Andrew Dickens Afternoons

LISTEN TO CALLER GARY TALK WITH ANDREW DICKENS ABOUT HIS OWN CHILDHOOD
About eight per cent of New Zealand children have social, emotional and/or behavioural problems, and another seven per cent are on the borderline of having issues, Ministry of Health statistics say.
The numbers have major implications for health and disability services as they could indicate future mental health issues — the largest contributor to disability statistics for 15- to 24-year-olds and about 35 per cent of all health issues for people of that age.
That eight per cent figure represents about 57,000 people and suggests better screening of children for mental health issues is needed to ensure no-one missed out on treatment.
Issues identified included emotional symptoms, peer problems, hyperactivity and conduct problems.
"It is possible to detect social, emotional and behavioural difficulties at an early age, which may be indicative of an underlying mental health problem," a new ministry report said. "Being able to do so is important as it provides opportunities for intervention.
"Early intervention in response to difficulties can reduce the risk or severity of certain types of mental disorders later in childhood, adolescence or adulthood."
A government-ordered inquiry into mental health and addiction services is now holding public meetings around New Zealand gathering information for a report due on October 31.
Its terms of reference highlight youth as a key group for consideration.
The ministry report was based on information collected through the New Zealand Health Survey over a three-year period, using a sample of 10,457 children.
Children were assessed through a "strengths and difficulties questionnaire", an internationally used tool to chart children's development.
Boys were more likely to have concerning total difficulty scores than girls and Maori children were more likely to have concerning scores than non-Maori children.
Asian children were less likely to be experiencing difficulties than non-Asian children.
Scores were comparable for Pacific Island and non-Pacific Island children.

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So Shane Jones has been in the select committee this week, facing questions about the Provincial Growth Fund.
Of course, he faced rigorous questioning as to whether he’s using it as a political slush fund to reward New Zealand First’s friends and win favour in the party’s heartland.
It’s an easy accusation to make, so far the prime beneficiaries of Shane’s largesse has been in the North where both he and Winston Peters have their power base.
His answer was, to the winner goes the booty and that the North was first up and best dressed. Shane fancies himself as an orator and he’s fond of a flowery flourish but I’m not a fan. It diminishes his authority and reduces my confidence.
But that said there is no doubt that the North is starting to feel a little bit better about itself. In fact, it was the star of the latest ASB regional growth survey. They’ve seen Four-point-six per cent employment growth, 5.2 per cent in retail sales, 10.3 per cent house price growth and a 19 per cent growth in construction.
So it’s worth a helping hand because these figures come off a low base and the North still has a long way to go.
The question is whether Shane Jones and his merry NZ First team have an eye for winners and an eye for the opportunities that are sustainable and able to grow under their own steam.
I worried about that when the Provincial Growth Fund granted just over $6 million to restore New Plymouth’s cathedral. While it was a great feel good, and while it will temporarily increase construction work in the region it fails my ongoing benefit test. Once the cathedral is all fixed up the benefit will dissipate.
After some initial scepticism that the Provincial Growth Fund's $3 billion in 3 years was the ultimate in pork barrel politics, I’ve come to the conclusion that it could, in fact, be a small stroke of genius.
I had a number of callers yesterday raving about the energy and zip in the regions these days. One even went as far to suggest there was a silver lining in the cities housing crises as it was prompting house price refugees to stream into the regions in one of the biggest population re-distributions we’ve seen in a long time and that’s not a bad thing.
Judicious use of the Provincial Growth Fund could fertilise this and make New Zealand a more balanced economy and country.
But that ball rests in Shane Jones’ court. So far I doubt his claim that the North’s applications were the best dressed but it’s early days and I urge the economic advisors from around the country to put their thinking caps on and front foot the Minister with outstanding, achievable and sustainable ideas.
Whatever you do don’t sit around waiting for the magic wand to be waved over your town or Mr Jones will wave it all away on his hobby horses.
 

