Yes. What they found for rabbits, back in the day whilst figuring out how to design it, was that they'd always go right up to the fence and then try to dig. If they hit metal then they'd move sideways rather than backwards, so the skirt goes about 40cm outwards and that prevents all the rabbit incursions.

At the time I don't think they ever imagined the need to design for tuatara burrowing outwards, but probably good that it's only starting to become a question at about the time they've been planning for the fence to be replaced anyway. It'll be interesting to see if and how this affects all the other fenced sanctuaries that have sprung up later.

Another bonus of replacing the fence is that they'll be able to change the mesh, as the original one didn't have small enough holes to prevent baby mice getting through. I'm not sure how the mice inside will be properly eradicated after that's done. The original eradication was (I think) a brodifacoum drop which would no longer be practical unless everything important was somehow cleared out from inside the fence first.

I coincidentally went to a talk about it tonight where it was noted they're getting so populous that there's a new suspected risk of tuatara burrowing under the fence and letting something bad in.

The fence is due to be replaced within the next decade, and apparently they have tentative plans for an adjusted design to prevent this from happening.

I guess it's a good problem to have.

To elaborate however, although Zealandia has a fenced "scientific" enclosure for Tuatara near the front, there's a separate group of them running wild around the rest of the sanctuary (though still inside the main fence). There's a particular track up near the back of the fence with artificial burrows where they're encouraged to hang out. You can often encounter them in the tracks near there, but it's also completely possible to meet them effectively living wild anywhere else within the fence, and also not entirely uncommon.

But yeah they basically don't live on the mainland outside fenced sanctuaries at all any more. Rats interfered too much that they were effectively gone from the mainland from some time after Maori arrival.

More from The Spinoff today: https://thespinoff.co.nz/politics/27-05-2024/could-ray-chung-really-be-the-mayor-of-wellington

Chung said that, if he ended up in a similar position, he would look at ways to step back from the mayoral role and stay on as a councillor. He was yet to look into the technicalities of it.

And on this, it could be quite difficult for him.

Under the Local Government Act if he resigns after being declared Mayor then there's an extraordinary vacancy which triggers a by-election for a new mayor. He doesn't revert to being a councillor and push out another councillor who's already been declared elected.

Under the Local Electoral Act he can cancel his mayoral nomination before the close of voting, and then everyone's votes will just transfer to their next preference, but he'd not have the information he wants about other councillors if he cancelled it at that time.

He'd probably need to figure out a way to step back after seeing the preliminary election results but before the final result was declared, and hope the outcome was obvious enough from that, but doing so doesn't seem clear cut.

Under the Local Electoral Act if he died or became incapable after voting closes but before declaration of the final result, then it gets adjusted as if he'd not run at all. There doesn't seem to be a comparable clause for if he simply decided he didn't want to be Mayor, unless it hinges on the definition of the word "incapable"... but it'd be odd for him to be incapable of being Mayor but capable of being a councillor. He's committed to the possibility of having to be Mayor from the time of the close of voting, and if he's elected but doesn't want it then he can't stay on the council even if a ward had elected him.

Can anyone else see a technical way around this for him?

Additional coverage from today (also soft paywall):

Wellington mayoral candidate Ray Chung will look to vacate top chair if he gets a dud council:

But, he was keen to avoid a repeat of Wellington’s former mayor, Andy Foster, who struggled through his term with a council majority often at odds with him.

Chung said that, if he ended up in a similar position, he would look at ways to step back from the mayoral role and stay on as a councillor. He was yet to look into the technicalities of it.

And How Wellington’s left council may be the right’s hidden weapon which is an opinion piece from Tom Hunt:

... There is a perception, partly founded, that in a city awash with leaking pipes the council is focused on the wrong things.

Former mayors Dame Kerry Prendergast and Mark Blumsky, or Wellington Central’s first MP under the MMP voting system, Richard Prebble, show this famously-liberal city can swing right.

There is every chance it will do it again if the left don’t right the ship.

Councillors – and the council – need to show they are actually listening. They need to leave their party affiliations at the door when they walk into the council chamber. They need to vote for their communities, not political parties.

