Feb 14, 2018  -  Environmental organisation WWF-New Zealand is deeply concerned by suggestions from the new Fisheries Minister Stuart Nash that he might “scrap” plans to put cameras on fishing boats.

Feb 14, 2018  -  Global design firm Stantec is strengthening its New Zealand and Australia-based capabilities with the planned acquisition of Wellington, New Zealand-based consulting transportation engineering firm, Traffic Design Group (TDG). With more than 80 team members, TDG has offices located in markets throughout New Zealand, including Auckland, Tauranga, Hamilton, Napier, Wellington, Nelson, and Christchurch. The firm also has an office in Sydney, Australia. The transaction is expected to close April 1.

feb 14, 2018  -  Plant & Food Research is proud to be the recipient of this year’s Prime Minister’s Science Prize for its rapid response to the vine-killing kiwifruit disease Psa.

feb 13, 2018  -  A Napier Port commercial training scheme is drawing praise from the Government for the way it is improving safety levels across New Zealand - and boosting the Fijian economy.

Feb 13, 2018  -  Siemens Postal, Parcel & Airport Logistics (SPPAL) has equipped New Zealand Post’s largest mail sorting centers with its new Open Mail Handling Systems (OMS) for flats sorting.

Feb 13, 2018  - New technology from a student-led research project at Victoria University of Wellington looks set to revolutionise the way geotechnical engineers monitor and predict landslides, potentially helping to save countless lives and cut costs. Engineering and Computer Science student Jonathan Olds was looking for a research project for his Master’s and his supervisor, Professor of Network Engineering in the School of Engineering and Computer Science Winston Seah, suggested developing and testing an automated solution for the long-term monitoring of landslides. The result of that research is AccuMM, which Jonathan validated with a pilot installation in Taiwan. image004.png“The holy grail of managing landslide risk is prediction,” says Nick Willis, Viclink’s Commercialisation Manager, Engineering, who is working with the researchers to bring the product to market. “But predictions can only be made if movement—or, more importantly, the acceleration of land mass—can be measured right down to the number of millimetres per day, over a long period of time.” He says the traditional method of measurement involves sending a surveyor or engineer out into the field each day to measure land movement with theodolites—a manual, costly process. Even the higher tech options involving robots or drones are costly or have their drawbacks. AccuMM uses low-cost solar or battery-powered wireless GPS sensors together with a unique, cloud-based algorithm to calculate the location of each sensor, relative to a fixed-base station. This enables daily measurements to be taken at multiple points on a landslide without the need for site visits, with no line-of-sight or cabling requirements, and no need for intervention at the site for five or more years.

Following the pilot in Taiwan, the technology is now being trialled closer to home in areas where landslides have occurred, including monitoring the transport corridors in Kaikoura, Kāpiti Coast and Wellington.

“Approximately 66 million people—one percent of the world’s population—are currently in high-risk landslide areas,” says Mr Willis “Add to that events such as global warming, changing rainfall patterns and aging infrastructure and it’s not hard to see the increasing need for this kind of technology.” Professor Seah says, “By exploiting the similarity in wireless channel conditions between sensors placed in close proximity, we are able to achieve a high degree of accuracy compared with much higher cost systems. We can power the wireless network by energy harvesting, which means our system can operate for long duration to meet the monitoring needs of geotechnical engineers.” Viclink is targeting the product at geotechnical engineering companies that undertake long-term analysis and monitoring of landslide risk, as AccuMM measures but does not interpret the data or send real-time alerts.

| A Victoria University release  ||  February 13, 2018   |||

Feb 13, 2018  -  Legal experts will host a meeting at Wesley Church, 75 Taranaki Street, on Wednesday 14 February at 6.30 pm as part of a nationwide tour informing the public about the rebrand of the Trans Pacific Partnership Agreement (TPPA). Dr Jane Kelsey, Professor of Law at the University of Auckland, is a leading scholar on international trade and investment agreements. She is joined by Dr Burcu Kilic, from the US organisation Public Citizen, who provides technical assistance to governments and civil society groups on intellectual property law and global access to medicine, as well as former MP and employment lawyer Laila Harré. The event will also provide an update on how local activists are organising in opposition to the Government’s plan to sign up on 8 March in Chile – without Parliament having seen the final text! – and later ratify the agreement.

Prior to last year’s election, the Labour Party, New Zealand First and the Green Party all said they would not support ratification of the TPPA. During the parliamentary examination of the text, Labour cited concerns about sovereignty, secrecy and inadequate economic modelling leading to uncertainty in projected outcomes; the Greens added that the TPPA is “inimical to the imperative of sustainability”; and New Zealand First focused on the anticipated dangers of Investor-State Dispute Settlement (ISDS).

