Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Shareholders approve of sale of TradeMe to private equity firm, family ties between Shane Jones and logging boss, and Newsroom journalists detained in Fiji.

TradeMe shareholders have given overwhelming backing to a takeover offer from a British private equity firm called Apax Partners, reports Business Desk. It’s the final major hurdle to clear for the $2.56 billion offer, with only High Court approval to come. It has secured Overseas Investment Office approval. The vote passed with about two thirds of shares represented, by a 99% margin. Out of the nine thousand or so shareholders, about 20 were in the room in Wellington when the vote went through, with another 30 tuning in online. We haven’t covered this sale much in The Bulletin, but it’s worth unpacking further.

In a very clear way, it’s understandable that the shareholders were so keen to cash up. During the offer process, shares jumped to record highs. They have always been pretty handy shares to have. A Stuff story from when the Apax Partners offer was made quoted investment advisor Grant Davies as saying the company was a “cash cow,” after high growth in the early years. The offer that came in (and was later raised to meet a rival offer) was considered on the good side of what the company was worth.

TradeMe has become one of the pre-eminent growth companies in New Zealand over the last 20 years. It’s sometimes easy to forget that back in 2001, they saw off a challenge from eBay, and a lot of that was by tapping into the local community of the userbase. They have become one of those rare things in the New Zealand economy, as an organisation that dominates their particular market, when there are also international giants to compete with – (think Alibaba, Craigslist or even Gumtree in Australia.) They’ve also been through a few previous sales.

For the NZX itself, the sale isn’t the best news. While shareholders will make off well, the company as a whole will be delisted, and it was one of the better performing shares on the main board. It may come back into NZ hands – it has before, after a period of ownership by Fairfax – but it has long been useful for that exchange. They have very few new listings coming in, and “the loss of Xero and TradeMe in reasonably quick succession does reinforce its global backwater vibe”, said The Spinoff’s managing editor Duncan Greive on Slack last night. Having said that, there’s an interesting take on all of this from Victoria Crone, who noted late last year that the money that comes in to shareholders will probably then be further distributed around New Zealand – potentially on new ventures.

And what will all of this mean for the people who work for TradeMe, and for users themselves? There’s a really good piece of analysis from Stuff’s Tom Pullar-Strecker on this, which notes that the immense profitability of TradeMe will probably keep the wolves from the door for a while. Many are naturally wary of private equity firms, as they so often become vultures, who strip out assets and leave a shell of a company in their wake. But Apax are considered to be more long term in their thinking (they’ve been around a long time at least) and the value of TradeMe is that it requires relatively low costs to maintain high margins and a large customer base. Their best way to maximise their money may well be to leave everything pretty much as it is. We’ll soon see what they choose.

An update to yesterday’s story about minister Shane Jones and the Northland logging company. Stuff reports that Mr Jones is actually related to the owner of Semenoff Logging, Stan Semenoff. Mr Jones raised concerns about the economic implications an NZTA decision to take the company off the road would have, after a massive number of long-standing safety concerns over their operations.  An appeal against the decision is currently under way. Oh, and by the way, Shane Jones is also an associate transport minister, so that’s just another hat he may or may not be wearing in all of this. Shane Jones denies any conflict of interest.

A trio of Newsroom journalists have been detained in Fiji overnight, in the course of trying to cover a story about a resort doing serious environmental damage. Their phones were taken, and they were held for questioning – at the time of writing they’re still understood to be in detention. Melanie Reid, one of those in custody, said it was ridiculous, and despite working in some nasty places around the world it has never happened to her. It’s outrageous stuff, and they should be released immediately.

Has Facebook really changed at all? Two stories jump out regarding their recent talk about livestreaming on their platform, and hosting white nationalist content. Privacy commissioner John Edwards told Radio NZ yesterday that he had been informed that no changes to live-streaming had been made, in the wake of the Christchurch terror attack being live-streamed on Facebook.

As well as that, this story from Huffpost is pretty damning. Their journalist showed a company spokesperson a video from Canadian white nationalist Faith Goldy, in which clear and obvious white nationalist views were espoused, and the spokesperson said it wouldn’t breach their new guidelines. It raises the question – what exactly has been changed?

The National Party is facing a dispute with the so-called “emotional junior staffer” at the centre of a saga around a deleted website petition. Stuff reports that what the staffer is alleging refers to media comments on the process of deleting a petition against the UN Migration Pact from National’s website, in the immediate aftermath of the Christchurch terror attack. At the time, Simon Bridges said it had been cleared earlier as part of a routine cleanup – cached records later proved that to be wrong. The staffer has retained the services of high-powered lawyer Linda Clark.

Here’s a really interesting piece from Farmers Weekly, about incremental environmental gains being tested by dairy farmers. Basically, through doing a whole lot of small things a little bit better, the test farm was able to reduce nitrogen loss to waterways, and cut down on the greenhouse gases produced by the farm’s operations. If those measures were applied across the whole sector – and that’s a big if to be fair – the overall outcomes could be quite significant.

New Zealand’s involvement in the endless Afghanistan war could have stopped around 2009, according to declassified documents. Stuff reports the Cabinet papers describe an over-stretched military, and illustrated a desire to withdraw without offending the USA. At that stage, New Zealand had already been involved in the war for almost a decade. NZDF personnel remain there to this day.

Spark boss Simon Moutter has sprung a surprise and stepped away from the job, reports the NZ Herald. He was replaced immediately by customer director Jolie Hodson. It comes at an interesting time for Spark, amid their pivot towards being a sports broadcaster. The board reckons the best interests of the company are maintained in Julie Hodson, who had been pre-vetted as part of their succession planning.

The Bulletin is The Spinoff’s acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

Right now on The Spinoff: Sam Brooks returns the publication to its roots, with a brilliant set of power-rankings for the new contestants on Dancing with the Stars. Madeleine Chapman follows up her viral post about chips, with a a post about the viral post about chips. Leonie Hayden gets a look inside some of the enclosure changes being made by Auckland Zoo. And I spoke to former Washington Post Beijing bureau chief John Pomfret about aspects of the NZ-China relationship that don’t often get covered quite so much.

So, yesterday’s feature about climate change was quite doom and gloom. Fortunately, today’s feature does a brilliant job of capturing a different side of it all – in a nihilistic way, climate change writing can actually be really funny too. Writing for US publication Popula, Sarah Miller went to go and look at beachfront property in Miami, a low lying city that is unlikely to be habitable by the end of the century. And what she wrote about it was deeply, darkly hilarious. Anyway, here’s an excerpt:

Biscayne Bay is breathtaking. I asked how the flooding was.

“There are pump stations everywhere, and the roads were raised,” he said. “So that’s all been fixed.”

“Fixed,” I said. “Wow. Amazing.” I asked how the hurricanes were.

He said that because the hurricanes came from the tropics, from the south and this was the west side of Miami Beach, they were not that bad in this neighborhood. “Oh, right,” I said, as if that made any sense.

The Crusaders have announced how they’ll go about deciding whether to have a name or branding change. In a media release, they pointed out that the city of Christchurch had significant English heritage, and to be fair a lot of the rugby community has always drawn on that heritage. But they also said the attack had changed a lot, and they had a responsibility to make the best decision for the community. As such, they may change either the iconography, or the name as a whole, at the end of the season.

There were a lot of interesting calls coming in to Sportstalk on Newstalk ZB last night on the subject, with many views covered. One from an older guy called Grant made a salient point about branding change. “Someone said removing the horsemen would mean that the terrorist had won. Well, we understand a bit about what his views were, and I’d think he’d want hundreds of horsemen riding around.” Fair call Grant.

Meanwhile, how good are the Central Pulse right now? 7 wins from 7 games, that’s how good. Newshub reports they’ve smashed the Northern Starts 68-42 in Porirua, with teenagers Aliyah Dunn leading the scoring, shooting 38 goals at 92% accuracy. There’s still a month of games to go, but a huge gap has opened up between the top 3 and the bottom 3 in the ANZ Premiership, which means the Pulse are all but assured of a spot in the finals.

From our partners: Climate change has already affected how electricity gets delivered to customers, and it’s only going to get more challenging. Vector’s Chief Networks Officer Andre Botha outlines what the lines company is doing to respond.

That’s it for The Bulletin. If you liked what you read, and know other people who would find it useful, pass on this signup form to them.

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Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Landfills in focus after pair of disasters, new firearms laws to be streamlined through Parliament, and generational conflict over climate change in Thames.

A pair of recent stories have shown that what gets put in landfills doesn’t ever really go away. Over and above the widely-covered crisis in recycling, landfills themselves are now causing significant issues for local residents. The problem basically boils down to the fact that what goes into the rubbish doesn’t always stay there.

In North Waikato, a fire at a dump in Hampton Downs has been burning since Sunday, reports One News. People nearby were told to keep their doors and windows shut, so that the smoke didn’t make it into their houses. It wasn’t considered a hazardous substance fire, and the firefighting effort was recently scaled back with the fire almost out. But it has completely ruined the plans of locals to collect rainwater, amid a drought in the area. Now they’ll have to wait for a few hours of rain to wash away the residue from their roofs. They’ve been drenched in rubbish – it has just been in a gaseous form.

Then down the other end of the country on the West Coast, a massive cleanup looms. All the way up and down the Fox River and along the beaches of Okarito and South Westland trash has been strewn, after flooding cut through the walls of an old dump. Conservation minister Eugenie Sage is warning that the cleanup will require more people than just local volunteers, reports Stuff. And it needs to happen soon – the longer the cleanup lasts, the more rubbish will end up in the sea, getting caught in the river or sinking into the land. For the ecosystem and the people it sustains, it’s a catastrophe.

Part of the problem is that it was a fairly poor quality dump on the West Coast. Newstalk ZB was told by waste management consultant Lisa Eve that old sites, and even more ad-hoc facilities like old quarries, are the worry. She says local councils need to rethink how they’re managing landfills more, and that newer landfills have a lot more protections.

But it’s no wonder people in the Dome Valley don’t want a new dump to be built near them. A petition has been launched, on the grounds that dumps shouldn’t be built near waterways, reports Radio NZ. And in the local news reporting you can see signs of consternation. Take for example this from the Mahurangi Matters, where they’ve used an idyllic, grassy photo of where the dump will go, and a provocative use of the term ‘Supercity Super Dump’ in the headline to describe the rubbish that the dump will service.

Surely the wider philosophical question has got to be asked here – what are we doing so that we aren’t simply building new dumps for more rubbish? Would it help if we switched to compostable materials? Or use incineration or pyrolysis? When talking to experts for both of those stories, the response was unanimous – the best way forward in terms of dealing with rubbish is just to immediately start producing a lot less of it.

New firearms laws will be streamlined through parliament. The government have intended to move quickly on them, and they made it through a first reading of parliament today. ACT leader David Seymour had planned to oppose the move, which would have forced parliament to sit under urgency, but he wasn’t there.

He was in fact outside, speaking to media. Stuff journalist Henry Cooke captured video of both Leader of the House Chris Hipkins putting the point of order through, and the subsequent response from Mr Seymour – again to the media. The NZ Herald reported his objections to the process, which were that the government was suspending consultation and scrutiny, and passing a law quickly more for the benefit of global opinion than outcomes.

The battle over whether the Thames District Council should sign on to a climate change declaration is being cast as a generational conflict, in this story by Stuff’s Charlie Mitchell. The town’s average population skews out, and an even older demographic of councillors have repeatedly refused to sign on to the Local Government NZ climate change declaration. On the other hand, an increasing number of young people in Thames are getting involved in climate protest, which is perhaps understandable – as opposed to their representatives, they’ll actually have to live in a climate changed world.

Just on this – the declaration itself is perhaps a bit of a red herring. It is non-binding and aspirational. The more fundamental question is whether any emissions reduction action is actually taking place. On that point, local mayor Sandra Goudie says the council is leading the way, though protesters say the Council is doing little outside of what they’re legally required to do. As for the question of whether Mayor Goudie is a climate change denier, she says she accepts the climate is changing, but refused to answer whether she thought human activity was the cause, despite the overwhelming scientific evidence that is the case.

Child poverty figures are moving in the wrong direction, reports the NZ Herald. In the year to June 2018, four of the government’s new measurements showed an increase in child poverty, and about 148,000 children are living in material hardship. Minister for children Tracey Martin says that’s too high.

How strongly spoken was the PM in raising concerns about Uyghur internment camps in China? We don’t know, because as Newshub reports, Jacinda Ardern won’t say. She does say she raised the issue, and in a way that was consistent and predictable relative to previous governments. But it’s unlikely to satisfy groups like Human Rights Watch, who have called on the PM to make her concerns known directly and publicly. There’s approximately a million people being held without charge in these camps.

