Agenda Transcript: Jim Anderton & Gordon Copeland

THE FUTURE OF FARMING
Transforming the rural economy

LISA Today is the final day of the annual field days farming expo at Mystery Creek near Hamilton, the four day event is expected to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in sales even if dairy farmers decide not to spend up large ahead of their record payout from Fonterra, but just where is the industry heading as New Zealand tries to transform itself into a carbon neutral knowledge based economy. Minister of Agriculture Jim Anderton joins me now from Rotorua. Good morning Mr Anderton.

I mean it's clear that dairy is booming but are we a one track pony, what about the meat and wool sector?

JIM ANDERTON – Minister of Agriculture – Leader of Progressive Party
I think we've got to remember that the agricultural sector in particular and the primary sector industries in general have been part of the economic transformation of New Zealand for 125 years since we introduced refrigerated shipping and nothing much has changed, in fact 65% of all of our overseas exchange earnings come through the primary sector industries and if it wasn’t for those industries New Zealand would be a second world country, no question about that, and it's not a blunt sector either, people have this idea sometimes in urban New Zealand that if you can't do anything else well you can go forestry or farming or fishing or market gardening, but actually if you put all those together they're based on high science, research and development, pastoral technology, soil analysis, irrigation techniques and dairy we've virtually got a Gulf oil boom, in face an overseas visitor said to me recently New Zealand is like a Gulf oil state with its milk.

LISA But Minister that’s dairy and I'm interested to know how we're doing in meat and wool, we have a situation where in the UK there's a battle over New Zealand lamb on the shelves there, you have a situation where US lamb prices in the last couple of years has dropped by 30% so how is meat and wool doing?

JIM Well of course you get these cyclical ups and downs but if you look at the position that New Zealand's in, we're in a Pacific Rim basin, if you take from India through China, through Japan, Indonesia and so on this century three and a half thousand million people emerging as very affluent nations, I mean there'd be more millionaires in those countries than there are people in New Zealand, and their greatest need will be for high value, high quality, high protein food, meat, fish, dairy, fruit and vegetables, and where is there a country near us that has a profile of being able to supply those markets and so the future is very very promising for New Zealand, the present is not all that bad, and it's a bit of a thing to think about when the fact that one sector of our agriculture industry dairy is facing a real boom and everyone's kind of commiserating about it all and you know even the reserve bank gets into the act and wants to clobber us because of increased milk prices. Many countries in fact most I know of would be celebrating.

LISA So did you take exception to that then, Mr Bollard's comments on the dairy industry?

JIM I mean what's the counter factual if dairy prices were down, the dairy industry was in a state of collapse and regions were falling apart in New Zealand would that please everybody, I don’t think so we've been there done that, I think we should just take hold of ourselves a little bit, celebrate the fact that commodities in New Zealand are not actually raw commodities as they're usually described. You look at our milk industry for example, our dairy industry, high science, high technology, most amazingly high standard international standard suppliers of stainless steel and technology for dairy farms and all the rest of it, the rest of the world is in awe of our dairy industry and when it's succeeding we should be celebrating its success, not worrying about the possibility that might actually add to our problems by having a lot more money in certain regions.

LISA In saying that then Mr Anderton what do you want the Cabinet to do about it?

JIM Well the Cabinet doesn’t actually run the Reserve Bank in case anyone hasn’t noticed, it's an independent institution and no one is advocating, that I've heard anyway, that the government should take over the Reserve Bank again, what I'm saying is that sometimes I think we get a bit miserable. I mean if you look at the reality that we're in now, we've got an average growth rate of about 3%, on our historical standards that’s actually very high, our inflation rate is about 2.5% now if you look at those combinations it wouldn’t exactly be a disastrous condition for everybody, so my view is we should relax a bit. There's one thing worse than house prices going up by the way and that’s them going down, we've been there and it's called a depression or recession.

LISA Mr Anderson as a Progressive MP then are you happy with the Reserve Bank legislation or would you like to see some changes?

JIM Well I was part of the discussion that widened the parameters of the agreement between the government and the Reserve Bank so that there could be other factors like the economic wellbeing of New Zealand taken into account and I think you know to be fair Dr Bollard has done that, but you know still in my view we have too narrow a fixation on one element of our economy and that’s inflation. I understand, I mean high inflation's not good nor is deflation, so I understand the need to have that objective, but if you're not careful you can get fixated on one objective and if you use one instrument like high interest rates then that tends to impact on our tradable goods sector which is the one that I mainly represent of course so I would say that, and you know I think sometimes we throw the baby out with the bath water, so we've just gotta be careful and I'm not saying Bollard isn't careful but you know I'm entitled to my view and I express it from time to time and full and frank discussions take place.

LISA Alright well let's look at some of the other challenges that are facing the agricultural sector. You talk of water shortages, problems with emissions, I mean how are you gonna keep growing an industry that we rely on so heavily without ruining the environment?

JIM Carefully, I mean the truth is that all of those issues are problematic but they're challenges that every country faces, where would you prefer to be farming at the moment, Australia or in New Zealand? I think I know the answer to that. So sure in some places in New Zealand we have far too much water and I have to deal with that through emergency events programmes to help people, in some places we don’t have enough. I was in Hawkes Bay last week and they had a drought, two days after I was there it was torrential rain, it's been raining ever since so I should be brought in before the drought not afterwards and I head off to Gisborne this afternoon to see Gisborne farmers who've got a drought although it's raining there as well. You know we've got these issues, water quality, access to water, you’ve got encroachment on high quality farmland around our cities with lifestyle blocks and all the rest of it, you’ve got the challenge of changing use, I mean a lot of forests coming down at the moment because of dairy prices, you know some people say it's because people are a bit vexatious but in truth we've always had flexible land use in New Zealand and it's one of our strengths to have it.

LISA So how do you meet all these challenges, you’ve previously said that research and development is part of that but I mean just this week you’ve got the CEO of Agresearch saying that there's not enough money out there to do the proper research required to make these developments, is he right?

JIM There's never enough money.

LISA So is Andy West right is he?

JIM Well everyone's right, there's not enough money put into the health system there's not enough money put into the education system, there's not enough money put into infrastructure, there's not enough money put into research and development, and you’ve got two gentlemen there who if I said tomorrow we're going to increase the tax rate so get more money put into them would probably cry foul, so it's always a balancing act between what the government can invest. This government has invested more in research and development than any time in our history, but Andy's right, we live off the back of high research and development investment and in some ways we've been living off the capital of that over many years and we've gotta keep going because our only advantage in a competitive world is innovation, creativity and investment in research and development, and getting our best and brightest involved in our most important industry base and that’s the primary sector of New Zealand where there's real excitement and real potential for the future of the wellbeing, economic social environmental for all of New Zealand.

LISA You mentioned land use there, I mean the Greens on the show last week were indicating they want dairy capped, could you live with that, a cap on land use for dairy farming?

JIM No I don’t think that that’s the sensible way to go, we need flexibility in land use. I mean sometimes in New Zealand it makes sense to plant trees, we've got a permanent forest syncs initiative at the moment where international corporations are lining up with hundreds of millions of dollars to invest in permanent forest syncs to get into the carbon trading market, but we do need flexibility, sometimes it's economically sensible to plant trees from an economic point of view, sometimes it's economically sensible to plant grass for farming purpose or for intensive horticulture. You know Kiwifruit sell in the Tokyo supermarkets for ten dollars each and the intensive horticultural returns we get from Kiwifruit farming are enormous, so who would say that you shouldn’t turn a four or five hectare block which was once a sheep farm into high quality horticulture if you can do it, and in New Zealand we do it often, vineyards, horticulture of various kinds like Kiwifruit, and that flexibility isn't always available in many countries in the world and we should guard it preciously.