They need to stop saying their are listening to people when they only hear the people they agree with.

And they need to find some drastic ways to cut back on rates increases (at the current projected rates increases, a ratepayer charged $4000 in rates last year will face a $11,035 bill within a decade).

Because, if they don’t, a Chung-led council will find some drastic cuts – and they won’t be where the left like.

Obviously this isn't the first time he's run for mayor, but last time it was more about building his profile for the councillor position he really wanted instead. This time around he seems to be a bit more serious in wanting to win it. I don't really know how he's likely to go, and maybe that depends on whether he becomes the focal point of the anti-Tory-Whanau campaign.

Last time I watched him in a local candidate meeting. He repeatedly stated straw man facts that were outright wrong, attacked them, then had to be corrected by other candidates, even by Diane Calvert! Afterwards I checked with one of the other candidates who confirmed that every single debate (and there are lots because it's Wellington) he'd been bringing out exactly the same wrong statements to make his points in front of the new crowds, and then being corrected in the same way.

I didn't think he'd do well then, but with him being very strongly elected before the other two councillors, other voters in my local western ward sure showed me. I really do wish the advocates on that side could find some candidates who were a bit more likeable and positive instead of just angry about everything, though. It seems like a long time since we've seen a Mark Blumsky in the mayoralty race.

My thoughts too. From memory sales of double cab utes also surged immediately before and plummeted immediately after the prices went up as expected due to their high emissions.

Heh. I'm afraid trying to answer that question is above my pay grade.

This is my layperson's reading of the law, but I think it's from an Independent Hearings Panel that the council was required to establish under this part of the RMA in relation to an Instrumentation Planning Instrument (basically all the changes going through the motions in the housing density rules).

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/0069/latest/whole.html#LMS634247

Next the council has to consider each recommendation, and accept it reject them. It can provide alternative recommendations but in doing so it can only consider evidence that was submitted to the Independent Hearings Panel.

The council doesn't have to accept its recommendations, but if it chooses not to accept any or all of them then the Minister gets to decide if they have to be implemented.

https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1991/0069/latest/whole.html#LMS634479

Expect plenty more lobbying aimed at Simeon Brown.

Yes it's certainly costed out by the councils. It'd vary for each council in the region but (for example) WCC shows 13.46% of rates going into water, not including wastewater and stormwater which are costed separately. I think there would be an outcry if people had to pay for meter costs without rates dropping proportionately. It's probably not entirely clear though, because some of the current rates allocation could be for certain overheads that it mightn't be sensible for meters to cover. Also costs are just generally rising for everything, so even if the cost of water is removed from rates, it mightn't feel as if it has been for most people who pay them.

Personally I'd be mildly concerned for renters. I think it's highly likely that many landlords would simply pocket any rates reduction while their tenants get a new bill to pay, assuming meters are used for billing rather than just measuring or only billing for excessive use (which is also an option). That said I don't think a broken rental market, which needs to be fixed in other ways, is a good enough reason to hold off addressing fundamental problems with the water system.

As far as paying less for water, though, that's what supposedly happened in Kapiti when they went through the change a decade ago:

In Kāpiti the installation of water meters had an immediate impact on water usage, with the discovery of 443 leaks initially and more over the years. Fixing these leaks means millions of litres of water are no longer being wasted.

Reduced household water use has also decreased substantially, with a sharp drop as soon as the 23,000 meters were introduced, a reduction which has been maintained overtime.

High water users have reduced their consumption by 70%. Many of these were our keen gardeners, so it’s great to see we still have healthy green gardens in the district.

I think it'd be silly not to at least have that on the board for consideration as a possibility for how to manage things in certain circumstances, even if it's then ruled out or considered highly unlikely.

I've had leaks outside the house which, to me, looked very significant. They've sat there for two or three months after I've reported them, and gotten visibly worse over that time (which I've also reported), before eventually seeing them addressed.

They do turn up and assess them early, though.

According to Wellington Water, at least, many of the worst leaks are underground without being visible from the surface at all. Those are the ones that tend to get prioritised for traking down and fixing between all the others, but i think a fair amount of effort sometimes also has to be put into tracking down exactly where they are.

