Category: 3. Business

The Tourism Minister has signalled significant change could be on the horizon for the industry.

Louise Upston has set her sights on doubling the value of tourism exports by 2034, growing the number of Kiwis working in tourism and hospitality, and restoring international visitor arrivals to at least 2019 levels.

In June, she unveiled how the government plans to hit that target, but more details for the medium and long term picture were yet to be revealed.

The targets were ambitious, but she said the industry had pulled together this year.

“It’s getting the balance of continuing to push for visitors to choose New Zealand and then helping them throughout New Zealand where there is still strong capacity and options,” she said.

The industry had been pushing for bold change, and a working group had considered what that change was and how they planned to get there, she said.

Upston planned to review advice and proposals from officials about the next steps in the roadmap in January.

“Some of it is potentially quite significant change so I would be looking at probably taking something to Cabinet towards the end of quarter one or the beginning of quarter two,” she said.

The government was aiming to see international visitor arrivals reach at least 3.89 million by 2026.

Recent figures showed overseas arrivals hit 3.43 million in the year to September.

“We’ve got momentum, we’ve made significant investments, we are measuring the impact and I’m confident that we will achieve those visitor growth numbers by the end of next year,” Upston said.

That investment – which was often funded by the International Visitor Levy – included a $70 million major events and tourism package and more than $26m for Tourism New Zealand to attract more visitors.

She was confident that [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/557448/how-do-queenstown-residents-feel-about-increasing-tourism-and-its-impact

concerns from areas like Queenstown], where visitors numbers had already surpassed 2019 levels, were being addressed by mahi underway and planned in the Tourism Growth Roadmap.

She wanted to make sure every ounce of value was squeezed from investments in the industry as well as having consistent and predictable funding, Upston said.

Another priority was attracting more New Zealanders into hospitality and tourism by making sure they could see a career pathway and had ongoing training opportunities as a solid workforce would be a “critical part” in the success of tourism growth, Upston said.

In November, the government announced funding for a new industry-led qualification, Te Haeata, to boost the business events workforce.

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It’s an icy cold winter morning, and 80-year-old Mohammed Bashir is armed with a broom, tackling the large pile of rubbish that has accumulated outside his terraced house in Small Heath, Birmingham.

This has become an almost daily activity for Bashir since the city’s bin strike started 50 weeks ago and, like many in the city, he is starting to lose patience.

“Look at the condition we’re living in. I’ve lived here for 64 years, I came to this country at 16 – I’ve never seen it this bad. I’m sick,” he says. “I try my best. At the end of the day, I just want my area clean. That’s all I want.”

Piles of bin bags, broken glass and furniture have been dumped on the street outside his home and the mosque next door. Across the road, scorched pavement shows where a pile of rubbish was recently set on fire.

Bashir follows the council’s advice and tries to take much of his rubbish to the local tip, but residents have to book a slot online, and Bashir cannot read or write in English. “I want to do it but it’s hard for old people like myself. We need help. The city needs help. It’s gone on too long,” he says.

The bin strike in Birmingham hit headlines in March when the council declared a major incident due to 17,000 tonnes of rubbish that had built up on the streets and was attracting vermin.

Although the city council had used agency workers to cover the striking bin staff, people on the picket line were staging “go slow” protests that were preventing bin lorries from leaving the depot, causing the buildup of waste.

After the council secured a court injunction in May to stop this from happening, a degree of normality returned and national attention swiftly moved on – people outside the city thought the strike had long since finished.

But the people of Birmingham, which is home to more than one million, are still waiting for their normal bin collections to resume. With the workforce still striking, the council is relying on a smaller agency workforce which means collections are sporadic in some areas and there have been no recycling bin collections anywhere in the city since early January.

A December strike by the agency bin workers threatens to make things worse. Meanwhile, people have started to cram all their rubbish, including cardboard boxes, cans and bottles, into one general waste bin and they’re often overflowing by the time bin collection day comes round.

The effect has been felt most in the more deprived areas of the city where there is higher-density living such as houses in multiple occupation (HMOs) and large families squeezed into small homes – there are eight people, including Bashir’s children and grandchildren, living in his house. “How is one bin enough?” he says. “I can guarantee you that you can go into every house on this street and it is overcrowded with people. There are more than six people, seven people, eight people. One bin is not enough, is it?”

