Latest news with #DavidParker
RNZ News
20-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Greens must reject 'tokenism' to connect with marginalised communities
Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick says her party must confront the uncomfortable reality that it continues to struggle with support from lower-income New Zealanders, despite advocating policies aimed squarely at economic and social justice. In a wide-ranging interview on RNZ's 30 With Guyon Espiner , Swarbrick said the Greens were committed to engaging beyond their traditionally urban, affluent voter base, but acknowledged it was a "big issue we have to crack open". "Lower-income people tend to not vote, and that is a really big issue," she said. "We haven't got there yet, but that's why we need to keep going." Swarbrick admitted the Greens have work to do to be more "present" with marginalised New Zealanders, conceding the left has not always earned trust. Swarbrick said building trust means "actually listening to people and understanding what their issues are, and working with them to create solutions". "We need to have quite a lot of humility in building rapport with communities who do not engage with politics at all. Swarbrick also addressed claims both from political opponents and parts of the left that "progressive" identity politics have contributed to a global backlash enabling the rise of right-leaning populist figures like Donald Trump. Former Labour finance minister David Parker recently criticised the political left's "obsession" with identity issues to the detriment of meaningful progress during his valedictory speech . In response, Swarbrick argued that representation initiatives and material outcomes for society are not mutually exclusive. Green Party co-leader Chloe Swarbrick Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly But she also noted the missteps of superficial diversity efforts that fail to shift power. "Anything other than material redistribution is tokenism." "People are right to be frustrated," she said. "But some of these self-styled strongmen are punching down, scapegoating minority groups instead of confronting the systems that caused inequality in the first place." She pointed the finger instead at other political leaders inflaming culture wars. "If we're going to talk about who's inviting this inflammatory culture war, it's the deputy prime minister deciding to bicker about what bathrooms people can use." Swarbrick also defended her party's proposed wealth tax, a 2.5 percent annual levy on net assets over $2 million, as a necessary structural change. She addressed criticism that such a tax could hurt asset-rich, income-poor homeowners. When asked how the Greens could justify making a widow living on the pension in a family home pay an annual wealth tax of $25,000 or more, Swarbrick was unapologetic, noting the policy includes a deferral mechanism. "If they don't have income at the time, the tax can accumulate against the property." "This is about the top 3 percent," she said. "It unlocks the resources necessary for all of us to live better lives." Swarbrick also backed a wealth transfer tax on large inheritances and gifts, framing it as a matter of fairness. "That income hasn't been earned, it's been passed on. We all belong in this country and have a responsibility to support it." The tax platform is central to the Greens' alternative budget and is expected to be a key issue in the next election campaign. "We've shown people our hand," Swarbrick said. "If we want to have the country that all of us ultimately deserve, we are going to radically need to turn this economy around." While stopping short of confirming openness to a National coalition, Swarbrick said the Greens could work with "anyone" who supports meaningful action on climate and equity. Pressed on whether the Greens would consider governing with National, Swarbrick replied: "Sure. If the National Party were to completely U-turn on their callous, cruel cuts to climate, to science, to people's well-being." She noted some cross-party work on climate adaptation legislation but was critical of National's wider climate approach. "Right now they are knowingly shredding climate action," she said, referencing the party's emphasis on carbon capture technology. Her comments hint towards a more pragmatic stance compared to previous Green leaders, though she made clear any cooperation would require a "demonstrably different" National Party. "The Green Party has always stood for both environmental and social justice," she said. "These were never separate issues." Watch the full conversation with Chloe Swarbrick and Guyon Espiner on 30 With Guyon Espiner . Subscribe to the podcast feed now to get every episode of 30 on your phone when it lands: On Spotify On iHeartRadio On Apple podcasts
Forbes
19-05-2025
- Business
- Forbes
Of Course People Will Hand Their Finances Over To AI Agents