I think this is a big reason why WW is so keen on smart water meters becoming a thing. It'd allow for relatively immediate information on exactly how much water is leaving very specific parts of the network out of places where it's not meant to be leaving, and allow it to be tracked down and fixed rapidly.

I remember them in the UK when we visited as long ago as 2012. My main recollection was that they seemed very effective at causing you to think very carefully about your speed, because in a long line of traffic nobody wants to be the person who drives extra slow to make up for accidentally going too fast a few seconds earlier.

I'm curious to know the reasons for them apparently being hated.

Just on this, it's extremely hard for unestablished political parties to get established in NZ. I think a thing we constantly need to be conscious of, though, is the possibility of existing established parties being infiltrated and redirected from within.

Several major parties this election have list candidates who'd not look out of place in some of the much more fringe parties. It's not as if we haven't had fringe candidates enter Parliament previously via existing parties, and they have tended to be either controlled from the top down or ejected, but those groups are getting more organised and aren't as stupid as some people like to think.

If the US is anything to go by, they started with school boards and local politics which often have lower turnout and less attention. Since then, one of the two major political parties has effectively been usurped and reshaped by people who'd simply not have had a significant place in political life two or three decades ago.

I'm sad I missed it. For our family this sort of thing seems as if it'd have been much better value for money than the Jurassic World Brickman exhibition on in town.

It's been a while since I've seen TNG and maybe my memory's bad, but the first one that came to mind, Data's Day, seems to be one that nobody's yet listed.

This is really interesting. Is it something to do with people wanting to feel as if they're on the winning team, even though you can effectively declare you're voting for someone and there's still no way for anyone to prove it^*^?

^*^ Although the recent trend from the past couple of elections of people photographing their completed ballot papers and posting to social media really needs to be clamped down upon, imho.

Okay 'guided' might've been the wrong word, but more just that they're involved in the discussions more than most people are likely to encounter offline, and that's going to affect the tone. We shouldn't ignore it because these days a lot of us spend a lot of time hanging around r/nz and other places like it and forming opinions.

We don't (and can't) assess people who contribute online in the same way as people we interact with in person. When a trigger topic comes up, and everyone who's attracted to it converges on each other, we'll get more exposed to those views and dopamine kicks from interactions with people we'd never have encountered the same way elsewhere. For anything resembling murky common ground, they encourage us and we encourage them, and there's none of that inconvenient stigma to deal with from knowing who the other person really is or what they'll take from it.

I didn’t think it was a particularly sensible thing to say but holy crap, the level of hate that brought up was insane.

Yes and I think part of what gets me is that it's still going. It's really common to see people exclaim something like "I quite like the Greens (for some reason) but there's no way I'll vote for them while Marama Davidson's there..." but frequently they can't articulate why they dislike her so much. It's just become normalised to express dislike of her, or worse, and then expect to be rewarded for it, or something like that. In a forum where we reward each other for what we say via rating buttons, our brains are being trained that expressing hate for Marama Davidson will be rewarded with a dopamine hit.

Recently I've been following RNZ's Undercurrent podcast. Episode 5 (Muddying the water) covers what's happening for politicians. Much of it is sadly what we've come to expect regarding the amount of toxicity, hate and threats that politicians get from certain sectors of the public.

As well as referencing the two UK MPs who've been quite brutally murdered in public in recent years, they interviewed James Shaw about being physically attacked and beaten while he walked to work. Golriz Ghahraman, who seems to be another favourite target for hating in social media, talks about all the threats and hate and lies about her that she has to cope with. It notes that in March when Posie Parker visited, Marama Davidson was the target of intense online attacks that spiked to a level of abusive content, particularly from the far right and neo-nazis, higher than anyone else in NZ has ever faced except for Jacinda Ardern. This was all at about the time that r/nz was going insane, which to me suggests that r/nz's normalised dislike of Marama Davidson, by people who are probably otherwise relatively normal - sometimes adolescents, has been guided by neo-nazis. If that's the case, what should we then be reading into all the other topics that draw so much controversy or predictable dislike, whether it's Three Waters, Te Pāti Māori, and so on?

