November 9, 2024 • 11 mins
This week on The Sunday Panel, director at Capital and political commentator Ben Thomas and senior PR consultant at One Plus One Communications Damien Venuto joined in on a discussion about the following issues of the week - and more!
The US election is over and done with, and Donald Trump will be the next President of the United States. Do we think he'll be a good leader - or better than Joe Biden? How can we make the most of a Trump presidency?
Insurance premiums are going up at a rapid rate following an increase in floods and other natural disasters. Who should cover these costs?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It is time for the panel and I will explain
the relevance of the song and just a moment. Joining
us today, we have director at Capital and political commentator
Ben Thomas. Good morning, Ben Modern. And we have senior
pr consultant at one plus one Communications, Damien Venuto. Hey, Damien, Hey,
good to have you both with us. Of course, it's
been a very big week, heavy week. Some might say
(00:36):
there are people who've taken the result of the UIs
selection on and feeling very concerned or upset and things
about it. My colleague Heather Toplissy Allen wrote a column
today in the New Zealand Herald saying, yes, Donald Trump
is a bad guy, but he should be a better
president than Joe Biden. And she talks about his sort
(00:57):
of international relations and his performance sort of last time
in various areas. Would you agree, Thomas, You might not
be sorry, you might not like the guy, but do
we need to be depressed and hysterical about his reelection?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well? Yeah, Look, I mean there is a bit of
a sense. I don't know if you've ever read the
Kurt Vonnegut novel title Quake, where if everybody is thrust
back into the past and has to relive it like
an automaton, unable to change anything for ten years or something.
And that's sort of what it feels like, was Trump.
That's kind of we're just doing it all again. Look,
(01:41):
I'm an old fashioned kind of guy. I'm a traditionalist.
I think it's quite bad for democracies if you have
somebody who kind of endorses a sort of violent resistance
to an election result, is on track to pardon the
people who invaded the capital. That sort of encourages political
and violence, that encourages the sort of weakening of institutions,
(02:04):
including trust and elections. I think even just by that
it will be amit bad that Donald Trump has been
restored to the White House. But you know, look, he
Biden got trapped in the same kind of situation that
leaders across the Western world have, where you know, inflation
is slowing, but we have not dropped their stalls high
(02:25):
as ever, and people are caught in that kind of
trap of high prices and high infrast rates as they
try and battle to get inflation down. And that's proven
pretty difficult for anyone to kind of overcome. Will he
be a better president than Biden? I wouldn't think so.
In terms of international relations. You know, the way that
he sort of I think encourages the enemies of the West,
(02:49):
you know, not to be too dramatic about it, like
China and Russia, only adds more instability to world orders,
to the world order. You know, if he goes through
with his promises, he will have calamitous effects on international trade,
which will be bad for America, will be particular. So no,
(03:10):
I respectfully disagree with me.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, but you know here there is also you know,
she mentioned something in this article that Jack taym was
speaking about, and he's been on the ground in the
US as well, and he was saying that a lot
of his friends were saying, actually, look, you know, there
was peace under Trump because he is unpredictable. No one
knew how he would react. People were more cautious about him.
So actually international relations may have actually been better off
(03:34):
under her.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Damien, I absolutely disagree because we can't describe that period
as peaceful when you look at the fact that he
was trying to hold onto power in twenty sixteen and
the scene that keeps like replaying in my head as
I think about this. Is justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime minister,
when he was asked at the time in twenty sixteen
what he thought of what was unfolding in the Capitol
(03:57):
in twenty sixteen, he had this expression, he paused for
but twenty seconds, didn't say anything, and then what he
said was, we watch with great consternation what is happening
in the United States right now? And I feel like
that sense of constellation it just hasn't gone away. It's
like on repeat. It's very much like that Kurt Vonnegult
novel that Ben Thomas has just referred to. It's we've
(04:19):
paused on a sense of consternation, because that's what you
feel when Trump is in power, when he is in
a position where he's trying to hold onto power. You
just don't know what's going to happen, and it's an uncertainty,
and it's that uncertainty is never good. It's not good
for markets, it's not good for business owners, it's not
good for international relations. So along with Ben, I completely
(04:39):
degree I disagree.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
With Yeah, I suppose. I suppose I'm coming from a
position whereby the deal is done. He is the president,
and we've got to kind of be practical about it
and move forward. Obviously, our greatest concerns are sort of
geopolitics and potential tariffs on New Zealand businesses, and all
we can do is try and move forward and make
sure that we've got good relationships and that we're looking
(05:03):
after the interests that we need to. And you kind
of just got to get on with the guys, right,
there's no point actually sitting getting stressed about it either.
