TLDL: This week Peter Bale and I took a 'hoon' around the week's events in a Friday afternoon zoom webinar with a couple of dozen subscribers to The Kākā. This stands in for our weekly ‘News over the horizon’ ‘hoon’ and hopefully will become a regular thing. I welcome your thoughts in the comments below.
We talked about China’s new nuclear silo field, its ‘techlash’ against its own tech giants, China’s appointment of its main ‘Wolf Warrior’ diplomat as its US ambassador, my journey to the Durie Hill elevator to find out more about provincial public transport, and the latest on Covid in New Zealand, Australia, Britain, America and Israel.
There’s plenty more on these topics in Peter’s excellent weekly email news bulletin via The Spinoff. You can subscribe to that here.
Here’s the highlights of the week on The Kākā and a few extra goodies below. Just a reminder that from September 20 I’ll be moving to a paid subscription model for my Dawn Choruses. This Saturday summary will remain free to all subscribers.
Don’t bet on a supermarkets break-up
In Friday’s Dawn Chorus, I looked at the Commerce Commission's scathing draft review of the Foodstuffs/Woolworths duopoly and it's suggestions of state intervention that could include a ‘Kiwishop’ and/or a Telecom-style break-up. However, I wrote why it’s best not to bet on either actually happening.
Rio Tinto profits as NZ’s poor shiver
In Thursday’s Dawn Chorus, I pointed out Rio Tinto’s results, which included a US$9.1b dividend, funded partly by the lower power prices it received after threatening to shut down the Bluff smelter.
I detailed why 100,000 New Zealanders living in energy poverty and our energy market regulators and state-controlled gentailers should know about Rio Tinto’s strong results.
Why China’s Tech crackdown matters
In Wednesday’s Dawn Chorus, I looked at how the increasingly aggressive and controlling approach of China’s Xi Jinping, which New Zealand is slowly calling out in public along with others, is now unnerving the global investment community, particularly in the tech area.
Shares in China’s tech firms listed in New York and Hong Kong slumped early in the week after Tencent’s WeChat instant messaging and payments platform announced a suspension of all new registrations to ‘comply with new regulations’ and after it was banned from exclusive ownership of music rights.
Earlier, shares in Meituan fell sharply after China’s Government ordered tech firms to ensure they paid contractors at least minimum wage and that drivers and riders obeyed traffic rules. Meituan runs China’s version of Uber Eats.
The scandal of NZ’s housing-and-power-driven poverty
In Tuesday’s Dawn Chorus, I wrote we all knew the housing supply and winter power crunch for poor renters was awful, but the latest revelations emphasise the need for even more massive new supply of housing and a root and branch restructure of the electricity market.
It is a scandal that the Government is not building many, many more homes — or at least signalling hundreds of thousands in the years to come — while at the same time prioritising ‘keeping a lid on debt’ in its spending plans. And all at a time when real interest rates on Government debt are negative, and going lower.
It is also a scandal that state-controlled power companies are allowing an independent power retailer specialising in helping poor families needing power in winter to shut its doors while selling cheap power to a smelter.
2021 is now a travel writeoff
In Monday’s Dawn Chorus, I wrote that it’s becoming clearer by the day that the Delta variant of Covid-19, which is 1,000 more transmissible and deadlier for the unvaccinated than earlier variants, will shut down ‘normal’ travel to the rest of the world until well into 2023, if not longer.
Our travel bubble was closed for at least eight weeks this week and it appears Australia will now be closed until it is 80% vaccinated, which is unlikely until next year.
Some longer reads and listens for the weekend
The week that was for the week's end