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There are calls for the Government to invest more into music venues for underage punters.
Ignite Programme says that it is becoming harder for young Kiwis to go to concerts, as strict liquor licensing laws prevent them from attending gigs.
The programme’s leader, Savina Fountain, told Andrew Dickens that the limited choice in venues is holding back rising music acts, who can’t find anywhere to perform.
"The number of venues that are decreasing and shutting down, it's a scary thought, but especially for these young people."
Fountain says she has spoken with the Prime Minister about the issue. 
The Ignite Programme is aiming to give children more opportunities to get a foot in the door. For more on their work, go to www.igniteprogramme.org.nz
LISTEN TO SAVINA FOUNTAIN TALK WITH ANDREW DICKENS ABOVE

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There are some mornings when I step outside myself and look around my town and wonder at how busy and interconnected it is. This morning was one of those mornings.
I headed out just after seven to get a warrant of fitness. I stopped off at the local café to get a coffee.  The barista was already busy and gave me a cheery good morning.  At the testing station a mechanic also said good morning and got cracking on without delay.  The woman at the counter had seen my number plate and had already started the paperwork before I walked in the door.
Waiting for the car a man was mowing the berm. Some service station workers were busy and then I saw a man with three medicine balls walking into the gym equipment store across the road.
Everybody busy working alone yet the result was keeping the whole town moving forward in their own little way.
The way the machine works always blows my mind but today I looked with different eyes as I wondered whether each of these people beavering away were being paid fairly for what they do.
Yesterday the government announced a fair pay working group to be chaired by Sir Jim Bolger to look at what was fair pay on a sector by sector basis.
Fair Pay Agreements will set minimum standards for wages and employment conditions like allowances, weekend and night rates, hours of work and leave arrangements for all workers within industries.
The agreements will be set through collective bargaining between unions and employers within each sector, without the need for bargaining with each individual employer.
Meanwhile, strikes and lockouts will not be permitted in negotiations for Fair Pay Agreements.
Remember we already have a basic fair pay agreements.  It’s covered in the minimum wage legislation and labour laws.
Fair Pay Agreements have been Labour’s policy for a while but as is this government’s style it’s a compromise.  It stops short of being a collective wage bargaining policy because it only determines minimum conditions.
That makes it a double edge sword.  Set minimum conditions too high and employers will feel the squeeze but set them too low and employers will take advantage and pay employees less than they’re actually worth.  Ask the good teachers who are already paid the same as bad ones.
Fair pay is a very subjective thing.  Was the lawnmower I saw this morning worth as much as service station worker or barista?  Was the woman in the testing station who was very efficient at her job worth more than the surly admin staff I’ve met there before? And can anyone in a head office know the various worth of each of us.
I’ve often heard employers talk about great workers  and say they’re worth their weight in gold. The question has always been do employers put their gold where their mouth is.
At the end of the day the working relationship is between individuals and that is where the responsibility for fairness lies.  I feel that when committees take over fair pay negotiations there will be just as many winners and losers as we already have.
By the way.  I got the warrant.

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The Anthony Peden affair is part of a worrying trend.
Peden was the boss of the New Zealand cycling squad who abruptly walked away from his job in recent days.  Subsequently stories have come out saying that there was a bullying and intimidatary regime under his watch.  There were concerns about a drinking culture and finally that he was having an inappropriate relationship.
Now all this may be true but at the same time is any of this actually our business.
There are accusations that all the news stories are part of a smear campaign run by disgruntled athletes and their acquaintances.  And this is where it gets worrying.  Cycling New Zealand processed Peden’s performance and behaviour and the 2 parted ways and that’s where it should end for the coach.
He’s lost his job and his reputation within his chosen career but is there any need for the wider population to hear about his alleged faults?
It’s part of the modern complaint where an allegation is all it takes to convict. The rise of the MeToo mindset has made employers and managing authorities wary of collateral damage but as it stands Peden is being slowly crucified in the court of public opinion.
Underneath it all is the nagging worry that Cycling New Zealand is another sporting organisation where the management is a little out of their depth.
Anthony Peden was always an alpha male.  He was always brutally competitive.  His nickname was the Weapon for goodness sake. He lost his place at the Athens Olympics because of a drug scandal.  He didn’t take a performance enhancing drug but he did take a banned substance and at the time Cycling New Zealand scolded him for not consulting his coach. He is a driven, confident island of man.  He’s Australian after all.
So in taking him on Cycling New Zealand must have known this was a man who would take no prisoners.
This winner-take-all attitude could explain the bullying and intimidating behaviour.  It takes a certain single-mindedness and aggression to reach the top in any sport.  So with the Weapon in place you have to wonder whether Cycling New Zealand then put in checks and balances so that he didn’t bite off more than anyone could chew. You have to wonder why such a coach was also in charge of selection which is coming home to bite everyone
In allowing Cycling New Zealand and High Performance Sport New Zealand to now leak like a sieve about Anthony’s shortcomings is also a sign of poor management.
New Zealand is a small country and the born leaders are few and far between.  So many under-qualified people are being put in positions where they fail.  Ex athletes do not automatically make the best coaches.  Weekend Warrior administrators do not become high quality professional managers when there sport suddenly receives a wad of cash.
And it’s not just sport.  Good nurses do not automatically become great bosses of a ward.  Great teachers are not necessarily the people to become CEOs of the million dollar businesses our bigger schools have become.
We have an awful lot of enthusiastic amateurs running big budget enterprises and their boards of control need to keep a much closer eye on them or it all falls apart as Cycling New Zealand is starting to find out.