The result has been an increase in dumped bin bags and fly-tipping as people desperately try to get rid of their waste. Noor Ahmed, 57, said the bus stop outside her home has become a magnet for dumped rubbish, which she is forced to tackle while caring for her husband, who has cancer. “It’s a health and safety hazard, and there’s a very bad smell. I’ve had rats in my garden, even in my kitchen,” she says. “We have to go to the tip, but sometimes there are big queues. We started to organise groups to help older people who can’t take their own rubbish, we take it for them. We still pay our council tax and yet we do our bins like this. It’s exhausting.”

Robert Charlton, who runs his own pest control business in Birmingham, says it had been his busiest year since he first started working in the industry 11 years ago, and he has been gearing up for a hectic Christmas period. “It’s starting to pick up again because rodents are looking for food and shelter, so I’m getting more phone calls,” he says. “I’ve hardly had any days off, to be honest. At the peak, I was working from 8am to 8pm every day.”

He says most of his callouts were for mice and rats, as well as dead foxes who had been snooping around the piled-up bin bags, and he had to deal with some very distressed families. “Last month I was called to a house and we caught 23 rodents. It was crazy – the worst I have seen in my career,” he says. Have the rats actually been as big as cats, as has been much quoted in the press since the start of the strike? “I would say kittens, yeah, I do believe that,” he says.

One of the biggest impacts of the bin strike is the environmental toll. With recycling collections across the city paused for almost a year, more and more rubbish is heading into general waste, much of which ends up in an incinerator in the east of the city. Birmingham’s recycling rate has plummeted to 14%, substantially below the council’s target of 35% and the 44% average for England – of 90,667 tonnes of rubbish collected between July and September in Birmingham, just 12,471 tonnes was recycled.

“It is the biggest local authority in the country in population terms, so anything that happens in Birmingham affects 1.2 million people. And there is still no recycling collection,” says John Newson, from Birmingham Friends of the Earth. “Many people outside Birmingham, and even people inside Birmingham, can’t really believe that’s true and somehow think it’s over. But it is true, and that is a lot of stuff.”

He says there’s growing concern that people’s recycling habits could be permanently disrupted. “It’s not about blaming people – nobody in Birmingham asked for this to happen or has any real control over it,” says Newson. “There is a lot of confusion in people’s minds now, and the trust that was built up has gone – what do you want us to do with our rubbish, and what are you going to do with it? It has all gone backwards.”

Shafaq Hussain, a community leader and youth worker in Small Heath, says it would be particularly hard to reintroduce recycling in his area, where issues have persisted for some time. “It took a long time for us to do a lot of educating in the community about recycling, about the distinction between the two bins – but it has been almost a year now without that. So the environmental impact is very messy,” he says.

He has been leading community calls to end the strike, or to force central government to intervene and bring the striking workers and council back around the table, saying that the voice of residents had been lost over the course of the year. “People are just fed up – we’ve had maggots, we’ve had rats,” he says. “There are about 190 takeaways in a radius of about a half-mile here, which creates more bulk waste and we’re substantially overcrowded – there’s a lot of people in each household. We’re the ones left dealing with it but there’s no transparency – we have no idea what has gone on in those negotiations.”

On the picket line outside the bin lorry depot in Tyseley, the striking bin workers, have said they are more resolved than ever – having voted to continue their strike mandate to May 2026, when Labour will be vying to keep control of the council in local elections. They want to guarantee pay protection for the rest of the bin workers and the council to reverse its decision to scrap the waste and recycling collection officer role.

Scrapping the role would not only cut costs but the council also argues that the position is an equal-pay liability risk, with no equivalent paying role in the female-dominated workforce such as cleaning staff and school-meal supervisors. The council has lost millions of pounds in equal-pay claims in recent years – it is one of the main reasons it went “bankrupt”. However, the unions say they have consulted lawyers who say the role is not an equal-pay liability risk.

“We’re committed to see it through to the end,” says Matthew Reid, a bin lorry driver and Unite convener. “We can’t go through 11 months of what we’ve been through, and put the city through, to get no results at the end of it.” The striking workers are receiving £70 a day from the Unite strike fund, which is a significant pay cut, although Reid says this is what they would be paid under the council’s plan.

“There’s a feeling here of determination, people are willing to take that hit because they can’t accept an £8,000 [annual pay] loss,” he says. “But it has been a rollercoaster. We’ve never been on strike for this long before, and there’s financial strain – people not being able to afford mortgages and rent, family strain. We just have to stand with one other.”

Some of Basmin Khan’s videos, showing the huge piles of rubbish dumped on her street in Small Heath, have gone viral on social media – a mound of mattresses, broken furniture, cardboard boxes and plastic bottles sits at the end of her road, right next to a school playground.

The 47-year-old says the strike has “emboldened” fly-tippers, and vans have appeared in the middle of the night to drop off rubbish, with little consequence. Some of her neighbours say they have paid money to have their rubbish taken away, only to find it dumped on a street corner less than a mile away. “I don’t think the council know how to control it any more,” she says. “I can’t blame the council completely and I’m not going to, but we are stuck because we just want them to see what we’re experiencing and give us something to help tackle the problem.”

Her videos have attracted a toxic rhetoric directed at deprived areas with large BAME populations, she says. “Import the third world, and you get the third world” is one of many comments that frequently appear under her clips.

“We know that there is a problem, absolutely. But we also know we are under-resourced, there’s a huge lack of investment,” she says. “It gives us a really bad reputation to say we’re all like this – to suggest we all want to live in a dirty place. We don’t. That’s not how we want to live at all. It was never like this when I moved here.”

She has launched a petition to get the council to install more security cameras to clamp down on fly-tipping, and push to end the strike that has dragged on for so long. “Nobody should ever think this is normal,” she says. “We are the UK’s second city. It’s a disgrace. Everyone says we’re bankrupt or we’re poor. For goodness sake, the UK is in the G7. We should have enough money to be able to keep our streets clean.”

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A US-listed crypto venture backed by the Trump family has an auditor whose licence to practise lapsed earlier this year, as it wrestles with a crisis after failing to produce financial results.

Alt5 Sigma, a Las Vegas-based recycling business-turned-biotech-turned blockchain company, in August signed a deal to buy crypto tokens issued by the Trump family’s World Liberty Financial, with Eric Trump joining as a board observer.

But the company’s financial position has become murky since the deal was announced after it failed to produce quarterly results on time and switched auditors this month to a firm that has been fined by accounting regulators and failed an inspection under the industry’s peer review process.

The licence of the newly appointed firm, Victor Mokuolu CPA PLLC, expired in August, according to filings in its home state of Texas. It is therefore currently barred from doing audit work until the licence is renewed, under state regulations.

Victor Mokuolu, the firm’s founder, renewed his personal certified public accountant’s licence on August 31 but his firm’s licence had not been renewed as of December 26, the board’s records show.

Alt5 Sigma said in a statement to the Financial Times that its auditor was “undergoing a peer review per Texas State Board of Accountancy regulations and will be completed by the end of January 2026, at which point the auditor expects the firm’s licence to be active”.

“No reviews or audits of Alt5’s financial statements will be issued by our auditor until the firm’s licence is active,” it added.

Messages seeking comment from Mokuolu were not returned.

Mokuolu was an accountant in the oil and gas industry before setting up his own firm in 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. His firm listed 30 small-cap audit clients in a recent regulatory filing.

The firm has been working for more than two years to remediate deficiencies which resulted in it getting a failing grade under the accounting profession’s peer review process in 2023.

The failure to renew its licence this year comes after the Texas State Board of Public Accountancy and another US regulator earlier took action against the firm for repeatedly failing to file regulatory paperwork on time.

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board in 2023 fined the firm $30,000 for failing to inform the regulator of six public companies’ audits it had conducted the previous year, as it is supposed to do within 35 days of the audit being completed. The Texas board issued an additional $15,000 penalty last year for the same violations.

Alt5 Sigma’s appointment of Victor Mokuolu CPA PLLC on December 8 came amid a period of turmoil for the company, which now calls itself “a fintech with a pioneering $WLFI digital asset treasury strategy”.

The August Trump deal committed the company to buying and holding large quantities of World Liberty Financial’s $WLFI token, and the Trump venture became an investor in Alt5 Sigma.

Jonathan Hugh, the chief financial officer brought in at the time of the Trump deal, left the company after just three months, and Alt5 also parted ways with chief executive Peter Tassiopoulos in October.

Board member David Danziger resigned last month, putting the company in violation of a requirement to have an audit committee of a certain size and with accounting experience.

The company is now under threat of delisting from Nasdaq after failing to file its quarterly results for the period to late September. It blamed the delay in part on the “timeliness and responsiveness” of its previous auditor, who formally quit in November.

Alt5 Sigma was incorporated in July 2024 by a biotech company called JanOne Inc, which had previously focused on developing “innovative solutions for ending the opioid epidemic”. JanOne merged with Alt5 Sigma and assumed the latter’s name during the same month. 

JanOne had rebranded once before, in September 2019, prior to which it was called Appliance Recycling Centers of America. 

Alt5 Sigma says it provides financial infrastructure that allows traditional financial institutions to integrate with the digital asset economy. It held roughly 7.3bn $WLFI tokens as of December 8, worth about $1.1bn.

