PoliticsMay 17, 2016

Influencers, inventors and international relations: on the ground at the Tripartite Economic Summit

Guest writer

It sounds like a bureaucratic bore, but Auckland’s Tripartite Economic Summit, with guests including a British YouTube superstar and an American political “rock star”, is the hottest ticket in town. Tim Murphy reports from day one.

YouTuber Tom Cassell – who is globally famous as Syndicate Tom – has been walking and talking around Auckland, filming himself on his iPhone between 50 and 100 times a day.

He then edits his life, documented like this every day, down to 10 minutes and broadcasts it to 2 million subscribers.

That’s his personal account, called Syndicate Central. His main one – Syndicate Project, which is for gamers – has 10 million subscribers. At 22, Tom routinely ‘influences’ almost triple the population of New Zealand. He has an estimated net worth of $NZ6 million.

“I make videos, put them on YouTube and for some reason people watch them,” he says while posing for a selfie at the Viaduct in Auckland.

YouTube star Tom Cassell, his business partner Angelo Pullen and the writer selfied by an expert at the Viaduct .

Yesterday Cassell, from Manchester via a technology business deal in Los Angeles, was one of the star influencers at the big Auckland-LA-Guangzhou summit at the harbour’s edge. It has a heavy-duty name, The Tripartite Economic Summit 2016, but it is loaded with techs, creatives, inventors and thinkers from here and the two international markets.

It is an 800-person extravaganza. The registrations well outdid organisers’ highest hopes. And it was running with big names, although few would have been as big beyond the conference walls as our man Tom.

The theme is “Making Connections” and aims at business and trade links, investment and jobs for the three cities. Cassell has been making connections everywhere he turns in Auckland.

At Auckland Airport, he encountered a backpacker who stopped, pulled down part of his shirt and showed Tom a tattoo of Syndicate’s logo (a lion) and motto (Life’s too short, make the most of it). “That was awesome”.

Then, walking to the venue through downtown Auckland yesterday, a high-rise window washer called down from his platform “Gidday Tom” revealing that he, too, followed the daily video log (vlog).

Cassell is here as a symbol for the possibilities in technology and marketing, for the benefits of collaboration and as evidence that the ordinary can have just as much appeal as the extraordinary.

3Blackdot, the Los Angeles technology company he runs with American business partner Angelo Pullen, links big global brands with Cassell and 21 other YouTubers. It is, says Pullen, a “very low-overhead endeavour”. People like Cassell keep on doing their thing with a major brand coming on for the ride.

“It is not about how exceptional someone like he is. It’s about how accessible he is. He’s a very common guy and that’s not to be disrespectful.”

Having started posting to YouTube with his dad’s camera as a 17 year-old, Cassell still sounds disbelieving about what’s happened to him. “I play video games and I travel the world. I went with Microsoft to Russia – I flew First Class! – and there were 1.7 million views of me just flying on an airplane. It was ridiculous.”

The Microsoft gig was to Siberia to publicise the new Tomb Raider game, giving an influencer the real Raider experience.

He’s happy to tell the Kiwi, Chinese and American delegates of the reach and potential of a communications genre few would recognise. Except through their kids: for teens, YouTube can be their dominant online experience.

Cassell, who as @Prosyndicate has 2.1 million Twitter followers, entertained that audience with praise of New Zealanders, tales of being driven around in Kim Dotcom’s car and his interactions with the “coolest mayor in the world” – Los Angeles’ Eric Garcetti.

LOOK WHAT HE GAVE US!! https://t.co/nQyHQiihNC via @YouTube

— Tom (@Syndicate) May 16, 2016

The Tripartite Summit is, after all, about making connections. And it’s about scale. With China in the room, how could it not be? It has a delegation of 60 from Guangzhou, China’s third largest region at 14 million people. Then you have Mayor Garcetti’s business and creative delegation representing the 10 million from the West Coast super city.

Auckland might seem the odd man out, but the three-way alliance signed two years ago in Guangzhou and cemented in L.A last year seems thoroughly egalitarian and a rosy spirit of friendship was evident yesterday.

It may be that, as is often the case, the wee Kiwi is the middle man. The broker of a better relationship between two of its friends.

But why not? This is no lightweight junket. People are talking and meaning business. Mayor Garcetti, a charmer who is routinely labelled a “rock star” by other speakers, is a big name. So is the senior emissary from China, Madame Li Xiaolin. According to host mayor Len Brown, she is not only a close friend of China’s President Xi Xinping but also daughter of former Premier Li Peng, who was in office at the time of the Tiananmen protests and crackdown in 1989.

