The Hoon

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with special guests Felicity Roxburgh, the executive director of the New Zealand International Business Forum, and Patrick Reynolds, the transport activist and Auckland Council candidate.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* A discussion between Peter and Bernard about the dismantling of Kāinga Ora and the history of socal housing, given Peter’s feature about Kāinga Ora is due to be published in The Listener this weekend.

* A discussion with Felicity about Donald Trump putting a 15% tariff rate on New Zealand exports and the future of globalisation.

* A discussion with Patrick about Chris Bishop’s announcement this week about the replacement of fuel taxes with Road User Charges, and another blowout in the cost of the Ōtaki to north of Levin Road of National Significance to $2.1 billion.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

I spoke with Victoria University of Wellington political scientist Natalia Albert this week about her excellent substack post titled: The Politics of Trust: What the Wellbeing Era Got Right (and Wrong).

I highly recommend it, along with Natalia’s many previous posts on the quirks and features of Aotearoa’s deeply frustrating political economy. She wrote this week about trust in Government, in particular after the previous Labour Government’s detour into talking about ‘Wellbeing’ as some sort of governing framework.

We got to talking about how the nature of politics has become increasingly performative, especially in our social-media-soaked worlds, which are now full of tribes shouting at each other to get attention in a time of dwindling attention spans. But why exactly has this led to an obvious erosion in trust in the arms of Government and other institutions of authority?

We talked about these and other things in the video above, which is available to all, as part of my public interest mandate to cover issues in our political economy, such as housing, poverty and climate.

I have always been surprised when I’ve asked Finance Ministers and Prime Ministers why the policies they won elections on just never seem to be implemented in full, or in a way that makes peoples lives better.

They have often told me there was a wall of objections, frustrations and an enervating status quo bias inside ministries working in tandem with well-connected industry groups that made things much more difficult than they expected. The common reason they’re given when told to ‘talk to the hand’ is the policy would not allow the Government to return to a Budget surplus fast enough to keep debt down around a ‘fiscally prudent’ level of 20-30% of GDP, and that Government should aim to be no bigger than 30% of GDP.

This rigorously enforced (by Treasury) set of financial guidelines has actually been the bi-partisan consensus for the last 30 years. It led to sinking lids being put on Education, Health, Welfare, Infrastructure and Housing investment and spending whenever possible, and has bred a culture of avoiding ongoing spending commitments that would lift the size of Government beyond 30% of GDP. Even the Greens agreed to this ‘fiscal responsibility framework’ before the 2017 election.

Yet it’s never really been explained to either voters or to MPs and ministers themselves. They eventually learn it through a process of countless cabinet committee meetings, Treasury-advice-laden cabinet papers and the remorseless financial logic of everything, everything always having to serve the ‘Fiscal North Star’ of returning to surplus.

Meanwhile, politicians and voters still believe all of the things they want can be achieved with the Government keeping public debt low, limiting itself to less than 30% of GDP and not taxing capital gains on residential land.

In the end, politicians make the promises and don’t deliver.

There’s a discussion of these conundrums and more in the discussion above.

Many thanks to Natalia.

Ngā Mihi Nui.

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman, plus special guest Auckland City Councillor Angela Dalton.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* a discussion about the events in Gaza and New Zealand’s position on recognising the Palestinian Authority as a state;

* the Trump administration’s rescinding of the long-standing finding that greenhouse gas emissions endanger human health, removing the legal foundation for U.S. greenhouse gas regulations (Reuters); and

* evidence of a doubling of homelessness in Auckland presented to the Council’s Community Committee chaired by Angela Dalton on Tuesday (meeting Agenda pages 9-11)

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

There are thousands of hectares worth of hot steel roofs on warehouses and factories in our biggest cities, but few have solar panels on them that could act as virtual power plants for those factories and the homes, schools, hospitals, offices and shops that are often nearby. Anyone flying into Auckland and Christchurch airports can look down and see the biggest missed opportunity for renewable energy and resilience just sitting there, radiating heat back up at the plane on a sunny day.

It was particularly frustrating to think about during last winter’s energy crisis when many large industrial and manufacturing facilities had to suspend or close their operations permanently because the spot power price deals they were on made them uneconomic.

So why hasn’t it happened yet?

I spoke with FortHill Property Fund General Manager Nick Maier this morning about the fund’s latest $50 million capital raising exercise, which it plans to use to buy more new warehouses and factory buildings in Auckland and Christchurch.

