Dark Days

It's a pretty fraught time to be a journalist in New Zealand at the moment. Retrenchment, lay-offs, cut-backs, and redundancy are words with which we are all becoming too familiar. A wide range of broadcasters; TRN and Radioworks in radio, and Prime and TVNZ in television, are all in the process of shedding staff.

Or, as out bosses like to tell us, adjusting to the current economic climate.

90 staff are being axed at TVNZ of which around 20 are from news and current affairs. This follows on from cuts TVNZ made but a year or so ago when around 160 people were sent down the road. It's hard to see what fat, if any, there can possibly left to trim within TVNZ's news unit. How on earth they're going to cover morning news, the midday bulletin, the 4.30 pm bulletin, news at 6 and the late news, beggars belief. Add into that its commitments to TVNZ7 and its news service and one has to surmise it's an impossible task for those that are left.

But as bad as things are at TVNZ the situation at Prime News is far far worse. Its 5.30 news show already operated on a shoestring and, with no disrespect to those who work there, its quality always was well short of what it should have been. This is now going to go downhill double quick. From what I've been told the production, camera, and editing staff have pretty much been massacred. The show will now be piped out of Sydney based on the efforts of 4 video-journalists (three in Auckland and one in Wellington) and very limited production support.

Basically Prime News is now terminally fucked. There's absolutely no way they will be able to produce a credible news programme on those numbers. My suspicion is that their bulletin will either be cut in length, or canned altogether, within six months.



To all my colleagues out there who are now facing a fraught future. My sympathies are with you.

A Right Banker

It's a funny old thing this credit crunch. Especially the way it appears to have tightened the sphincter muscles of certain banking types.

A little over a year ago, when the property boom was in full swing, I approached my bank to see how much they would lend me should I consider splashing out and buy myself a home. As it turned out they were happy to lend me something in the vicinity of a quarter of a million dollars.

However the market was manic and obviously heading for a fall so I said thanks but no thanks and waited for the real estate bubble to burst.

Which it duly did.

Anyway now the market's in free-fall and property prices in our fair capital are finally approaching something vaguely resembling reasonable my partner and I thought we'd approach the bank again and see how much we could borrow on our combined incomes.

That is; roughly twice the income that I had when I approached the bank solo last year.

Well the man at the bank did what bankers do best. Took details, crunched numbers, hummed and harred etc etc. In fact he even managed to find the banking details my partner had when she banked with this bank back in 1983.

WARNING - even after a quarter of a century these bastards will still have something on you lurking somewhere within their networks. My mind boggles at the fact they went to the trouble to:
a) move it from a paper record to an electronic one (computer records weren't the norm in 1983)
and;
b) hold onto the records of the banking behaviour of a seven year child.

Right I'll get back to the point of this rambling.

So our grey little banking man finally did all his sums and informed us of the sum the bank would be prepared to lend us in exchange for our life, liberty, happiness, and eternal souls.

It turns out it was only 30K more than what they were prepared to lend me as an individual 14 months ago.

So it seems it's not just been the finance companies that have been guilty of loose lending. I can't imagine them getting this tight, this quickly, unless some pretty bad calls were made in the not too distant past.



Actually it reminds of an old joke that's now been completely destroyed by the European Union and single currency.

Q: Why do the Irish call their currency the Punt?
A: Because it rhymes with banker.

Now they Tell Us!

According to Telecom NZ needs to spend one and a half billion dollars if internet broadband targets set by the government are to be met.

Apparently they can only foot a third of the bill.

A decade and a half as a monopoly with a virtual license to print money yet they never got round to doing much in the way of infrastructure investment.

I wonder why?

Maybe it slipped their mind. Or was it the fact that, with a largely captive market in their pocket, they simply didn't give a fuck.