Guangdong City’s mayor couldn’t make it but Madame Li labels his stand-in, Vice Mayor Wang Dong, a “rising star politically speaking”. So he could be one to watch.

Guangzhou Vice-Mayor Wang Dong, Len Brown, and L.A Mayor Eric Garcetti

The summit opened almost poetically. Inspired perhaps by the welcome from Ngati Whatua and explanation of the hongi as “more than a pressing of noses, the bringing together of two breaths”, speakers dug deep.

Mayor Garcetti can orate. “I come from a place where the sun only kisses the Pacific when it sets, to a place where it kisses the Pacific when it both rises and sets.” And “Whether it eventually sets over the Pearl River or the California coast, we come together [beneath it] as one people.”

Sir Pita Sharples welcomed the manuhiri (visitors) by citing the ancient bond of the godwit migrating from the Yellow River to New Zealand in one 8-day flight. He recalled a statue at Parliament of the bird, inscribed with “I am the dreams of the people. The length of my flights depends on the wisdom of your decisions.”

In all tongues the spirit was lyrical. Len Brown invoked Chinese fraternal imagery. He, the eldest, was the big brother of the three mayors. Wang the middle one and Garcetti the youngster. “And I want to acknowledge Madame Li as our sister.”

If it all sounded a bit saccharine, it didn’t tip over into wanton sentimentality. Madame Li, whose main job is as chair of the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, threw in a Chinese proverb: “True friendship exists only where there’s an abiding commitment to share common goals.”

China has 2297 sister cities worldwide, 33 within New Zealand and 257 with US cities and states. Such relationships can easily be dismissed as window dressing. The Tripartite allies were having none of that. Garcetti said: “L.A is home to the most Chinese in the US and the most New Zealanders in the US. We like to think of ourselves as a great Chinese city and a great New Zealand city.”

Despite just one percent of its business being in exporting, Los Angeles is the trade capital of the US. “Cities” Garcetti said, “are where national promises turn into local progress.”

Fabulous! Grammy nominated artist @OtmaroRuiz & Los Angeles Mayor @ericgarcetti playing a piano duet #tripartiteAKL pic.twitter.com/yXz6hAJ00J

— Kevin Covert 🇺🇸 (@USAmbNZ) May 16, 2016

A major focus of yesterday was the Māori‎ economy and the potential for international links and markets. Sessions on the subject were over-subscribed from visiting nations.

Maori Affairs Minister Te Ururoa Flavell outlined the $40 billion Maori economy, with 40 percent of the land for export forests, 40 percent of fish quota, 12 percent of sheep and been units, 10 percent of kiwifruit and 5 percent of dairy.

“But we want to hear from your heart. We don’t want to hear just slick words. No connection to your heart? No deal, or it will be doomed from the start.”

Mr Brown had an ebullient day. Certainty of his October retirement seemed to relax him into hosting with the kidding, roaring laughs and singing Len of old. It could possibly be his last big stand on the international stage wearing the mayoral chains and he reclaimed the title “The Singing Mayor”. Urging the Kiwis present to join him in “Pokarekare Ana”, he told his guests:

“This is a love song and today we share our love and passion.”

Meanwhile Tom ‘Syndicate’ Cassell will be posting some time about now on his life yesterday among the mayors and diplomats and suits and Kiwis and Yanks and Chinese. He’ll be talking to more people than will read all the mainstream media in New Zealand today.

Smile, Auckland, for the camera.

This report was commissioned in association with conference organiser ATEED (Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development). The summit continues today.

Keep going!

Photo: Getty Images

SocietyMay 16, 2016

Revealed: New Zealand’s enormous 60-year, 25 million tonne illegal fishing lie

Michael Field

Guest writer

Photo: Getty Images

Michael Field, whose book The Catch helped expose the labour and human rights abuses in New Zealand’s fishing industry, says a report out today reveals a decades-long abuse of our much-vaunted quota system, with more than twice as many fish caught as declared.

New Zealanders know the power of national utterances; we live by “clean and green” and “a great place to raise kids”.

Then there is the one favoured by politicians: “New Zealand’s world-leading fish quota scheme”. Like the others, it turned out to be false.

An academic report out today (media release) shows the quota system has failed – and may have even drifted into the realm of the criminal. It reveals that the total amount of marine fish caught in New Zealand waters between 1950 and 2010 is an astounding 2.7 times more than that recorded by official statistics.