Alt5 Sigma’s chair since the Trump deal in August has been Zack Witkoff, who is co-founder of World Liberty Financial and son of President Donald Trump’s special envoy for peace negotiations, Steve Witkoff.

In August, Alt5 disclosed to US regulators that its Canadian subsidiary and the group’s former principal was found criminally liable by a Rwandan court in May “for offences including illicit enrichment and money laundering”.

Alt5 Sigma Canada and Andre Beauchesne appealed the judgment to the High Court of Kigali, Rwanda, in June, and the matter remains under judicial review. Both Alt5 Sigma Canada and Beauchesne denied any wrongdoing and maintain that they were the victims of fraud. 

Additional reporting by Joe Miller

I don’t own a dishwasher, so when it’s time for me to help stack one in the homes of friends and family, I’m not across the rules.

What I do know is some people like to rinse the dishes before stacking, and others bypass this step, loading up some of the crustiest plates I’ve seen.

So, is rinsing necessary, and how should we be stacking a dishwasher?

Rinsing may give worse results

Rinsing can actually send a message to your dishwasher that your plate doesn’t need as much washing, explains Ashley Iredale.

He is a whitegoods expert who worked at advocacy group Choice at the time of this interview.

All you need to do is scrape off any solid food before stacking your dishes. The dishwasher will clean off the rest.

Mr Iredale says if you pre-rinse, you may trick your dishwasher.

That’s because most dishwashers have sensors that detect how dirty your plates are, and wash your dishes with a suitably strong jet.

Rinsing is especially redundant if you have a good detergent, explains Mr Iredale.

Your dishwasher will do a better job of washing those unrinsed dishes if you use tablets rather than powders, Choice’s research has found.

But that doesn’t mean you have to buy the costly fancy ones, he says, noting price is not an indication of performance.

But won’t the food bits clog the dishwasher?

Scraping properly before stacking is important, so you don’t clog your dishwasher with food residue.

That’s according to Joshua Henzel, who runs an appliance servicing and repair business in Melbourne/Naarm.

And the newer the model, the greater the risk of this happening.

To stay on top of things, he recommends cleaning your dishwasher’s filter once a month.

The caveat around rinsing

If you’ve left your dishes a while before loading them in, a pre-wash can be beneficial, says Bridget Gardner, the director of a firm that advises cleaning and facility managers.

“If the dishes are coated in food containing proteins and carbs that tend to stick, such as milk, cereal or egg, and they are left for hours or even a day before washing, it is expecting too much of any dishwasher to remove.”

But if you’re keen to save water and avoid rinsing, there’s a workaround.

“I know people who try to live sustainably who use stale bread to clean away residual food rather than water, which they then put into the compost or feed their chooks,” Ms Gardner says.

How you stack matters

Stacking correctly is going to optimise the cleaning process.

For example, the size of your plates determines where they should go.

“You want your big plates on the outside, and the smaller plates closer to the centre,” says Mr Iredale.

“And everything should be facing towards the centre.”

That’s because there’s typically a jet spray at the bottom of a dishwasher.

Placing larger dishes on the outside, facing in, will allow the water to reach the smaller dishes, while also spraying the dirtiest surfaces of all your items.

For similar reasons, Kate Croukamp, the owner of a Gold Coast-based cleaning business, recommends stacking larger plates at the back of the dishwasher.

“This positioning prevents large items from obstructing water and detergent from reaching smaller dishes, allowing for a more thorough and efficient cleaning process.”

If you’re working with an upright cutlery basket, Mr Iredale says to place the “business end” of cutlery — so, “all your points and prongs” — facing downwards.

That’s for safety reasons, but also for hygiene.

“When it does come time to unload your cutlery, you’re not touching the end that goes in your mouth with your germ-laden fingers,” Mr Iredale says.

There are multiple jets and spray arms in a dishwasher, but the bottom shelf is “typically the more intensive wash zone”, says Mr Iredale, which is why heavily soiled pots and pans go on the bottom rack, and delicates go on top.

Plastics will also last longer if they’re stacked on the top shelf, because they’ll be less aggressively washed, he says.

And always run a full load, our experts recommend, provided water can reach all surfaces.

That way your dishwasher is “more energy-efficient and eco-friendly” as it saves water and energy, explains Ms Croukamp.

“This not only reduces your environmental impact but also cuts down on your power bills and saves you time in the long run.”

(Bloomberg) — Asian stocks rose for a seventh straight day, helping extend a global equities rally, while silver gyrated after jumping to yet another record.