I am convinced that the agentic finance revolution is real and not so far away. And just to be clear, I mean true agentic AI in finance, as in a network of AI-powered software agents acting on your behalf to improve your financial health, and not simply AI agents carrying out financial tasks that you assign to them. But will people really trust bots to do business for them? I think we already know that they will. Let's begin by being clear about what is meant by agentic finance. There is a good paper about this just out from Sapkota et al on "AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenge' (1st May 2025) that helpfully distinguishes between AI agents and agentic AI. It describes AI agents as modular systems for narrow, task-specific automation whereas, by contrast, agentic AI systems represent a true paradigm shift marked by multi-agent collaboration, dynamic task decomposition, persistent memory and what they call "orchestrated autonomy'. This orchestration takes place in an ecosystem comprising, as David Parker describes, an orchestrator as well as what he labels 'super agent(s)' and multiple utility agents. Each of these agents has a specific role and the ability to reason and act in pursuit of a goal. These agents, capable of working with local and remote data sources, have long-term memory so that they can learn and enhance their performance. IBM's Consulting's white paper on "Agentic AI in Financial Services' uses similar concepts, talking about a 'principal agent' that will co-ordinate a network of 'service agents' to operate 'task agents' on the consumer's behalf. (I've also heard people talking about the idea of a "personal CEO', which I think is a useful way of thinking and I rather like the idea of having my own CFO, CISO, CFO and other members of my board working tirelessly to advance my interests across the metaverse.) Given a goal, the network of agents will work on the consumer's behalf (given the right regulatory framework, which is outside the scope of this discussion) to obtain the desired outcome. To give an obvious example, I just had to book a hotel for a personal trip and every step of the process was boring: given the opportunity of saying to a bot 'can you book a hotel for me on these dates near this event' and then forgetting about it, I would do it unhesitatingly. (My bot, given minimal memory, knows which hotel chains I prefer and can easily compare the prices in money and money plus points or points. It knows which cards to use and to ask for a late checkout. There is no need for me to be involved at all.) In the emerging agentic finance ecosystem, my 'CFO' will have a key role, because it will be trusted with access to my bank accounts, payment instruments, investments and other assets. It will be making a whole variety of decisions that I categorise as too boring (eg, payments) or too baffling (eg, pension planning) for me to deal with. For a normal consumer (and I place myself firmly in that category), this will be almost all transactions. There is an obvious question to ask about the transition to Me Inc., and the choice of board members, though: Will people actually do it? That is, will the normal consumer that I referred to earlier be prepared to hand over control of their finances to a network of bots? I think the answer to that question is a resounding yes, and the facts to support this firm conviction are already evident. Age gap. © Helen Holmes (2025). Harvard Business Review reports on a recent survey that shows American's no.1 use of AI is for therapy. Yes, that's right. Therapy. Not search, not recipes for pizza, not preparing court filings or Powerpoint presentations but therapy. In fact, the top three use cases in that report fell under the personal and professional support category, including a brand new use case of "Finding purpose'. It is absolutely clear that the people use bots for therapy are not deluded that they are talking to a conscious being and that they know that they are interacting with an invisible friend in software, but they value the interaction all the same. As one Californian teenager puts it, 'I have a couple mental issues, which I don't really feel like unloading on my friends, so I kind of use my bots like free therapy'. Now, people making friends with bots is hardly new, but it is fair to observe that over the last couple of years the phenomenon has exploded. The number of people with invisible friends is probably already greater than you think. And their relationship with these friends can get very deep. As one woman says of ChatGPT, it is her "companion and partner'. In fact, she says, she finds it expedient to think of it as her boyfriend, because their relationship has "heavy emotional and romantic undertones'. This is not, incidentally, an American phenomenon. The Economist reports on China's most popular virtual partner app Maoxiang, which already has 2.2m monthly active users (almost equally split male-female), and quote a twenty-something chap who created his own bot babe by mashing up Deepseek and WeChat. He says 'it is much cheaper to date an ai girlfriend than a real one' who he claims would take too much time and too many 'financial resources'. (Not good news for those concerned about falling birth rates.) The Economist also quote a married woman who says that unlike her real-life husband, 'with whom she often argues', her bot boyfriend always listens: on the app, she is the 'empress' and her bot is the 'minister of her court' who messages her (and even calls her) throughout the day. Empress? Minister? That sounds awfully like my plan to be dictator-for-life in a virtual realm where my minister of finance deals with boring stuff like banking on my behalf while I get to spend my time in more productive, and more creative, activities. The point here is that it seems to me that if consumers are prepared to share their innermost personal secrets and sexual fantasies with the bots that we already have available to use today, then it does not take much of a stretch of the imagination to see those same consumers trusting an agentic CFO to deal with their sensitive financial matters. Fintechs have no choice but to prepare their strategies for a new world in which customers are replaced by custobots that are 1,000 times smarter.