What really struck me with the episode, though, is that Brooke van Velden acknowledged that "some people" get some forms of abuse and threats, but she herself doesn't believe it's that large and nor does she feel threatened. Nicola Willis also said that while she accepts this happens to other people and is concerned about it, she doesn't get a lot of it herself.

I think this is likely more complex than strictly being a partisan thing, but to me that sort of comparison really shows up how, at least right now, one side of politics is really attracting this abuse whereas the other side seems to be passively benefitting from it, just kind of cruising and happy to see that big negative cloud surround their opponents without really wanting to acknowledge where it's coming from. There's a lot of "sure it's not very nice what that person over there is saying, who supports the same thing I do, but don't blame me because I'm not saying it." A few years ago, maybe it was the other way around with people like Simon Bridges or Judith Collins on the receiving end, or not, but whatever the case right now that's not what's happening.

I don't know how we deal with this effectively, but I can't see how we can unless people like Brooke van Velden, Seymour, etc, who are passively benefitting, get up and own it, and unambiguously tell people outright who support them that what they're doing to those on the other side is absolutely not acceptable.

It felt like it was getting brigaded to all hell for a long time before that, chock full of anti-cogoverance, tuff on crime, pro act party nonsense that would absolutely surge in particular posts.

I've felt like this a lot when reading it, too. It seems very polarised. You can have a couple of posts saying relatively similar things maybe a few days apart. One of them might go nearly untouched and possibly even have worthwhile discussions whereas the other gets hit with intense toxicity to the extent that it's demoralising even to try and be involved in a rational discussion.

I get that people have opinions on things and we're never all going to agree, but I know there are also quite a lot of younger people who hang out in r/nz ... including on the younger end of being teenagers. I find it depressing that some might grow up find this type of toxic conflict, or especially toxic opinions (imho at least) normalised.

As far as Marama Davidson is concerned, whatever criticism might be levelled at her, when people start hating her and removed about her because it seems like the trendy thing to do (which seems to be a lot of what's happening when I've asked people), rather than because they have a clear understanding of why they think that way and why they need to articulate it as they do, there seems to be something quite wrong.

In the NZ context it's a wider part of the pest control discussion. NZ never had native land mammals (except a species of bat) until fewer than 1000 years ago, and everything's changed radically since colonisation from Europe began around 200+ years ago. We have lots of native flora and fauna that's in a downward spiral, being eaten or hunted or starved towards extinction. There's never been stability during that period, especially due to particular introduced species (rats, possums, mustelids) that destroy them.

Cats are also a big part of that dynamic, particularly feral, but it's a complicated discussion because so many people have grown up and still have them as pets. At the same time as there are efforts to reintroduce native flora and fauna to populated areas, the presence of cats is a contradiction, particularly when the law allows them to roam in ways that sometimes result in them being many kms from home.

The "I don't want cats on my property" line is often an extension of the belief that cat owners simply shouldn't be allowed to let them leave their own property in the first place. That isn't unprecedented, even near here. Across the Tasman in Australia there are lots of local jurisdictions which require cat owners to keep cats indoors or in proper enclosures. There are counter arguments, though, along the lines of "I keep my cat indoors at night" and "my cat never hunts any of that stuff".

Yes I hope that's purely an issue with their app's implementation, rather than something broken with online EFTPOS's flow generally. I've never struck a similar problem with other retailers, although for others I'm usually buying through a browser on a desktop system rather than a smartphone app, so you don't get quite the same requirement of completely switching away from it to approve the payment in your banking app.

I could easily imagine he's writing a book in which they feature as part of a wider topic, though.

I have literally never used online EFTPOS, and I don’t even recall seeing it anywhere. I’m just aware it exists, hopefully it becomes more widely available.

It might just be a coincidence of the retailers I frequent, but every so often I come across a new one. Maybe it's getting more enticing with more banks signing up, plus a third party payment provider or two.

