Letters: The rights and wrongs of David Seymour's UN letter
It needed to be said
David Seymour is to be congratulated for taking the proverbial bull by the horns and replying immediately and strongly to the UN letter to the New Zealand Government.
He may have been technically out of line from a protocol point of view, but quite frankly, what he said in his letter needed to be said.
I have a lot of time for Winston Peters and am confident that his official reply will not sell us out, even though he has said that his reply will be different to that of Seymour's.
We, the public, can only hope that the official letters will be published unredacted in due course, possibly even accompanied by Seymour's withdrawn letter.
At the very least, although withdrawn officially, Seymour's letter will have pointed out to the UN where it simply got it wrong.
Steve Clerk, Meadowbank.
Health system fears
Simeon Brown is not quite right to suggest New Zealanders do not care who does their operations, as long as they get done.
It is not in New Zealanders' interest to take surgeons out of public hospitals and for them to be employed at greater cost by private hospitals. It is not in New Zealand's interest to promote an American-style private health system which will mean many will not be able to afford services.
The day that we see such a system will be a very sad one indeed.
Marie Kaire, Whangārei.
Sad state of housing
I found the article by Simon Wilson (July 16) disgraceful. Not so much in the content as the fact it needed to be written at all.
We were promised pre-election that this Government would build warm, dry, liveable homes for all those who were not able to afford them. So far, all that has happened is that plan after plan has been abandoned or delayed because of 'rigour and fiscal responsibility' requirements.
'Writing down' $220 million and halting hundreds of housing developments hardly seems very fiscally responsible, does it? Maybe they can recoup the deficit by selling multimillion-dollar homes for investors from overseas rather than address the problems at home?
Meanwhile, when it comes to what has happened to people who have been removed from emergency accommodation, Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka says it is 'not our responsibility'. Whose responsibility is it, then?
I would remind Housing Minister Chris Bishop and Potaka that as part of a Government that promised to take every New Zealander's needs into consideration, they are very much responsible. For every single one. It's beyond time they realised they are servants of this country, not board members of an elite real estate group selling to the highest bidder. Or are they?
Jeremy Coleman, Hillpark.
A community problem
The first day of the inquest into the death of Malachi Subecz reveals some horrific facts about a little boy whose mother describes as 'a very, very special kid'.
The inquest is serving as yet another report on the shortcomings of the so-called child protection system. A 2022 review by Dame Karen Poutasi following the death of 5-year-old Malachi made 14 recommendations, which Aroturuki Tamariki/Independent Children's Monitor was tasked with reviewing. Among the key points raised in the review process was the apparent lack of urgency to implement change but more important was the finding that Oranga Tamariki was not sufficiently focused on the safety of the child.
This is a community problem in which we all need to be involved.
Glennys Adams, Oneroa.
Classroom changes
I'm not surprised open-plan classrooms have not worked.
Learning needs to be focused, teachers need to be able to monitor their students and ensure all are catered to.
Open plan was way too new age, some might consider a bit woke even.
As long as students get tailored education that maximises their potential, everyone wins.
John Ford, Taradale.
