Farmers prepare for dose of political mojo

National has released two agriculture policies ahead of the opening day of Fieldays tomorrow including bumping agricultural emissions pricing until 2030

Mōrena and welcome to The Bulletin for Tuesday, June 13, by Anna Rawhiti-Connell. Presented in partnership with Z Energy.

In today’s edition: teachers head back to negotiating table; has inequality worsened under this Labour government?; house price decline slows for second month in a row; but first, all bound for Mystery Creek as politicians get ready to pitch to the farmers

Getting NZ’s mojo back — Christopher Luxon at the launch of a pre-election tour in Birkenhead in May (Photo: Stewart Sowman-Lund, design: Archi Banal)

Politicians get set to have a field day

Tomorrow, politicians will converge on Fieldays at Mystery Creek just outside Hamilton. BusinessDesk’s Riley Kennedy and Rebecca Howard have a run down (paywalled) on which politicians are likely to attend, including prime minister Chris Hipkins. They also confirm Act will be there with candidate Andrew Hoggard, and a bus. Hoggard is the former president of Federated Farmers and his candidacy has raised questions about the party pulling the rural vote away from National. I’ve worked my share of Fieldays, the Southern hemisphere's largest agricultural event, so I can say that for the sake of the bus, it’s a good thing it’s been dry over the last few days. The weather forecast looks good until Friday, while, as Kennedy and Howard detail, predictions on spending from farmers are less rosy.

A “moo turn” on agricultural emissions charging

A “moo turn” was how the Herald’s Thomas Coughlan’s piece on National’s agri-emissions announcement was headlined. Party leader Christopher Luxon announced that the agriculture sector wouldn’t be forced to pay for emissions until 2030 at a farm in Helensville yesterday. It follows the announcement on Sunday to end an effective ban on gene editing and genetic modification if elected. As Newsroom’s Marc Daalder reminds us, “the first price on agricultural emissions – the so-called fart tax under Helen Clark's government – was originally set to take effect from mid-2004.” Daalder writes that “delaying the introduction of pricing will threaten the country's ability to meet its 2030 target for biogenic methane emissions.”

Hipkins heading to China

Yesterday, the prime minister confirmed he will take a trade delegation to China at the end of the month. Exports to China account for a quarter of New Zealand’s total exports, and were worth over $21.6b in the year ending March 2023, double what it was in 2015. Of that, close to 30% of our exports are dairy, followed by meat and offal, then wood. The trip will no doubt be a topic of discussion at Fieldays and as Newsroom’s Sam Sachdeva writes, will also “be welcome news to those who believe the government has begun to tilt too far towards the United States in its foreign policy.”

A mojo-less people

Giving Gordon McLauchlan, author of The Passionless People, a run for his money, Luxon told a farmer he was chatting to in Helensville that “We have become a very negative, wet, whiny, inward-looking country and we have lost the plot." He went on to say that "We've got to get our mojo back... a lot more ambition and aspiration." No doubt a range of opinions and fun polls to come on whether that’s a widely-held view and the political wisdom of using your outside voice to comment on the national psyche, but out of context “wet” is at least objectively correct in the North Island. Scientists are working to ascertain how much of an impact human-made climate change (emissions, agricultural or otherwise) had on the very wet start to the year. If you’d like to feel 150 years old or don’t know what mojo is, it’s what the French call “I don't know what" and what Dr Evil set out to steal from Austin Powers in the 1999 film, The Spy Who Shagged Me. Technically, the word mojo is thought to be African in origin and these days refers to a seemingly magical influence or ability. All political parties will be hoping they’ve got it by the bucket load as they face farmers tomorrow.

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Secondary school union negotiators expect to resume bargaining this week

A PPTA (Post Primary Teachers’ Association) spokesperson said yesterday that negotiations are expected to resume with Ministry of Education officials later this week, as parents and the prime minister express frustration about strike action. Under the latest industrial action, teachers are refusing to teach two year levels per day over the next three weeks and will not attend meetings or respond to emails out of school hours, along with other work bans. PPTA acting president Chris Abercrombie says “No-one's happy about this, everyone is frustrated. Teachers don't want to be doing this, they'd rather be in the classroom.” Parents spoken to by Stuff described this school year as “a total disaster”.

Has Labour worsened inequality?

In the second part of a two-part series assessing the Labour government’s record on key measures, Max Rashbrooke takes a look at inequality this morning. Rashbrooke uses the Gini coefficient, “a measure that – in a crude sense – adds up each of a society’s divergences from a perfectly equal distribution and combines them into a single number.” Rashbrooke concludes that while there is “no neat story to say that Labour has increased or decreased inequality, in toto”, a narrative can be pieced together when looking at income poverty, income disparities, the Covid response and the housing market. Yesterday’s feature from Rashbrooke looked at the government’s track record on hardship and poverty.

House price decline slows for second month in a row

A couple of reports out on house prices this morning. The latest Quotable Value (QV) house price index showed values fell 3.4% over the three months to the end of May, slightly slower than the 3.5% fall in April and the 3.9% fall in March. QV’s James Wilson said that while it was still too soon to call this the bottom of the market, the difference in trend combined with other stats and anecdotal evidence, we may be beginning to reach a transition point towards a flatter [market or] pathway to return to positive conditions. According to Trade Me’s latest figures, asking prices on properties are around $100k less than they were a year ago with its spokesperson making similar comments about the signs that suggest the market is levelling out. The country’s largest lender ANZ lifted a range of home loan interest rates yesterday.

Click and collect

• RNZ staff member who allegedly inserted pro-Russian sentiment into news stories claims they edited reports that way for five years and nobody queried it

• Summer may bring acute water shortage for Wellingtonians (paywalled)

• Waikato University has paid nearly $1m to an advisory firm run by former cabinet minister Steven Joyce

• Cabinet agrees to support Whakapapa Holdings and Pure Tūroa to take over the ski operations at Ruapehu

• Former Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi dies — “Bunga bunga and bling aside, Berlusconi’s legacy is a loss of faith in Italy’s political elite”, writes Jon Henley in The Guardian

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