She just got you know, one something funny.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I think the last sort of eight years has shown anything.
It's that's sort of moping around and going on, going
on Twitter and saying that you've lost faith in everything
and this isn't normal capital letters and things doesn't really
help anybody, you know. I think people of my age,
(05:36):
you know, dinosaurs in the current world. You know, people
whose ages passed will look back and think, you know,
the sort of after the end of the Cold War
and for about twenty five years, we had a remarkable
era of global peace and economic well being. You know,
it may not have seemed it at the time, and
(05:59):
and look now we're going back to sort of more
business as usual in the course of history, where you know,
there are challenges, always challenges, but by and large, lots
of things in the world are getting better as well.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And good history is chaotic being it's always been chaotic.
Even when one part of the world might think that
they're having a relative sort of you know, secure, sort
of uneventful period, there'll be another part of the world
that isn't. It's just kind of it's you know, I
know that everyone looks at it as unprecedented times, but
you could probably look back through history and there's plenty
of unprecedented times, aren't there.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
I think us millennials have lived through this period where
there was incredible peace, and the mistake that we made
was thinking that it would stay like that indefinitely. It's
just a return to the mean. Really, we just have
chaos returning again and that's pretty much where it's going,
where it's always been.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
All right, let's move on to more chaos. There's over
four hundred thousand residential buildings that are deemed already at
risk of flooding in New Zealand, and of course we're
seeing a lot of storms, we sing a lot of flooding,
we seing a lot of erosion nature is doing its business.
At the moment, there is this steady increase in insurance premiums.
(07:09):
We're going to get to a point though, where they're
going to get quite steep, and we will get to
a point where insurance will stop ensuring certain areas or
certain properties. Do we need to be looking ahead and
having a backstop here, ben? Do we need to be
going We need to have a public insurance scheme that
is going to mean that people who are in a
position whereby suddenly their house has no value, they can't
(07:31):
sell it, their one main asset is no longer viable,
that we help them protect it with some sort of
public insurance scheme.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, there was, Yeah, So there was that Helen Clark
Foundation of this week which sort of suggested some moves
along those lines are task for So I think maybe
chaired by Shan Elias, came to siml kind of conclusion
on a conceptual level. You know that this is a
(08:04):
huge issue in the sense that you know, ultimately you
can talk about it, and there's been discussions about the
principles for a number of years and the Select Committee,
the Financial Expenditure Select Committee, have released another report on
that is a sort of way forward that the government
wants to basic sort of bipart as an approach on.
But ultimately that the issue here is that there is
(08:26):
a huge expense coming down the line, or a huge
cost coming down the line. And you know, initially there
was sort of it was it was kind of passing
the passing the you know, the hot potato around of
who will pay for it, councils or central government or
landowners or insurance companies. Over the last couple of years,
(08:47):
with more and more severe weather, the insurance companies, which
I said, like, don't count us out. You know, we're
not going to get part of it, will either recover
the cost or or we will just exit those difficult markets.
And so the you know that that that puts between
the landowners, the councils, and central government, none of whom
(09:11):
exactly a sort of coming forward to say their flush
with extra cash. And so there are going to be
some pretty hard decisions.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
I think one of the things you mentioned that the
coverage of the report was, you know, in Florida that
has been you know, houses that have been rebuilt about
forty times and fifty years. Yeah, damage and that's not
going to fly. In New Zealand, the Select Committee sort
of said, maybe we need to put people on notice.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, there's more to it, isn't there.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Then don't get rebuilt, you.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Know, I mean your thoughts. I mean there is more
to it than just and necessarily looking at insurance side
of it.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Yeah, so, I mean insurance companies are within their right.