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A new documentary on Rhythm and Vines has got many reminiscing about their favourite festival memories. 
Andrew Dickens is amongst them - the doco has reminded him of his own experiences at the Sweet Water Festival in 1982.
LISTEN TO ANDREW'S STORY ABOVE

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Reading the paper this morning it’s very tempting to think that this little nation of ours is well down the road to hell, travelling in a handcart.
One article today on business confidence is even headlined 'Business is heading into a winter of discontent'.
We hear of loan sharks charging 800 per cent interest.  Mycoplasma Bovis is a billion dollar problem for one of our biggest exports. People earning $100,000 are now being classed as working poor.  Property values are at risk from climate change. Bailed killers will soon be on the streets slaughtering us all. Aucklanders are being hit with a fuel tax and the AA warns of dark days ahead if change isn’t quickly forthcoming. The globe is now in a trade war and the final nail in the coffin is that it’s really really cold for this time of year.
Sometimes it’s worth just taking a step back.
The billion-dollar bovis problem is certainly a thing but you need some perspective.  The cull will only affect two per cent of our national herd.  An economist says its effects will be similar to a bad drought and we seem to have those every couple of years.  It’s a hit sure but it’s not the end of days.  So calm the farm
The fuel tax in Auckland will hit the pocket, but as the cartoonist Emmerson points out today, in real terms it will cost you a glass of wine a week or half an avocado or a bus trip a day. It will have an effect but it won’t stop anyone from driving to the supermarket. The AA’s warning of dark days was for political effect.
The claim that people earning $100,000 a year are feeling the pinch needs some investigation as well.  That survey was on household incomes which include a lot of households with four flatmates all earning $25,000 each. There are working poor but very few of the individuals earning 100 grand are part of them.  Again the figures were distorted for maximum effect.
Another hyped fact was the jail population of gang members increasing 350 per cent while the general population increased just five per cent.  But that’s a percentage figure.  There are now just 90 extra gang members in jail out of the 3000 increase.  So are jails are not full just because of gangs.
And finally, business confidence is in free fall.  The business confidence index is the least realistic measure you can have.  It really is just a bunch of stats wonks asking businesses how do you feel.
Well, surrounded by overhyped misery headlines it’s no wonder they feel worried/
The reality is that three per cent growth is predicted for the next three years and the budget has been analysed as generally business-friendly.
Maybe as New Zealanders, we’re accustomed to only seeing clouds and never silver linings, but it’s important that we don’t talk ourselves into a funk, get depressed and stop trying.
We’re a small country with a few problems but vastly better off than the majority of everyone else on this planet.  So chin up Kiwis.  Things are not nearly as bad as the misery brigade would have you believe.

