Bill Dalton

In France, when a person is accused of wrong-doing they are deemed to be guilty until they can prove their innocence.

In New Zealand, the same person would be regarded as being innocent until the accuser could prove the guilt.  That is – everywhere in New Zealand other then at the Inland Revenue Department – they work on French law.

So, on that basis it could be said that Winston Peters is innocent – no-one has yet proven his guilt.  But, surely there have been enough questions raised in and by the media – questions about the Glenn donation, the Vela donations and the Jones donation, that to fail to give reasonable explanations is in effect obstructing the path to the truth.  If there is nothing to hide give us the facts.

Peters’ failure to even attempt to explain these matters and his insistence on arrogantly attacking any questioners is totally unacceptable behaviour from a person who draws his income from the public purse.

Surely the blue rinse set in Tauranga is not going to inflict this fellow on us again in November.

And speaking of unacceptable behaviour – the Labour Government, realising they are about to bite the dust, are flat out appointing all their cronies to cushy boards and public bodies.

They need to get these appointments made no later than 3 months out from an election so the process is in overdrive.

Last week alone they appointed 43 people to soft, publicly funded jobs.  They have appointed 140 in the last five weeks.

People like Mike Williams, President of the Labour Party has picked up a directorship of the New Zealand Transport Agency, his fifth such appointment.

I suppose the rumoured $140,000 plus per year he receives from these appointments, fees paid by you and I the humble taxpayers, ensures that the New Zealand Labour Party can save on any presidential stipend.

It really is open season on jobs for the boys – and girls – and you and I will be keeping these people in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

Doesn’t it make you feel good to be such a benefactor?

Yeah right.

Related links

Murry McCully’s newsletter - A Tsunami of Cronies? 25/8/08

Isn’t it strange how cult leaders always like to adorn their weird groups with a respectable main-stream purpose.

The Reverend Moon claimed his brainwashing cult was a religion.  Jones claimed his cult was a new and successful style of living until the Jonestown massacre.

Recently we have had an offshoot of the mormon religion led by Warren Jeffs who claimed he was doing gods work until it was realised he and all his grubby old mates were producing children from young girls.

Winston Peters simply calls his cult a political party.  MMP has enabled the likes of Jim Anderton to call himself a political party and therefore receive large dollops of dough from you and I the humble tax-payers and to me – that is bad enough.  But I certainly draw the line at a system that allows someone like Winston Peters to benefit from the government coffers as he does.

His so called political party is a joke.  As the leader of this cult in 2005 he blathered to all and sundry that he was not interest in the “baubles of office.”  Immediately after the election, when he saw he was in a position to bargain, all that went out the window.

Not only did he grab a ministerial post, with all its “baubles of office”, but he only took on the easy part of the job.

No Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade for Peters, he just took on foreign affairs.  Clearly there was too much work in the trade part of the portfolio because that was put in the excellent hands of Phil Goff.  Not even Aunty Helen would trust Winston in that important area.

And now Winston Peters asks us to believe he never knew that $100,000 had been dumped in to his legal fees account.  I don’t know about you, but I find that absolutely impossible to believe.

By his own admission, Peters is not a wealthy man.  You can’t tell me, that any man of modest means who has racked up huge legal fees on a fruitless mission to heal a bruised ego, would not know when someone dumped one hundred grand into the kitty.  And if, in the very slightest chance that your solicitor did receive the money and not tell you, wouldn’t you sack him forthwith.

Peter’s solicitor admitted on TV that if the large donation had not been received, then Peters was liable for the shortfall in fees.  Does that mean Peters had a pecuniary interest in the donation?  And for that solicitor to appear on TV and suggest that he acted in a way that he had been taught in the 1980’s – well its’ just laughable.  Doesn’t he realise there have been substantial changes in MP’s disclosure rules since then.

Frankly, even those poor sycophantic souls who have continued to support the Winston Peters cult, must now see the error their ways.

Several times a day I have the same question put to me. Is it time to climb back into the share market? And frankly there is no yes/no answer.

When share markets are high, we often suggest that investors take a profit. That doesn’t mean you sell all your good stocks that have done well. It means that selling a few off the top locks in some profit – reduces the average cost of the remaining shares you hold in that company and better protects you if there should be a downturn. It may be that it makes sense to take a profit on a certain stock on several occasions.