A gauge of Asian shares advanced 0.5% on Monday, with the tech sector leading gains. A seven-day winning streak would be its longest since mid-September. Mining stocks in the region climbed as a broad measure of commodities gained for a sixth day. US futures edged lower after the S&P 500 finished near an all-time high on Friday.

Silver turned volatile after smashing through $80 an ounce for the first time amid a historic surge powered by a structural imbalance in supply and demand. Gold was lower after reaching a new peak in the previous session, while copper jumped more than 6% to hit a record following a two-day break on the London Metal Exchange.

Precious metals have emerged as a hot corner of financial markets in recent months, boosted by elevated central-bank purchases, inflows to exchange-traded funds and three successive rate cuts by the Federal Reserve. Lower borrowing costs are a tailwind for the commodities, which don’t pay interest, and traders are betting on more rate cuts in 2026.

“We are witnessing a generational bubble playing out in silver,” Tony Sycamore, market analyst at IG Australia, wrote in a note Sunday. “Relentless industrial demand from solar panels, EVs, AI data centers and electronics, pushing against depleting inventories, has driven physical premiums to extremes.”

In the last week, frictions in Venezuela — where the US has blockaded oil tankers — and strikes by Washington on Islamic State in Nigeria have added to the haven appeal of precious metals. With silver inventories near their lowest on record, there’s a risk of supply shortages that could impact multiple sectors.

“This is not good. Silver is needed in many industrial processes,” Elon Musk said on X on Saturday in response to a series of tweets on the supply shortage.

What Bloomberg Strategists say…

“Silver has particular drivers which mean it is understandable for it to be outperforming the general rally in metals, precious and otherwise, against the US dollar. Nevertheless it is very tough to justify the parabolic ramp-up in silver as it leaves peers behind.”

Garfield Reynolds, Markets Live Strategist. For full analysis, click here.

The MSCI All Country World Index — one of the broadest measures of the equity market — edged higher in Asia after climbing 1.4% last week to an all-time high as a much-expected year-end rally took hold.

Chinese stocks on the mainland underperformed the Asian benchmark on Monday. Data over the weekend showed industrial profits fell for a second month in November, adding to signs that weakening domestic demand and persistent deflation are weighing on corporate earnings.

The nation on Sunday pledged to broaden its fiscal spending base in 2026, signaling sustained government support to drive growth in a challenging external environment. Separately, Chinese state media cautioned against making one-way bets on the yuan, signaling growing official discomfort about the pace of recent gains in the currency. The yuan advanced past 7 per dollar last week in offshore trading for the first time since September 2024.

Geopolitics also drew attention at the start of a new week. Defense stocks in China and Taiwan rose as the former conducted military drills in waters and airspace surrounding Taiwan starting Monday. Meanwhile, Donald Trump said he made “a lot of progress” in talks with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy over a possible peace deal, but that it might take a few weeks to get it done and there’s no set timeline.

Elsewhere in markets, oil was higher on prospects for improved Chinese demand in 2026. It is still on track for a fifth monthly drop in December, which would be the longest losing streak in more than two years. Bitcoin advanced while a gauge of the dollar edged lower.

The gauge equities gauge has risen nearly 22% in 2025, heading for a third straight annual gain and the biggest since 2019.

Trends in AI, the key driver of this year’s rally, as well as the path of the Fed’s interest rates are seen by investors as two of the most crucial factors that will determine how equities perform in 2026.

“The focus this week will be on the release of the FOMC minutes” from the Fed’s December meeting, according to Sycamore. “Markets will scour the minutes for deeper insights into the committee debates on the balance of risks and the timing of future easing.”

Stocks

S&P 500 futures were little changed as of 12:43 p.m. Tokyo time Japan’s Topix rose 0.2% Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 fell 0.3% Hong Kong’s Hang Seng rose 0.4% The Shanghai Composite rose 0.3% Euro Stoxx 50 futures rose 0.3% Currencies

The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index was little changed The euro was little changed at $1.1774 The Japanese yen rose 0.1% to 156.37 per dollar The offshore yuan was little changed at 7.0085 per dollar Cryptocurrencies

Bitcoin rose 2.6% to $89,809.32 Ether rose 3.2% to $3,030.85 Bonds

The yield on 10-year Treasuries was little changed at 4.14% Australia’s 10-year yield advanced two basis points to 4.76% Commodities

West Texas Intermediate crude rose 1.1% to $57.34 a barrel Spot gold fell 0.4% to $4,515.50 an ounce This story was produced with the assistance of Bloomberg Automation.

–With assistance from Carmeli Argana, Rita Nazareth and Ruth Carson.

©2025 Bloomberg L.P.