The Re-WrapTHE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Tuesday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) But What Can You Do?/There Are Worse Jobs/That About Wraps it Up for the Climate/Not so Cleaver After All
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Rewrap.
Okay, welcome to the Rewrap for Tuesday. All the best buts from the mic Husking Breakfast on Newstalk, said B. I am Glenhart today making it easier and more attractive to join the army or the navy or the is this still on the air Force? Keep forgidding? Are we ever going to achieve net zero? Or shall we just give up on that? And clevercor gives up on itself before any of that. So more tariff madness today, the madness. You can't even have too much madness, can you?
Or can you tell you what the down's worth? Watching? Are not in any good way? But it was flat and then it was down five hundred, then it was down two hundred. Now it was down three fifty, then it was down eight hundred, then it was flat. I think it's just all over the place. They're on the yellow chiers, Nitnyahu and Trump Chump's now into China.
China is essentially a closed country. In fact, it is a closed country. And what they do is they charge tariffs so that if you, if you sell cars, or if you sell anything, nobody's going to buy it because the price is out of control.
But that's true with a lot of.
Other countries also, So we're going to get fair deals and good deals with every country, and if we don't, we're going to have nothing to do with them. They're not going to be allowed to participate in the United States.
You see what I mean. China is not a closed country. It's our biggest trading partner, and it's worth twenty billion dollars a year, and it's called free trade. So I don't know whether Americans are following this with any level of detail, but it's a missed Trump's now moved on to the EU.
We have a deficit with the European Union of three hundred and fifty billion dollars and it's going to disappear fast. And one of the reasons and one of the ways that that can disappear easily and quickly, is gonna have to buy our energy from us. Because they need it. They're gonna have to buy it from us. They can buy it. We can knock off three hundred and fifty billion dollars in one week. They have to buy and commit to buy a like amount of energy, and we have that. You know, we have more energy than any country in the world. I don't know if you know that.
I see. This is the part I get. Just to try and reiterate and explain this one more time, that's the part I get. That's if you're not a free trader, which New Zealand is and he isn't, then that's the part you can line up alongside Trump. So if you've got a deficit with the place, let's say it's the EU, and the deficit is several hundred billion dollars, how do you counteract that they buy more of your stuff? Or you tariff them. They already tariff America. So in that sense, I get what Trump's trying to do. If they've got a twenty percent tariff, he'll match them at a twenty percent tariff. That part makes some sort of sense. The part that doesn't make sense, and they still haven't got to because Netanya, who's still in the room, is Nettnia who's dropped the tariffs. There are no tariffs, there is no deficit, there's no So how come the tariffs haven't been dropped? In the American point of view, How is it that Vietnam can drop the tariffs and there is no reciprocal arrangement with the Americans. And none of that part makes sense. And that's why the world and the markets are up into it at the moment because no one can make sense of it. Not only can't they make sense of it, what they can't calculate, and this is economist's top to bottom. They can't work out how they came up with the different numbers for all the different countries, whether or not there is a deficit or not. Australia doesn't have a deficit. Australia has a surplus. America gains by dealing with Australia. Yet Australia got whacked with the tariff. Why New Zealand is even Stevens it's a balanced portfolio. We got whacked with the tariff. Why and until they can explain that, which they can't and they won't because it's inexplicable, we're gonna have the trouble we've got.
Don't like it when Mike has more questions than answers. Piece that the guy I go to for all my answers, because I got a lot of dumb questions I'm going to assure you that that so we wrapped. So, yes, we just want again spend all morning fixated on the stupid stuff.
Trump was saying, why aren't all countries implementing terra free trade? Very good question. We certainly don't have one with Europe, No, we do not. We have a very good one with the UK, very good one with the UAE, very good one with China. The reason we don't have free trade all over the world is simply politics. The French farmer cannot raise a cow or a sheep, or make milk or cheese in a way that's remotely efficient, and so they go to the government and they go unless you protect us, unless you give us a false economy, unless you hand out some free money to us, we will not vote for you. And that's called lobbying. And the lobbying industry is massive, and that's how it works. So even if you're good at something, it doesn't mean you can land your product terre free. And that, unfortunately, is everything that's wrong with trade now.
So, yeah, if you're one of these people who's out there thinking none of this makes any sense, that is right, you're onto it. Unfortunately, apparently it doesn't have to rewrap right. So the big push to try and get people to join the defense horses and some capacity. It's not just all about shooting people.
Touch the old intellectual snobbery, I thought yesterday rearing its head with news that the Defense Force dropped education criteria last year. So, as a person who had no time for school and could not wait to get out into the world, I was and still am, very grateful for the idea that you choose the person, not the piece of paper when it comes to work. When I started school, certain ue well what you needed to get into the media, or at least have a crack at it. These days you need a degree, and I can assure you the quality of those graduates has not changed one iota as a result of several years of study. The military is an awfully difficult place to recruit for, especially in a country like ours. I mean, just what is it you're offering. We don't do a lot, We don't have a lot of equipment. We don't fight wars, We peacekeep and weed patrol. So in a world where work life balance and work from home and four day weeks, a commonplace, average pay WAYOUU and a lot of early rises aren't exactly calling cards, are they? So you simply now need three years of school. You don't even need level one nceea join. So here's the thing. Some people aren't into skill. And I know this because I was one of them. Not all life choices, work choices, or skills are gained by passing year eleven maths. The military is as much about attitude and aptitude. It's a structured environment. It is designed for specific types of people. In places like America, they recruit people who may well struggle to get regular work. That's the way it is. It's a simple truth. They offer dental and medical in a country where you may not be able to afford it. They offer a career and travel and opportunity, careers and trades you may not have even thought of. Here. What are they offering? Auto technician, plumber, diver? These are jobs on offer in the military with no skills. Could you do that in civilian life? No, you couldn't. Being good with an engine doesn't mean you're good in a classroom. These are doors of opportunity. If the military, through necessity, can make this work. Who are these outside snobs who still believe that exams and results are the sole key to employment.