When stocks are well down – like right now - investors seem to think they have to either stay right away or climb back into the market in a big way. They are ignoring the very sensible process of dollar cost averaging.

Dollar cost averaging happens when an investor decides how much he or she wants to invest in a certain company, then moves towards that goal with a series of purchases.

Say for example XYZ Ltd was currently trading at $5 – an all time low. An investor may decide to buy say 3,000 shares. In these uncertain times it makes sense to buy say 1,000 shares right now and two parcels of 1,000 at later dates.

In that way – if the price continues to fall the investor has the opportunity to average their price down and if the price moves upwards they have bought one third of their proposed holding at the bottom of the market.

So it’s not a case of all in or all out – it’s a case of taking a sensible approach.

Right now the financial market place is the most difficult I have known in 30 years in the industry. But difficulty means volatility and volatility means opportunity.

In the secondary fixed interest market there are securities in good companies trading on yields up to 20% - such is the lack of confidence in that sector.

The share market has fallen right across the board and yet some of those companies are performing well and have good prospects.

As one commentator so aptly put it – Buying last year was like buying in the days before Christmas, buying today is like buying in the Boxing Day sales.

Related Links

Somerset Smith Partner’s disclosure-statement. (PDF 1.1mb)

There are still some in our community who believe that Marineland should not close its doors to the public when the last dolphin dies.

The fact that two of our councillors voted against the closure simply beggars belief.

What do these people want the Marineland staff to do?  Sell tickets to the public – usher them in to the grandstand – make an announcement that the government prohibits us from capturing, breeding or importing dolphins so there ain’t no dolphins – thank them for coming – and wish them a happy day.

You can’t sell tickets to a show when your headline act is no longer with the show.  You don’t sell tickets to the movies and ask the patrons to look at a blank screen.

There is no option, when the last dolphin dies we do not have a viable entertainment spectacle therefore we must close our doors to the public.  It’s that bloody simple.

What we should be concentrating our energies on is “where do we go from here?”

The marine zoo and hospital has always been a very important part of Marineland and I would like to see that retained.  However that will never be viable on its own – we need a new headline act.  We need a new act that will draw in the punters and please, no-one suggest dolphins – that is a dead duck.

The facilities at Marineland need a huge facelift and that is going to require a great deal of money.  To justify that expenditure we need to have a business model that shows we can increase patronage dramatically.

That means we need a stunning headline act.  Someone out there must have an idea or an image in their mind of an act or a demonstration or a spectacle that would be unique in New Zealand and attract people to Napier the way the dolphins used to.

I am strongly of the opinion that the infrastructure in place at Marineland is too valuable to loose but we can only retain it and build and develop on it, if we can find a new attraction.

So Marineland must close when the last dolphin dies.  Not to do so would be defying logic.

What we need is your ideas to enable us to plan the re-birth.

I still can not believe – or I don’t want to believe the information that John Key brought to our attention this week.

Key claims that bureaucracy is gobbling up huge amounts of the government’s contribution to sport in this country. He claims that Sparc, the government’s sports funding agency, spends a third of its budget on administration. We are told that Sparc employs 86 full-time staff, 47 of them on over $100,000 per year and 14 of those on over $150,000 per year. And despite this army of highly paid and therefore one would hope highly skilled employees – they plan to spend $5.5 million on their website this year.

Frankly I find this outrageous. Surely the government allocates funds to Sparc with the intention of improving the health and well-being of all New Zealanders. Surely the government allocates funds to Sparc to foster sport in such a way that champions are produced. People we can all be proud of.

I am sure Sparc was never set-up to produce a large number of highly paid semi-civil servants who no doubt bolster the numbers on the Wellington cocktail party circuit.

The minister who allowed this to happen should be sacked although - in the interest of costs – we can probably wait until November when that will happen anyway.

But it does raise in my mind the so-called regional sports park.

I say so-called because it is clearly a Hastings District Council initiative – if it was truly regional, others would have been consulted in the region.

For instance – and I accept that this project has been underway since 2004 – I have never been asked if I think a velodrome is a greater asset than a swimming pool, or if gym-sports were more important then badminton.

It is my view that the opportunity to build this park has been lost. We are now into a severe downturn in the economy and corporate backing is going to be extremely hard to obtain.

But if Hastings do manage to complete this ambitious project, they are going to have to be very careful that the planned administrative offices are not full of overpaid bureaucrats eating from the hands of real sports people.