95bFM: The Monday Wire with Will Pollard 13/12/10

The bFM WIRE Today: 12 - 2pm weekdays

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1205 – Vollie Report

This morning Meg Rivera takes a look at the recent spate of incidents involving cruelty to animals which have cropped up in the news.

1215 – Karli Thomas, Greenpeace New Zealand’s Oceans Campaigner

This weekend, a meeting in Hawaii to decide the future management of Pacific tuna stocks has left environmental campaigners unimpressed. The meeting of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission ended without reaching agreement on plans to more tightly regulate the way tuna are fished for in the Pacific. Greenpeace New Zealand’s Karli Thomas says the outcome is “an insult to Pacific Island marine conservation efforts,” and will effectively allow industrial fleets from outside the Pacific to continue to fish for tuna with little restrictions. This constitutes a threat both to the health of the tuna fishery itself, and to the people of the Pacific who rely on fishing for their livelihood. To hear more about the meeting and what the result (or lack thereof) will mean, I will have Karli Thomas from Greenpeace New Zealand on the line live from Hawaii at around quarter past the hour.

1230 – Jason Garman, Oxfam New Zealand Spokesperson

This weekend also saw the close of COP16, the latest round of UN climate change negotiations which were held in Cancun, Mexico. The parties to the conference made some progress, but with those involved talking down prospects of a successor to Kyoto even before the conference began, any progress made was never going to be earth-shattering. The outcome is an agreement (not a binding treaty) to reduce emissions as planned under the Copenhagen Accord, with a goal of keeping global climate warming to an average of 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. But as part of this agreement, those at the conference are moving towards establishing a $100 billion-a-year fund to assist poorer countries finance emission reductions and adaptation. This could see New Zealand playing a greater role in assisting other Pacific nations to adapt to greener technologies. Oxfam is one of the NGOs that has had a presence at the conference in Mexico, and at around 12.30pm today I’ll have their spokesperson Jason Garman on the show to give us a overview of the final agreements.

1245 – Professor Robert Patman, Victoria University Political Studies Department

The Sunday Star Times has now published some of the leaked diplomatic cables between New Zealand and the United states from WikiLeaks’ dump of more than 250,000 US State Department Cables last month. The cables tell us a bit about what American diplomatic staff think of our politicians: Helen Clark was a "very controlling manager,” while Don Brash had a “tendency towards embarrassing gaffes,” and John Key has “a strongly personal pro-American outlook.” The cables also appear to confirm that the National Party considered a u-turn on their anti-nuclear stance back in 2006. But one of the most interesting pieces of information within these previously confidential documents is the news that NZ secretly resumed full intelligence co-operation with the United States around a year ago. Why keep this a secret? And what does it mean in practice to say we are ‘co-operating fully’? The government won’t comment on intelligence issues… but at around 12.45 I’ll be speaking with Robert Patman, Professor of International Relations down at Victoria University, to talk about something we’re apparently not supposed to know anything about…

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