LISA You talked about Kiwifruit, there was the incident there with us being bagged for food miles, I mean how much of a threat is that perception that we are an offender in that area.

JIM Well it depends whether the facts get in the way of your prejudice, I mean we're accused of using up food miles by air freighting Kiwifruit to the UK well guess what we don’t, we send it by ship and shipping is about the least intrusive carbon emission problem the world faces, shipping is the best and most reliable and most efficient means of transport. If you get into your four wheel drive car four and a half ks from the supermarket in Birmingham you'll use more energy than we use to ship Kiwifruit from New Zealand to the UK supermarket, so it's nonsense.

LISA Welcome back, well this morning we're speaking to the Minister of Agriculture Jim Anderton, so let's bring our panel in on the discussion going first to Bernard Hickey from Fairfax, your questions for the Minister.

BERNARD HICKEY – Managing Editor, Fairfax
Minister it's boom time for the dairy industry right now but are they really being subsidised by the rest of the country, particularly as we look at taxing or putting a cap on carbon emissions by those using cars and power, shouldn’t dairy farmers have to pay for their own greenhouse emissions?

JIM I think it's a fair point and of course everyone in New Zealand will have to take their share of responsibility for this, but it's very hard to just suddenly do this to anybody, even though driving cars or running a dairy herd, for example per hectare under the Kyoto regime the cost of converting to dairy say in the central North Island from forestry to dairy would be about $13,000 a hectare. Now when we pointed this out in the discussion document recently all hell broke loose from foresters and agricultural people alike thinking we're going to impose that kind of tax on them, but what we were pointing out is that’s the cost to New Zealand. Now that’s not the end of it because once you convert to dairy from those central North Island plateaus you’ve got nitrification of the Waikato River, you’ve got flooding potential very quickly downstream because the forests are not holding back the water any more, and eventually the government in Wellington on behalf of all the taxpayers often picks up the tab for all that. So we have to have this discussion and if I think this is what you're getting at, if the full cost of those conversions had to be met by the developers then it would slow them down a bit or make them think twice. Now I think that’s fair in the end and we're gonna get there because we're going to have to accept that there is a cost, the questions about environmental sustainability and all the rest of it which the world is interested in now, it's not just an option, it's a consumer demand and supermarkets are soon going to be saying unless you're sustainably catching a fish or sustainably developing a dairy industry we're not interested in buying your product. Now that'll focus everyone's mind, so we're all in this and you're quite right everyone will have to take their share, but we have to do it on a planned and sensible basis. For example if you said to the dairy farmers at the moment you have to stop all your emissions or otherwise you won't be able to dairy farm well you stop them dead in their tracks, so we're doing research and development in methane emissions and all the rest of it so that we can give them some options about how they can assist in lowering emissions.

LISA Minister I just want to ask you about a story that’s been developing over the last couple of days, PPCS the meat company which some people are saying is self combusting at the moment, what's your take on the situation, is there a need for reform in this area like we see we've got Fonterra with the dairying industry concentrated looking after the producers, is there a need for reform?

JIM Well I think you know these are commercial matters and as Minister I have information available to me and so on. What I can say is that I wouldn’t be too alarmist about it, the information I have without wanting to comment in detail is that there might be some exaggeration about the financial situation of the company, but nevertheless the overall problem of marketing of our meat and some of the competition that we entertain against ourselves and overseas markets certainly doesn’t have too much rational quality about it and I think we've learnt from the dairy industry how you know a combined approach to marketing and a more unified industry on a cooperative basis does bring benefits, and I think the meat industry is starting to realise that and if you listen carefully to the tom-toms beating around New Zealand you'll see that farmers themselves are starting to get interested in a more cooperative marketing approach and I think they're right.

LISA What would you like to see in that respect?

JIM I'm a bit reluctant to express my personal opinion on this because it tends to have repercussions in international markets if I do, but I'm watching this space very carefully, I'm keeping close watch on it, I've met with representatives of the industry and I am encouraging people to think clearly about a more cooperative approach to marketing, that’s where I think the real issues are, it's not a matter of not having any competition inside New Zealand, but it's a matter of having a more cooperative and integrated approach to marketing our product that gets the best returns for New Zealand growers.

LISA Alright Nevil Gibson from NBR.

NEVIL GIBSON – Editor, National Business Review
Well Mr Anderton I'd like to congratulate you for being about a lone voice in the Cabinet in advocating real change in agriculture, but I'd like to go back on two points, one is we do not need the government throwing more money around with the higher taxes but what we do need in science and research and development in agriculture is a greater set of priorities and a different structure, you know the complaints, but why is it that the government is spending more money on R&D but it's spreading it round more widely instead of focusing on areas that have proven in the past to have a real return, and in fact agricultural research is going down and you’ve got too many people fighting over too small a pool.

JIM Well I doubt that you're right about agriculture research going down, I'd dispute that and I'm quite happy to entertain some correspondence with you and get some facts into that, but let me just say that on my watch anyway I've been working closely with the industry, the dairy industry, the Dairy Accord and Pastoral 21, they're working with us. We started last year with some investment matched by the industry in priority in research and development that they nominated, this year we've increased those amounts. It's not as much as they want that’s true but if you speak to them they’ll say well as I've mentioned to them, it's incremental gain, you get your foot in the door you widen it a bit and that’s what's happening and it's cumulative. Every time you increase it it goes into the base lines and so it goes up three million then another six on that three so it's nine, they match it so it's 18, you multiply that over five years it's a 100 million dollars, it starts to add up and that’s where I'm heading and I think we're in the right direction, we're never going to satisfy everybody but at least I think you'll get acknowledgement from the industry that we've made a reasonable start.

NEVIL But it's not just the question of the amount because I think I'd agree with you on that, but really there is too many people deciding what is going to be done rather than just go the simple way and do more bulk funding for the CRIs which is what they want rather than having lots of bureaucrats in Wellington handing out small parcels of money and even more scientists filling out forms rather than doing their job.

JIM Well to be fair it's not always bureaucrats in Wellington, I mean through the Foundation for Scientific Research and Development you have peer group analysis of projects, there's far more projects for research and development like something like three or four to one that are approved, and they're approved by scientists themselves who peer review the applications, so I don’t ever get to make a decision on what research projects will be done and what won't be done nor does any other Cabinet Minister, and nor really do any of the socalled bureaucrats in the Minister of Agriculture and so on, it's all done at a reasonably high level of scientists themselves, so you know if that system doesn’t work properly in the end well we have to look at it but you’ve got to admit and I know that these systems have been reviewed and changed so many times you know we used to have 8,000 people working for MAF now we've got about 150 in terms of the policy areas and now all these other Crown Research Institutes are out there competing for this money, the competition thing might be a bit of a problem I accept that, but look I don’t think there's any perfect system.

LISA Alright, Mr Anderton I want to ask you about you're future with the Progressive Party, you’ve already indicated that you're standing again next election, were you in the Labour executive when they put forward mandatory retirement, I mean how do you reconcile those two positions?

JIM No I wasn’t an executive I was a very young Labour Party member when they made a resolution.

LISA But you supported mandatory retirement?

JIM Well I think I was about 22 at the time so I don’t know that I had a firm view on this. I mean we had Walter Nash when I was a young enthusiast for politics, who became Prime Minister of New Zealand when he was 78. as Michael Cullen reminded me the other day I've got a few terms to go before I'd actually qualify for that.

LISA Well Labour's looking at the whole renewal process within its caucus, what about the Progressive Party are you going to be trying to renew in some way?

JIM I don’t have too many members who are pressing me for renewal. To be honest let's face it the Wigram seat is the key to the Progressives having a place in government at the moment and it's not easy when you're in parliament on your own, I mean when Matt Robson was with me he could deal with a lot of the party building stuff and our party is still active, we've got regional groups and we've got policy conferences coming up this month and so on.