NZ Herald
18-05-2025
- Politics
- NZ Herald
Danyl McLauchlan: Departure of two key figures illuminate what went wrong under Ardern
Two senior figures are leaving New Zealand politics within a few months of each other: long-serving Labour MP David Parker, who recently delivered his farewell speech in the House, and Auditor-General John Ryan, whose seven-year term spanning most of the Ardern-Hipkins years ends on July 1. With the current coalition
Otago Daily Times
18-05-2025
- Politics
- Otago Daily Times
Letters to the Editor: politics, austerity and customer service
Today's Letters to the Editor from readers cover topics including the circus that is our parliament, austerity reigns at home and abroad, and when telephonists won't answer. MPs' acts beg question who do they represent? The deputy prime minister is right: "Parliament has morphed into an embarrassment to the very people we are here purporting to represent". The New Zealand Herald , in reporting his views, found it necessary to point out that Winston Peters is an octogenarian. As if that was relevant. Age after all, sometimes brings a great deal of wisdom. Put simply, the circus that the members of Te Pāti Māori love to indulge in was absolutely deserving of severe censure, and should have been dealt with far more severely at the time by the ever-increasingly ineffectiveness of the Speaker of the House. Equally deserving of censure was the gutter depth comments aimed at women parliamentarians by a member of the Fourth Estate in her recent opinion piece. That censure seems to be either slow in coming or won't arrive at all. Not often that I would agree with anything the former MP David Parker would say, but his view in his valedictory speech that MMP was perhaps the wrong choice for New Zealand and that we should return to a true House of Representatives is something that we should collectively ponder. Surely a House of Representatives should comprise a body whereby every member is truly a representative of an electorate and not a person selected by a small, mainly anonymous group of party officials? None of these people indulging in this circus represent me and I suspect not too many others. As I was saying My letter (8.5.25) was to highlight the Prime Minister's lie when he said "six years of Labour government utter inaction didn't deliver a single thing for the people of Dunedin on the Dunedin hospital". So having a dislike of lies and especially those from the highest elected position in the country, I wrote my views. I am also disappointed that this government has not "turned a sod" at the site of the proposed inpatients building since they came to power 18 months ago. Time is money. It will be mounting every day, so get on with the build. A stranded whale I would like to comment on the letter from Ewan McDougall (10.5.25) in which he demonstrates a classic case of Trump derangement syndrome. I must admit, it is a rare thing in this modern age for the leader of a Western country to put the interests of his own country first. We all know that Donald Trump gets caught up in his own hubris, but essentially, he wants years of United States moral and industrial decline to be arrested, and America made great again. What a pity we have a leader who does not have the moral or mental capacity to achieve the same result for New Zealand. I would use the analogy of the failed amphibious landing at the Anzio beachhead during World War 2. Winston Churchill said: "I had hoped we were hurling a wildcat on to the shore, but all we got was a stranded whale". This best describes in my view, the Luxon administration so far. He has achieved little of what his voters wanted and expected, which means we may as well have kept the morally bankrupt and divisive Labour government in power. Fresh approach? Does the purchase of age-care facilities by "Warehouse Storage Limited" signal a new approach to community care in New Zealand? ( ODT 7.5.25). John Holmes & Anna Holmes Blaming unnecessary cuts on 'the others' Austerity reigns once again, from a UK Labour government cutting winter fuel payments for millions of pensioners, to Musk's destructive crusade against social investment in the US, to our own coalition's shameless gutting of pay equity legislation. This government acts out of a mix of outdated ideology and a deliberate strategy to obscure real systemic problems while dismantling social investment, all under the