Exploring Barossa, South Australia: Wine, terroir and the art of winemaking
In the Barossa Valley, Roman Travers meets the passionate winemakers, bold varietals and warm-hearted locals shaping the future of Australian wine.
'People don't have patience anymore. The average wine is bought and drunk within 25 minutes of purchasing.'
Katie Spain is the Australian pocket rocket of wine writing.
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The Spinoff
3 hours ago
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Could changing the incentives for power companies make electricity cheaper?
High power prices now seem normal in New Zealand, especially in winter. Could incentivising power companies to invest in generation capacity, rather than return dividends to the government, lower costs for individuals and businesses alike? One sign that electricity in New Zealand is expensive? The Powerswitch website, a service that lets you input some information and figure out if you could be getting a better deal with another plan. 'In June, we saw double the previous month's record for users,' says Paul Fuge, who runs Powerswitch on behalf of Consumer NZ, with funding from the Electricity Authority. Thousands of people are logging on every day – many of whom, Fuge says, find they could be paying up to $500 less a year just by switching plans. Retail power prices have increased 11% over the course of the year, Consumer says, partly because of changes in transmission costs and revenue limits for lines companies. There's a flow-on effect, Fuge says. 'Lots of people underheat their homes to save money but it's a false economy. People get cold and sick, end up in hospital, more kids don't go to school – it costs New Zealand more and makes it harder to participate in the economy.' It's not just individuals and households being affected by high power prices. When retail prices increase, wholesale power is pricier, too, although the cost fluctuates a lot more than a household plan. Manufacturers across New Zealand have said that power costs threaten their businesses; Winstone Pulp and Oji Fibre Solutions, paper mills that closed last year, said that the cost of electricity in New Zealand was one reason they couldn't continue. 'We should be in a position where our country has abundant renewable energy that is low cost and secure,' said Karen Boyes, the executive director of the Major Electricity Users Group, in an interview on Q + A in July. Fluctuating power prices make it hard for businesses to plan for the future. 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New Zealand's electricity market operates as a group of private companies, with generators Contact, Meridian, Genesis and Mercury publicly listed and traded on the New Zealand (and for some also the Australian) stock exchange. But the New Zealand government owns 51% of each company (except Contact, which is fully privately owned), meaning it gets paid dividends from electricity profits. Ed Miller, an economist, has calculated that the government gets nearly a billion dollars of returns from dividends and taxes from electricity generation each year – the figure was $980m in 2024. The companies also return money to their private shareholders, $655.8m in 2024. That's money that isn't being invested in generation – and, Miller argues, means individuals and businesses will continue to experience high electricity prices. The scarcity drives the price of electricity up, decreasing how much generating companies are willing to invest in increasing the amount of power they make. The power companies exist under the State-Owned Enterprises Act, which expects them to maximise returns, without the government making business decisions. 'That's a function of the market – the incentives to build [generation] relative to the risks aren't right,' Fuge says. It's worth noting that generators are investing in growing how much power they make as well as figuring out ways to make existing assets more efficient. Better batteries will increase Meridian's solar output; Genesis opened a new solar farm in Canterbury in April; Contact's geothermal plant near Taupō, which cost $924m to build, has been running at full capacity since November 2024; Mercury is building dozens of new wind turbines in Northland, and there are myriad other projects which have been approved or designed, though construction hasn't started yet. 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'The rules of the market presented to the gentailers are not to change generation or have the retailers price cheaper,' Fuge says. 'But if you don't like the rugby being played, you don't blame the players, you change the rules.' Miller says that increasing the incentives for gentailers would require reimagining the State-Owned Enterprise Act, which mentions dividends rather than profit. In the law, there's no reason for companies to reinvest profits to grow generation, or to support electricity users in need, whether they are low-income people or struggling businesses. Instead of David Seymour's vision of asset sales, the state would have to retain partial ownership of the electricity companies, rather than selling off its remaining 51% share. 'As long as electricity is a private market, we will contend with this,' he says. 'There's no single magic bullet,' Fuge points out. But with an estimated 40,000 people having had their power cut off in the last year due to not paying bills, there are lots of reasons to rethink the system that sells electricity.
Otago Daily Times
15 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Social media firms 'turning a blind eye' to child abuse material: watchdog
Australia's internet watchdog has said the world's biggest social media firms are still 'turning a blind eye' to online child sex abuse material on their platforms, and said YouTube in particular had been unresponsive to its enquiries. In a report released on Wednesday, the eSafety Commissioner said YouTube, along with Apple AAPL.O, failed to track the number of user reports it received of child sex abuse appearing on their platforms and also could not say how long it took them to respond to such reports. The Australian government decided last week to include YouTube in its world-first social media ban for teenagers, following eSafety's advice to overturn its planned exemption for the Alphabet-owned Google's GOOGL.O video-sharing site. 'When left to their own devices, these companies aren't prioritising the protection of children and are seemingly turning a blind eye to crimes occurring on their services,' eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant said in a statement. 'No other consumer-facing industry would be given the licence to operate by enabling such heinous crimes against children on their premises, or services.' A Google spokesperson said 'eSafety's comments are rooted in reporting metrics, not online safety performance', adding that YouTube's systems proactively removed over 99% of all abuse content before being flagged or viewed. 'Our focus remains on outcomes and detecting and removing (child sexual exploitation and abuse) on YouTube,' the spokesperson said in a statement. Meta META.O - owner of Facebook, Instagram and Threads, three of the biggest platforms with more than 3 billion users worldwide - has said it prohibits graphic videos. The eSafety Commissioner, an office set up to protect internet users, has mandated Apple, Discord, Google, Meta, Microsoft MSFT.O, Skype, Snap SNAP.N and WhatsApp to report on the measures they take to address child exploitation and abuse material in Australia. The report on their responses so far found a 'range of safety deficiencies on their services which increases the risk that child sexual exploitation and abuse material and activity appear on the services'. Safety gaps included failures to detect and prevent livestreaming of the material or block links to known child abuse material, as well as inadequate reporting mechanisms. It said platforms were also not using 'hash-matching' technology on all parts of their services to identify images of child sexual abuse by checking them against a database. Google has said before that its anti-abuse measures include hash-matching technology and artificial intelligence. The Australian regulator said some providers had not made improvements to address these safety gaps on their services despite it putting them on notice in previous years. 'In the case of Apple services and Google's YouTube, they didn't even answer our questions about how many user reports they received about child sexual abuse on their services or details of how many trust and safety personnel Apple and Google have on-staff,' Inman Grant said.
NZ Herald
20 hours ago
- NZ Herald
Exploring Barossa, South Australia: Wine, terroir and the art of winemaking
Vino Lokal. Photo / Supplied In the Barossa Valley, Roman Travers meets the passionate winemakers, bold varietals and warm-hearted locals shaping the future of Australian wine. 'People don't have patience anymore. The average wine is bought and drunk within 25 minutes of purchasing.' Katie Spain is the Australian pocket rocket of wine writing.