LISA But when you say that the Wigram seat is key are you saying that there's no Progressive Party without Jim Anderton?

JIM Well there's no Progressive Party hold in parliament or representation in parliament without Wigram and I'd be disingenuous if I didn’t acknowledge that holding the Wigram seat has a lot to do with me not with the Progressive Party because in the end the people in Wigram are natural Labour voters, about 60 or 70% of them vote for Labour on the party vote but a majority of them overwhelmingly vote for me on the electorate vote, so you know if that seat was having someone other than me representing it tomorrow then probably it would return to Labour, I think that’s a fair call. So there's a bit of pressure on me of course to stay in that regard but on the other hand as long as I'm doing good work and I think I can make a contribution, if I didn’t I wouldn’t be there, I wouldn’t be in the Opposition at the moment firing press releases at the government but I'm in a position now to do things and that’s what you go into politics to do, and you only get once shot at this you know and once you’ve got it you'd better make the best of it and that’s what I'm trying to do.

LISA Alright thank you very much for joining us this morning, Minister of Agriculture, Jim Anderton.

FUTURE NEW ZEALAND
Why we need another political party

LISA Last month list MP Gordon Copeland resigned from the United Future Party over his opposition to the anti-smacking legislation. Copeland plans to form a new Christian right party with another former United Future MP Larry Baldock. In the meantime however he's decided to give his proxy vote to National on all matters outside of confidence and supply. Gordon Copeland joins me now from Wellington. Good morning Mr Copeland.

I'm just wondering why we need another Christian political party, are Destiny and Phillip Taito Field not Christian enough?

GORDON COPELAND – Independent MP
Well I would like to describe the new party Future New Zealand by its distinctiveness which is that it will have a constitutional commitment to Judeo-Christian values, so that party will be open to all New Zealanders and the great majority of New Zealanders actually strongly support Judeo-Christian values so potentially this is a mainstream party with that distinctiveness. We would never have needed some 20, 30, 40 years ago to have a constitutional commitment to Judeo-Christian values because the Labour Party and National Party in those days would have taken that for granted, but our society has changed now and we do have now in our society at the heart of it a very very deep debate around the question of values, so we want to say look we believe these are the values on which we can have a foundation to build a strong successful peaceful coherent great country, and that’s our policy position.

LISA Well where does that leave other religious individuals in New Zealand like Jewish people or Islamic people?

GORDON Well actually I've road tested the idea of Judeo-Christian values, obviously Jews are the Judeo part of that, but I've also for example spoken to people in the Hindu community and I've said is this offensive to you and they say no because we actually agree with those values particularly around marriage and family.

LISA Alright well both George Bush and Tony Blair have said in the past that they sought divine guidance on political matters, I want to know have you prayed on this one, have you sought some guidance on what you're doing?

GORDON Look my relationship with God is central to my life, but in addition to that I'm also of course listening to what New Zealanders are saying and if you for example look at the 80% of New Zealanders who expressed very very strong opposition to the ant-smacking legislation you'll go back straight away to the Judeo-Christian tradition over 5000 years and the conviction that discipline and love are two sides of the same coin, loving children hugging children having great times with kids is part of happy family life, and the other side of it is that children do need to be trained and corrected, and also part of that tradition is that that’s a decision that should be made by parents because that’s their role and that’s their responsibility, and people are very very really deeply deeply insulted when people suggest that that amounts to child abuse, it does not.

LISA So what was unchristian about United Future and Peter Dunne then?

GORDON Well the situation there was that if you go back there were two component parties, there was the Future New Zealand Party which had that constitutional commitment to Judeo-Christian values, and Peter Dunne's United Party which was basically a liberal party. When the two came together in some ways it wasn’t a – I think in the early days it was a very happy marriage but as time went by it became increasingly apparent that there were quite strong differences on legislation between the liberal wing, the United wing which actually was the much smaller part of it and the great majority of the party which was the Future New Zealand wing, for example the membership base of the combined party would have been I don’t know exactly, but certainly a significant majority of those people would have been Christians, probably 80% or more, and those people were beginning to resign, they were beginning to say we'll never vote for United Future again, and the smacking bill in a way was just the tipping point, but it went back to this essential debate, what are the underlying values and it increasingly became apparent that we need actually to state very clearly that the underlying values of this are Judeo-Christian values. Those values underpin democracy and the history of this nation.

