An ill fated love affair

...between a vacuum cleaner and a wall board sander. Things with the sander got too hot for our little sucker.

Late nights putting the house to rights

The man whose mother was a pirate

When I was at primary school in 1988 I was lucky enough to get a part in the first school operetta  production of Margaret Mahy's book The man whose mother was a pirate. 


I remember Margaret Mahy coming to a rehearsal and giving all of us glowing encouragement as we sung our hearts out. After the rehearsal she took my script, drew a picture of a lion on the cover and wrote a note for me on it. She was a celebrity to kids and I packed that script away with all the other assorted, treasured bits of paper you collect at school. 


Like many others my age I have a stack of well thumbed Mahy books that I now read to my two kids. On hearing the sad news that she passed away earlier this week I hunted through the bits of paper I've managed to hold on to over the years looking for that play script. Sadly, I think it's long gone. But in an old file I did find this clipping below from the Christchurch Press.


These boys can more than likely grow their own beards these days!


RIP Margaret Mahy, & thanks for the memories you're still passing on. 

Iwi play broker role in employment relations dispute

The news that AFFCO and meat workers are close to resolving their differences with a new collective agreement started creeping out today.  It seems that an iwi leadership group has been a catalyst in the process. Tuku Morgan and Ken Mair among others are mentioned as playing a part between the Talleys and the Meat Workers Union.

I've not followed this dispute in detail. I'm also very green on the workings of Maoridom. But I am interested to know if this iwi group by lending their support to an employment relations issue, as a broker between deadlocked parties, is unique and something rather special.

Andrew Talley is reported on the Stuff website as saying this type of relationship is new, and it seems to have been successful.

"We have both sought to learn from this dispute and ensure that moving forward we build in the opportunity for a new type of relationship between the company, the union and its members.  We also both value the ongoing commitment from Iwi to support this relationship"  Andrew Talley said on behalf of Affco.

It is interesting for iwi to be in the role of referee in an employment relations dispute where they could have watched from the sidelines. However, the members of this iwi group have certainly been involved in a fair number of deadlocks over the years and this result, whether it comes off or not, may be seen as turning those learnings into a new role, one of real leadership for the country as a whole.

Read the joint statement made today after 78 days of the lockout here:
http://www.mwu.org.nz/2012/05/21/significant-progress-in-affco-dispute/

DesignLine - could staff still save it?

DesignLine staff were back at work yesterday presumably building buses with less focus than they would normally have as they speculated on their futures.

I can only imagine that the chat would have been over potential buyers, redundancy options, how they'd be entering a job market already flooded by people after the earthquake, and how their lucky break to still be in work after what had happened in the city had finally run out.

They were a well-established manufacturer in Rolleston. Listening to the locals canvassed on radio the other day they sounded genuinely surprised at the situation.

I started thinking about the possibility of local communities buying into companies that should work on the face of it, but have gone bust.

The first example that came to my mind were the various supporter-owned football clubs in the UK's lower leagues, the most well known being AFC Wimbledon. I follow a little, formerly supporter-owned football team in the UK and it's not an uncommon model in other codes with many AFL teams being supporter-owned.

I guess it's reasonable to expect a groundswell of support from a community to financially back their local sporting club. Sport is so closely linked with community pride and the business plan is built on engaging and entertaining their supporter base so locals reach into their pockets.

Whether this holds for communities supporting manufacturing businesses they care about, but don't have such a close interaction with is another matter; especially given the post-'quake economic conditions facing people in Christchurch.

Examples of staff buying out businesses are common. Many businesses even encourage a degree of staff ownership with share offers. A bank my partner worked for rewarded staff with shares no doubt to give employees a greater stake and interest in driving the performance of the bank.

I wonder if any of those conversations around the shop floor yesterday were about the possibility of taking control over their own destiny by pooling their resources and putting in an offer to buy the company.

If they could pull it off they'd have more collective drive to get DesignLine performing again. No doubt they could also unburden the company from it's debt laden owners in the US.

My brother-in-law's a banker and was interested in community micro-finance initiatives while working in Melbourne. I started thinking about how his experience may apply to my speculation about those DesignLine staff and got on to a couple of good Australian sites on how staff and communities can buy into their own futures: Social Traders and the Australian Employee Buyout Centre.

A vision to see our country fly

I was lucky to see Sir Paul Callaghan share his aspirations for our country last week.

He's a very thoughtful and convincing man and his vision was described as 'seductive' by someone I spoke with afterwards. I had to agree.

What I liked about Sir Paul was his plan to get this little country's economy performing to our social and environmental expectations.

The crux of his plan lies in shifting our effort into industries which can trade our intellectual capital on the global market.

We are a nation of clever people and we should make the most of it from our own shores and not let our brightest slip away. When he put up the OECD stats on how well our education system performs I was surprised that we rank so highly.

Other surprising realities for me were our current focus on tourism (and to a lesser extent our niche viticulture industry) not measuring up when it comes to the productivity of our country. They just don't bring in enough revenue to the country per person employed in these sectors to make us a wealthier and more liveable nation. He argued that if we continue to focus on tourism we'd become poorer (because we'd have more people working in low-wage jobs) and we'd be overrun by tourists at the expense of our environment.

Where the dairy sector does perform well on this productivity measure (around 3x better than tourism); the country is still working to find the right balance between it's economic contribution and environmental footprint.

I guess for him agriculture can only ever take NZ so far economically before the environmental trade-off is too great; and if we're to do better for ourselves we've got to find other random niches where we can trade on a resource that pays well and one that's not limited by our land - our brains.

Sir Paul's alternative is to give the entrepreneurs, the scientists and the 'crazies' a fair crack at diversifying our economy and finding those global niches. Investment in wide-ranging science and technology programmes from government is something we desperately need to give his vision a kick-start.

For me he struck a perfect balance between a society's needs for environmental, social and economic sustainability. He has undoubted vision, a thoughtful plan to get there and charisma to boot. I was enchanted and convinced.

He tells it better than I do so watch his theory here:

http://www.ecasttv.co.nz/program_detail.php?program_id=21&channel_id=84&group_id=73

An amusing joke

Two climbers were climbing roped together in the Scottish Highlands. They saw some eagles soaring above them. Later the climbers slipped over the edge of a precipice and unfortunately plunged to their deaths. Their souls left their mortal bodies and ascended to heaven. As they rose they saw the same eagles and one soul cried out to them, 'Ah - Eagles'. But the eagles, being polite, decided to say nothing.