North & South December 2019

Ask any exporter: no matter how good your product, it can still be hard to get phone calls returned, meetings taken. The FernMark, our national symbol for country-of-origin, can be your secret handshake. Just ask Campbell Gin of Port Nicholson Fisheries LP, a 100% Māori owned business exporting lobster to China. New Zealand has a compelling story to tell the world, Campbell says, and the FernMark is helping to tell it. The story is about food from a clean and beautiful environment, and about traditional Māori values of kaitiakitanga – guardianship – of scarce fisheries that has seen New Zealand achieve the highest of world rankings for fisheries management. New Zealand rock lobster is already worth more than $200 million a year in exports to Asia, with a reputation as the finest seafood…

1 New Zealand is ranked among the best performing fisheries nations in the world* 2 FernMark offers protection to seafood exporters building in-market credibility 3 Seafood from New Zealand achieves a 127% premium over the world price** 4 Have confidence knowing your produce has the ‘tick of approval’ from the New Zealand Government 5 FernMark inspires trust in business relationships with food safety and sustainable practices ** Ministry for Primary Industries **Emerging Growth Opportunities in New Zealand Food & Beverage, Coriolis/MBIE, March 2018 Discover how the FernMark strengthens your export potential fernmark.nzstory.govt.nz…

HAVE WE CALMED down yet? Everybody just about over the rugby and the All Blacks getting turfed out of the World Cup? I’m sure I can’t be the only one who was already a bit over it, even before England thumped us. All that interminable news coverage for weeks and weeks, with pointless postulating. Who’s going to win? Who knows – that’s why we have a world cup, to find out. I enjoy rugby, but find I’m not so invested in the outcome as I was as a kid, when I’d get up in the middle of the night to watch or listen to test matches. So much so, I went tramping at Labour weekend, leaving the All Blacks to play the semi-final without my trifling support. It’s not disloyalty, or even disinterest,…

The first time Lee-Anne Duncan met Tama Muru, it was on the steps of Radio Waitaki in Ōamaru at an unseemly early hour in February 1996. He opened the glass doors of the town’s community radio station and welcomed in his replacement, newly graduated as she was, from the University of Canterbury’s postgraduate diploma in journalism. After just over a year as the station’s sole-charge journalist/newsreader, Muru was off to Radio New Zealand’s Christchurch newsroom. His time in regional radio was done, but Duncan’s had just begun. Five years later, both Duncan and Muru fetched up at BBC World TV at White City, London, helping produce the channel’s 24-hour news bulletins. Muru escaped quickly to the Hardtalk office, where he flourished into the globe-trotting senior producer he is today. As…

North & South cemented its position as the home of New Zealand’s best travel writing after a swag of wins at the 2019 Philippine Airlines-Travcom Travel Writing Awards on October 31. Senior writer Mike White (above) took home the Travel Writer of the Year award for the third time. He was awarded the major prize for his feature Season’s Greetings, which saw him embrace the wild, wonderful and plain wacky at the Queenstown Winter Festival. Judge Helen Hayes said his winning story was “entertaining from beginning to end and made me look at Queenstown, a place I’ve been to many times, through different eyes. It was cleverly constructed, brilliantly written and made me smile.” North & South’s deputy editor Joanna Wane (above), who won Travel Writer of the Year in 2017,…

SPEAKING OUT Yvonne van Dongen’s interview with Jill Abigail is excellent journalism, the synthesis of a remarkable New Zealand life interwoven with a very topical and timely issue – that of the rise of extreme gender ideology and its implications (Face to Face: Jill Abigail, November). I am very concerned about the issues raised in the article and agree with Abigail on all of them. She states it very well. However, like many others, I am frustrated and truly alarmed by the unrelenting censorship of any discussion of the issues, no matter how valid or reasonably presented. This situation is now approaching the ridiculous. When I learned of the Speak Up for Women Feminism 2020 event in November at Massey University, Wellington, I booked a ticket and made travel plans from Australia. I…