The Mike Hosking Breakfast

We got the press release recently from the Restaurant Association where they said there were flat sales, cost pressures and regional divergence was the theme. I have changed my mind a bit on hospitality. More broadly, I wonder whether there are too many vested interests in this country who get in the way of real progress. The hospitality story has been a long, arduous and well told one. We hear hospitality is shot, hospitality is a disaster, no one makes money and no one wants to work in hospitality. Yet my increasing observation is that is not true. If you take a very large industry as a whole and average everything out, you might well be able to find some dour times. But what is increasingly obvious, not just from personal experience but a lot of anecdotal expert opinions as well, is a lot of hospitality is not only fine, it's actually going quite well. The thing about hospitality is it is malleable. You are not a log exporter reliant on a single market to either buy, or not buy, your tree. In hospitality you can vary what it is you are offering and what I see is a lot of people doing really good things and, as a result, they are doing very nicely thank you. It took us over a week to get the last table for lunch the other day at a local that, in our experience, has changed hands and boosted their product and offering and as a result has gone from a quiet, regional operator to a booming tourism business rushed off its feet. Same place, same name, new product - whole different result. The other thing about hospitality is it doesn’t require any skill to enter. Anyone can buy a café, and a lot do, and I have seen them, often immigrants, as it's an easy entry point. They take over a going concern and wreck it, change a menu, employ the family, kill the service and they're dead in a week. We are over supplied of course. So in your area where you have a choice of a dozen places, only two have to be good before they boom and the others wilt. So the Restaurant Association telling us things aren't flash is not the real story. Bits aren't flash, but then if you are not up to much in the first place - they never will be.   LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The problem with committing to things that may well come back to haunt you, is down the track, at some point, the mistake starts to hit you in the face a bit and some hard decisions are required.  My sense of it is we have become too reliant on pine trees to meet the Paris climate target.  The sheep farmers have worked that out as the protests around land conversion have once again been reignited, with posters put up by the Meat and Wool folk with the line: "I am not the problem".  Since 1982 we have gone from 70 million sheep to 25 million.  In the last seven years a quarter of a million hectares has been swapped from sheep to trees.  This of course was always going to happen. What's the easiest way to meet a target on carbon? Trees.  Cutting and slashing, whether its farm production or the economy, in general was never going to be palatable. So trees were easy.  But you might have noticed a couple of major things have happened;  1) Paris looks increasingly shaky in terms of people meeting targets, or indeed people even being interested in meeting targets.  2) Stuff grown on the land with legs is fetching very good money all over the world and as far as us earning a living goes, we have never made more from farming.  Carbon offsetting, which is what planting trees is called, has restrictions in other countries. But I bet you anything you want that other countries aren't as reliant on sheep and cows as we are.  We used to have tourism back us up. But last week's numbers tell the sad story - dairy is worth $20 billion, while tourism is at $12 billion. Even offal comes in at $9 billion.  Tourism used to vie for first place, hence the Government threw another $13 million at it yesterday to try and attract another 70,000 or so new visitors.  Trees also kill communities. Farming is life. A forest isn't.  As laudable as Paris was all those years ago, if we had thought about it, if we had been less evangelical, we might have stopped to think just what it was we were asking of a small economy.  And the simple truth is we were asking so much, a quick shortcut like trees was always going to be adopted with alacrity.  Saving the planet, as people get tossed off the land, is not an equation we should be proud of. As the protest poster with the photo of the sheep says, I am not the problem. And it's right.  The zealots are.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Warriors legend Shaun Johnson will be back on our screens – this time, without a rugby ball in hand.  He’s supercharging his fledgling media career, fronting a new weekly TV show dedicated to the analysis of rugby league.  Johnson signed a new deal with Sky TV for ‘League Lounge’, which launches Wednesday, and will broadcast on Sky and Sky Sport Now, with delayed release on Sky Open and YouTube.   He told Mike Hosking he wants to speak to what the audience might be feeling and seeing from the game and help educate them.  Johnson says that if he can offer a bit of perspective as to what may be going on with players’ performances, it might buy a bit of time to start seeing better results.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On the Mike Hosking Breakfast Full Show Podcast for Tuesday 10th of June, it's good news Tuesday, so we have good news on our teaching numbers, business sales, and tourism.  But there’s bad news regarding corruption – we are way too complacent, and a new report suggests organised crime is corrupting our officials at a lot of different levels.  Warriors legend Shaun Johnson has a new midweek league show coming out, so we talk to him about League Lounge and life after professional sport.    Get the Mike Hosking Breakfast Full Show Podcast every weekday morning on iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now is the time to sell your business.  According to ABC Business Sales, the number of buyers enquiring about purchases is up 30%.  Demand is currently outstripping supply, as new listings are down 10% on last year.  CEO Chris Small told Mike Hosking much of the interest is led by migrants, and hospitality, services, and construction are the three sectors people are primarily looking to buy in.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Solar energy company Lodestone is expanding to the South Island.  It's constructing a solar farm in Canterbury's Clandeboye, with first generation expected next year.  It will generate 43 gigawatt hours of renewable electricity annually, similar to the company's sites in the Upper North Island.  Managing Director Gary Holden told Mike Hosking there are six more consented sites in their portfolio.  He says they're trying to build a solar farm in every area they can, to follow the populations.   LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Outgoing New Zealand Rugby boss Mark Robinson believes he's leaving the game in a better place than he found it.  He's confirmed he will leave the job at the end of the year, bringing to an end a six-year tenure that started just before the Covid-19 pandemic.  Robinson says he's proud of what's been achieved during a turbulent period.  He told Mike Hosking that the next six months are critical for their role both domestically and internationally, with both their involvement in the establishment of international calendars and competitions as well as the opportunity they have to reset the financial model for the New Zealand game.   Robinson likes to think those would both be signed off by the end of the year, and that in conjunction with his family moving over to Australia, makes him feel it’s time to move on.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A tick of approval for the Government's new tourism funding boost, aiming to generate an extra $300 million in spending.  Minister Louise Upston's announced a $13.5 million injection into Tourism New Zealand, targeting markets in Australia, the US and China.  It's hoping to bring an extra 72 thousand visitors over coming years.   Tourism Holdings CEO Grant Webster told Mike Hosking it'll provide recovery from the post-Covid hangover.   He says this is the most ambitious Government from a tourism perspective in around eight years, and looks forward to helping the economy grow.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealand's heading down a precarious road of corruption, with organised crime networks targeting our institutions and borders.   An independent advisory panel on Transnational Crime says we need to take urgent action.   It says police officers, immigration officials, and private sector employees are facilitating corruption.   Group chair Steve Symon told Mike Hosking they talked to senior officials in enforcement agencies, former gang members, and frontline staff.   He says the problem with organised crime is it's everywhere you look, and it's seeping into all areas of business which deal with potential for drugs coming into the country.    LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Education Minister says several factors are at play in making teaching an increasingly attractive career option.  New figures released to Newstalk ZB show the teaching workforce increased 2.5% last year – the largest annual increase since records began back in 2009.  First-time enrolments in teaching courses are also up, 6.3%.  Erica Stanford told Mike Hosking the Government's doing several things to attract and retain teachers.  She says that includes good resources, world-leading professional learning and development, on-site training programmes, and paying teacher fees.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.