Podcasts about plessis allan

Prominent colorectal surgeon Frank Frizelle says it is now a necessity for dedicated cancer centres in New Zealand. The Christchurch-based surgeon believes if New Zealand does not adopt comprehensive cancer centres, the system will fail patients. Frizelle told Heather du Plessis-Allan, "it's just about trying to give adequate volumes and concentrations of resources to try and get the best value for money". LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Te Pāti Māori's behaviour is once again a topic of discussion following bill burning and allegations of over-spending this week. Barry Soper told Heather du Plessis-Allan that Te Pāti Māori 'shouldn't be anywhere near Government'. Soper identified a possible link between the ongoing party controversies and it's culture of nepotism. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Air New Zealand CEO Nikhil Ravishankar has suggested a “situational subsidy” to support regional routes when the economy is not doing well and demand is low. Ravishankar officially took over as CEO on 20 October 2025, replacing Greg Foran who stepped down after six years. Deputy Prime Minister David Seymour tells Heather du Plessis-Allan that the implementation of a subsidy could allow for too much Government control over the agency which would be a 'complete disaster'. Seymour also addresses the legalisation of melatonin for those aged under-55. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I have to be honest with you, because it's been a little while since I sat in the home economics class in Tuakau College - so there is a fair chance that my experience is a little out of date by about 20 years and I might just make a fool of myself with what I'm about to say next. But I do not understand the angst about Erica Stanford dropping home economics from the NCEA curriculum. There is an opinion piece in The Spinoff today, and it's arguing against Erica Stanford removing this 'vital' subject from our school subject list because it's a 'moral decision,' - because, quote, 'everyone deserves to know what's in their food, how it affects their health, and how to make choices that support their overall well-being.' Now, I tend to agree with that. You should know what's going on in your food. But from what I understand, home ec is still being taught and will still be taught to years 9 and 10 in some form or another, that's not going to change. And if you cannot learn in the space of 2 years that you need to eat your fruit and your vegetables and your meat and maybe avoid the processed stuff and the sugar, then I don't have much hope that you're ever gonna learn this stuff. And what's more, we are already one of the most obese nations on this planet. So home economics hasn't done very much for us in helping us to keep ourselves healthy in the last 114 years that it's been around, has it? But also, and I think this is the most important thing, come on - did you actually learn anything in home ec? Libby, who works with us, reckons that in one class, she spent the entire class just learning how to make a sandwich. I remember setting a pot of oil on fire and and then running around with it and being taught how to put the fire out. So I suppose that's semi-helpful, but I also learned how to cut carrots, which, frankly, I should have known anyway. All of this stuff, you can learn at home. Now, home economics strikes me as one of those subjects that the country would be better off dropping altogether and replacing with another session on maths. Don't you agree? LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's yet another, frankly welcome, sign that the world's climate overhype may be over, or at least correcting. The latest is that the Government has announced it's now easing the rules on how much compulsory climate reporting the big listed companies have to do. Now, I don't blame you if you feel at this minute like your eyes are about to glaze over, but do not let that happen. Because this is actually much more important than it sounds. This goes back to the bad old days of Jacinda and Grant in 2021, when the Ardern administration brought in rules forcing large, publicly listed companies to report to shareholders the impact that climate change may have on them. It was world-leading, it was ground-breaking - and it was incredibly expensive. Turner's, the car company, reckons that their first report, which only runs to seven pages, cost them $1 million to produce. Some companies have told the relevant minister, Scott Simpson, that it cost them $2 million to produce their reports. And the ones who are getting off easy here are still paying apparently close to $10,000. Veteran director Joan Withers famously complained about this in July, when she said that climate reporting was taking up more of her time than preparing financial statements, which is the actual thing that shareholders are interested in - and that is completely nuts. And for all of the money and all of the effort that these businesses were putting into it, not one carbon particle was saved from going into the atmosphere. It did not bring down anybody's emissions and that was not the point of it. It was simply to talk about it. And the money was just wasted on paperwork instead of being reinvested into the business to raise productivity, which is the thing that we should be laser-focused on in this country. Now, I applaud the Government for doing what it has done today, but it does not go far enough, because they've only eased the rules for the smaller companies. So about 88 of them will now not have to report. But 76 of the big ones are still going to be required to do this utterly pointless, expensive, unproductive exercise. If it is pointless and expensive and unproductive for the small companies, it is also pointless, expensive and unproductive for the big companies. And the Government should go further than it has today. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There's yet another, frankly welcome, sign that the world's climate overhype may be over, or at least correcting. The latest is that the Government has announced it's now easing the rules on how much compulsory climate reporting the big listed companies have to do. Now, I don't blame you if you feel at this minute like your eyes are about to glaze over, but do not let that happen. Because this is actually much more important than it sounds. This goes back to the bad old days of Jacinda and Grant in 2021, when the Ardern administration brought in rules forcing large, publicly listed companies to report to shareholders the impact that climate change may have on them. It was world-leading, it was ground-breaking - and it was incredibly expensive. Turner's, the car company, reckons that their first report, which only runs to seven pages, cost them $1 million to produce. Some companies have told the relevant minister, Scott Simpson, that it cost them $2 million to produce their reports. And the ones who are getting off easy here are still paying apparently close to $10,000. Veteran director Joan Withers famously complained about this in July, when she said that climate reporting was taking up more of her time than preparing financial statements, which is the actual thing that shareholders are interested in - and that is completely nuts. And for all of the money and all of the effort that these businesses were putting into it, not one carbon particle was saved from going into the atmosphere. It did not bring down anybody's emissions and that was not the point of it. It was simply to talk about it. And the money was just wasted on paperwork instead of being reinvested into the business to raise productivity, which is the thing that we should be laser-focused on in this country. Now, I applaud the Government for doing what it has done today, but it does not go far enough, because they've only eased the rules for the smaller companies. So about 88 of them will now not have to report. But 76 of the big ones are still going to be required to do this utterly pointless, expensive, unproductive exercise. If it is pointless and expensive and unproductive for the small companies, it is also pointless, expensive and unproductive for the big companies. And the Government should go further than it has today. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I think it's fair to say, don't you think, that Labour's first policy has been a flop? It's been panned by pretty much everybody worth listening to or worth reading. I mean, I see Maiki Sherman over at TVNZ liked it last night. She called it a 'solid first hit' on telly, but I think everyone else seems to have seen through what Chippy's trying to do here. Let me quote you some. Tom Pullar-Strecker at The Post: Labour's Future Fund hits the buzzwords, but the rationale is hard to follow. Pattrick Smellie at BusinessDesk: This suggests either that Labour is economically illiterate or that its target audience is presumed to be. Radio New Zealand: The distinct lack of detail has left Labour somewhat exposed, evoking echoes of other ambitious projects that fizzled like KiwiBuild or the Green Investment Fund. Jenée Tibshraeny at the Herald says this is actually less about making New Zealand wealthy and really more about having a crack at National and possible asset sales at the next election. Henry Cooke at The Post: Labour's Future Fund promises everything and nothing. It's hard to know what to really make of this. And then from Patrick Smellie again, because his piece is just so eviscerating: Labour will have to do a whole lot better than this. Now, basically, what you could take from that is that no one serious is convinced by it - because Labour has taken a great idea, which is Singapore's Temasek, and then taken away all the things that make Temasek successful. Temasek sells assets, this lot is not allowed. Temasek invests overseas, this lot is not allowed. That's just a couple of the problems here. Honestly, the list of problems in this policy announcement is so long, we could do an entire show about it. I suspect Labour knows and I think they know it's a bad idea. They just think we're too stupid to realize how bad an idea it is. They think that we're going to be hoodwinked by all of the feel-good slogans about investing in New Zealand's future and cutting out the foreign investors and stuff like that. But I'm happy to report that judging by the media roundup I just read you, we're not at all as stupid as Labour thinks we are. We can see a dog policy when we're presented with one, and this is one. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, even I didn't expect Prince Andrew to lose the use of his titles that fast. It was about 5pm on Friday afternoon that I said that he would lose them - and about 7am the next morning, the news broke that he had. But then again, I suppose we can see why it happened so fast, right? Because since that happened, it has just been one revelation after the other involving him. First, the police are looking into reports that he tried to get his personal protection officers to dig up dirt on Virginia Giuffre, his accuser. Then came the news that Fergie and the girls were among the first to welcome Epstein out of jail, and she kept trying to borrow money. And now you've got the creepy detail emerging from Giuffre's book about how Andrew behaved. Now, that is why the announcement about Andrew's titles came so quickly, because King Charles needed it to happen before the newspapers started printing excerpts from the book so that the stuff that came out didn't hurt the royals by association. But honestly, I don't know that King Charles has done enough, because Andrew hasn't actually lost anything. Which might be news to you, because the palace has done an epic spin job in trying to make it look like Andrew's given up all of his titles. He actually hasn't. He is still the Duke of York, he just has agreed not to use it in public. And I don't know about you, but we saw how that went with Meghan and Harry, didn't we? They were also promising not to use the HRH titles, and then Megs was busted using it in a private note to someone. So what's happening now is that all the UK newspapers are unsatisfied and they're calling for complete stripping of the titles. You've got the MPs coming under pressure to confront the royal family - just the sheer volume of coverage that this is getting at the moment over in the UK suggests that this could go on for days. That is not what King Charles wants, because in a couple of days he's got a meeting with the Pope, and he will not want that meeting to be overshadowed by his playboy brother and all the revelations coming out. I would say, watch this space. I reckon there's a better than average chance that Andrew hasn't even got his full punishment yet. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In July the Government announced a ban on surcharges on credit card payments in-store from May 2026 at the latest. ACT is attempting to block this ban by allowing credit card surcharges, as long as other payment options are offered- such as cash or eftpos. They suggest the ban will either increase prices for customers or unfairly punish businesses. ACT Commerce and Consumer Affairs spokesperson Dr Parmjeet Parmar said to Heather du Plessis-Allan that ACT's proposal was creating with 'cost and choice' in mind. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