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NZ Herald
2 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Letters: Warriors defensive woes, voting reforms, David Seymour and dropkicks, passport name-changing
It is just too easy for opponents to exploit the frailties we have here. Alan Walker, St Heliers. Voting reforms How are the changes to voting going to make it harder to cast a vote? The election date is announced months in advance, so people have no excuse to not enrol to vote. Also, by making it illegal to have entertainment or food offerings within 100m of a voting station is just common sense, votes must be cast freely and no inducement should be offered. It seems the only ones complaining are the ones who use this as an election-day strategy. Mark Young, Ōrewa. David Seymour and dropkicks David Seymour has again demonstrated his gift for insult, this time calling tardy voting registrants 'dropkicks'. Such boorish, sneering, self-righteous language, while not surprising coming from Seymour, really shows what a massive dropkick he is. Brian Dwyer, Welcome Bay. Passports It is so hard to understand what the Government is trying to do in changing the order of name on our New Zealand passports. The use of te reo is a source of pride in the unique embracing of our heritage through our original language. Other countries praise us for it. There are no obvious nay-sayers except certain voters who are dwindling in number as they 'get' the unique lustre of 'Aotearoa New Zealand'. In that order. Christine, Northcote Point. What's in a name? I am a New Zealand citizen living in South Dakota. I recently had my New Zealand passport renewed and noticed the Māori word for New Zealand was placed above the English word on the passport. I was somewhat mystified and offended by this change, as I view myself as a New Zealander, not an Aotearoan. I presume this renaming order is a manifestation of 'woke' ideology derived from the previous Government under Dame Jacinda Ardern. I find this form of 'virtue signalling' distasteful and not becoming of the Commonwealth country New Zealand is. To the three leaders of the current Government, congratulations are deserved on their sensible and appropriate name reversal on the front of the New Zealand passport. Quentin Durward, South Dakota, US. Cost of living We are currently in Perth and there are five different supermarket chains to shop at, plus a whole host of independent stores. One greengrocer in particular, Spud Shed, is 17 stores strong. Many of these are open 24 hours, offering an exciting shopping experience for the customer. It is a lot easier to shop around here to keep them honest. Some purchases included red capsicums for $1.75 each, two for $4 cabbages, $5 blueberries, and large 500gm strawberries for only $4.99. Two chips of cherry tomatoes for $3, and a block of Aussie butter for $6.79. Their in-season Sumo mandarins are magic, but it is not all beer and skittles in the produce world; we spotted our gold kiwifruit for $12.99/kg, and we miss our glorious New Zealand apples dearly. However, one thing is for certain, our New Zealand grocery retail needs some serious competition. Glenn Forsyth, Taupō.
NZ Herald
2 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Never mind the tariffs, NZ must prepare for the Chinese consumer rebound
Tourism has been a bigger problem. Chinese visitors to New Zealand remain well down on pre-Covid numbers, and it's not clear that this will be easy to turn around. Then, as we look forward, China will play an increasing role in driving the technology in our lives: think electric vehicles. Two leading international experts on China's economic outlook – Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Andrew Browne and ANZ China chief economist Raymond Yeung – attended Auckland's China Business Summit this month to unpick what's going on. Their conclusions offered some real hope for New Zealand businesses in the years ahead. First the bad news There's no question Chinese consumer sentiment is low and there is slowing economic growth. 'The number one issue dragging the Chinese sentiment down is the property market,' says ANZ's Yeung. 'We definitely need to see a recovery of the property market in order to see a sustainable recovery in sentiment and consumer spending because of the wealth effect.' The latest numbers show the property market is still dropping month on month, he says. A report from Goldman Sachs last month estimated prices have fallen 20% over the past four years and could decline another 10% before bottoming out in 2027. That matches ANZ's estimates. 'I believe it will be another 18 to 24 months of contraction of the property market,' Yeung says. 'That sounds bad. But that is a national strategy to turn the country from a property-led economy to a tech and renewable energy-led economy. 'There is a view from the top that China simply has to go through this transition,' he says. It's one of the features of the Chinese system that its leadership can look through often painful periods of transition and focus on bigger, longer-term goals. As Chinese Ambassador to New Zealand, Wang Xiaolong (also speaking at the summit) put it: 'No matter how turbulent the global landscape is, or will be, China remains unremittingly committed to development to deliver better lives for the Chinese people, in the historic process of the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. 