Therapeutic value restores hill country

Cultivation of the manuka tree has become a priority on hillsides from Nelson to Waikato.

The manuka tree, a member of the myrtle family, is the basis for the sharply growing industry in the production of therapeutic manuka honey.

The health benefits of the manuka tree (pictured) were introduced to the rest of the world by Captain Cook who dubbed it the tea tree.

The demand for manuka honey has created another cooperative opportunity in the form of share production between farmers and apiarists.

In return for allocating blocks of land for the location of hives, the farmer receives a cut from the revenue derived from the honey produced.

International demand for manuka honey more than matches supply which means that apiarists are in the most coveted position of New Zealand primary exporters in that they are able to set their own premium price.

This is as opposed to accepting the international commodity price.

Because the manuka tree flowers out of synch with other nectar-producing flora, the manuka content of the honey can be defined.

StatisticallyNew Zealand is the world's third-largest exporter of honey by value, behind China and Argentina.

Manuka honey accounts for most of this.

Even so these figures account only for the foodstuffs value of the honey. They do not take into account the branded manuka honey dedicated to medical applications.

The activity around the hives is conferring meanwhile a healthy transfusion to regional joinery firms and transport operators among others.

The joiners who once made trusses, doors and window frames are rapidly converting to making hives while truck operators are busy transferring the hives between locations.

Similarly regional construction firms are building honey pack houses.

Farmers are finding their marginal lands, especially the areas on which sheep cannot be enticed to graze, have become a new source of shared profit..

What could go wrong?

In a word, Australia.

The manuka tree also grows in Australia. It is claimed too that it originated in Australia and found its way to New Zealand as an element of the southerly migration of flora and fauna.

Australia offers economies of cultivation scale and viewed as even more significant is its terrain allowing for the rapid shuttling of hives between flowering districts and pack houses.

Some have seen a comparison between the New Zealand kiwifruit boom and the resulting competition from countries such as Chile.

But such quibbling aside, it is hard not to see a new and diversified frontier opening up for hill country farmers.

There is no investment in things like heavy duty fencing (deer and goat farming.)

Even where manuka plantations need to be established, farmers are able run sheep in the plantation once the trees became established after 3-4 years.

In addition there is now good shelter for the stock.

|From the MscNewsWire reporters' desk  | Tuesday 20 December, 2016  |

Ethnic Communities Portfolio is Gesture to New Zealand First ties

Judith Collins held the police portfolio before the reshuffle, along with Corrections, but she has lost them both and picked up Revenue, Energy and Resources, and Ethnic Communities.

She has also been moved down two places on the Cabinet rankings, but new prime minister Bill English insisted she had not been demoted in the cabinet shuffle. We foresaw this tactical re-assignment..

Our report last Monday, a week ago......

Monday, 12 December 2016 07:54NZ National Government new Co-Leaders Curb Rebels

Day one of the Dream Team means coping with problems before they become bigger problems and in politics this means people which is what the word politics actually means.

Top priority is hardly surprisingly Mrs Judith Collins MP, minister of police.

The new team knows that Mrs Collins must be kept in the tent and also kept busy, very busy.

Mrs Collins demonstrated her determination of purpose when she reached for the top job and did so without any support from the National government’s king-makers, people such as Murray McCully MP or of enforcers such as Steven Joyce MP, the new minister of finance.

She compounded this by mooting that she was the one, the match maker, within the National government to bring into the fold permanent stormy petrel Winston Peters MP of New Zealand First Party.

She might just as well have offered her colleagues a cup of tractor sump oil.

Mrs Collins is the National Government MP who most equates to Margaret Thatcher, also a tax lawyer.

So as today draws on and the coronation caucus smiles however insincere, along with the sound of clinking glasses recede into the evening the new premier Bill English MP and his deputy Paula Bennett MP will crystalise their thoughts on Mrs Collins.

They will do so in concert with solving another problem..

It is one to which long running National governments have found themselves in the quite recent past to be prone.

This is of the seemingly spontaneous but in fact carefully orchestrated advent of a middle class revolt.

