Q + A
Panel Discussion 1
Hosted by GREG BOYED
In response to THE ENVIRONMENT

GREG Time to welcome the panel along this morning. Dr Claire Robinson from Massey University, good to have you along with us. Former Deputy Prime Minister in the Labour-Alliance Government, Jim Anderton, welcome. And Fran O’Sullivan, Herald columnist. Good morning and welcome to you all. First of all, Claire, Amy Adams’ performance. It was always going to be a tough job. We’ve gone from first to 14th in a fairly well-known survey. How’d she do?

CLAIRE ROBINSON – Political Analyst
Well, I mean, she started out the interview with a lot of clichés.

GREG I counted ‘playing the long game’, ‘moving forward’, ‘step in the right direction’. She only missed out ‘game of two halves’, but I think we heard that later on.

CLAIRE But I think, you know, she got into it at the end. I think the problem for the Government is that this government clearly doesn’t have a green economy as its number-one priority. It has economic growth and jobs, and so while it looks to improve conservation, environment, the green economy, it’s not its major priority, so it has to be able to try and sort of justify that quite well. But it’s not simply this government’s issue either. I mean, the last government also didn’t prioritise the green economy, the government before that didn’t prioritise the green economy, and that’s not even a New Zealand issue. No government actually in the OECD prioritises a green economy, so we’re all kind of in the same boat together, and I think that’s one of the messages from this Rio+20 conference is that, you know, governments really have to do something quite radically different if they’re going to make a difference.

PAUL That said, Jim, we do have an ETS. We were the first ones to get an ETS, but we are slipping backwards.

JIM ANDERTON – Fmr Deputy Prime Minister
Well, there’s no question climate change is the number-one issue facing the future of the world. I don’t have any doubt about that, but you’ve also got to have the ‘glass half empty, glass half full’ thing. I mean, our major emitter, methane gas, for example, is our agricultural community. 50% of all our emissions come from there, and this is a very important exporting-food nation, so we live by exporting food, and yet we’ve got a big problem with the method of doing it. So we’re putting a lot of research into that. We’re encouraging farmers, and farmers have stepped up to the plate too. I get— As a townie, but former Minister of Agriculture, I get a bit tetchy with the green kind of approach to this – that all farmers are dirty farmers and all the rest of it. They are not. There are thousands of young farming families in New Zealand that are putting their best endeavours into making their streams on their farms fenced off and planted and making sure that their farms are in better shape environmentally than anything they inherited from their parents and grandparents. And sometimes we have to celebrate that instead of bashing into them. And when we get into the clean-energy thing, well, try and dam a river these days. I mean—

GREG Fran, if I can just put it to you, as we heard there, more cows, more drilling, more roads. That’s going to be a balancing act we’re probably always going to struggle with.

FRAN O’SULLIVAN – NZ Herald Columnist
Well, I think it’s great that we’re actually doing all of those things, to be honest. If we weren’t doing that, what sort of economy would we have. If we weren’t—

GREG A very green one, apparently.

FRAN Well, no, we wouldn’t have a green economy. That’s bullshit. Absolute bullshit.

GREG You can’t say that on telly.

FRAN Yes, you can.

GREG Oh, you did.

FRAN I did.

GREG Bullshit. No, I just wanted to get one in as well.

FRAN No, but, I mean, you wouldn’t immediately have a green economy. A green economy – what do they actually mean by that? If they mean producing stuff to tackle major markets like China, which has put— you know, the green tech, that side of things. Clean tech is one of their major drivers, and they have to, because the place is hugely polluted. Now, we can build things that actually work for that economy, but, you know, we already have major renewables here on the energy front. And I’m with Jim in that, you know, our problem is the agricultural emissions and the rest of it.

JIM That might be the first time, Fran.

LAUGHTER

GREG First time for everything, Jim.

FRAN Well, probably. (laughs) So—

GREG On the political side, Claire, this coincides pretty nicely with the rise and rise and rise of the Greens. This is what they’re all about, yet we’re slipping backwards. What does that say? They’re not, sort of, taking care of the knitting. Is that right?

CLAIRE You mean the government?

GREG Well, the Green Party.

