Here in Kapiti the council started its charging for water through the tap 3 years ago — but it has nothing on Nestlé.

A few weeks ago we shared with readers a lawsuit filed in Connecticut against Nestle Waters North America, Inc. alleging that the water they marketed as Poland ‘Natural Spring Water’ was actually just bottled groundwater…the same water that runs through the taps of many American households. Now a new investigation from Bloomberg Businessweek reveals how […]

via How Nestle Makes Billions Selling You Groundwater in A Bottle — Rangitikei Enviromental Health Watch

By Sally Maguire — info

An article on the NZ Farmer website about Fonterra revealing that its boss, Theo Spierings, gets an $8.3 m pay package is below.

Most of these people get what they get because they are at the top of a pyramid with the front line workers forming the bottom levels; and the bigger the pyramid, usually the more the man (and it’s nearly always a man) at the top gets.

Mr Spierings get paid nearly 20 times what a High Court judge gets ($434,000), and the theory behind that level is they won’t be tempted by bribes, or at least not much.

Mr Spierings gets 277 times the average income of someone in Waikanae.

Otago University professor Dr Helen Roberts says there has been a rapidly growing divide between the average income of New Zealanders and that of chief executives over the last 20 years.

Do these bosses need to get such obscene amounts?  No.  As Don Brash pointed out on Newshub (TV3), there is what is called the Law of Diminishing Marginal Utility.  This basically says that more pay someone gets, the increasingly more of an increase they need for it to make a difference to them. And, of course, that works in reverse.

So this notion that such payments are needed is bunkum.

In Kapiti it doesn’t matter how awful a boss like Dougherty is, the councilors think that they need to pay enormous amounts to him to be “competitive” with what equivalent persons in other areas get.  No, they don’t.

The difference with a boss like Spierings of course, is that he is at the top of a business that needs to keep customers satisfied or they may go elsewhere, but regardless, most of what he and those like him decide to do isn’t rocket science, just common sense, provided research is good.

With businesses, provided they are in a competitive and level playing field situation, these enormous payments are at the expense of the shareholders, not the taxpaying public.  But how many of NZ’s mega businesses aren’t cosy little cartels effectively controlled by oligarchies?

NZ First leader Winston Peters says the payments to Fonterra chief executive Theo Spierings show why there needs to be a “say-on-pay” law, which would give shareholders the right to hold executives to account.

However Strategic Pay chief executive John McGill, who analyses executive pay, said his pay needed to be compared with compensation for overseas CEOs because there was no other company in New Zealand as big as Fonterra.

“Is this corporate New Zealand? Fat cat payouts for doing their day job,” Peters said in a statement.

Read the rest

The address is 2 Hira Street, the Playcentre, so not literally in a garage.

While heading out to the Spring Fling on Sunday we noticed these magnificent lines of trees in full bloom, but being a dull day, here instead is Sue Lusk’s pic of them in sunshine taken last year. 🙂

If there’s another sunny day in the next week, we’ll go out and take our own. 🙂

Reproduced from the Kapiti Independent News website

By Dave Johnston, of the Paekakariki Station Museum

The Discover Kapiti Heritage Group — with representatives from the different museums on the Kapiti Coast, including Mahara Gallery — are holding special ‘open days’ for the first time this coming weekend: 30 September and 1 October.

The theme for the weekend is the ‘Story of Transport’ across the region. Each Museum will share stories and displays regarding different aspects of transport.

Paekakariki Station Museum will have a new display showing historic photographs of Centennial Highway, Paekakariki Hill Road and the Wellington & Manawatu Railway.

In conjunction with this display, it has produced a book outlining the different forms of transport used throughout the Kapiti Region.

The book, Kapiti Transport History, has been produced on behalf of the Station Museum by Michael O’Leary, the Paekakariki writer and poet.

It will be available for sale at the Museums and at Paper Plus in Coastlands. Michael O’Leary will also be available to discuss the project and sign copies at the Kakariki Bookshop on the Railway Station.

The book contains historic photographs of road and rail travel throughout the region, with a section on aviation history — and it also covers walkways and cycleways.

To sum up: ‘The new volume describes all forms of transport used on the Kapiti Coast — and is informative and easy to read.”

Paekakariki in April 1966. (Dave Turner pic)

We visited at about 11:30 this morning and there was a steady arrival of cars.  Despite the hot dry weather forecast there was also a steady scattering of ‘sky juice’, just as there has been at other such events this this year, but it was light.

The old schoolroom and playground, now the tennis court, add to the quaintly rural atmosphere and an environment which just like the Waikanae Beach zone, needs to be protected from ‘progress’.

The provisional state of the parties in the 120 seat parliament is:

National 58,  Labour 45, NZ First 9, Greens 7, ACT (David Seymour) 1

Special votes could make a difference of 1 seat as happened in 2014 (in favour of the Greens at the expense of National). David Seymour of ACT is there to support National.  Which leaves National 2 seats short, possibly 3, and a coalition with NZ First is probable as Winston Peters did this in 1996. That will hopefully mean a ban on 1080 poison, a curbing of the undue influence of the Road Transport Forum in favour of the movement of freight by rail, and a big reduction in the numbers of immigrants.

Jacinda Ardern has made a remarkable improvement to Labour’s showing: from 25% of the vote in 2014 to 36%.  It’s likely that she has a good chance of being the next PM after Bill English — if that’s in 2020, she’ll still be the youngest PM that NZ has had at 40 (David Lange so far has been the youngest at just short of 42 when he was elected).

We have three pieces of advice for her:

1. The best solutions to problems are not always the government throwing money at them.  This is particularly true in health.  What is needed is close scrutiny of how money is allocated and spent. She only needs to look at what’s happened with Kapiti council mismanagement under Mr Dougherty where there has been a huge increase in taxing and spending, but instead of public amenties it has gone on an army of bureaucrats and on vast over-payments for consultants and contractors; in other words “jobs for the boys”.
2. People working together can achieve significant improvements in services without significant recourse to public money.  Look at how much volunteer firefighters, community patrolers, nature enhancers and community beautifiers do in Waikanae!
3. People do not like taxes on water!  Again she only needs to look at Kapiti where two mayors in a row have been defeated because of it.

The election night tally:

Nathan Guy (National) 18,866

Rob McCann (Labour) 12,824

Sam Ferguson (Green) 1,712

Romuald Rudzki (NZ First) 1,508

Others 1,425

Special and overseas votes will probably add about 13-14% to these figures.

The margin of 6,042 is about the same as in 2014 and is more than the 4,380 difference in the party vote.  Full details.