LISA I just want to pick you up on what you're saying there about United Future, so is the Christian element being steamrolled, I mean how democratic were operations within the party?

GORDON Well there's the normal process in terms of I say board elections, but the board itself became completely divided and a number of board members subsequently resigned when I resigned from United Future, and certainly many members of the party resigned as well, so I was moving not alone as some sort of lone ranger, but as part of a significant proportion of the party which had really become quite disillusioned with the direction that Peter Dunne was leading us.

LISA Alright let's bring the panel in on the conversation here.

BERNARD Mr Copeland, why have you decided to continue on in parliament and try to build a party from within parliament when you were elected to another party and in fact not even directly as an electorate MP but as a list MP, why didn’t you just resign from parliament and try to build a party from outside parliament?

GORDON I think it's an excellent question but if you look at the way that I was elected there's two components. First of all we cleared the 5% threshold because of Peter Dunne's seat in Ohariu-Belmont, and in addition to that I'll give you an analogy, if Peter Dunne had got that seat that as he was before Future New Zealand joined it at about .4% of the party vote, I would not have been in parliament even though he had the seat. The reality was in 2002 we had more than 7% of the vote to 2005 2.67% of the vote and those votes which came of course from New Zealanders all over the country predominantly came as to 80%, I've done the analysis, 80% of those votes came from Christians. So that was the main underlying constituency which gave their party votes to get us from where Peter would have been on his own, up to a situation where he had additional ….

BERNARD They didn’t vote for you they voted for the party and now you’ve decided to jump out of the party why don’t you jump out of parliament?

GORDON Well I think that’s a little bit simplistic, I was number two on the list in 2002, number three on the list in 2005 and believe you me I'm in contact with your voter base right through this country, many of those people know me personally and so you can't leave me out of that equation as simply as that.

NEVIL Mr Copeland I'd like to ask you how you're going to entrench these values in a constitutional way given a secular society, and I don’t think people would disagree, I'm certainly not flippant about your values, I share them, as indeed would probably be the majority of the population, but I think it's that degree that entrenching them in some way in a secular law is an element of compulsion there that people say this is really about personal conscience and how I live my life and my and so on.

GORDON No sorry what I was saying was that the constitution of the Future New Zealand Party will have it written into its wording that the party which is the vehicle, political vehicle we're forming, has a commitment to Judeo-Christian values, you won't find that probably I don’t think in the constitution of the other parties because as I said before 30 years ago or longer when Labour and National came into being that would have been taken for granted, I remember Keith Holyoake for example told me that every day he had the Ten Commandments in his house folder.

LISA Mr Copeland can you tell me how do you reckon United Future's gonna go without you?

GORDON I wouldn’t like to speculate on that, as I say they’ve certainly lost quite a significant chunk of their support base and that was known to the party really around Christmas time but that happened because of Peter's stance on the anti-smacking legislation.

LISA So will they still be around?

GORDON But I think on the other hand there's some people there who will continue to work very hard to try and keep that party with a presence in parliament, so really that’s their business now, I'm very very much focused on building Future New Zealand as a strong political force in the country.

LISA Thank you very much for joining us this morning, Independent MP, Gordon Copeland.

FINAL THOUGHTS – GUEST COMMENTATORS

LISA Just coming back to earlier interviews there Bernard looking at the agricultural sector and what Jim Anderton was suggesting about beef and sheep meat, maybe there needs to be some kind of consolidation in the industry.

