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St James in disrepair (Image design: Archi Banal)
St James in disrepair (Image design: Archi Banal)

OPINIONBusinessDecember 7, 2022

The case against saving the St James

St James in disrepair (Image design: Archi Banal)
St James in disrepair (Image design: Archi Banal)

There are two easy ways to get rich: find one very wealthy sucker or find a million very poor suckers. As a public, it’s our duty to make sure we don’t become the million poor suckers, argues Dan Taipua.

A wealth of public buildings, a poverty of millionaire developers

In the theatre of my mind, I stand on top of the St James complex with a cricket ball in my hand. From this position I can throw that cricket ball and hit the Auckland Town Hall, Civic Theatre, Q Theatre, Aotea Centre (Kiri Te Kanawa Theatre and Herald Theatre), the Basement Theatre if the ball rolls for a bit and the Auckland Art Gallery with some effort for an uphill trajectory.

Publicly controlled buildings, restored and maintained for the public good.

Meanwhile, in the theatre of public relations, the privately-owned St James is seeking no less than $30m for renovation. An investment of funds drawn directly from Aucklanders who do not own that building.

We who support the arts (and I do support the arts) will cry, “we must support the arts!”, while several existing and healthy performing venues are less than 100m from the St James’s front door. Supporters of colonial style architecture will cry, “we must support colonial style architecture!”, while the Auckland Town Hall and the beautifully-renovated Auckland Art Gallery lie in that same 100 metre radius, and a fully-restored Civic Theatre with its beautiful Orientalisms is literally across the road.

How to escape a gaping hole of sunk financial costs: Dig upwards!

I’m not an expert on the structural condition of the St James complex, but I’m familiar with the building as I worked inside the venue up until the time it caught on fire (the first of two times) in 2007. I was working on the fated night a chunk of the building simply fell from the upper levels and injured a concert-goer.

st james
Restoration work remains unfinished at the St James theatre (Photo: Sonya Nagels)

Like most punters, I enjoyed the concert experience the theatre offered and the almost-stately decor of the lobby and mezzanine areas. As a worker, though, I also saw the derelict state of the Odeon and Regent theatres, which are attached to the building but almost never mentioned in subsidy-seeking press releases. I’ve been into the basements of the complex and the backstages and the roofing and walls and in-betweens. Those spaces were a wreck 15 years ago, and it’s difficult to see how two internal fires and general decay would have improved their state.

All this is to say that lovely memories of the concert theatre, which you’ll recall you’ve only seen in the dark, betray the actual condition of the site. In my opinion, there is no way on earth that $30m will cover the costs of its repair, not even close. But once the public has committed that massive amount and it peters out, what will we do with an unfinished theatre? We know the answer is that the public will burden future costs.

St James
The upper levels of Auckland’s St James theatre (Photo: Sonya Nagels)

The public good demands public control

Most people would see the tangible value in creating $30m worth of cycle lanes, even if they didn’t believe those lanes were a priority. Almost no one would see the value in handing me $30m to pave my own driveway, even if I promised it would offer emerging cyclists a world-class venue on which they could pedal about, creating a dynamic sense of community and fulfilling climate change goals eke noa etc. It’s still my driveway, and your $30m, no matter the claims I make about its lofty and indeterminate future uses. I will also be charging the same members of the public for tickets and booking fees, much like a theatre or concert.

The current proposition that the St James should receive funds from both local and central government is a complete reversal of how we should understand the arts and public/private support. There is a long tradition of benefaction supporting Auckland arts. Our gallery carries the names of many wealthy donors who decided to give something back. We also have an equally long tradition of the public bailing out failed commercial enterprises, resulting in a net loss of both public funds and art.

Recently the Bank of New Zealand auctioned off the most significant collection of NZ art in our collective history, with none of that art or money flowing back to the public. The deep, stinging, infuriating irony is that New Zealanders bailed out BNZ to the tune $1b in the 1990s.

Fool us once, shame on us. Fool us twice, shame on us again.

Keep going!
Goodnature
Goodnature’s products are used in the bush and backyards all over the world. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

BusinessDecember 6, 2022

The company tackling our pest problem – one rat, possum and hedgehog (!) at a time

Goodnature
Goodnature’s products are used in the bush and backyards all over the world. (Photo: Supplied / Treatment: Tina Tiller)

Homegrown smart traps are keeping backyards and bush pest free – including those cute spiky things snuffling around on lawns at night.

This is an excerpt from our weekly business newsletter Stocktake.