I mean their job is risk miss mitigation. And when
you have Lloyds of London declaring news in as the
second riskiest place in the world from an insurance perspective,
that's telling. That's telling what insurance companies are thinking about.
But one thing that I've thought about is if we
don't settle this debate between landowners, central government and council,
(10:09):
then what happens is that it does it lands on
the landowners. And I've always found the climate change it's
about the environment, yes, but it's also a fundamentally an
economic issue. The poorest among us will be those who
are affected the most by climate change. Those who can
afford to sell their house, make a lass and live
somewhere else will be fine. But those who have to
stay in those houses, they're the ones that are going
(10:30):
to be affected by so this is a fundamentally it's
a poverty issue. It's an issue that we have to
solve on an economic level because it's an economic issue
as much as it's about the environment.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Thank you both so much for joining me this morning,
Ben Thomas and Damien Venuto. And since I brought you
to depressed millennials on the panel today, I'm going to
give you something to cheer you up. The music that
I played in sync Bye Bye Bye. That was a
song that was used by an Australian Fast five netball team.
They did this little dance before the tournament yesterday. If
(11:02):
you have not seen it, google it and go and
watch it. At first, I thought, hmm, that's unusual. They're
kind of doing a little dance before they start playing
the game, which we haven't really seen before. And it
sort of started out a little bit chitzy, but I'm
gonna be honest with you, they kind of won me over.
They are all very good dances. So did we go.
If you want to laugh, if you just want to
cheer yourself up, Australia Fast five Men's dance hea a
(11:23):
google than.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Have a laugh For more from the Sunday session with
Francesca Rudkin. Listen live to news talks it'd be from
nine am Sunday, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudgin
from News Talks EDB.
Speaker 2 (00:13):
It is time for the panel and I will explain
the relevance of the song and just a moment. Joining
us today, we have director at Capital and political commentator
Ben Thomas. Good morning, Ben Modern. And we have senior
pr consultant at one plus one Communications, Damien Venuto. Hey, Damien, Hey,
good to have you both with us. Of course, it's
been a very big week, heavy week. Some might say
(00:36):
there are people who've taken the result of the UIs
selection on and feeling very concerned or upset and things
about it. My colleague Heather Toplissy Allen wrote a column
today in the New Zealand Herald saying, yes, Donald Trump
is a bad guy, but he should be a better
president than Joe Biden. And she talks about his sort
(00:57):
of international relations and his performance sort of last time
in various areas. Would you agree, Thomas, You might not
be sorry, you might not like the guy, but do
we need to be depressed and hysterical about his reelection?
Speaker 3 (01:17):
Well? Yeah, Look, I mean there is a bit of
a sense. I don't know if you've ever read the
Kurt Vonnegut novel title Quake, where if everybody is thrust
back into the past and has to relive it like
an automaton, unable to change anything for ten years or something.
And that's sort of what it feels like, was Trump.
That's kind of we're just doing it all again. Look,
(01:41):
I'm an old fashioned kind of guy. I'm a traditionalist.
I think it's quite bad for democracies if you have
somebody who kind of endorses a sort of violent resistance
to an election result, is on track to pardon the
people who invaded the capital. That sort of encourages political
and violence, that encourages the sort of weakening of institutions,
(02:04):
including trust and elections. I think even just by that
it will be amit bad that Donald Trump has been
restored to the White House. But you know, look, he
Biden got trapped in the same kind of situation that
leaders across the Western world have, where you know, inflation
is slowing, but we have not dropped their stalls high
(02:25):
as ever, and people are caught in that kind of
trap of high prices and high infrast rates as they
try and battle to get inflation down. And that's proven
pretty difficult for anyone to kind of overcome. Will he
be a better president than Biden? I wouldn't think so.