It is currently a low-level threat in the form of a peoples’ party currently being nurtured by pop-economist Gareth Morgan.

Mr Morgan’s movement centres on the need for an asset tax .

This it is claimed is required to cope with the problem of the well-off sidestepping paying tax.

Voiders and evaders alike slide past it by a process of expensing blended with the advantages presented by the much storied absence of a capital gains tax..

Enter now the solution to be seen to be at least facing the problem.

It is Mrs Judith Collins MP.

But now with a new title.

That of revenue minister..

Trade finance remains poor relation of populist state industry hand-outs

As the 1980s dawned the Silicon Valley of the South Seas was the Hutt Valley. Apple’s Steve Wozniak cruised the valley in awe of the digital presentation skills of the state television operation based on the Avalon studios. The state’s own physics and engineering laboratory was at work on advanced integrated circuitry and superconducting.

A privately held company variously known as Systems and Programmes Ltd, SPL, and Progeni had designed a desk top product that had taken interactive screen graphics further than any other developer had taken the science up to this time.

More significantly still, the company had a branded product ready to sell. Better still, it had a customer ready and waiting, wanting to buy the new product range aimed which was aimed at the education sector.

At this time China had not yet become the market star it was to become several decades later.

China was then a nightmare for anyone exporting anything other than raw commodities. The problem was in getting paid – a problem that continues now still throughout Asia.

The deal was an early forerunner of what became an established yet still unspoken and thus unrecognised problem

Samples and drawings are required (and copied). Everything was, and still is, forthcoming but payment.

This was before the era in which China transitioned to a virtual free market economy.

The specific selling proposition underpinning the Lower Hutt desk tops was the graphical user interface and thus their application in practical teaching.

A Chinese mining company said it wanted thousands of the machines in order to instruct employees in safe mining practices. The photograph of the Poly desk top computer, as it was known, shows its custom moulded rugged sealed casing. (Photograph courtesy Retrowe Museum.)

The demand was now identified. But in the classic tradition of such deals in the region then as now, the method of payment remained floating in the air.

Banks at all stages within China and outside it were involved in order to devise a scheme of credit finance.

More samples were sent to China.

At this time New Zealand’s rigorous import licensing/quota restrictions were still in force.

Steel, the logical counter trade commodity in the deal was out of the question because of the need to protect New Zealand Steel.

At this time the Chinese had not yet developed their consumer range products such as whiteware to the stage of being considered as barter trade products.

SO the deal languished. Until that is someone thought of bicycles. New Zealand didn’t make them. The kit assemblies of the Raleighs and Rudges of the era was confined to the back rooms of the retail bike shops.

SO there was no concerted vested-interest lobby against bicycles becoming the counter trade counterweight to the sending to China of the desk top computers.

A test shipment of bicycles duly arrived in Lower Hutt. And failed to sell.

The early enthusiasm for bicycling had waned, and was not to reappear until much, much later when it again became viewed as a fashionable, rather than an eccentric, pastime.

The episode which amounts to one of lost opportunity, remains of value now because it points up the lack of export trade finance capability in New Zealand, a nation which no longer even has its own merchant bank, or one to rank with the international version.

The conditions of the era described here exist substantially to this day. The existing banking structure is attuned to restricting risk to the taking of real estate collateral.

The official trade promotion and development departmental apparatus refuses to acknowledge even the chronic problem now of receiving payment for manufactured or processed goods sent to Asia.

It has a see-no-evil stance on things like Asian buyer fees for tender and tender deposits along with endless and unacknowledged copying problem.

A favoured official dead-end referral is to the development banks such as the Asian Development Bank.

New Zealand has never really been on the must-help list of these banks, in spite of a generalised reluctance to admit it.

|  From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk  |  Wednesday 14 December 2016  |

Media-encouraged hysteria feeds false hopes.

The first priority of the National government’s new dream team is to confront a nightmare. A real one. It is the moral issue of the Pike River aftermath and which takes the form of reopening the mine in order to seek for the mortal remains of the 29 brave miners who perished there.

It is a fevered issue which must now be cauterised in the national interest and in the interest of the bereaved. .

