Climate of weather worries

Catherine Harris reports as geography and climate change create uncertainty for businesses.

If you had any doubt the weather has a huge impact on New Zealand productivity, Wellington builder Mike Fox will set you straight.

The highly weather-dependent building industry is in the middle of a boom, and he and other builders can’t afford for vital tradesmen not to turn up. But sometimes subcontractors will use a dodgy weather forecast as an excuse to ‘‘spread themselves around’’.

‘‘Because the industry’s under so much pressure, it’s worse than it was . . . It’s very, very difficult for main contractors to get all the resources they need to deliver on time,’’ he says.

‘‘If they don’t show up, they’re not working and not making money. So they use it as an excuse to go somewhere else where someone’s got more pressure on them.’’

On the other side of the fence, former scaffolder Graham Burke, now chief executive of the Specialist Trades Contractors Federation, says he personally tried never to let the weather get too much in the way.

‘‘I found out early on, you rely on the weather forecast, you missed some good days.’’

But most tradies ‘‘look at the weather window before you do some jobs, that’s for sure’’.

‘‘Some jobs need an ambient temperature above a certain level, some of them need humidity below a certain level.’’

He’s heartened to see innovation is starting to come to the rescue. ‘‘We’ve seen a huge increase in the amount of shrinkwrap going around scaffolds and alterations and remedial work.’’

For any horticulturalist, painter, builder, farmer, fisherman, roading contractor, or even a retailer, bad weather has always been a force to be reckoned with.

A drought, a flood, a heatwave or hailstorm has the potential to wipe thousands from a company’s books, and hundreds of millions in terms of gross domestic product.

And climate change is making that unpredictability worse.

As a result, an accurate weather forecast can be worth its weight in gold. But Metservice meteorologist Lisa Murray says that in a long, skinny country surrounded by sea and split by mountains, it’s not that easy to guarantee.

‘‘If you take Europe, even Australia or America, they have a massive continental land mass, they track showers as they come,’’ she says.

‘‘We’re bringing stuff in from the ocean, we don’t have radar to track it. We use satellite imagery . . . We have great weather modelling as well which give us solutions to what could possibly happen over New Zealand.

‘‘So it’s certainly better than it was in the past, but it’s certainly a very tricky country to do it for.’’

Metservice provides weather forecasts for the general public, but it also has a long list of commercial clients.

Customers include the New Zealand Transport Authority, which uses the weather warnings to alert drivers and get staff on site ready to grit roads.

Murray says meteorologists are very aware that what they do influences myriad decisions, ‘‘from hanging your clothes out to laying concrete for the runway, to the road network or aviation purposes’’.

But climate change ‘‘certainly adds a complexity to the job’’. A few degrees of warmth globally will release more water vapour into the air and increase the likelihood of heavy rainfall events.

Nelson berry and dairy farmer Julian Raine relies on private farming forecasts, which give him a lot more detail than the public gets. Those forecasts are important for crops needing frost protection, staff planning for harvesting, and optimal planting.

Climate change worries him. As president of Horticulture New Zealand, he knows some growers have been under water this winter from abnormally high rainfall.

‘‘You’ll go from very wet to very dry in a relatively short space and you’ll look at our annual rainfall this year in Nelson and we’ve virtually had our annual rainfall and we’ve still got four months to go,’’ Raine says.

Ultimately, events like that are an issue for our food supply, Raine says. And with an eye to the debate on water taxes, he says that supply needs some protection.

‘‘I find it staggering some people can’t join the dots.’’

The sheer unpredictability of weather patterns in future also poses a higher safety threat to some industries. Back in the scaffolding trade, Burke is sure climate change is having an effect.

‘‘I think we’re seeing more wind events in places where we didn’t used to. Also seem to be getting more earthquakes, funnily enough.’’ OPINION: Mike Hosking’s job is to talk politics. The job also requires him to express views and provoke thought and controversy.

He has not made any secret of his political leanings. And it follows that a lot of what he says could not be described as neutral.

None of this would be a problem but for the fact that he will be performing the role of moderator in the upcoming leaders’ debates. This has led to complaints about his ability to be fair and objective.

He made it worse last week by making surprisingly ill-informed comments about who can and cannot vote for the Maori Party.

Then he made it worse still by providing a frankly ridiculous explanation to cover up what appears to have been a straightforward mistake. This is all very entertaining and Hosking may or may not retain his role as moderator of the debates. Meantime, the real workers of New Zealand might be wondering what they are allowed to say and do publicly in an election year.

The starting principle is that everyone has the right to freedom of expression. The High Court stated in Solicitor-general v Radio NZ Ltd that this includes that opinion, thought or belief being unpopular, distasteful or contrary to the general public opinion or to the particular opinion of others in the community.

One limitation on this right is where the views expressed are threatening, abusive or insulting, and are likely to incite hostility or bring contempt.

Such instances may amount to hate speech under section 61 of the Human Rights Act.

Further, in an employment context, an employee needs to take care that their public utterances do not bring their employer into disrepute or otherwise affect their ability to perform their role.

In 2014, broadcaster Shane Taurima was dismissed from his position at Television New Zealand after it was found that he used company resources for Labour Party purposes, including holding meetings in TVNZ offices.

The starting principle is that everyone has the right to freedom of expression.