'There is a firm, unshakeable national consensus that has not changed and will not change.' Trade war showdown The ability to absorb more short-term economic pain is one of the big advantages China has in its current trade war showdown with the US, says Browne. 'I think it is important to know that Xi Jinping thinks he is winning! And he may not be wrong,' Browne says. 'Obviously, China has problems in its economy. We're in the third year of a real estate meltdown. Youth unemployment is high, it is crushing the dreams of an entire generation of college graduates and their families. 'Xi Jinping is enormously concerned about all of this but he is focused on a different prize,' Browne says. That prize is technology. China is laser-focused on developing a high-tech manufacturing industry to enable China to escape the American choke hold, he says. '[Xi] sees what he says are changes 'unseen in a century' ... meaning the rise of China and relative decline of the USA. 'This, from Xi's perspective, is China's moment to seize.' When it comes to tariffs and the trade war, both Yeung and Browne see China having the upper hand. Yeung believes it's likely the present US/China tariffs (currently sitting at 30%) will fade into insignificance in the coming years. ANZ China chief economist Raymond Yeung. 'I expect this tariff will be gone very soon,' he says. 'There is too much stakeholder interest.' Basically, the US needs China's rare earth metals, and China needs access to US semiconductor chip technology. Vietnam is the most highly vulnerable to US tariffs, with 8.3% of its GDP exposed to the US, Yeung says. 'For China it is just 3%. They can give it up, just let it go.' He notes that China is also currently suffering from deflation – something that helps mitigate any inflationary impact from tariffs. Browne isn't so convinced Trump will back down further on tariffs. However, he does believe the US got outplayed by China in the showdown earlier this year. 'Nobody knows how this is going to play out. We haven't seen this since the 1930s. So I still wouldn't rule out an inflationary surge.' We can't even exclude the 'possibility that Trump isn't stark raving mad', he says. We may see some positive outcomes emerge from the tariff policies. 'We've already seen a few. It has galvanised Germany, and it has galvanised Europe. It is possible Europe might get its act together and launch a unified capital market and start issuing bonds, and compete with the US and China. 'It's equally possible that the US could convince China to shift its economic model further to consumption.' Or, it could all end up relatively benign for the US economy. Trump might continue to reduce tariffs, and a combination with 'cutting taxes, slimming the government and cutting red tape may usher in a golden era for the US ... we don't know.' Another possible outcome is that the world economy 'bifurcates' around the US and China, and countries like New Zealand are caught in the middle, he warns. But regardless of what happens next, Trump has made the fundamental cardinal mistake in his second term of underestimating China, Browne says. '[Former US President Joe] Biden, whether you like him or not, had the measure of China, so when he wanted to put export controls on chip-making materials, his team worked very hard with governments in the Netherlands and Japan. 'At one point in the Biden administration, he decided to get rid of all of the cranes in all of the ports in the US because there were fears they'd be counting things like military equipment going in and out. 'Unfortunately for the US they don't make cranes anymore. The Japanese do so he put in place a technology transfer agreement with Japan. Biden understood the challenge.' The US is the world's financial superpower but China is the world's manufacturing superpower, Browne says. 'It now has an industrial base that is equal to the US, plus Germany, plus Japan, plus South Korea, and then some.' That gives China a critical advantage in all the technologies that are coming of age at the same time. That came to the fore during the recent trade negotiations, where Browne says US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessant also underestimated China. 'He said, 'When China exports five times as much to the US as we export to them, we have all the cards'. 'He said the Chinese were 'playing with a pair of twos ... It turned out that when he turned the cards over that China had a couple of aces.' One of those aces was rare earths. 'China threatened to choke off the supply of rare earths to the US and in doing so would have closed down vast swathes of the manufacturing industry, the defence industry, the entire car industry.' The US attempted to retaliate, denying China exports for jet engines and threatening to close down China's civilian airline project. The tariff war morphed into a supply chain war that was far more serious, Browne says. 