Mighty Ape was an early adopter and I found something cheap to buy there just so I could test it out. Ascent and PBTech are where I tend to order most of my geek stuff from lately and they both support it. At least one of the pizza chains (Dominoes?) supports it for payment in their app.

I've hit a couple of early snags, though. When Ascent first implemented it, it didn't accept my payment because it didn't like me having a 0 at the front of my phone number. I guess they were converting it to an integer for some reason and didn't think of that. They fixed it when I reported it.

Also a couple of times with ordering a pizza I've found the company never got confirmation that I'd paid. In that implementation it relies on me switching back to the app before a timeout, so the auto process can complete, but it has to be after I've been to my bank app to confirm the payment. I've been caught out by this at least twice because I didn't realise the order hadn't gone through for ages, then had to order and pay again, then had to wait ages to get the refund for the first one. Consequently several times I've gone back to credit cards for the few delivery pizza orders I put in. I figure they intentionally obscure the prices so much that I don't really care if they have to absorb an extra fee. I'd still rather use online EFTPOS if I felt I could trust it with them, though.

I'm certainly tending to prefer online EFTPOS where I see it. I like the process of confirming with the bank that I authorise the charge before it's allowed to happen. I've struck the odd technical issue here and there with implementations, but it's getting better.

It's depressing how long it's taken, though, which is basically how a system as terrible as POLi got a foot-hold.

As for paywave, I still use it sometimes at supermarket self checkouts because I figure they're big enough to say screw you to the banks, but I don't really use it elsewhere.

I used it through the NFC chip in my phone for a bit too, but went completely off that when ASB decided I'd have to connect it through Google Pay if I wanted to keep using it. Right now there's no way in hell I want Google to have anything to do with knowing exactly what I'm spending money on day to day, given everything else they collect before profiling and selling the ability to manipulate me.

There's also the stage three cancer diagnosis and treatment, just to throw it in there, and honestly who knows what triggered the breakdown on Sunday evening?

As everyone says it doesn't excuse the alleged behaviour, nor the decisions (whoever's ultimate responsibility it was) to press on with a job as stressful as a Ministerial position when she mightn't have been in a necessary frame of mind. As far as explaining it, though, I'm sure all this crappy stuff adds up between herself and those around her.

I hope she finds a less stressful and more rewarding way to contribute somehow when the time allows.

Well I have to disagree with you on this. I think there's plenty wrong with a tax system that distorts investment markets and heavily advantages people with wealth over those without by encouraging them to stash it in property, where there are a bunch of tax loopholes.

Whatever the fix for it, I don't see how it can be fixed by tinkering with rates of income tax.

Yeah, the draft report from the Independent Electoral Review, to be published in November, is (if not changed) once-again recommending that Parliament's size increases over time to keep the ratio of electorate to list seats fixed at 60:40, although in this case it's about retaining proportionality rather than for Palmer's point of ensuring there are enough back-benchers to properly hold Cabinet to account.. and the suggested ratio wouldn't be enough for that according to his interview. If implemented today for our 72 electorates, it'd still only give us the exact 120 seats we presently have, but it would at least increase in future.

The same 60:40 recommendation was ignored from the 2012 Electoral Commission Review (in which all recommendations were ignored), and from both 2017 and 2020 Electoral Commission post-election reports. I don't have my hopes up on this unless there's some kind of post-election deal with a minor party (most likely the Greens) that requires the government to implement the recommendations. Even a deal like that could be unlikely given the recommendations won't be officially published until after the election.

To be honest every time I've looked at ebay it's seemed so full of clutter I've struggled to figure out what was going on.

And yeah the critical mass is a big thing. Back in the early 2000s or whenever it was, I remember Sam Morgan was doing stuff like gluing ads to street lamps around town just to get people to look at Trademe. Maybe he got in at the right time. Ebay had already proved the model worked and lots of people wanted it, but it hadn't bothered to enter the NZ market.

It's not as if there weren't alternatives because the huge way of selling stuff then was newspaper classifieds, but Trademe was virtually free in comparison and made it much easiest to list things.