Yeah.
I mean, for example, if you do want to shoot people for a living, and you can prove that you're good at that, there should be nothing stopping you. As you can tell, I'm not a massive fan of any kind of war machine, and I may have proposed the idea before that if everybody just stopped joining these organizations that have made the wars very hard to fight, and it would just be left to things like trade wars instead, the death was probably a little bit lower. I have to get the statistics on that, rewrap. It could be wrong, of course, you know, hard economic times, they actually do come at a cost of lives and health all the time. It's a bit like the climate crisis, a lot of climate refugees and things. But we can't be worrying about that right now.
Bit of angst over the release of the governments thinking around reaching nit zero by twenty fifty are the famous nit zero Let me tell you, well, let me reassure you that by twenty fifty the whole twenty fifty thing is going to be a distant memory. Like Peter Dutton and working from home. It's a great idea until it's a mistake, the whole rhetoric zero is heading in completely the wrong direction. There are now far too many countries who are either worn down by the cold heart truth that it isn't doable without a level of economic carnage that they're simply not prepared to endure. You think Cami bad Knock in Britain, who has to be admired for her straight up and down honesty. Or you look at countries like in Deer and China who talk a half decent game but make little or any real progress. All places like America, of course, who these days are openly hostile to the whole idea as a global plan, widely endorsed and enacted. It's over. But until we reach the inevitable conclusion, the government here is still officially aims for net zero, while at the same time doing as little as humanly possible to get there, which is a welcome relief from the previous government, who have of course bent over backwards costs of fortune and basically just hobbled business in the process. New details suggests that private enterprise is going to plant huge numbers of trees on public land.
Now.
The upset around this is coming from the Outdoors Brigade, who are a vast chunks of the conservation estate will be locked up and we will be locked out. Obviously, they won't be planting on Milford Track or on Mount Cook. That, along with our national parks and so on, is the conservation estate that we know and we love. What many may not know is vast swathes of this country is Crown property. And you've never been there and you're never going to. It's not pristine landscape, hiking trails and birds song. It's rugged, uncharted and barren. Put all the trees there you want. And if someone somewhere thinks that's going to save the world, will have done our part. The Outdoors Brigade mistake is that anything outdoors is one ours to frolic through at will, and two accessible parts of the landscape that are indistinguishable from rolling meadows. Neither are true.
Remember the last time I had a good frolic? Jeez, my dog loves a frolic. Get him off the lean and a bit of relatively long grass that can sort of bound through loves that. And then it's been the rest of the night looking grass seats out of his paws and it is But it's a good while that lasts, the frolicking, the consequences, the rerap. Right now, Mike is going a little bit back in time here. He wants to talk about something that happened last week.
Mentioned on the program last week, Clevercore, which was Fletcher Challenge's prefab facility, and sadly it closed. And I ran it around the idea that this is theory versus reality. In theory, if we ran a poll and said, hey, if somebody came up with an idea to make housing really cheap and affordable, do you reckon that's a good idea, And in the poll everyone to go, oh yeah, fantastic. You get to get amongst that. And of course in reality where snobs and we don't want prefab housing, so it never went anywhere. So it's very good piece in the Herald, and Gibson's written up about why Fletchers have spoken for the first time about why clevercre didn't work, and it's in many respects it's a very sad story. It's going to close by June thirty. Insufficient volumes, lack of commercial viability, the market downturn, industry reluctance, and they've gone through a whole list of what went wrong, and they were doing it really well. So what was sad about it? Is one they came up with an idea, So theory, yep, sounds good to me. They actually started doing it and it worked. We got to the stage where we could assemble not just one home every two days, but three homes a day using the principle of Kaizin Kaizen's the famous Toyota thing, which is, you know, continual improvement, three homes a day, bang bang bang bang every day and at a cheaper rate. Why didn't it get snapped up? Why didn't it work? Why wasn't it successful? Quote? A lot of people don't value time, safety, or quality unless they're sold this. Customers simply don't know what's possible. So is that on Fletchers for not selling it in a way that people understood. Unlike the typical builders merchant market, you don't get rebates or loyalty reward programs or other incentives to use offsite manufacturing. Now, that's interesting, So that may be a foible of the housing market. In other words, you know, if you're just building a house for house of sake, jib's not giving you a little bit of extra, you know, trip to Fiji for buying all the jib board stuff like that. So there are some obviously some lessons learned. But read it in the Herald. Wife Letcher's fifteen million dollar clever Core prefab house building facility failed because the bloker run at Steve Evans is very sad, and you make some very salient points I would have thought on the housing market in general, but it seemed to me one a clever idea, too workable and was working, and yet they're closing the doors.
So perhaps not clever. I can't be the only one who's commented in that way on this issue, but give cut me some slack. We're twelve minutes into the podcast and I'm starting to run out of ideas. I am Glen Hart. That was the rewrap. I'll go and fresh in my ideas machine and I'll be back with a fresh pack tomorrow. See then.
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