Your baby boy is not a different species

Homo floresiensis is the real "little man". So stop calling your baby that. OK?

Endangered Species: Hatchback

For quite a while now I've noted the total domination of sedans in the Auckland car population. It wasn't that long ago that everyone was saying the hatchback is the car of the future because of its balance of handling and versatility, closely followed by so-called "crossovers" which I interpret to mean vehicles like the Toyota Spacio. So where are they all?

Taking a closer look at the cars on our streets, I noticed a few things:

- there are lots of older hatchbacks, say early nineties

- a large proportion of the hatchbacks I see are non-Japanese makes - Euro or Aussie marques.

Try selecting hatchbacks in www.autoselect.co.nz! Not a single Jap is displayed.

- the styling of new hatchbacks often lacks any subtlety compared to the sedan of the same model.

Check out the Mazda3 hatch, it reminds me of those revolting overdesigned chrome stereo systems you get on one side of Noel Leemings, while the other side has the classy black minimalist stuff that doesn't cause involuntary retching. By contrast, the sedan looks fairly ordinary.

So what do my observations amount to?

Hypothesis #1: the Japanese don't like hatchbacks.

We import a colossal quantity from Japan and these end up constituting the bulk of our cars. And it appears that relatively few of these imports are hatchbacks.

But what about all those old hatchbacks? Aren't they imports too? My suspicion is that more Japanese cars were NZ built back then. Or it may be that Japanese tastes changed for some reason.

Hypothesis #2: ordinary people don't like hatchbacks.

The design and marketing of new hatchbacks suggests to me that auto makers realise they're popular with younger drivers who like to soup up. An essential requirement for this buyer type is the ability to fill the boot with stereo equipment, hence their predilection for hatchbacks.

However this demographic also feel the need to overcompensate with loud public displays of both vehicular and musical noise. This has alienated them from most of the rest of the driving public and it may well have turned the average driver off hatchbacks.

A corollary factor may be that hatchbacks have become highly desirable to the doof-doof contingent, making them theft targets which is also a turnoff to the motoring public.

Highly paid idiots crawl out of the Susan Wood-work

• Unsurprised at zero public sympathy for Susan Wood ($450k/year)
• Disgusted at the buck passing tactics perpetrated by her managers Bill Ralston (???k/year) and Ian Fraser (300k/6mths)
• Disgruntled at the failure of the TVNZ HR department to produce a watertight contract. Ultimate responsibility: Sidney Smith (???k/year)
• Consterned at observations about the general public's failure to accept massive salaries ventured by Leon Robinson (???k/year)
• And finally, cynically amused that Susan Wood had the opportunity to claim a penalty from TVNZ for failure to inform her that she should take independent advice about her contract, but this was missed by top lawyer Mai Chen (?????k/year)

Tax cuts and separate portions

Post the election, everybody says NZ is a divided country. But where exactly is the faultline that separates citizen from citizen? Pundits have hypothesised at length on TV and in the papers, but it took me just one evening with a gaggle of relatives to see a yawning chasm open up in the middle of the living room between: FAMILIES and DINKS. The cohort divided neatly on issue after issue:

- across the board tax cuts are either "fair" or "inflationary"
- Working for Families "helps out struggling families", but "that was your choice to make, why should I have to pay for it?"
- "my taxes pay for your kids' education", but "my kids' taxes will pay for your retirement!"

The takeaway dinner even became a war prize as those who wanted to place one big order and those who wanted separate portions argued the toss.

Dinkism was once an insignificant and shameful creed. However they have grown precipitately in numbers, the stigma has been cast off and I foresee titanic battles of demography.

Family Health Diary = hypocrisy

Big pharma hates Pharmac because its position as sole procurer for NZ public health gives it huge negotiating power to keep the price of drugs down. However the likes of GSK don't hesitate to participate in the Family Health Diary TV advertising collective. So what's the story, is bulk purchasing in the public interest or not? When's the learned academic paper going to be released?

And Another Thing

At just 2% margin, reselling landlines in NZ is hardly a profitable activity. Any company embarking on this must be using it as a trojan horse to acquire other related business. TelstraClear are doing just this with call services such as voicemail and internet. But are they taking full advantage of their opportunities?

Take Telecom's Go Onebill plan, where the customer designates up to two Telecom prepay mobile phones to be billed to their landline account, obviating the need for topups, and calls between these phones and the landline receive a small discount. TelstraClear, by offering both landline and (resold Vodafone) mobile services, is uniquely positioned to provide a similar plan and dramatically increase their mobile phone uptake.

TelstraClear's mobile plans - work it out!

So TelstraClear's not bluffing on building a mobile network, despite analysts claiming it would be a financial disaster. All Allan Freeth has been prepared to say is the business case is viable and "It won't be conventional mobile", which so far has been interpreted to mean that TelstraClear would piggyback on Vodafone's network using the 10% rule. However this would still require an expensive buildout and years of gaining approval for cell towers.

But there's another way for TelstraClear to leap the 10% hurdle. Another company already has enough cell sites to cover 700,000 Aucklanders - that's nearly a sixth of NZ's population for starters. What's more, they're haemorrhaging money despite recent promising initiatives.

I reckon the business case is on ice, waiting for Woosh's backers to finally admit defeat. At which point the deeper-pocketed TelstraClear could swoop. Cell sites, a highly competitive voice service and the interconnect agreement are up for grabs.