1[Caucus] National, ACT & NZ First: Delivering the sun or just beach cricket? Multiple polls point to a change of government. Is National passing the sniff test? Do voters really want ACT's 'real change' or a handbrake? We ask what a centre-right government might look like. Analysis - David Seymour is usually more a talker than a fighter, an ideas man; but he's been flexing his political muscles during this election campaign. Running as high 13 percent in major media polls this year (and even 18 percent in one Roy Morgan), ACT has been threatening to become the most successful minor party ever under MMP. (New Zealand First got 13.3 percent in 1996, in the first MMP election). But with two polls showing ACT slipping to 10 percent, has the mouse roared too much and is Seymour misreading the mood for change? In this week's Caucus podcast, we look at what the polls are suggesting a change of government may look like. Labour and the Greens are painting the picture of a National-ACT coalition as the most free-market, right-wing government New Zealand has ever seen. If New Zealand First is needed, they predict chaos. And as Guyon Espiner says in the podcast, Luxon's inexperience alongside Peters' and Seymour's belligerence could mean we are back at the polls in no time if the votes require that three-way coalition arrangement. At this stage, voters don't seem to be concerned. National leader Christopher Luxon has caught up with Labour's Chris Hipkins in the preferred prime minister stakes as National has reached 39 or 40 percent in this week's polls. that suggests that, while New Zealanders may not be taking Luxon to their collective breast, he's passed a certain sniff test. He's not the liability Labour was hoping he'd be. Sure, he repeats lines like a parrot and his tax plan doesn't add up, but he's good enough. And he's working hard not to appear mean and scary. Just this week Luxon said, "I consider myself very much a centrist and I'm very much a pragmatist." So voters don't seem to be afraid of a hard swing to the right as in 1984 or 1990. And most of all, he's not the incumbent government. Just as the British public voted out Winston Churchill within weeks of VE Day at the end of the Second World War and chose a new government to 'win the peace', so the New Zealand public seem to want to wash their hands of the pandemic government. So long and thanks for all the vax. That puts the pressure on National to, as Lisa Own puts it, deliver the sunlight. Voters are wanting better times and any new government will be on the clock to deliver, which could be hard in this global economic (and literal) climate. But to form a government, Luxon will almost certainly need ACT. Enter Seymour stage right. And he's very much not interested in propping up a centrist government. In a revealing interview on TVNZ's Q+A last year he said National tends to campaign from the right and govern from the left, never overturning Labour's reforms. "The ACT Party says that's just not good enough," Seymour told Jack Tame in July 2022. In the first 100 days, that's the litmus test. Are you prepared to take some of this stuff on?" ACT knows minor parties only get so much time in government, and even less at 10 percent or more. He doesn't want to be what the Greens have been to Labour the past six years. Expect a full court press from a party motivated more by liberal principles than shiny BMWs. To quote Eminem, Seymour knows he's going to "only get one shot, do not miss your chance to blow". Seymour does not want Luxon the centrist, he wants Luxon the Air New Zealand CEO going line by line through the budget to cut costs. By Christmas he wants many of the Ardern and Hipkins era reforms consigned to history, from Three Waters and gun laws to co-governance and fair pay agreements. Most of those National will happily concede or have promised to axe themselves. Seymour will want to go further. As the presumptive minister over-seeing his new Ministry of Regulation, he will look to shrink the size of government. And as Owen says in this week's episode, he's identified on Checkpoint that tax reform is top of his list; ideally a move to ACT's two-tier tax system (17.5 percent and 28 percent). This week he floated the idea that if National and ACT are a majority of MPs after the election but National won't go far enough, he might offer a new minority government confidence, but not supply. That is, Luxon could go to the Governor-General after the election and say he has the confidence of a majority of MPs, but that he doesn't have the majority needed to pass the Budget next year. That negotiations were ongoing. It's never been done before and it would likely never fly. While the Governor-General would likely have to accept such an unprecedented offer and let National form a minority government, in truth confidence and supply go together like a horse and carriage. I tell ya brother, you can't have one without the other (hat tip: Frank Sinatra). New Zealand's constitutional conventions say pretty strongly that if you can't pay the bills, you can't run the government. And it would be anything but the "strong and stable" government Luxon is currently promising on high-rotate. Labour and the Greens want to use this prospect of instability and a swing right to fret voters into a rethink. So far Luxon and Nicola Willis are assuring voters - if they are in fact worried - that they can and will restrain ACT. But the questions will only grow in the next month. That could spell risk for ACT. While the polls suggest a mood for change, it's hard to see a mood for a big liberal change. Not for the "real change" that Seymour wants. As is almost always the case in New