has a big problem.

On Wednesday night, US time, the electric vehicle maker confessed what rumours had already suggested.

Its production processes are not working properly and in the last three months of 2017 it failed to make anything like as many vehicles as it had originally pledged.

Chief executive Elon Musk once said his company would make 20,000 of its affordable Model 3 vehicles in December alone.

 At the end of December Tesla counted up all the Model 3s it made in October, November and December and it was just 2,425. Just 1550 were delivered to customers.

 

This is not the first time Tesla has failed to keep a promise. The company has a pattern of missing self-imposed deadlines.

And more bad news:

The Model 3 is supposed to cost US$35,000 ($49,000) and sell in huge numbers. More than 400,000 people put down a reservation costing US$1000 on the basis of that promise. For now, though, the price tag is far higher than that, with buyers paying as much as US$57,500. And it is selling in puny numbers, limited mostly by Tesla’s inability to actually make the damn thing.

Costing two thirds more than what you promised kills credibility.

For as long as the ramp-up is delayed, losses are likely to accumulate. That matters because Tesla has relatively little money in the bank (cash of US$3.5 billion) relative to how much it has been using (free cash flow of negative US$3.2b in the last nine months).

If revenues are lower than costs for much longer, it may need to raise more money to keep paying staff.

Back in 2012, Elon Musk suggested Tesla would never need to raise more money again. The profits on the luxury cars would fund the mass-market car, was the plan.

Most of Tesla’s revenue has been corporate welfare from taxpayers. Around $7 billion off memory.

Tesla is spending as much as GM is, yet producing a fraction of the vehicles. GM has $25 billion cash reserves. Tesla has under $4 billion.

Their bubble will burst. Their market cap of US$50 billion is around the same as GM and Ford and three times Fiat.

But in 2016 those three companies each sold two to three million vehicles each. Tesla sold 76,000.