The new prime minister Bill English is the authority figure to do it. He must now state quite definitely that the mine cannot be reopened because it is too dangerous to do so.

The reason that Mr English must be quite definite that the mine cannot be reopened is because of the spiralling hysteria about the Pike River coal mine disaster and its aftermath.

Much of this is based on a generalised ignorance, and in some instances a feigned ignorance, about the specific dangers of coal mining in these latitudes. Also the way in which coal mining differs from, civil engineering tunnelling in transport or in hydro electric projects.

Coal mining in New Zealand is much more dangerous than coal mining is in most countries.

The reason is that the mining is carried out in the midst of relatively recent rock formations. This means that the drives are constantly passing through only recently formed rock through which permeates the gas of the decaying vegetation from which the coal is derived.

This gas known as firedamp-–damp is German for vapour– and it is the inflammable component.

The extent of this inflammable gas will have multiplied since the Pike River coal mine has been sealed off.

In the absence of ventilation the mine will have become one vast bottle of compressed gas.

Flushing out the firedamp from the mine in itself will be fraught.

The reason is that it will require pressure ventilation.

Where there is ventilation installed there is air handling equipment and in coal mines such equipment, notably fans, can emit sparks which can ignite this highly volatile gas.

The entire history of the short-lived mine demonstrates the dangers of what happens when moral and ideological desiderata conflict with the practical objectives of human safety.

In the case of the Pike River coal mine the conflict was embedded from the outset.

It was known that the area contained high value coal deposits.

Yet it was declared a National Park.

What followed was a moral trade-off as the demands of safety were set against the requirement of the preservation of flora and fauna and vistas.

Mr English must now use his authority to bring this lethal saga to a close. Decisively and firmly. He must say that the mine will stay sealed. He must state the reason which is Safety First .

Few will doubt his sincerity. His words though will appear harsh, most of all to Mr English himself.

He can temper the severity of his announcement by declaring that there will be a state-funded memorial to the victims of the explosion at the mine.

There are a number of such memorials on the West Coast. Among them is one to those who perished in the Strongman mine disaster of 1967. There is the memorial to those killed in the Brunner disaster of 1896.

A road has been donated to give easy access to the Pike River mine. It will provide access to the constructors of the memorial and to those who wish to pay their respects to those who perished in it.

An underground coal mine is always dangerous. Especially a disused underground coal mine .

Mr English must be blunt. He must avoid the temptation to be ambiguous.

It is never nice down there.

|  From the MSCNewsWire reporters desk  | Tuesday 13 December 2016  |

Day one of the Dream Team means coping with problems before they become bigger problems and in politics this means people which is what the word politics actually means.

Top priority is hardly surprisingly Mrs Judith Collins MP, minister of police.

The new team knows that Mrs Collins must be kept in the tent and also kept busy, very busy.

Mrs Collins demonstrated her determination of purpose when she reached for the top job and did so without any support from the National government’s king-makers, people such as Murray McCully MP or of enforcers such as Steven Joyce MP, the new minister of finance.

She compounded this by mooting that she was the one, the match maker, within the National government to bring into the fold permanent stormy petrel Winston Peters MP of New Zealand First Party.

She might just as well have offered her colleagues a cup of tractor sump oil.

Mrs Collins is the National Government MP who most equates to Margaret Thatcher, also a tax lawyer.

So as today draws on and the coronation caucus smiles however insincere, along with the sound of clinking glasses recede into the evening the new premier Bill English MP and his deputy Paula Bennett MP will crystalise their thoughts on Mrs Collins.

They will do so in concert with solving another problem..

It is one to which long running National governments have found themselves in the quite recent past to be prone.

This is of the seemingly spontaneous but in fact carefully orchestrated advent of a middle class revolt.

It is currently a low-level threat in the form of a peoples’ party currently being nurtured by pop-economist Gareth Morgan.

Mr Morgan’s movement centres on the need for an asset tax .

This it is claimed is required to cope with the problem of the well-off sidestepping paying tax.

Voiders and evaders alike slide past it by a process of expensing blended with the advantages presented by the much storied absence of a capital gains tax..