CLAIRE Oh, the Green— No, the Green Party is doing really well. I mean, you look at anything, any issue, the Green Party is number one to comment on any issue. But what they have is that they have a philosophical base to any comment they make which is around the predominance of the green economy and sustainability. And I think that what— in the process of seeing Russel Norman step up and comment on everything is you’re seeing that those issues and that kind of philosophy is really getting hold in the electorate.

GREG All right, we will leave it there and hope potty-mouth O’Sullivan keeps it together in the next part.

Q + A
PANEL DISCUSSION 2
Hosted by GREG BOYED
In response to STEVEN JOYCE INTERVIEW

GREG Claire Robinson, Jim Anderton and Fran O’Sullivan. Claire, we’ll start with you. More efficient, a new super-ministry – is it going to kick-start and get things going?

CLAIRE Well, I mean, I think, as the Minister said, it is a structural solution to the fact that he was receiving a whole lot of advice from a number of different agencies, and that’s a really inefficient way of operating as a public-sector agency. But what they don’t necessarily have and the public sector doesn’t have in general is a good understanding – Jim will know this – of what goes in business. I mean, there are some big holes still in the Government’s innovation agenda, and, you know, from my own particular perspective, I don’t think they focus enough on design, on how we can actually produce new products, improve products and services in order to get those SMEs and start-ups going. But he’s also right about the capital markets. We also need a more capital market, more investment in those SMEs to get them up to the Fisher & Paykels in order to be able to make that big step change to be able to go forward as an economy.

GREG Fran, the Minister talking about creating a platform – is that enough at this stage?

FRAN Well, it’s essential that we do have a platform, a growth platform, and I think one of the things, if I read the Minister right, it seems to be that he’s building up to the stage where he’s prepared to have a debate – a proper debate – on oil and gas exploration. He’s made the point today about how Western Australia is surging ahead. Of course, we’ve got massive natural resources ourselves, a whole range of mineral wealth in this country that at the moment the Lucy Lawlesses of this world would say we shouldn’t do it.

GREG Which is a really good point. We don’t want to do that, but we do want— we want a bob each way, don’t we?

FRAN Well, it’s important that we actually start to get a few bob, and I think, you know, just basically we can be maybe not at Western Australia’s heights, but we can certainly be a heck of a lot richer than we are now if we actually leverage our own mineral wealth and oil and gas wealth.

GREG Jim Anderton, do you agree? Is that the only way to kick this forward?

FRAN It doesn’t have to be the only way. It’s just another—

JIM No, no. It’s not the only way, but it’s interesting when the Minister talks about needing growth and innovation and he’s taken over the Department of Labour and the Department of Building and Housing. How is that going to lead to growth and innovation? And he’s lost NZT. NZT is now outside the economic development portfolio. How does that work? That’s New Zealand Trade and Enterprise. So the minister responsible for growth and innovation has the agency that the state put up to do it, and I know because I had a bit to do with it to bring it into the fold for business, that’s gone. And not only that, but the regional development ministry is gone. We don’t have a regional development policy any more now as a government. And yet many of the things we do that are crucial for New Zealand’s future are done in the regions of New Zealand. And it was very good for the bureaucracy in New Zealand to go out into the regions and find out how New Zealand really ticks, which is what they had to do when we had them. So I don’t believe in this big new super-ministry the way it’s structured, and in any case, it’s what you do with it. I mean, there is, at the end of the day, a test – how does it actually work? And I’d put that to strategic assets. If selling strategic assets was the way to fix New Zealand’s economy, we’d have the best economy in the world because we sold most of them. And yet I sat around the Cabinet table with the people who sold most of them, and we had to buy some of them back because they were too strategic to let fail.

FRAN But they were also sold as predominantly trade sales. They went to single buyers in the main. There were one or two floats. But I think the notion of putting a few of these on the market and here where New Zealanders can have that exposure to it and including our super funds and Kiwi funds— At the end of the day, we have a very very poor capital market, so unless we start to grow it, it’s just going to further implode.

GREG Fran, if we could jump ahead? From the Herald in May, Bill English said the surplus became, during the election campaign, the symbol of responsibility. Given where we are at or not at now, what does that mean about how National has handled this?

CLAIRE Well, I think the difficulty, again, for National, and it would be the same difficulty for Labour is that you can put a whole lot of policy changes and structural changes in place, but we’re not going to see results for a number of years. And I think— I suspect that it will be the Labour government that benefits from a lot of these changes that the Government is implementing now. You can’t change behaviour overnight. You can’t— We need some more incentives to change behaviour, but again it’s a very long process.