A rogue rodent has been terrorising our home. For the past few months, a pesky possum has been leaping across fences, running across rooftops, climbing through trees and generally making a noisy nuisance of itself. Sometimes I go outside to watch our resident cute hedgehogs run around on the grass at night and our problem possum lurches into view, its eyes glinting fiercely in the moonlight, ruining the moment.

For months, I’ve wondered, “How do I get rid of that damn thing?’”

That’s why I’m on a Zoom call with Dave Shoemack and Craig Bond. Together they run Goodnature, a Wellington company making smart traps that exterminates pests “humanely”. Unlike other traps, no poison or glue or inescapable box is involved in this New Zealand-made product. Instead, their traps kill unwanted possums, stoats, mice and rats instantly then reset until the next one shows up. Their mission statement is “Rewild the world” and it seems to be working: their traps are available in 40 countries.



They’re popular because they’re easy to use. Customers set them up low on the ground and a tube of lure (a chocolate or meat paste) entices an unwanted animal within range. When it reaches its head up to lick the lure, a trigger is initiated. “A piston, powered by gas, comes from the side straight into the animal’s head and kills it humanely within a couple of seconds,” says Shoemack.

A notification is sent to the phone of the trap’s owner alerting it to the kill and the trap resets, ready for the next one. Goodnature’s range of traps can be left to do their thing for months at a time. Using the app, kills are catalogued among many others, showing just how many unwanted pests have been captured around the country.

Goodnature
Goodnature’s traps are small and sit low to the ground at ankle height. Photo: Supplied

This sounds like exactly what I need. But I’m worried about my pets. The pair inform me their traps are too small for my cat or my dog to get hurt in any way. “We have no evidence of a dog ever getting into these traps,” says Bond, who tells me their specialist possum trap has just been taken off the market as it needs a refresh. He assures me it should be back in action soon.

But there’s another problem. As Bond patiently informs me that my annoying possum isn’t my only problem pest that needs dealing with, my jaw drops.

My snuffly hedgehogs need to go too.

“I know hedgehogs are cute and everyone loves them but they do a huge amount of damage,” says Bond, the company’s co-founder. “[Our traps] will definitely kill hedgehogs and we make no apologies for that here in New Zealand. They are a really big problem and that problem is growing.”

Hedgehogs are a problem? That’s news to me. Bond tells me it’s true. Shoemack, who joined Goodnature as CEO, recently installed a Goodnature trap in his backyard only to find a hedgehog was the first thing it killed. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, what have I done?’” he says. Dismayed, he ran into the office the next day to ask what was going on.

Bond told him what he told me, then listed all the damage hedgehogs can do. “They cruise along the forest floor eating everything … all the ground-dwelling invertebrates, all the eggs, all the ground-nesting birds,” he says. “We’re finding them spread further and further into the bush relatively recently … They’re super killers. They just mess up everything.”

Rats, stoats and mice, which their traps also deal with, do damage of a different kind. “They’re eating baby bird chicks, lots of little invertebrates, lizards, wētā. They’re the primary food source for our bigger animals like morepork (ruru) and all sorts of bigger birds. [The rat’s eating] poison and then our native bird species have been killed through secondary poisoning by eating the dead rat.”

Goodnature
Craig Bond gets busy in his favourite place, the bush. (Photo: Supplied)

These problems have been growing and demand for Goodnature’s traps is at an all-time high. The company’s been in business for 20 years but things have really taken off across the past five, with it doubling in size thanks to growth across America, the UK and Europe. They’re now celebrating after selling their 500,000th trap and receiving recent investment from Gallagher Group. From Newtown, Wellington, where their traps are built by hand, they’re cleaning up bush and backyards all over the world.

But there’s no getting past the fact that an animal is being killed every time one of Goodnature’s traps is used successfully. Is that really humane? “It’s a tricky one, we’ve all struggled with it,” says Bond. “But that’s why we put so much effort into being as humane as possible, and as targeted as possible, and ensuring that we don’t kill non-target species. We’re trying to control an invasive species which is causing massive problems to biodiversity. Ultimately, we believe it’s justified because of the gains we get through both biodiversity and the health of our forests, the health of our land and waterways, and then ultimately, the health of our people.”

That might go over the head of my daughter, who just loves her little hedgehogs. How do I break the news to her that her spiky friends are a massive problem and need to be killed in the garden? Bond faced the same thing with his own daughters, and he did so by explaining there was a simple choice to make. “We either have a hedgehog or we have lots of native birds and invertebrates and really healthy forests regenerating,” he says. “That’s the choice, because that’s what the hedgehog takes from us.”

But wait there's more!