guise of "common sense" and "necessity". This playbook is not new. Dating back to the crisis and reactionary movements that followed the Great Depression, it has always relied on scapegoating others. Today, it manifests as fearmongering over immigration and divisive culture war issues, designed to distract from the shared pain caused by cuts to social spending. Blame is shifted on to "the others" — minorities, migrants, and the marginalised — precisely because they are least able to challenge the narrative. As society grows increasingly frustrated with a broken political system and economy, many turn to those offering simple explanations, whether in the form of "necessary cuts" or, more dangerously, blaming "those others". Just pick up the phone Being a telephonist requires customer service skills. It also requires customer knowledge. Not "Sorry I'm busy, send me an email." Excuses don't fix problems. Dunedin is a great city which needs people to promote it, with people who answer the phone. Address Letters to the Editor to: Otago Daily Times, PO Box 517, 52-56 Lower Stuart St, Dunedin. Email: editor@
Kiwiblog
16-05-2025
- Business
- Kiwiblog
Parker's valedictory
Quite a few interesting things said by David Parker in his valedictory speech: Dame Anne Salmond describes the Treaty as an exchange of gifts—tuku—between the Queen for her subjects and a rangatira on behalf of hapū. I agree with Dame Anne that Te Tiriti is not a partnership between races. She criticises both the phrase and that legal construct from the decision of Lord Cooke in the 1987 land case. I don't think those comments from Cooke are a necessary part of the ratio decidendi of that case, and it would be helpful for the senior courts to say so if they are of that view. I agree it would be very useful for the Supreme Court to say exactly that. Cooke actually said that it was akin to a partnership, and as noted that was not a binding view. Kelvin Davis says that article 1 plus article 2 equals article 3. Treaty rights are substantial, but there is no Treaty right to a parallel system of Government that would breach article 1. Does Willie agree? The Greens and TPM certainly don't. Now, there's a debate about the relative merits of a capital income tax or realisation-based capital gains tax (CGT), which I've also advocated for, and either solution is good. And, yes, if I had my way, we would have both with appropriate credit for one against other. Capital income would not be double-taxed. That would allow everyone to get the first $20,000 income tax free, $10K immediately, and the next $10K phased in as CGT revenue grew. I'd fix interest deductibility again, and I'd let everyone inherit $1 million tax-free, be it from trusts or deceased estates. Good God, he wanted to implement a Capital gains Tax, a wealth tax and also a death tax! His death tax would kick in at around the level of the median house price in New Zealand, so basically if you end up owning your own home and die, Parker would tax you! Capital flight is exaggerated. The land, the buildings, the cows, the fish, and the trees stay; even pigs can't fly. This means the means of production remain. This is a view that might have been true in 1900 or 1950 but definitely not in 2025. The means of production are no longer land and buildings. Our most successful global company Xero is not dependent on NZ land and buildings. Same goes for Zuru. We are all hostages to MMP. Why else would so much political capital be frittered away on identity politics while others fan culture wars and size society polarisers? To be clear, MMP drives these behaviours in main parties too. Under first past the post, New Zealand became amongst the best country in the world, but MMP was meant to be better. Perhaps Dr Hooten is right and MMP gets worse over time. It's the people's system, not ours. As things polarise and the hard issues don't get fixed, we should allow the people to, again, make their choice. I'd vote STV. All 120 of us would have to serve in a seat. I agree that STV would be a far better system than MMP. It is still roughly proportional, but it means voters, not party lists, would determine who gets to be an MP – and every MP would have to keep their electorate happy to be re-elected. And if we become a Republic—not high on my list—please avoid giving a president executive powers. Absolutely. They should have the same powers as the Governor-General.