The fund already has $432 million worth of these buildings, which are in hot demand, are 100% tenanted with an average lease length of 8.2 years. That’s not too unusual in the wake of the logistics boom of the last decade, driven partly by the switch towards online delivery. The unique and interesting thing is Forthill’s property builder, Calder Stewart, is building them so they are capable of hosting solar panels on their roofs from the start, which avoids the extra cost of retro-fitting in later years.

Forthill has already started putting solar panels on its new warehouses. It plans to put 8,000 panels on 20 such buildings, giving them a generating capacity of more than 4 million kilowatt hours.

The full conversation with Nick is in the video above. The key takeaways I took from the chat were:

* It’s still more expensive and difficult to ‘retrofit’ existing warehouses with solar panels, given some don’t have the structural strength in their roofs or the wiring systems to connect easily to;

* the cost of panels and the cost of spot electricity makes the economics of building new warehouses with stronger structures and panels installed from the start much more attractive;

* Foothill doesn’t own the panels, as it simply rents the space to Calder Stewart Energy, which installs and own the panels and offers long-term contracts to building tenants that match their lease terms;

* Calder Stewart is not installing panels across all of the available roof space because the market and regulatory arrangements are not there for the electricity to be sold back into the grid;

* Other countries such as France allow tenants to have multiple electricity retailers they can access through a single point, which makes the economics of virtual grids and solar power exporting and buy-backs more viable; and,

* Nick suggests regulatory reform is needed to make that more viable.

Calder Stewart built the warehouse below in Christchurch in 2022 for its initial tenant, Komatsu, with 133 solar panels to supply up to 50 kilowatt or 50% of Komatsu’s daily power needs.

Chapters:

00:00 Introduction to Renewable Energy in Industrial Properties

02:23 The Economics of Solar Panel Installation

05:25 Tenant Relationships and Power Management

07:59 Innovative Partnerships in Energy Solutions

10:30 Energy Monitoring and Sustainability Initiatives

15:47 Challenges and Future of Renewable Energy in New Zealand

Ka kite ano

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman, plus special guests Jessica Palairat from Lawyers for Climate Action and Alan Pollard from Civil Contractors New Zealand about the news of the week.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* a discussion about the ICJ’s climate ruling with Jessica and Cathrine.

* a discussion about Gaza with Robert.

* a discussion about Civil Contractors’ annual Teletrac Navman survey of the industry.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman and special guest Helen Clark about the news of the week.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* a discussion about research showing East Asia’s cleanup of its atmosphere has accelerated climate warming.

* a discussion about how New Zealand might respond to an American suggestion we commit to helping to defend Taiwan against a Chinese attack.

* Bernard mentioned this deep-dive article about urban planning.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guest Cathrine Dyer about the week’s news in geopolitics and climate, along with special guests Professor Jonathan Boston from Victoria University of Wellington and Professor Wolfgang Rack from University of Canterbury.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* a discussion about research showing rising Southern Oceans surface salinity and declining sea ice with climate scientist and Antarctic ice specialist Wolfgang Rack. Cathrine mentioned this Katharine Hayhoe post on LinkedIn about conspiracy theories that cloud-seeding caused this week’s Texas floods.

* a discussion about an independent experts’ report this week on climate adaptation with Jonathan Boston, who has also written a comment piece on it over at Newsroom.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Robert Patman and Cathrine Dyer about the week’s news in geopolitics and climate.

This week’s Hoon featured:

* a discussion over research showing the sensitivity to climate change of extreme weather events in Aotearoa-NZ.

* a chat about an application to take Winston Peters, David Seymour, Christopher Luxon, Peter Beck and Judith Collins to the International Criminal Court.

* CICTAR’s Edward Miller talking about his report on UBER’s tax arrangements in Aotearoa-NZ.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-host Peter Bale talking with regular guests Robert Patman and Cathrine Dyer about the week’s news in geopolitics and climate.

This week’s Hoon featured special guests:

author, historian and a former colleague from Reuters, former Tehran bureau chief Jonathan Lyons;

professor of international law Treasa Dunworth

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night features co-hosts Bernard Hickey and Peter Bale talking with regular guests Robert Patman and Cathrine Dyer about the week’s news in geopolitics and climate.

This week’s Hoon featured special guests:

* author, historian and a former colleague from Reuters, former Tehran bureau chief Jonathan Lyons;

* Noted author and critic of Israeli policy, Antony Loewenstein talking about this week’s events in Iran and Israel; and,

* New Zealand economist Andrea Black on her Post Op-Ed on Budget 2025’s investment boost policy.

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in this year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard