Kaipara's Tidal Turbines

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After years of speculation and hearings, it seems that the Kaipara Harbour will soon be the site of New Zealand’s first tidal power station. I am sure a lot of people have mixed feelings about this. We all need electric power to run our houses and businesses, but we also need a healthy environment to maintain an enjoyable and sustainable way of life.

Most of us probably take reliable supplies of electricity for granted and it would be very hard to live without it. As we all know, every day there appears to be a new “must have” appliance that is bound to increase our power bills.

Northland’s power supply comes from far away in other regions. This will change radically if Crest Energy fulfils its expectations to use its tidal turbines on the Kaipara Harbour. They expect to produce enough power to supply all current electrical demand from Albany to Cape Reinga.

Ruawai and Dargaville will be the closest towns to the turbines and this must surely offer them unique opportunities to access cheaper power. This is because a lot of power is lost transmitting it away from the generators and so power hungry businesses are bound to be waiting to invest there if the price is right.

In my opinion, one of those enterprises would be fish farming. A while back, I heard an interesting BBC documentary about salmon farming in the fiords of Chile and I could see how easy it would be for the Kaipara Harbour to attract that sort of investment. Various people were interviewed and the least happy were the native Indian people whose ancestors have been living there for thousands of years.

They were slowly being forced to move out because of the pollution that has upset the purity of the water. As a consequence, the wild fish stocks and shellfish beds declined and can no longer support the local tribes with food. Another problem was the use of thousands of electric lights to boost the growth of salmon. These further upset the natural balance, along with the diesel generator fumes and spillage from servicing craft.

The Kaipara Harbour too has been under a lot of environmental pressure ever since man first arrived here. What we see today is very different from pre-human times. Even though there are some positive changes in land use that are slowing the decline of water quality, there is still a long way to go. Perhaps the proposed Crest Energy Kaipara Trust Fund could put some money in that direction now that their project has the green light.

The Crest Energy website assures us that their turbines will not have a negative affect on fish in the Kaipara Harbour. However, I imagine the photo on the homepage will do little to calm their opponents. Some might see it as a large group of birds waiting on the shoreline for the tidal turbines to provide their daily feed of “fish in chips”.

Business As Usual

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Living “out in the Wopwops” once meant putting up with rough roads, variable electric supply, party lines and weak radio/TV receptions. Today, it is quite a different story. Country people can increasingly live lifestyles not much different from their urban counterparts. Many feel they have an equal right the same services and amenities and world class broadband is often high up on their wish lists.

For quite some time now, economically advanced countries have been investing heavily in broadband. Unfortunately, New Zealand has been lagging behind as it waited for private investment from the two main providers, Telecom and Vodafone. These companies appeared to respond by keeping their prices well above the world average while they phased out their slower copper connections and older wireless transmission equipment.

It was taking far too long and so the National Government has decided to spend $1500 million to catch up with countries like Australia. Sadly, rural New Zealand will only get around $300 million heading its way and it will be given to the old duopoly – Telecom and Vodafone. Telecom will continue putting in fibre optic cable (to schools and then elsewhere) and Vodafone will extend its wireless coverage.

This has disappointed many rural commentators and farming leaders like Don Nicholson, as it appears to be nowhere near what is needed and rewards mainly Telecom and Vodafone. However Communications Minister, Steven Joyce, has insisted that the improvements will now be openly accessible to other providers and this will mean Telecom will have to change how it runs its business.

So what improvements can rural people in Northland expect? At present, in my rural area, broadband via copper wires delivers an average of 3 Megabytes per second (Mps) on a really good day and a lot less upload speed. As optic fibre connection to exchanges and houses spreads, that speed could gradually rise to a potential 100Mps – which is what most the urban areas will get within 6 to10 years. In contrast, I expect broadband rates in my area of the Kaipara to lift from 3Mps to about 5Mps download and a greater improvement in present upload speeds with a few years.

After the work is done, will we be up there in the World broadband speed stakes? According to my research, not really. Many Asian countries are already laying out 1000 Mps connections and that sort of leaves us in their dust.

Quite clearly, a lot more investment needs to be done and farmers in some areas are not waiting for Telecom and they are laying down cable of their own. I expect this will happen in Northland too as they plug into providers like the Opto Network who use the railway lines as an optic fibre route.

For most rural Northlanders though, I expect the urban/rural divide to get wider. Perhaps here is an opportunity for the Northland Regional Council to step in and oversee a greater investment in Northland’s communication infrastructure. If nothing is done, it could be business as usual as we pay more for less

Many A Slip

Dyeing For Power

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It has often been said that ‘time waits for no man’. There is not much we can do about that, but a lot of us Baby Boomers seem to be very keen to slow down the way time affects the way we look.

Every night on TV, heaps of adverts tell us which cream will banish wrinkles, the best machines to eliminate flab and even tablets that promise to rejuvenate our love life. Hair dying is big business too, although very few people I know like to advertise that they are keeping the grey hairs at bay this way.

I was therefore very surprised to hear Phil Goff admitting that he had recently started changing the colour of his hair. Was this another Goff gaff, or was he hoping that being candid would stop his receding level of support in the popularity polls?

I think most of us want our politicians to be honest and Phil certainly appears making a real effort in this direction. However, I have noticed that quite often his body language does not appear to match his words. He was after all an enthusiastic supporter of the Rogernomics experiment and I have yet to be convinced that he no longer believes in those ideas.

Phil Goff is of course not alone with this sort of problem. I wish there was a better way for us to easily identify the direction our political leaders are heading and it has occurred to me that hair dying might provide a solution.

Perhaps it is time for scientists in the fabric dying industry to do some lateral thinking and take their amazing technology to the hairdressers. I know there are fabrics and paint available that responds to a person’s body heat. Just imagine how useful it would be if they could do something similar with politician’s hair and make it respond to their thoughts.

We could insist that all politicians entering Parliament have a “Poli-Perm” to give us another visible way to check which political camp they really feel at home in. Instead of, “Ayes to the right, Nays to the left”, we could have a MMP colour wheel directing members to numerous voting stations that indicate their level of commitment to each piece of legislation (and the Party that promotes it).

Obviously, there are some politicians like Rodney Hide who have no hair at all and they could have suitable wigs made to cope with that. In fact a wig on Rodney’s head would be very appropriate. In Britain The Tories and Wigs ran the country for a very long time and I and sure he would like to do the same here.

The Maori party could however be another kete of fish. All of them might believe the prophecy, made by a Kaumatua at Waitangi, that Wellington will soon be devastated by earthquakes and a tsunami. In that case they will all be wearing hard hats and fluorescent search and rescue jackets.

Guns

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“No freeman shall ever be debarred the use of arms”. This statement, by Thomas Jefferson, is still holds true in most parts of the U.S.A. Every citizen there has the right to own a firearm and that right is protected by their constitution (with the much debated, “Second Amendment”). The recent gunning down of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Tucson and the hundreds of daily shootings across the country, makes me wonder if their version of civil peace might be more accurately described as an armed truce.

I once thought that Americans lived lives very similar to our own. After all, most of our modern cultural influences come from there. I now know this is sadly not the case after talking to a neighbour’s son who described to me his experiences while working in the States as part of his O.E.

He had a job as a contract builder in Florida knocking up kitset houses with some Kiwi mates of his. One summers evening, they decided to buy some paint guns and try them out before driving off to a paint gun game park.

They set up some beer cans as targets in the backyard of their flat and began to compete to see who was the best shot. Very soon they heard sirens and heavily armed police came storming in, demanding through a megaphone that everyone should freeze or get shot. The Kiwis thought this was a bit over the top and tried to explain that all they were up to was harmless fun.

The police were not impressed it seems with this attitude. They told them to shut up, booked them for resisting arrest and man handled them into the paddy wagon. The hapless Kiwis then spent a few days on remand and had some nasty close encounters with some of the real criminals of the area.

Fortunately, they were released without charge. The judge was content to let them off with a sermon on how to behave in America. My neighbour’s son thought that working in the States was not his thing and came home. The rough treatment he received at the hands of the police was such a shock that for months afterwards anyone in uniform gave him the shakes.

So far, New Zealand governments have resisted attempts to arm every police officer here. I regard that as a great achievement - even though some policemen have been grievously injured recently. Sadly, these incidents still happen in countries with heavily armed police because the risks go with the job. It could even be argued that police guns increase the likelihood of violence by raising the tension level.

Unarmed police on the streets tells me that we live in a country that generally believes in persuasion rather than intimidation. Long may it remain so. Let us hope we will not have any politicians like Sarah Palin putting gun sight markings on election posters this year - or pushing the politics of fear to get firearms onto the streets.

iPads Are Best - CES Who?

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A couple of weeks ago I finally got my hands onto an iPad. The salesman demonstrated how it worked and then gave me a shot at playing a motor racing game. I gripped the iPad as though it was a steering wheel and drove onto the racing track.

The experience was so much like the real thing the salesman and a few onlookers laughed as I waved it around, crouching and wincing every time I crashed into another vehicle or a wall. I could also feel myself getting nervous. That beautifully designed iPad was as slippery as my iPod and could be easily dropped (best played on a couch perhaps).

I was very impressed with the picture quality and quick response times on the touch screen. After some practice, my fingers started to do what I wanted as I zoomed in and out, moved stuff around and typed on the keyboard. I can now see why so many commentators are saying that tablets are going to change the way we do things.

iPads were first off the block, but they are no longer alone in the tablet market. Rivals are gearing up to tackle them with products of their own. Although they might not be so sexy, tablets like Samsung’s “Galaxy” have a few nifty extras like two cameras and flash players to access some website video material.

Earlier this month, Las Vegas hosted the annual Consumer Electronic Show (CES) and sure enough the new tablet prototypes got most of the media attention. The ones to watch out for seem to be the Xoom by Motorola and the Blackberry Playbook. Hewlett-Packard is going to reveal its own tablet in February and Google and Microsoft are rumoured to be working on theirs.

The other tablets at CES were very interesting too, but what really caught my eye was a new graphics application for iPads called the Griffin Crayola Colour Studio. This is a very interesting joint project by an IT accessory company (Griffin) and an art materials company (Crayola).

There are plenty of other drawing and painting applications, however this one comes with a new interactive stylus, which mimics real crayons and paint brushes. At this stage it looks very basic and I have hopes that it will develop further to help people like myself who want to draw directly onto the tablet.

I once railed against computers in Primary Schools because I thought they might prevent children from experiencing the joyful discovery of handling real materials. I have since changed my tune. I have heard of children, with what has been described as “learning difficulties”, restore their self confidence by using computers.

The days of teachers behaving like Moses delivering the Ten Commandments from curriculum tablets to overcrowded classrooms, might well be coming to an end. In the near future, every child will probably have their own tablet. Hopefully, their own style of learning will be recognized and they will be able to march to their own drumbeat.

Here They Come Again

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