Save the birds – kill the cats and leave the bunnies alone
When I read about Predator Free New Zealand this week I thought it was another #MeToo article. I imagined a group that seeks to flush out sex pests. Maybe a group that sets traps by dressing young women in revealing clothes and parading them past groups of hi-vis wearing men in an effort to elicit catcalls.
Then, before some drongo knows what’s happening, Predator Free New Zealand logs his boorish behaviour on the internet and the judgment starts.
I was off the mark.
Turns out Predator Free New Zealand is just a loveable trust with the goal of making New Zealand predator free.
When they talk about predators they’re talking about possums and the like and not even thinking about the Harvey Weinsteins of the world.
The Trust has recently installed a bunch of traps around Halswell Quarry Park in an effort to encourage ka¯ ka¯ and tui back into the area. Someone, please, give these guys a gold star.
While you guys know me as a word man the truth is that I’m also a bird man.
I’ve spent many happy hours watching tui and bellbirds, marvelling at the miracle that is a fantail flying like a fighter jet, chasing godwits and wondering if watching a weka is an insight into dinosaurs.
As a bird lover I’ve done my bit: I get self righteous around people claiming to be bird lovers while owning a cat. I support Gareth Morgan. I’ve
What a difference a few moments can make. The earthquakes that walloped Canterbury earlier this decade may have lasted a matter of seconds apiece, but here we are years on with so many related claims unresolved. Sometimes it’s as if the brevity of the disaster was in inverse proportion to the ongoing anguish caused for claimants.
Small wonder, then, that the government is launching a special insurance tribunal to resolve outstanding claims.
According to the Minister Responsible even been out over the years and shot dead possums, stoats rats and cats.
Even better – I had fun doing it.
If I were a Scout I’d have my bird lover’s badge. But as a central city business owner I’ve done nothing toward the plague of pests that has taken over the centre of town since the city fell to the ground.
for the Earthquake Commission, Megan Woods, the independent body will be charged with resolving outstanding earthquake claims ‘‘so people can get on with their lives’’.
Budget 2018 also allocated $6.5m in operating funding and $1.5m in establishment funding to ‘‘help people look to the future with confidence and hope, instead of being trapped in limbo with their lives on hold because of a claim that keeps dragging on,’’ Woods said. The inquiry’s final terms and membership are still being drawn up.
She said it will be an active, individually case-managed resolution process for claimants and their insurers, along with relevant mediation services.
The role of mediation is of obvious professional interest to those of us in the dispute resolution business — but it should be enthusiastically welcomed elsewhere, too, because credentialed facilitators remain the best hope in many cases for enduring resolution.
A trained neutral facilitator, after all, builds trust at least in a robust process for resolution, aids communication between the participants and keeps the focus on the issues. Yet it’s also the participants who make all the final decisions – the power remains with them.
In the commercial realm, mediation remains a sophisticated process that has been proven to settle cases, and to save time and money.
I’m not talking about engineers. Someone much cleverer than me will have to work out how to eradicate these fee predators.
I’m talking about rabbits.
In case you haven’t noticed, these guys are running rampant in the Innovation Precinct.
Maybe they were drawn to all the edgy marketing? Maybe they want to be in a neighbourhood where ‘‘innovative dealmakers’’ bump into one another and create ‘‘disruptive technologies’’.
Or maybe they’re immune to marketing gobbledygook and they showed up because there was some unattended grass.
Whatever the case, I’ve grown fond of the colony which was started by a couple of brave rabbits who decided to head into the red zone when all that was there was a bunch of compromised buildings, the army and a few looters (who may or may not have been in the army).
What started as a couple of adventurous souls has quickly grown.
If you’d believe it, they’ve been breeding like rabbits and the descendants of those first intrepid explorers are now getting about completely unaware that large bipedal mammals might want to do anything to them besides film them on a smartphone.
On the DOC website it says rabbits are primarily regarded as an agricultural pest so maybe that means that in the city they’re fine. Maybe in the city they’re just another sign of gentrification alongside kombucha, barbershops and industrial chic.
The only birds I can see them competing with are dirty pigeons and the scruffy looking gang of seagulls that calls Pak-n-Save Moorhouse home. I’m sure you’ll agree that pigeons are just rats with wings and seagulls don’t count as real birds.
Because it seems to me that one man’s predator is another man’s fluffy-wuffy-rabbit and the last thing we need to do is murder Bugs Bunny.
Save the birds. Kill the cats. Leave the wabbits alone.
In 2013, after a mediated negotiation process, Lyttleton Port settled its dispute with its insurers, Vero, NZI and QBE. The payment in aggregate to be made by the three insurers was $438.3M.
More recently, the Christchurch City Council reached an even larger settlement with its insurers. Mediation was also a part of achieving that deal.
The last point is critical, and not just in Canterbury: both in New Zealand and internationally commercial mediators report that they settle over 85 per cent of their cases.
Many courts around the world have mediation schemes for civil cases, including England’s Court of Appeal.
EQC has a complaints mediation service it has sometimes offered, which has been independently run by my organisation.
Many other earthquake disputes are or have been privately mediated. Thus we keep a list of skilled mediators expert in earthquake disputes.
In disasters, such as the Canterbury earthquakes, mediation should be routinely offered, and early, to resolve disputes. It’s not effective for all disputes of course, but its effective for many of them.
As at earlier this year — seven years on from the worst of the shakes — EQC ‘‘dwelling’’ claims related to 103 properties were yet to be settled. Damage claims related to 415 properties were still
unsettled.
As for private insurers, claims related to 2316 properties remained unsettled as at the end of March.
That’s a shame for many reasons, but also, as Mark Kelly, a seasoned commercial mediator, noted, because mediation is also an opportunity for catharsis.
The point won’t exactly be news to anyone who followed the recent case of Christchurch man Peter Glasson, who went on a hunger strike to highlight his frustration at the lack of resolution over his own earthquake claim.
Often, Kelly said, mediation will be the ‘‘only time that litigants get to tell their story, and express their feelings, to the other side’’.
In earthquake insurance disputes, in particular, he said, it is ‘‘visibly important to give the homeowner the chance to tell their insurer how stressful the whole experience has been for them. And, having done so, the homeowner is then better able to turn and address settlement.’’
The caveat, of course, is ensuring that mediators are suitably qualified professionals — something the new tribunal will need to keep its eye on as it looks to stem the earthquake-related hemorrhaging of money, anguish and time that has brought us to the current point.
Of that there should be no dispute.