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The Government has set up a taskforce to deal with the greater than expected impact of China's ban on mixed recycling.
China stopped importing recyclable materials last year, affecting many countries around the world, including Australia.
New Zealand had been sending 15 million kilograms of recyclables that we can't process here, to China each year. 
Associate Environment Minister Eugenie Sage says small stockpiles have been building around the country, and it's clear the situation is not sustainable.
She says the taskforce will lead a coordinated response together with waste and business sectors, to find a solution.
Newstalk ZB caller, Craig, rang in and talked to Andrew Dickens about the difficulties New Zealand faces in dealing with our ever-expanding recyclable waste, and possible solutions.
LISTEN ABOVE

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Yesterday I was doing talkback on a couple of related stories.
The first was on the thoughts of Dr Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish education expert who’s just started at the University of New South Wales. He believes all smartphones should be banned at primary school and managed at secondary school because they are a distraction and impediment to learning.
This is a similar view to France who banned phones in school in 2017. Then their education minister said "These days the children don't play at break time anymore. They are just all in front of their smartphones, and from an educational point of view, that's a problem."
That dovetailed nicely into another story out of Lower Hutt, where a survey showed that 88% of kids don’t play every day and 96% of parents said their children weren’t playing daily.
In a social experiment, the kids were given chalk and told to draw pictures of what they do at home. The kids drew TVs, phones, gaming setups and one kid even drew the YouTube logo.
The 2 stories show just how in thrall our next generation is to screens. It showed how many parents have forgotten the art of letting their kids play and how many just throw a tablet at their children to keep them quiet and entertained.
After the show, I was contacted by Jim Young who’s just written a book on project management for businesses and he included an excerpt from the book which I think is very relevant
He argues that project management is not learnt at school but it is learnt through play.
Play is the key to the physical, mental, intellectual and social well-being of our children. For children, play is serious learning and the work of childhood. But it seems that the current parental zeitgeist is one of worry and fear for our children, often far out of proportion to the actual dangers involved. Yet bullrush is how he first learned about the essential ingredients of risk, reward, and group dynamics - all during the lunch break.
He directed me to watch “The Secret Life of Four Year Olds” a spy-cam documentary recently shown on TVNZ. It is about the leadership, planning, conflict, mischief, lies, rivalry, pestering, negotiation, dictatorship, decision-making, recruiting, gang warfare, delegation, rejection and violence of preschool life. It’s terrifying, but perhaps good preparation for a robust life as project managers and participants in the real world.
That said, in the documentary, several participants seem more interested in playing computer games than making friends.
So it’s a reminder to the new generation of parents and kids that taking the screens away and kicking the kids out the door is more educational than any Ted talk they’ll see on an iPad.
The message is let the children play. It’s the greatest educational tool in the world.

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It’s been an entertaining week of listening to Mike Hosking railing against Auckland Airport.
When he gets on a roll, the tsunami of verbiage is something to behold as Adrian Littlewood the CEO found out when he showed up to defend his company.  The trick with Mike is to start talking and never stop or else he’s in like a robber’s dog.
Now I don’t have too much beef with the airport but that might be because I rarely travel overseas. But it is fair to say that the most recent time I was at the airport I was amazed that the whole thing was in such a state of disrepair and it seems permanently in a state of reconstruction.
It smacks to me of a programme of renovation that was always too late and too little.
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Now the airport admits the extraordinary growth in tourist numbers has caught them a little short.  But they’re countering that with a $2 billion reconstruction that will sort them out for the next 30 years.  It is the largest private construction job in the country. They’re on track to get their act together.
But as Mike pointed out this morning this could have been avoided.  The airport company have been very dedicated to shareholder return, which includes the Auckland Councils near 30 per cent stake, who, by the way, has been very quiet on the whole affair.
Over the past decade, hundreds of millions of dollars have been paid to shareholders.  Including one year when the return totalled 102 per cent of profit. Now this is great news if you’re an investor but not if you’re maintaining your assets.  Of course the airport had budget for capex but it’s fair to assume they could have invested more earlier and they had the wherewithal to do it.
Now I compare that to the announcement from Mainfreight a day or two ago.  They had a great year and while they paid a return to shareholders they also rewarded one of their greatest stakeholders, their staff.  Out of their record profit they gave $21.7 million in bonuses to their employees.
This is a great investment and a sign of a company who understand that the success of a company is not just the profits they return to shareholders, but appropriate investment in all facets of their operation, including their people.
It’s always tempting as a CEO to go to the board and the shareholders and give them good news and figures.  But if you get it wrong and under invest then eventually the birds come home to roost. It’s a lesson for all businesses.

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