Zealand elections, voters are signaling they want rid of the incumbent, not inviting massive policy shifts. As Espiner says, sometimes voters treat governments like a game of beach cricket - it's just someone else's turn. Seymour risks overplaying his hand and pushing 'beach cricket' voters back to National (as we've seen in this week's polls) or even to New Zealand First. Because there stands Winston Peters, once again reassuring voters this isn't his first rodeo and he can be the centrist handbrake to ACT's promise to 'take this stuff on'. Peters hopes that - and a little race-baiting - is enough for NZF to reach 5 percent. So does Seymour moderate his language or double-down? Do voters on the right swing back to National now they are looking stronger, consider NZF or do they go to ACT to encourage more substantial change? Luxon for now parrots the line that he only wants to talk about National and anything else is hypothetical. But every political future is hypothetical. National's tax plan is hypothetical, but he still talks about it. Under MMP, voters deserve to know not just what single parties want to do, but what coalition governments might do. Luxon has ruled out some ACT policies and will be under pressure to take a position on more. So the key campaign questions have become what National and ACT can agree on and whether New Zealand First reaches 5 percent on election day and is needed as part of any coalition deals. [Thursday 14 September 2023, 14:00]

2[Voices] How to get salmon out of hot water Scientists are looking for ways to adapt salmon fisheries for climate change. In this episode we talk to UK-born Dr Jane Symonds about how to save the industry from mass fish die-offs. Researchers at Nelson's Cawthron Institute are working to help Marlborough's salmon industry survive the challenges of climate change. This week Voices visited the institute’s fin fish breeding lab, where large tubs contain salmon that are being monitored for growth and feeding habits. Sea water is pumped into these tubs from the ocean that's just a few metres outside the aquaculture park at Cawthron. Jane Symonds is an expert in genetics and selective breeding, but working with fish wasn't exactly something she'd foreseen growing up in a landlocked part of the UK. “I grew up in industrial Northern England in a mining town in Yorkshire, and never really saw the sea.” Once she came to Christchurch that all changed. “I suddenly realised there's a whole beautiful world out there and having the sea on your doorstep was fantastic.” This started her on her path to genetics and aquaculture, she says. Jane's been at Cawthron for about five years now. She's part of a global team of experts, with nearly 300 scientists from 35 different countries. New Zealand's salmon industry in Marlborough is based on farming a cold-water species of salmon that's susceptible to even half a degree or one degree change in water temperature. It faces huge challenges as a result of climate change and global warming. “We've been selecting for these traits like growth and product quality. How can we now look at what we need to do to make our stocks resilient to climate change? And so that's an important question as part of the industry adaptation to what's coming or what's happening now because they're already being impacted,” says Jane. To give a sense of the scale of that impact, last year was the first time New Zealand’s King Salmon had to close some of its farms because of higher ocean temperatures. That caused a net loss of $55.7 for the company in the 2022 financial year, with thousands of tons of fish having to be dumped in nearby Blenheim’s landfill. The team at Cawthron have set up a temperature challenge working with New Zealand King Salmon and their breeding program to test salmon. Early results are promising, Jane says. “There is a genetic component to temperature tolerance. It's got a good heritability you can breed from it.” The scientists test the salmon by warming water to a point that is sub-optimal for the salmon, she says. “And then we look at how the salmon respond to that. And we then pick out the ones that do well at the higher temperature. And then we can relate that back to how they would do in the farms.” New Zealand is the world's biggest supplier of King or Chinook salmon, accounting for about 85 percent of global supply. Faced with the increasing impact of climate change, Jane thinks selectively breeding thermal tolerant fish could help avoid mass die offs like the industry saw last year. But how does that actually work? “A standard breeding program in aquaculture is where you take certain crosses between a male and female broodstock. And that produces a family like brothers and sisters. And they're all genetically related to some extent and you create maybe 100 of these families. “And so, they've got different genetics, across the families. And then you basically can then evaluate those families and see how they do. “So that can be growth, it can be the colour of the flesh, it can be their consumer quality, it can be thermal tolerance, it can be disease resistance.” Large scale farming of fish like salmon is contributing to the very warming having a negative impact on the industry, but Jane believes there is still a place for carefully managed fish farming in New Zealand. “If you think about the ocean that we have in New Zealand and what we can farm in the ocean, doing it sustainably and efficiently and taking environmental impact into consideration, we can help produce nutritious protein with lower emissions for the future and become less reliant on just sheep and beef and other products.” [Monday 11 September 2023, 05:00]