In terms of international relations. You know, the way that
he sort of I think encourages the enemies of the West,
(02:49):
you know, not to be too dramatic about it, like
China and Russia, only adds more instability to world orders,
to the world order. You know, if he goes through
with his promises, he will have calamitous effects on international trade,
which will be bad for America, will be particular. So no,
(03:10):
I respectfully disagree with me.
Speaker 2 (03:13):
Yeah, but you know here there is also you know,
she mentioned something in this article that Jack taym was
speaking about, and he's been on the ground in the
US as well, and he was saying that a lot
of his friends were saying, actually, look, you know, there
was peace under Trump because he is unpredictable. No one
knew how he would react. People were more cautious about him.
So actually international relations may have actually been better off
(03:34):
under her.
Speaker 4 (03:34):
Damien, I absolutely disagree because we can't describe that period
as peaceful when you look at the fact that he
was trying to hold onto power in twenty sixteen and
the scene that keeps like replaying in my head as
I think about this. Is justin Trudeau, the Canadian Prime minister,
when he was asked at the time in twenty sixteen
what he thought of what was unfolding in the Capitol
(03:57):
in twenty sixteen, he had this expression, he paused for
but twenty seconds, didn't say anything, and then what he
said was, we watch with great consternation what is happening
in the United States right now? And I feel like
that sense of constellation it just hasn't gone away. It's
like on repeat. It's very much like that Kurt Vonnegult
novel that Ben Thomas has just referred to. It's we've
(04:19):
paused on a sense of consternation, because that's what you
feel when Trump is in power, when he is in
a position where he's trying to hold onto power. You
just don't know what's going to happen, and it's an uncertainty,
and it's that uncertainty is never good. It's not good
for markets, it's not good for business owners, it's not
good for international relations. So along with Ben, I completely
(04:39):
degree I disagree.
Speaker 2 (04:41):
With Yeah, I suppose. I suppose I'm coming from a
position whereby the deal is done. He is the president,
and we've got to kind of be practical about it
and move forward. Obviously, our greatest concerns are sort of
geopolitics and potential tariffs on New Zealand businesses, and all
we can do is try and move forward and make
sure that we've got good relationships and that we're looking
(05:03):
after the interests that we need to. And you kind
of just got to get on with the guys, right,
there's no point actually sitting getting stressed about it either.
She just got you know, one something funny.
Speaker 3 (05:15):
I think the last sort of eight years has shown anything.
It's that's sort of moping around and going on, going
on Twitter and saying that you've lost faith in everything
and this isn't normal capital letters and things doesn't really
help anybody, you know. I think people of my age,
(05:36):
you know, dinosaurs in the current world. You know, people
whose ages passed will look back and think, you know,
the sort of after the end of the Cold War
and for about twenty five years, we had a remarkable
era of global peace and economic well being. You know,
it may not have seemed it at the time, and
(05:59):
and look now we're going back to sort of more
business as usual in the course of history, where you know,
there are challenges, always challenges, but by and large, lots
of things in the world are getting better as well.
Speaker 2 (06:10):
And good history is chaotic being it's always been chaotic.
Even when one part of the world might think that
they're having a relative sort of you know, secure, sort
of uneventful period, there'll be another part of the world
that isn't. It's just kind of it's you know, I
know that everyone looks at it as unprecedented times, but
you could probably look back through history and there's plenty
of unprecedented times, aren't there.
Speaker 4 (06:33):
I think us millennials have lived through this period where
there was incredible peace, and the mistake that we made
was thinking that it would stay like that indefinitely. It's
just a return to the mean. Really, we just have
chaos returning again and that's pretty much where it's going,
where it's always been.
Speaker 2 (06:47):
All right, let's move on to more chaos. There's over
four hundred thousand residential buildings that are deemed already at
risk of flooding in New Zealand, and of course we're
seeing a lot of storms, we sing a lot of flooding,
we seing a lot of erosion nature is doing its business.
At the moment, there is this steady increase in insurance premiums.