Photo: Getty

The commercial fishing world has known this report was coming and feared it, knowing it would suggest the emperor has left off some of his robes. The recreational fishing world, as manifested in the increasingly powerful Legasea lobby (think the fishing equivalent of the NRA), is circling too, and last month had its own briefing on the report.

The report is part of a global Sea Around Us project published by the University of British Columbia’s Fisheries Centre. Its leading writer is the University of Auckland Business School’s Dr Glenn Simmons.

Simmons – an ex-cop with a kind of monkish demeanor – and his colleagues, including the dogged Professor Christina Stringer, have used the Official Information Act to extract information from the Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI). They knew that fishermen, the originators of the “it was this big” whopper, have an innate ability to lie.

Fishing in New Zealand’s 4 million km2 exclusive economic zone rests on the quota management system (QMS) which, with its profusion of abbreviations and jargon, has all the clarity of a Latin High Mass. Someone in MPI has had a bit of a joke over it; their undercover operations include the Greek mythical names Achilles, Hippocamp and Apate.

The hidden cameras, phone taps and undercover agents have exposed the world of inshore trawling in which one- to two-thirds of the catch on every trip gets dumped over the side. Achilles in 2012 found that 20 to 100 percent of some quota species from every haul were thrown overboard.

Those regular but unexplained news reports of lots of dead fish strewn across Coromandel, Piha and Muriwai beaches now make sense.

At the same time, lucrative fish like hapuka, moki, kahawai and kingfish were kept but not reported, an explicit violation of the QMS.

Simmons also found a case in which two rare Hector’s dolphins were caught by a trawler but only one was reported.

Extended reconstructed catch 1950-2013 (New Zealand and foreign flagged vessels), showing reported and unreported catch. (Source: Sea Around Us/Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries, University of British Columbia)

Sometimes MPI observers actually saw the dumping but said nothing. Even if they weren’t present, the reports show MPI knew all along but failed to act.

That’s bad enough, but the focus of the report is to work out what really was taken out of New Zealand’s waters from 1950 to 2010. The headline that will come out of the report is that over 61 years, 38.1 million tonnes of fish were taken. That number is 2.7 times, or 24.7 million tonnes, larger than what was officially reported by the government.

Much of the stuff was taken deliberately or, equally deliberately, caught and thrown overboard. What it adds up to is a fishing industry stealing the common wealth of New Zealanders.

The scary part of it all is the seemingly calculated nature of the misreporting. Simmons and team call them “invisible landings”, where all the fish arrives ashore either not reported or under-reported, or misidentified as another species, or simply as part of a blatant black market operation.

In The Catch I argued that foreign-flagged fishing boats should be kept out of our waters due to their appalling slave-like abuse of their crews.

Researchers Simmons and Stringer, who also fought the slave fishing industry, now show that the same vessels took nearly half of all New Zealand’s catch.

Not only did they use sweatshop cheap labour, they helped rob us.

The bottom line is that the QMS needs to be tossed overboard. Time to try again. The problems might be overcome with technology but, as the report says, the most serious obstacle to accurate reporting of catches is the fact that misreporting has been profitable, and the chances of being detected very small.

And then there is the secrecy. Much can be seen as a fishing boat unloads, but only the captain knows the paperwork.

Even MPI observers are sworn to secrecy; this I found out when I spent time on a Ukrainian Sealord trawler. The observer told me he felt sorry for the worthless fish that went overboard: “The more attention the politicians and the public give you, the more change you can bring about. If I was trying to save some little ragged-tooth guppies, no one would give much of a shit, even if they were critically endangered. Sea lions are fluffy, big and impressive.”

He was fired for saying that to me.

The seafood industry are blessed these days with skillful PR; only recently they circulated the joyful news that in the year to March seafood exports had hit a record $1.7 billion.

The problem we are left with is not the export accounting, but the knowledge of what has been left behind: the dead fish, the under-reported catches. Who knows whether any of it is sustainable?

Coincidentally, the $1.7 billion figure is the same as what Legasea claims is the contribution to New Zealand’s gross domestic product from recreational fishing. They say, hand on heart, a snapper caught by an amateur fisherman is worth five times more to the economy than the same fish taken by a Sanford boat.

What intrigued me at the launching of that study at Snell’s Beach, north of Auckland, was the large numbers of members of parliament who found time on a Saturday afternoon to listen. The message they are getting, and reinforced by this new report, is that a lot of voters take fishing very seriously – and they’re angry about what the seafood industry has been doing for decades.