GREG All right, we will leave it there.

Q + A
PANEL DISCUSSION 3
Hosted by GREG BOYED
In response to FONTERRA DEBATE

GREG Jim Anderton, former Agriculture Minister, does this mean farmers are going to start losing control if this vote goes ahead?

JIM No, I think farmers will lose momentum if it doesn’t go ahead. What New Zealand desperately needs, really, if we want to create wealth is international corporations who earn money. If you look at Finland, they’ve got Nokia; Switzerland, Nestle; Germany, Siemens engineering. I mean, these are huge companies that stand on the international marketplace and earn. They clip the ticket for— We haven’t got enough land in New Zealand to feed the world, but there’s enough land around the world to feed the world, and Fonterra has to be part of that, and they can’t be part of it unless they have a secure capital base. And this capital base at the moment where Lachlan says, ‘Oh, well, cooperatives can provide the solution,’ well, they’ve had a fair time to do it, and there’s no sign of any terms of agreement, so this is the only game in town.

GREG Then, Fran, why not say, ‘Sod it. Let’s turn into a public company. Let’s stop the faffing about and firewalls and let float it and go for it’?

FRAN Well, of course, I would be of that that side, but—

GREG I thought you might.

FRAN Yeah, but that’s not going to make me very popular with the farmers.

GREG Nope.

FRAN I think— I thoroughly agree with Jim. I mean, Fonterra has been a disappointment. It’s been basically doing very well indeed out of the melamine crisis, and it’s a hard thing to say, but that suddenly worked— put a premium value on New Zealand milk and product out of here. And so it’s been able to surf that, but it hasn’t actually invested in building new brands. It hasn’t invested in capacity – offshore manufacturing in places like China, which it does want to do. If it’s going to keep pace at all in the region and not be blown up by a whole pile of other dairy companies that will be setting up in Brazil, but maybe Chinese ones, as they want to do in Western Australia, it’s got to invest. And why are we blowing away our competitive advantage as a nation by not doing the right thing. It’s just incredible.

GREG Claire, at this point it seems like Fonterra does want a bob each way. They want to keep control, but they want a bit of outside cash.

CLAIRE Yeah, well, I think that they recognise the value in the current structure, but I think that they have to go forward. I mean, one of the problems with New Zealand as a nation, again, is that we focus so much on just simply our primary products. Whereas in order to be able to make that big leap, we’ve got to be able to look at how we’re going to add value and leverage to what we currently produce, look for completely new ways of doing things with the milk products that we have. We can’t do that without extra investment. I mean, I think farmers forget that this is one of the biggest companies in the world and New Zealand’s biggest company, and, boy, do we have to really focus on how we make that work for us.

GREG Jim, opponents say this is the thin end of a wedge; it’s going to be the start of a non-farmer takeover. Do you agree?

JIM No. No, it isn’t. The constitution protection is, as Craig said there. Look, when I was in Mexico, we were trying to do a trade deal with Mexico to get milk in and our own products, and they said no. And I said to them, ‘You realise, of course, where do you buy your milk products from now?’ and they said, ‘Chile.’ I said, ‘Who do you think supplies it to you? It’s Fonterra, who own milk-production facilities in Chile and that we export to Mexico.’ So this is the prototype for Fonterra. If they want access to world markets, they’ve got to have production facilities in those markets, and the only way to get it is investment of capital. And if you’ve got every farmer who can decide overnight, basically, to bail out of Fonterra and demand his money back tomorrow, you’ve just—

GREG Fran, are farmers going to back this?

FRAN Well, I hope they do, because I think what it does do— I mean, there is strength in the cooperative structure, but if they keep themselves at the centrepiece of that, if they have the funds so that they can just distance the redemption risk so that they can— the company can work the balance sheet and invest. That could be good. But there’s also, you know, down the track, why wouldn’t they look at things like spin-offs, listed subsidiaries that other New Zealanders can invest in, because when you get down to it, Fonterra has the lion’s share—

GREG All right, we have to leave it there.

FRAN of every trade deal we do.

GREG I’m going to go and have a glass of milk.

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