Enter now the solution to be seen to be at least facing the problem.

It is Mrs Judith Collins MP.

But now with a new title.

That of revenue minister..

Now to the other rebel Mr Simon Bridges MP, minister of transport.

He is a good-looking boyish chap.

He is of a definable National Party type which is known and categorised as being too clever by half.

The new leadership duo by nature are conciliatory. They will be tempted by inclination to overlook his premature and youthful power grab..

Then as the evening wears on and the Beehive cat has been put out, they will remind themselves of the first rule of being in power.

It is that once you have power then you must use it.

As the sun begins to set they will remind themselves of the second rule.

You must also be seen to be using it.

Cohesion, or at least the external perception of it, is central to the National Party

So it is now that Mr Bridges will find himself confronting a tour on the back benches where his presence will be a highly visible example to anyone else in the National government contemplating breaking the ranks.

The National Party though believes in second chances and thus in redemption.

So as 2017 advances and the general election looms so will the need to attend with still greater intensity to electoral window dressing, of the type that requires a 40 year old mediagenic type such as Mr Bridges.

With his international legal qualifications who better pre-election than Mr Bridges to take over the always troublesomely delicate portfolio of minister of police?

Duo master every contingency. But honeymoon will be brief

The pending official emergence of the new top two at the helm of New Zealand’s National government confirms the National Party’s routine boast that it represents the cross section of the nation’s electorate.

The new top team of Bill English and Paula Bennett has been crafted by outgoing premier John Key with the active assent of his leading lieutenants, notably Murray McCully, the foreign minister – strategist.

Paula Bennett who will emerge Monday at the National Party’s caucus-coronation personifies the National Party’s operational formula of being all things to all people.

She is posh and she is working class. She carries one of the most aristocratic of names in the Maori sphere, Bennett.

She is a solo mother whose early career was janitorial, she was a dishwasher for a while, before she segued into the social studies academic world.

She has the essential component for success in politics which is luck having fallen into the aegis of National strongman Murray McCully while working for him in a secretarial role.

Like her pending boss Bill English she is at one and the same time a professional politician or not a career politician which ever way you look at it.

The point being that she is not an immediate candidate for what has now become a bad brand, that of professional politician.

She fits the generational identi-kit being still comfortably in her 40s. She has the experience, having entered parliament in 2005.

Her cabinet career has been characterised by urban social issues portfolios which she has handled with a smiling equanimity in spite of the inevitable incendiary episodes which such roles must traverse.

Geography is always a National Party preoccupation and here again the dream time comes up, well, trumps.

She is from the north. He is from the south.

The honeymoon though will be brief.

The pair must confront a low-level radiation of opposition from Her Majesty's official Opposition.

But their biggest worry will be the more elusive cabal within their own party led by Mrs Judith Collins in the Brutus role.

In a cross-bencher sense they must also confront lurking like a Muldoon-era wraith in his own perennial Shakespearean role the brooding King of Coalition, Winston Peters MP.

Outside parliament and the party structure they must devote a weather eye to the activities of prairie populist Gareth Morgan.

His threat?

Drawing attention to National’s embedded technique of burying the nasty issues under the carpet of face-value prosperity.

Think here of things such as entitlements, national debt, immigration, ........

One could go on.

But let's not spoil that honeymoon.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk | Friday 9 December 2016

Restores National Party traditional era of Farmer- Prime Minister

Bill English will be the first farmer prime minister since Jim Bolger.

In selecting him for the top slot the National Party reinstates and restores a line which gave the appearance of becoming extinct.

Mr English will remain as prime minister at least until after the next general election.

With the Brexit/Trump syndrome in such recent memory the National Party will not make the mistake of assessing Mr English’s electoral popularity or otherwise prior to the 2017 general election on the basis of media opinion or poll samplings.

Mr English’s party branding as a farmer removes him from the now suddenly despised class of professional politician.

It is a breed that has now become especially vulnerable.

Populist, media-friendly, and extremely wealthy gadfly Gareth Morgan hovers in the wings promising to swat the category with the most effective instrument at hand, such as a new political party.