Last Thursday, ExportNZ and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade hosted a meeting at which the Minister for Trade and Export Growth David Parker told the attendees that those issues had been fixed in recent negotiations. TPP Free Wellington and Unions Wellington showed up to let the Minister know that they will continue to challenge the Government’s plans because nothing has changed expect the spin.

The “new” text is exactly the same, the only change being that 22 of the 1,000-plus original provisions have been suspended. These 22 provisions have not been removed so they can be revived if and when the United States comes back on board, as the Trump administration has indicated it is willing to do. When pushed on this point, Minister Parker said that New Zealand could veto any attempt by the United States to join if that would compromise the Labour Party’s five “bottom lines”: protecting Pharmac, upholding the Treaty of Waitangi, making meaningful gains in tariff reductions and market access, maintaining the right to restrict land and house sales to foreigners, and stopping corporations from suing the New Zealand government for regulating in the public interest. That, of course, would not stop a future government from giving up these important aspects of New Zealand’s sovereignty simply to reduce tariffs for exporting industries. And what was the Minister’s response to these serious concerns? “Time will tell.”

Even now, in fact, Labour’s bottom lines have not been met, as the legal experts will explain to the Wellington audience on Wednesday evening. The so-called Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) contains all of the core investor protections that are predicted to restrict the ability of Parliament to make laws in the interests of New Zealanders. There has been no health impact assessment or analysis of the economic costs and benefits, as the governing parties called for when they were in opposition. The Crown has not discussed how it intends to strengthen protections for Māori, as recommended by the Waitangi Tribunal. And it is all well and good for the Prime Minister to call climate change her generation’s “nuclear-free moment”, but that sort of rhetoric would be undercut by signing up to an agreement that prevents action on environmental concerns by empowering foreign investors to sue, for example, if the Government sought to close coal mines and roll back permits to prospect for offshore petroleum.

Come along to Wesley Church, 75 Taranaki Street, on Wednesday 14 February at 6.30 pm to learn about how and why we should push the Government not to sign such a bad deal.

https://www.facebook.com/events/1578636985577465/

The event is organised by It’s Our Future and the Council of Trade Unions.

| A TPP Free Wellington and Unions Wellington release   ||  February 13, 2018   |||

Feb 13, 2018  -  This year’s winning startup ventures created by keen young University of Canterbury student entrepreneurs have been chosen at the recent EY Summer Startup Annual Showcase.

Feb 13, 2018  -  Some of the world’s leading tech experts, including tech Ministers from other countries, will attend a coding session with a bunch of young New Zealand’s school children at the Young Coders Showcase during the international Digital Nations tech summit in Auckland next week. International and New Zealand tech leaders, social innovators, future thinkers and maybe even the Prime Minister will get a coding lesson from students at sessions from New Zealand's leading initiatives to get kids involved with coding – Code Club Aotearoa, Code Avengers and OMG Tech. The February 19 and 20 summit – organised by NZTech and Conferenz – is the biggest ever global tech summit held in New Zealand and is a lead-up event to the world's leading digital nations D5 meeting in Wellington on February 21. D5 is a network of the world’s most advanced digital nations. NZTech chief executive Graeme Muller says New Zealand is recognised globally as being leaders in getting kids to code. “The new education curricula introduced this year has all year one students learning about digital technology. Initiatives like these will help support teachers and schools as the demand for skills increase faster than we can prepare the teachers. It’s great to see the government buying into the massive impact of technology,” Muller says. “NZTech and initiatives like Code Club Aotearoa, OMG Tech and Code Avengers believe the new curricula will expedite the tech-digital knowledge that every child needs for future employment,” Muller says. Code Club already teaches more than 4000 New Zealand children how to code with 273 clubs operating nationwide from Whangarei to Bluff. One of the goals of the Digital Nations summit is to figure out the actions needed to create a Kiwi digital nation by 2030. Teaching kids to code is one way to create a digital nation, empower our next generation, and to help Aotearoa fulfill its potential. The, Digital Nations 2030 summit is the biggest and most important international tech conference ever to be staged in New Zealand and will help pave the way for faster advances in the Kiwi economy. Muller says the conference will cover every aspect of how New Zealand and global digital economies are shaping. The event has attracted more than 500 delegates including D5 Ministers and their delegations, invited international experts and New Zealand digital leaders and influencers representing all sectors.

| A MakeLemonade release  ||  February 13, 2018   |||

Feb 12, 2018  - E tū is extremely disappointed with the confirmation today that Juken New Zealand Ltd (JNL) intends axing the jobs of about 90 workers at its East Coast mill in Gisborne.

E tū represents production workers at the mill.