'It turns out the Chinese had played the US, and they completely caved. 'Trump brought the tariffs down from 145% to 30%. Still high but no longer prohibitive. That's where we are now. We have a truce.' Browne says he doesn't see Trump completely abandoning tariffs. 'We were warned about recession and inflation and we haven't seen that yet,' he says. 'Tariffs are raking record amounts of revenue for the US Government. In Trump's mind, this is a substitute for taxation.' It may be that the lack of negative consequences actually emboldens Trump. 'I would not count out that possibility, that he really does come through with the big tariffs he's promised on August 1.' Tech wars Technology is at the heart of US-China competition now, Browne says. 'A lot of people got the socialist market economy wrong,' he says. 'There was this idea that it would collapse under its own contradictions and an enormous amount of waste. 'And look, the waste in the Chinese system is spectacular but it is also spectacularly well co-ordinated.' It's a whole-of-nation approach, he says. 'Private/public partnerships, centralised R&D, centralised marketing and bottomless supplies of capital and this incredible winnowing process through dog-eat-dog capitalism in the marketplace. What emerges are these apex predators.' There's the rapid rise of car manufacturers like BYD and the big advances China is making in battery technology. But even in the media space, in the most highly censored economy in the world, China produced TikTok, which now has greater insight into the minds of young Americans than Meta, he says. 'They have a system for producing world-beating companies in sector after sector.' Tariffs are mostly a bad thing, Browne says. If they are well-targeted, however, they can sometimes do some good by protecting the industries that a country seeks to develop. 'The Biden administration identified semiconductors, clean tech, batteries and so on,' he says. 'When I talked to investors and asked, 'what are you interested in?' number one was the US. They were attracted by all of the money going into these sectors.' All of that is now being dismantled. 'The big beautiful tax bill doesn't just eliminate the subsidies and incentives in these areas, it actually penalises companies operating in these areas,' Browne says. The US is essentially handing the entire landscape over to China, he says. 'If you want to do your green transition now, whether you're in Africa or Latin America, you want Chinese technologies. And the United States will never catch up.' Can the US and China be friends? Browne says he's very sceptical that there is such a thing as a US-China grand bargain. 'I think the relationship is defined by a core tension. At a high level, there is an almost complete absence of trust,' he says. The idea China is a threat and must be treated as competition is one of the few areas of bipartisan political consensus in the US, he says. 'But these two economies are deeply enmeshed; they are joined at the hip. It creates all kinds of mind-bending paradoxes. 'The Chinese hypersonic Carrier Killer missile cannot find its target without high-end chips manufactured by TSMC in Taiwan, using US tech,' Browne says. 'By the same token, the American Patriot missile cannot defend against Chinese rockets without magnets that come from Chinese rare earth materials.' This is a relationship that is best described as 'weaponised interdependency', he says. Never mind the tariffs ... Yeung and Browne agree on a lot. But Browne still sees China as an exporting nation – as evidenced by its US$114 billion ($188.3b) trade surplus with the world. Yeung believes focusing on this can lead to a misunderstanding of what's really driving China's economic policy. He sees China as an importing nation, based on the fact 88% of its total GDP is domestic now. 'It's domestic growth that will drive China's development,' he says. Here in New Zealand we shouldn't pay too much attention to whether China hits 5.3% GDP or 5.1%, he says. 'If China is going to transition, it's not about how many percentage points of GDP, it is about the changes in lifestyle, the quality of life.' In order for New Zealand to make the most of the Chinese market we need to speed up our ability to adapt, he says. 'You really need to think about the Chinese speed. Maybe we talk about annual planning but even within one year the Chinese business cycle changes a lot.' New Zealand needs to be ready and to position itself for when Chinese consumer confidence eventually rebounds, he says. 'This tariff issue is not the core issue. 'I don't need to reiterate, this is a US$18 trillion economy. There is also US$36 trillion in household deposits sitting in bank accounts in China, ready to unlock and unleash. 'Once consumer sentiment comes back, that will be a massive wave of consumption power waiting for you guys to tap. 'Consumption is the future of China, supported by technological change. And China is going through this with or without the US.' Liam Dann is business editor-at-large for the New Zealand Herald. He is a senior writer and columnist, and also presents and produces videos and podcasts. He joined the Heraldin 2003.