In the event, though Mr English, who is actually of Irish lineage, looks like a farmer and usually sounds like one. But his non-career politician credentials do not stand up to all that much scrutiny.

His time devoted to the family farm in Dipton was fairly brief.

It was sandwiched between Otago University where he earned a degree in commerce and Victoria University (English literature) before he began ascending the politico-administrative ladder back in Wellington as a policy analyst with the Treasury department.

The clue to Mr English’s seamless transition from trusted lieutenant to prime minister is the unqualified and public support from his long time boss, John Key himself.

Mr Key will have run the numbers on Mr English before his surprise announcement of his own resignation as premier.

It is the appointment though of Mr English’s deputy prime minister that will present the clearest view of the National Party line of succession.

The importance of this pick was underlined in the unusual-purpose press conference suddenly called by government transport minister Simon Bridges.

The National Party has a horror of things like primary campaigns and other such public personal preferment promotional devices.

So Mr Bridges had to weigh this up before calling his self-nominating press conference for deputy premier .

It was convened in order to notify the public that his hat was very much in the ring .

He knows that in the deputy premiership resides the post-Bill English leadership of the National Party.

The opening could be next year.

Or it could be much, much later.

Nobody doubts that should Mr English lose the 2017 general election, which seems unlikely, but given Brexit/ Trump, is nonetheless possible, the leadership will fall upon Judith Collins.

Mrs Collins MP shares with the late Margaret Thatcher, another non-career politician, a pre-political profession as a tax lawyer.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk

Forgotten deal relied on common sense instead of currency

 The advent of New Zealand’s only branded home-grown vehicle the Trekka 50 years ago was the result of a counter trade, a barter, that even today is still staggering in its simplicity. Indeed, the sheer scope of the barter even today is still unrecognised just because it was so straightforward.

New Zealand had a surplus of wool.

Czechoslovakia’s Skoda Works had a surplus of vehicles.

Therein lay the deal.

Until this moment it has remained a secret. We will now reveal how it worked out in practice.

The organisation to see the opportunity was Motor Holdings of Auckland. The company in that era decided to run the deal through an offshoot in Palmerston North known as Five Star Motors.

In those days 50 years ago Palmerston North was an important centre of the auto industry in terms of assembly and distribution.

It was now that the government was approached with the outline of the deal.

The reason that a government approval was necessary was that at this time any import of any kind at all was controlled by quota and licence.

At this time. 50 years ago, the export price of wool declined by 40%.

New Zealand's sheep population continued to rise. Available storage space everywhere was crammed with unsold wool.

But still the government sought to squelch the deal on the grounds that the barter or counter-trade was simply a device to by-pass the rigid import licencing of that era.

But Five Star motors had a trump up its sleeve which it now played carefully.

Fifty percent of the showroom floor price of the New Zealand-ised Skoda would be local input.

Moreover, it would be branded as a New Zealand product and with a New Zealand name.

It was now that the Customs Department began to give way. The Trekka had taken on a political life of its own. The department backed down. The Trekka had arrived.

The skill and patience of the Palmerston North negotiators who implemented the Trekka counter trade had much to do with Palmerston North’s presence as a swinging parliamentary seat between National and Labour.

The rest of the story is relatively well-known. The Trekka, which looked like a boxier version of the Land Rover was one of the cheapest vehicles available in a market where new car prices were high, and cash deposits of up 60 percent were mandatory.

Better still, the Trekka, a forerunner of the SUV, was available off the floor, on low deposit, making new car ownership accessible to many for the first time.

The Trekka though will be remembered as the most successful counter deal ever. Its success was in its simplicity.

The most curious thing about it was that it was so hard to repeat as New Zealand trade began to turn eastward. In spite of Asian customers being notoriously and institutionally bad payers – another topic still rarely talked about, especially departmentally—it proved a hard act to follow.

In our next revelation on the silent, and officially-ignored world of counter-trades, we will detail an example of one that did not work out and very largely because of the absence of official support.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters desk - Wednesfday 7 December 2016

Departing Premier Emphasises status as non-professional politician

In the end his trader’s instinct told him that the market for John Key futures had reached its zenith and that it was thus time to quit the position.

