The Week in Detail: Baggage, backbenchers and school boards

Every weekday, The Detail makes sense of the big news stories. 

This week, we covered the labour shortages behind the mountains of waylaid luggage at airports across the globe, spoke to two former backbench MPs about their experiences in the halls of power, looked at the Labour government's great immigration reset and whether it's doing what it said it would, talked to a climate change actuary about the future of insuring against climate-related disasters, and dug into "one of the most significant democratic processes in New Zealand" - school board elections.

Whakarongo mai to any episodes you might have missed. 

Lost luggage: The realities of post-pandemic travel

Maybe you've seen the headlines, or maybe it's happened to you - airports are losing people's luggage at an alarming rate. 

E tū union's head of aviation Savage tells The Detail he's heard of hundreds of bags' worth of backlog piling up in airports overseas.

He says the problems are primarily related to the shutdown of aviation over the lockdown and the resulting labour market problems as the industry starts to rebuild. 

"There's a real recruitment problem at the moment in the industry," Savage says. 

"There used to be a queue of people waiting to join these companies. And there is not a queue right now." 

The life of a backbench MP

Parliament's backbenchers have been in the news in the last couple of weeks for all the wrong reasons. 

The life of an MP can be hard - especially if you've come from a job where you're respected, you've won a tremendous victory on election night, and you find yourself in a pot-boiler atmosphere in Wellington at the bottom of the heap.

"I had no idea what I was walking into, and I don't think that anybody who starts as a new MP can really understand the world into which you're embarking - there's just no way,"  says Sue Bradford, a Green MP from 1999 to 2009.

"I quickly realised it was a very pressured environment," says Lawrence Yule, a National MP for three years from 2017 to 2020. "There was massive scrutiny from the media on everything that happened," he says. 

The Detail talks to the pair about their experiences on the backbenches.

Judging the great immigration reset

During the 2017 election campaign, Labour promised something of an immigration reset: slicing the number of migrants coming in by 20,000 to 30,000 people a year to relieve the pressure on the country's exhausted infrastructure, while prioritising highly skilled workers inbound.

Once elected, the party didn't have to do much to hit that target - Covid-19's arrival took care of it. 

But now, five years on from getting into government, Labour is putting its immigration rebalancing into action.

"If you've got a lot more people coming into the economy, you need to be investing in infrastructure - building more houses, your roads are getting filled up - and so that has to happen, and I guess you could make the case that it didn't happen fast enough," NZ Herald business editor-at-large Liam Dann says.

Climate change and insurance: Weighing up the risk

Natural disasters happen - in fact, they're becoming more common. Just last month saw catastrophic flooding across Nelson and the West Coast.

When misfortune does befall us, one thing that can take the sting out of a loss is insurance.

But insurance is an industry which is shrouded in mystery: the process of figuring out premiums, of assessing the risk of different things happening, the role big insurance firms play in the global economic system, and how an industry based fundamentally on calculating risk as accurately as possible is adjusting to climate change, and how severely the industry - and property-owners - will be affected. 

Emma Vitz, an actuary who specialises in natural perils and climate-based risk, talks to The Detail about the work she does, and how this crucial, global industry is approaching the known-unknowns of climate change. 

School trustees: What happens when a board fractures?

It's time for the triennial election that's been described as "one of the most significant democratic processes in New Zealand".

We're talking about voting for the country's 2500 school boards of trustees.   

The Detail looks at what a board of trustees does, how much influence it has over a school and why, this year, there is some unease about candidates who may have other agendas. 

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