(07:09):
We're going to get to a point though, where they're
going to get quite steep, and we will get to
a point where insurance will stop ensuring certain areas or
certain properties. Do we need to be looking ahead and
having a backstop here, ben? Do we need to be
going We need to have a public insurance scheme that
is going to mean that people who are in a
position whereby suddenly their house has no value, they can't
(07:31):
sell it, their one main asset is no longer viable,
that we help them protect it with some sort of
public insurance scheme.
Speaker 3 (07:44):
Yeah, there was, Yeah, So there was that Helen Clark
Foundation of this week which sort of suggested some moves
along those lines are task for So I think maybe
chaired by Shan Elias, came to siml kind of conclusion
on a conceptual level. You know that this is a
(08:04):
huge issue in the sense that you know, ultimately you
can talk about it, and there's been discussions about the
principles for a number of years and the Select Committee,
the Financial Expenditure Select Committee, have released another report on
that is a sort of way forward that the government
wants to basic sort of bipart as an approach on.
But ultimately that the issue here is that there is
(08:26):
a huge expense coming down the line, or a huge
cost coming down the line. And you know, initially there
was sort of it was it was kind of passing
the passing the you know, the hot potato around of
who will pay for it, councils or central government or
landowners or insurance companies. Over the last couple of years,
(08:47):
with more and more severe weather, the insurance companies, which
I said, like, don't count us out. You know, we're
not going to get part of it, will either recover
the cost or or we will just exit those difficult markets.
And so the you know that that that puts between
the landowners, the councils, and central government, none of whom
(09:11):
exactly a sort of coming forward to say their flush
with extra cash. And so there are going to be
some pretty hard decisions.
Speaker 4 (09:18):
You know.
Speaker 3 (09:19):
I think one of the things you mentioned that the
coverage of the report was, you know, in Florida that
has been you know, houses that have been rebuilt about
forty times and fifty years. Yeah, damage and that's not
going to fly. In New Zealand, the Select Committee sort
of said, maybe we need to put people on notice.
Speaker 2 (09:36):
Yeah, there's more to it, isn't there.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Then don't get rebuilt, you.
Speaker 2 (09:39):
Know, I mean your thoughts. I mean there is more
to it than just and necessarily looking at insurance side
of it.
Speaker 4 (09:47):
Yeah, so, I mean insurance companies are within their right.
I mean their job is risk miss mitigation. And when
you have Lloyds of London declaring news in as the
second riskiest place in the world from an insurance perspective,
that's telling. That's telling what insurance companies are thinking about.
But one thing that I've thought about is if we
don't settle this debate between landowners, central government and council,
(10:09):
then what happens is that it does it lands on
the landowners. And I've always found the climate change it's
about the environment, yes, but it's also a fundamentally an
economic issue. The poorest among us will be those who
are affected the most by climate change. Those who can
afford to sell their house, make a lass and live
somewhere else will be fine. But those who have to
stay in those houses, they're the ones that are going
(10:30):
to be affected by so this is a fundamentally it's
a poverty issue. It's an issue that we have to
solve on an economic level because it's an economic issue
as much as it's about the environment.
Speaker 2 (10:41):
Thank you both so much for joining me this morning,
Ben Thomas and Damien Venuto. And since I brought you
to depressed millennials on the panel today, I'm going to
give you something to cheer you up. The music that
I played in sync Bye Bye Bye. That was a
song that was used by an Australian Fast five netball team.
They did this little dance before the tournament yesterday. If
(11:02):
you have not seen it, google it and go and
watch it. At first, I thought, hmm, that's unusual. They're
kind of doing a little dance before they start playing
the game, which we haven't really seen before. And it
sort of started out a little bit chitzy, but I'm
gonna be honest with you, they kind of won me over.
They are all very good dances. So did we go.
If you want to laugh, if you just want to
cheer yourself up, Australia Fast five Men's dance hea a
(11:23):
google than.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
Have a laugh For more from the Sunday session with
Francesca Rudkin. Listen live to news talks it'd be from
nine am Sunday, or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
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