It was John Key’s good luck to take up New Zealand’s portfolio of prime minister at the precise time that a baby-boomer backbone electorate tired of an extended doctrinal politics and instead required the stability needed to catapult them into an easy retirement.

John Key anticipated by a decade the dismay with professional politicians that is so evident today and he now brought to the job a solid earlier life as an international investment banker.

In the most effective National Party style he was also an outsider who inserted himself onto the inside track of the nation’s natural party of government.

From an everyday working class background his aw shucks everyman manner plus matching quizzical grin and horrible New Zealand accent were all genuine.

He brought to his decade at the top the professional banker’s ability to take his successes with equanimity and similarly his pratfalls.

He now leaves to his anointed successor finance minister Bill English the interrelated boiling pots of expensive urban housing and immigration.

His centrist instincts made him reluctant to introduce a capital gains tax to cool down the domestic property market. Similarly his businessman background meant he was reluctant to cap immigration which he saw as a priority for economic growth rather than petrol on the fire of the nation’s perennial property Klondike.

He was the first New Zealand leader to get on buddy terms with a United States president and nobody doubts that more golf games will soon be launched from his and similarly retiring president Obama’s Hawaii holiday homes.

The blots on his  premiership are mostly made up of the bizarre.

There was the case of the Auckland café meeting photo-op in which coalition boondoggling was revealed by a hidden tape recorder lurking unseen near the tea pot. This incident then became compounded when enforcement authorities ostentatiously went after the tapes,

There was the Dot Com affair in which a North European IT entrepreneur was allowed to settle in New Zealand with a view to gingering up the digital scene, only to become the subject of a US extradition warrant.

The subsequent and continuing series of events presented and continues to present a Keystone Kops style of unwitting entertainment to the nation at large.

Then there was John Key’s personal campaign to change the flag. This was the most bizarre of all because it was so obviously bungled in that Mr Key was unable to advance any clear reason why there should be a flag change in the first place.

Such as, for example, the near universal confusion over the look-alike Australian and New Zealand flags.

Not all his positive efforts fell into the public spotlight.

His deft hand on his exclusive right to dispense patronage was one such example. His ability to conceal what he really thought, notably in dealing with only semi-informed questioners, was another.

Cites Dictator’s emphasis on health, education throughout Latin America

Fidel Castro was a “giant” who saved Cuba from revolving door coups and counter coups declares New Zealander Bernard Diederich who was a close friend of Castro’s since his ascent to power.

Mr Diederich and his wife were on the invitation list for the 10th anniversary of the Cuba revolution.

Had it not been for Castro, emphasises Mr Diederich, Cuba would simply be another “poor and uneducated” Latin nation.

Mr Diederich cites Castro’s intense interest in science and religion as additional, and unrecognised, aspects to the personality of the dictator.

Mr Diederich also emphasises the way in which the Cuban leader deployed his technical people notably doctors throughout Latin America and to the benefit of the poor there.

For many year Mr Diederich ran Haiti's daily paper and was thus eyewitness to the various catastrophes in the region caused by human intervention.

Mr Diederich was for many years in charge of Time Life’s Central America coverage. He was awarded the National Press Club's Lifetime Achievement Award two years ago. He is pictured at the event in Martinborough where his New Zealand family is now based.

He hails from Wellington and is considered now to be New Zealand’s greatest living adventurer. His odyssey started early in World War 2 when he became a boy sailor on the Pamir, the square rigger seized from the Germans.

Considering this too safe, he went on to sail in tankers across the Atlantic.

After the war he hove-to in Port Au Prince, Haiti, where he started his newspaper and began a tortured relationship with the Duvalier dynasty.

Now a resident in Miami, Mr Diederich was to deal on personal terms with all the Central American dictators over the next half century and his books on them are considered standard reference works.

Early revolutionary days (top of page): Bernard Diederich, wearing tie, with Fidel Castro.

From the MSCNewsWire reporters' desk