Weirdly, the current options seem so hopeless that maybe there's space in the market for someone to create a new buy/sell website and/or app, not unlike what Sam Morgan did with Trademe a long time ago.

are Labour really that bad at managing their message?

I think they are. Remembering how they were between 2008 and 2017, at least. It was mostly luck that a constitutional clause let Ardern rapidly be elected leader because it was so close to the election. Before that Labour's image was endless infighting, and the inability to present a cohesive unit really hampered credibility of the messaging.

I think Bernard is overly pessimistic in saying that ends the debate for 20 years.

To me, at least, it seems the main way out of this would be if Labour lost the upcoming election, then somehow got its act together super quick to go back to arguing for a wealth tax, then National+ACT had a really difficult time working together so as to cause their collective popularity to drop horrendously in a short time.

Labour hasn't made a secret of the fact that it would like a wealth tax. It's just repeatedly committed not to do it, because it thinks that's the best way to win over the small number of swing voters it needs which National and ACT are also obsessively targeting with fears about what to expect from a Labour+Green+TPM tax policy.

It's concerning that it seems to be in so many different branches of the business. The company as a whole doesn't come across as having a very robust safety culture given the potential consequences it deals with.

I've only managed to see this episode once, but something I didn't understand was Spock's decision to try and hide in the debris field. At this point they believed the planet was the source of the problem, but it seemed mostly a guess that the debris field might shield them.

Wouldn't the most logical action have been to get as far away from the planet as reasonably possible until the effects appeared to subside? I know Una made a point that they had crew down there, but it's not as if they can't return more cautiously and with a clearer understanding of what's happening. You're also helpless to help your landing party if you're completely incapacitated yourself.

Have I missed something important?

Thanks. That looks like the right company but it's still really hard to navigate their website and I can't find any trace of info about this report.

I wonder if there's a list of countries out there which ranks by media-most-susceptible-to-republishing-press-releases-which-place-their-country-at-favourable-position-in-rankings.

Probably not because we'd have seen it on Newshub by now.

Has anyone come across the study? I can't find any references anywhere except for articles on Newshub and Stuff. I can't even narrow down which employment company it might be that ran the study, but if it's this one then it doesn't seem to be making a big deal of any of this on its press coverage page.

The article talks lots about GMO food, which is a valid consideration.

Is it fair to say that another aspect the article seemed to skip over is the potential for genetic modification, gene drives and so on for possible pest control strategies? Something like Crispr wasn't even a concept in 1996 when the current legislation was passed.

NZ has some unique pest problems that are likely to need local research for some of the specifics which might be really really useful here in future, but my understanding is that current GMO-blocking legislation kind of knee-caps a lot of that possible research beyond a certain point and makes it really hard, or impossible.

It might be that it's still appropriate to keep those restrictions in place because these are big decisions with potentially big consequences, or not, but I think it's something that also needs consideration alongside the food angle.

I don't like it either but NZ does it too. Eg. We're poaching Fiji's bus drivers.

In the end we're never going compete with what Australia can offer financially, but NZ never used to need to. It used to be that many people would accept a lower salary and often even migrate to NZ because it offered a better way of life than so many other places, often including Australia, but presently its questionable of that's still true for a lot of people. That's especially the case if you're in a front line profession like teaching or nursing where the nature of the job means you constantly have to face consequences from increasing breakdowns in other parts of society.

if you’re already in the underground importing business, getting a few handguns or military-pattern rifles tucked in with a shipment probably isn’t too hard.

Maybe but that's something I think I'd be keen to seek more info on.

My impression is that drug imports are cost effective because you can typically sell a tiny volume for a vast amount of money, making up for the risks. The equivalent volume in guns would perhaps be possible to smuggle in, but also make them extremely expensive compared with alternative non-smuggling options. Especially if you risk Police confiscating all guns found in or around your possession as soon as you're caught using one of them, and you can't just get your mate with the licence to go out and buy you replacements. If that were the case, at least, there would be very few internationally smuggled guns circulating.

(Edit: typo)

Oops - sorry Lemmy seemed to've locked up when I wrote the first comment and I thought it hadn't gone through, so I wrote it again and expanded it.