Meanwhile, what does China want from us? That’s outlined in this morning’s Politik article, which analyses the desire in China for more investment in New Zealand. But that could make things deeply uncomfortable with coalition partner NZ First. So if that is blocked, it could then make life more difficult for primary producers looking to export to China.

Regional economic development minister Shane Jones is walking a fine line in discussing a High Court case brought by NZTA against a major Northland trucking company. The NZ Herald reports on the front of their business section today that Mr Jones is concerned about “the economic implications flowing from issues between NZTA and Semenoff Logging,” – which is the largest logging transport operator in the region. Those economic implications include the loss of many jobs if Semenoff loses its license – which it stands to do on the grounds of many safety failures. Mr Jones says he’s not directly commenting on the High Court case itself – his National opponent Paul Goldsmith says as a minister he shouldn’t be talking about it at all.

If you were one of these people, go out and buy yourself something either nice or necessary. The NZ Herald reports 25,000 people wrongly received the Winter Energy Payment, which is meant to just be for beneficiaries and pensioners. The cause was a drafting error in the legislation. Minister Carmel Sepuloni says there are no plans to try and recoup the $3.4 million that was paid out.

Technical difficulties, resolved! If you still want to read that Max Rashbrooke article about the government’s first 18 months, the website appears to be fixed, so here it is.

The Bulletin is The Spinoff’s acclaimed, free daily curated digest of all the most important stories from around New Zealand delivered directly to your inbox each morning.

Right now on The Spinoff: David Farrier continues his quest to uncover abuses happening on the creepy side of Youtube. Hayden Donnell explores the hidden costs of buying a new house. Angela Cuming brings to light the many Hamilton City Councillors who one might raise an eyebrow at. Matthew Codd discusses the nature of difficulty in video games, and how hard is too hard.

Finally, this months edition of The Side Eye is told from the perspective of Sohail Din. He’s a student who is Muslim, and he wonders whether the current mood of reconciliation will last.

The worst potential outcomes of climate change are becoming increasingly plausible. This feature from Newshub Nation goes through the possibilities of each scenario, set against different levels of warming. For some, the effects of climate change will be immediately apocalyptic. But while those consequences won’t be evenly distributed straight away, they’ll catch up with all of us in the end. Here’s an excerpt that discusses ocean coral:

Coral reefs act like rainforests for the ocean ecosystem, supporting up to 25 percent of marine species, despite making up less than 1 percent of the ocean floor.

However coral is particularly sensitive to temperature, becoming ‘bleached’ and dying as the sea warms. Over half the Great Barrier Reef is already dead and the chances of saving what remains are remote.

Even in the best case warming scenario of 1.5degC, approximately 70 percent of coral reefs will die. At the more plausible (but still very optimistic) 2degC, 99 percent of coral reefs will be extinct.

Based on current UN projections, catastrophic loss of biodiversity in the oceans is almost inevitable. But it isn’t just the oceans in trouble – biologists estimate up to half of life on earth could face extinction by the end of the century.

The 2021 America’s Cup is on the verge of disaster, with Newshub reporting three teams are on the verge of crashing out. That would leave just three challengers still in the field – the minimum number in an agreement between Emirates Team NZ, and the government. Luna Rossa, INEOS Team UK and American Magic are all still understood to be solid. But fewer teams also means less money coming in, when much of the preparation has already begun.

Meanwhile, the World Cup squad for the Black Caps will be announced today, and the NZ Herald’s Niall Anderson believes he has the scoop about who’s in. Elements of the team are fairly predictable – 13 of the 15 names feel totally locked in. But Anderson says Tom Blundell will be going as a backup keeper, and Ish Sodhi has won the race to be the second spinner. The squad is also expected to include Jimmy Neesham, which will cap off a remarkable comeback – it wasn’t so long ago that he wasn’t even wanted on the park by Otago.

From our partners: Climate change has already affected how electricity gets delivered to customers, and it’s only going to get more challenging. Vector’s Chief Networks Officer Andre Botha outlines what the lines company is doing to respond.

That’s it for The Bulletin. If you liked what you read, and know other people who would find it useful, pass on this signup form to them.

This content is brought to you by Vector. If you live in Auckland, they also delivered the power you’re using to read it. And they’re creating a new energy future for all of us, as showcased by the incredible Vector Lights in partnership with Auckland Council.