BERNARD I thought that was really interesting the way he was talking about essentially, I'd quite a Fonterra for the sheep and beef industry, although he didn’t actually say it reading between the lines that’s what he wanted and PPCS which is a very interesting situation right now everyone should have a look a Marta Steen's piece in the press today, and interview with the CEO of PPCS, that company at least according to market observers is in a bit of trouble and mainly because of the currency and because sheep and beef prices, meat prices are down and maybe if PPCS needs to be restructured or reformed that’s the opportunity for the industry to come up with a Fonterra for beef and sheep and it sounds like Anderton is interested in pushing it along that way.

NEVIL I think he put up a very good case for agriculture, in fact we haven’t had a Minister like that for a long time and you're dead right because we've got the dairy industry's on a boom, that’s not accident it's due to all that science, research and higher productivity, the meat industry's a bit of a structural problem, a marketing one, because obviously it can't control prices, but there is an opportunity there and I think he's the one that can do it, but my doubts are with the rest of the Cabinet, I don’t think they actually understand where the country's wealth is generated.

BERNARD That’s right, it's interesting through this government he's been the one who's been most pro business, he proposed the business tax cuts, he's the only one in Cabinet who's actually run a business, very interesting.

NEVIL He'd be a very good partner for National I think wouldn’t he because they could put him on the road, he masters the information and he didn’t drop the ball did he on any of those questions.

BERNARD That’s right and he addresses them directly, even the one about greenhouse emissions and this is a serious issue for the dairy industry it's built on right now, but if you look at the real costs in greenhouse emissions the dairy industry should be paying in some form or another and the government particularly after the problems in trying to bring in a tax earlier in their term, they will have to address it at some stage and if they don’t then consumers and the rest of the world will when they jump on the fact that the New Zealand dairy industry is the biggest individual producer of greenhouse emissions in this country.

NEVIL But the big point there is if you spend the money on the research you could actually stop those costs going on to the consumer and that’s partly where New Zealand's problem is, it's the productivity and getting greater competition in reducing those costs not adding to them.

LISA What about his comments about Bollard, what did you make of those?

BERNARD Yes for a Minister they were quite critical of Bollard's increase in interest rates and it's something that I think the pressure will come on next year as we get closer to an election and as people's fixed mortgage rates roll out to those much higher levels there is going to be real pain out there in the mortgage belts where this election is gonna be decided and I suspect a lot of the MPs perhaps behind the front benches are a bit grumpy about how those interest rates keep on rising, particularly when inflation okay it's not completely out of control and we've also got a very high currency depressing prices and Bollard has just decided to go out there and break the housing market and there's a lot of home owners out there who don’t want him to do it and I suspect this will become more of an election issue as we go forward.

NEVIL I certainly agree, this has been the pattern in Australia and we haven’t followed that political pattern here economic influences on the election is how we're feeling, but this time there's portents of the future may not be so good for a lot of people and that’s when it becomes quite critical at election time. So it's interesting that we'll be following with your neighbours.

LISA And interesting I mean you said that you think Jim Anderton's on top of things and that he's go the push to follow through well he's definitely gonna be there by his count.

NEVIL Well the people in Wigram love him and you know it's one of the quirks of MMP that we've got all these small parties led by electorate MPs and they can stay there as long as they're popular.

BERNARD I must say just looking at the interview he looked like a New Zealand left wing version of Denny Crane, it's just me, it's the me party and good on him he's the one in Cabinet who seems to be driving the voice of business even though you could argue he seems the most left wing of the lot.

NEVIL Maybe he's moved to the centre and to the right.

LISA Very quickly then speaking of small parties you’ve got Gordon Copeland there with aspirations to be the Christian party in parliament.

NEVIL Well I completely misunderstood what he was talking about because I thought he was actually going to advocate Christian values as a policy not put them in to a political party and I don’t think there's many Christians around and that term is a very wide one of course, the majority of the population by a long chalk, but how you form a political party that has that meaning other than a very select group of Christians with a particular point of view on certain issues, I can't see it happening.

LISA Thank you very much for joining us this morning.

ENDS

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