Otago Daily Times
2 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Putting my poor prediction record on the line
"I hope I am wrong. My gut tells me we [the US and China] will fight in 2025," wrote General Mike Minihan, head of US Air Mobility Command, in a private memo two years ago. There's still five months to go, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say he's wrong. Don't take my word for it, because my recent record in these matters is bad. I didn't think Russia's Vladimir Putin was crazy enough to invade Ukraine although I knew he was largely detached from reality, and I was wrong. For a long time I would not use the word "genocide" to describe what Israel's Benjamin Netanyahu was doing in Gaza, and I was wrong again. In my defence, I had not spent quality time with either man and I was reluctant to predict their actions based entirely on other people's estimates of their characters (especially since most of those people didn't know them personally either). I still felt compelled to weigh the pros and cons of the case, on the mistaken assumption facts had some influence on their decisions. The possibility of a Chinese invasion of Taiwan is a far greater threat to the peace of the world (such as it is) than the relative sideshows in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine. Aircraft carriers and nuclear weapons on both sides. A few poorly planned displays of "determination" and the US is in a war with China — with the two Koreas and Japan not far behind. China's President Xi Jinping will never rule out using force to "recover" Taiwan, but the story he has set a 2027 deadline for that terrifying gamble is just a Washington think-tank special. He does harp on about it a lot though. Successive American administrations have practised strategic ambiguity (i.e., maybe the US would fight to defend Taiwan and maybe it wouldn't), and the fickle enthusiasms of Donald Trump muddy the waters even further. He is widely seen as a strategic coward (TACO), but he is sufficiently erratic that his response is really incalculable. As for Taiwan, President Lai Ching-te of the cautiously pro-independence Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) serves up the usual word salad: "The message of history is clear. Today we share the same values and face similar challenges as many of the democracies that participated in the European war [1939-45]." Evasiveness as policy, so as not to rile China. Hou Yu-ih of Taiwan's largest opposition part, the Kuomintang (KMT), is even fuzzier: "The current status quo is that the Taiwan Strait is on the brink of war. So, to maintain close ties with the United States while also making peace with China is the solution to the problem." And although very few ordinary citizens want to be part of China, most people are not bothered by all this. Yes, Taiwan's military is a poorly trained, under-equipped shambles, but the public doesn't seem worried about a Chinese invasion. The United States is willing to sell Taiwan more and better weapons, but some parties don't want to spend the money. So I will risk my reputation as a soothsayer once again and assume both Xi Jinping and Lai Ching-te are rational men. In that case, it is unlikely either man will risk everything on one roll of the dice. Xi will not set the machinery in motion for a sea- and airborne invasion of Taiwan, and Lai will certainly not declare independence for Taiwan. No government of Taiwan, even back in the decades when the KMT (now reformed) was the tyrannical and maniacally anti-communist single ruling party, has ever seriously considered abandoning the sacred fiction that there is only one China including Taiwan. There is just a persistent non-violent dispute over which government is legitimate, Beijing or Taipei. As for Xi, who is effectively president-for-life, he faces no special deadline to claim his prize. "Reunification" is his legacy project, but he has just turned 72 and there's lots of time yet. And always before him is the nightmare example of Putin's three-day "special military operation" to bring Ukraine back under the rule of the Russian "motherland". Above all, there is Taiwan's "silicon shield". The island state manufactures 47% of the world's advanced semiconductor chips, including all of the most advanced ones. Even the United States is one generation behind, and so is China, despite its Deep Seek triumph in producing much cheaper high-performance AIs (on Nvidia chips made in Taiwan). Invade Taiwan and all that is gone. It might be irrational, but even the Trump administration might feel Taiwan is a treasure it must defend come what may. The game is not worth the candle, and Xi will not invade for at least three years. He probably never will. There! I said it! Now we wait and see. — Gwynne Dyer is an independent London journalist.