In July the Government announced a ban on surcharges on credit card payments in-store from May 2026 at the latest. ACT is attempting to block this ban by allowing credit card surcharges, as long as other payment options are offered- such as cash or eftpos. They suggest the ban will either increase prices for customers or unfairly punish businesses. ACT Commerce and Consumer Affairs spokesperson Dr Parmjeet Parmar said to Heather du Plessis-Allan that ACT's proposal was creating with 'cost and choice' in mind. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen, I don't know how much most people will care about the drama that's unfolding with the BSA. Obviously here in radio world, we do, because these people are our watchdog. But if you enjoy watching people try something on and then be forced to retreat, you might enjoy this one. So what's kicked this off is that the BSA apparently decided, in secret, that they would give themselves permission to tidy up not just New Zealand's TV and radio, but now also the entire internet. And the first outfit that they've come after is The Platform. Now my personal dealings with the BSA have led me to believe that the people drawn to sitting on bodies like the BSA are not always the country's deepest thinkers, and this case only reinforces that - because if you thought about this for any more than 10 minutes, you would realize the BSA should just leave the internet alone. The BSA can't police the entire internet, it's too big. What, are they seriously proposing to send Joe Rogan a fine for $3000 NZD if someone in New Zealand complains about something he said? They can't even realistically police the part of the internet that New Zealand uses, it's too big. There's too many podcasts, too many videos, audio files, live streams, you name it, which means they're gonna have to pick and choose what they police and crack down on on the internet, which will inevitably lead to them being accused of bias and favouritism. Which is exactly what has happened here, because the first lot they've come after is The Platform, which if you know the story, was set up on the internet precisely to avoid the BSA and its rules. So - what a surprise that it's the first one the BSA comes after. What a surprise that they're copping a huge amount of flak and resistance from all over the show, including Winston and David Seymour. It seems to me there is a way out of this for the BSA - they'll have to back down. Because this is just an interim decision, and I think they might have to abandon it - and their plans for internet domination may have to also be abandoned. And then they will have to eat some humble pie, which surely would have been obvious to them if they had only thought about it, like the rest of us, for about, I don't know, 10 minutes. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen, go on and tell me that any of the allegations that we've heard about the Māori Party in the last 36 hours surprise you. Does it shock you in any way to find out that one of their MPs allegedly paid her son $120,000 of taxpayer money, that she couldn't apparently balance her own budget? And that her son allegedly abused parliamentary staff so badly that he was trespassed from the grounds? No really, right? Not really a surprise. And this feels exactly like the kind of stuff you would expect to be happening when a political party pulls together a collection of activists who have no respect for the rules - which they demonstrate on a seemingly weekly basis by not showing up to their jobs in Parliament, who can't even do up a pair of leather shoes to go to work, and who think nepotism is just another way of showing love to your family. Their words, not mine. Now, do you really think that that alleged incident where Eru Kapa-Kingi shouted at parliamentary staff and threatened to knock one out happened on Budget Day 2024 - as in 18 months ago, and we have only just found out now? Which has me wondering, what else is going on in there that we don't know about yet? Now, I'm not surprised by what's being revealed. And what it means is that I'm weirdly not actually terribly exercised by it, certainly not in the way that I would be if this was National or Labour or any other serious party. I would expect in those instances for heads to roll, and I would expect explanations and media stand-ups and real interrogations by the media and people appearing on the show to be grilled. But I don't expect that with the Māori Party. Now, that should worry the Māori Party, because what that means is that I, and anyone else who feels like me, don't take them seriously. We don't think they're serious people. We don't expect them to hold standards up. We regard what we're seeing as more of a clown show that needs to be contained so it doesn't contaminate the rest of Parliament. So good luck to them making it into a future Cabinet, which they're obviously quite keen on, if they're not being taken seriously by us. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, what happened last night is remarkable. Before the deadline of 10pm New Zealand time, 20 living Israeli hostages - who had been held for 2 years, who had been forced in some cases to dig their own graves, spend unknown lengths of time in tunnels underground, and go without much in the way of sustenance at times - were handed over by their captors back into the care of Israel, which is their home. That is remarkable. Because, I mean, let's be honest about it - in the last two years, there were times where surely we started to believe that we'd seen the last of the survivors make it out. Surely, we'd assumed most, if not all, of the remaining 20 would die in captivity in the years that we may have thought stretched ahead of us. But look at what's happened, aid is now flowing back into Gaza, people are going back to their homes - whatever is left of it - and the shelling has stopped. You would think this would be a moment to celebrate, right? The very thing that so many of us have been calling for for such a long time and increasingly in the last few months has happened. The fighting has stopped, the starvation has stopped. But where is the celebration? I mean, don't you think it's remarkably muted today? Now I realize a lot of that will be that there is some weariness, quite rightly, over whether this peace can hold because so many ceasefires have broken down in the past, and there are so many ways that this ceasefire can break down. It could be a rocket fired in error, it could be Hamas still refusing to disarm, it could be anything. But I do wonder if part of it is also because it's hard for some people to give credit to Donald Trump for the role that he played in this. I mean, already there are opinion pieces that are writing him out of this historic moment and talking up the diplomatic efforts of others, particularly in the Middle East, and warning he will never get a Nobel Peace Prize for this, regardless of whether this peace holds. But you can't ignore his role in this and you can't write him out of this. He was instrumental in a way that Biden never was. And it was for various reasons, mainly because of his friendship with Benjamin Netanyahu - which Biden never had - but also because of his relationship with the Arab countries because of previous work in the region, in his first administration, like the Abraham Accords. Now, let's be fair, it's always hard to give credit to people we dislike. It's also very hard to give credit to people who are so capable of dishing out copious amounts of credit to themselves, like Donald Trump. But Trump does deserve credit and he deserves a lot of it for getting the Gaza conflict to a point that it has never been before, which is that all the living hostages are out. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Listen, I am more and more convinced that we need to cut the number of councils we have across the country. I mean, that voter turnout that we've seen at the weekend was abysmal. Last count I've seen is that nationally, only 38 percent of us voted. It's worse in Auckland, where only around 29 percent - so not even 1 in 3 of us - voted. Now, I think anyone who thinks that we can fix local Government by ditching the postal vote system and going hard with the orange guy and his dog is dreaming. Because that is not the problem. The problem is not how you vote, the problem is who you vote for. I think we have a complete breakdown in the trust between the voter and the people that we are voting for and the authority in general. I mean, you've opened your booklet, right? Surely, you've had a look at who you had to vote for. It's overpopulated by people you wouldn't trust to mind your pet, never mind run the council. You don't actually believe that these people are going to make smart decisions, do you? Or do what they say they're gonna do? You wouldn't even know if they do what they say they're gonna do, because there's hardly any media coverage nowadays and holding people to account. I think it fundamentally comes down to us simply having too many local body politicians in New Zealand, right? Because Auckland alone has 170 of these people. That is more than Parliament has for the entire country. Now, run that 170 in Auckland across the entire country, but it's like 1000. We don't have enough media to cover everything, grill them when they break promises. We don't have enough attention spans ourselves to absorb that much information on top of everything we're already absorbing with central Government. And so what we do is we just tap out and we give up and only what, 40 percent of us vote? I reckon what we need to do is we need to take our 67 territorial authorities and just cut it down. Some commentators reckon we need to go as low as 13. I don't mind, that's a good starting point. It's certainly a better starting point than 67 which equals a, what, 38 percent turnout? LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's the 100th episode of Ask Me Anything, and we're flipping the script! This week, Paula's in the hot seat as Heather du Plessis-Allan takes over hosting duties to ask the hard questions. Paula opens up about life in John Key’s inner circle, the grief that changed her and what she really thinks of Winston Peters and David Seymour. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Three New Zealanders detained by Israel last week, have returned home. Rana Hamida, Youssef Sammour and Samuel Leason were in an aid flotilla to Gaza, intercepted by Israel's military in the Mediterranean. They were among hundreds from around the world, attempting to deliver food and medical supplies. Leason told Heather du Plessis-Allan that he's hoping the ceasefire announced yesterday, will hold. He says he wants what's best for the people of Gaza. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There are calls for a Government crackdown on some temporary pools, after five deaths in the past decade. Coroner Heidi Wrigley's reviewed the death of 20-month-old Aromaia Duff in Napier in 2023, after being found face down in a backyard pool. Wrigley says her death reaffirms concerns a pattern's emerging of drownings in such pools. Acting Water Safety NZ CEO Gavin Walker told Heather du Plessis Allan that the issue isn't paddling pools - or much larger ones. He says the problem is more with waist deep, medium-size pools about three metres across - which have proliferated. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Labour claims a promise isn't being kept - as the Government mulls selling its stake in Chorus. Finance Minister Nicola Willis today said the Government's considering selling the 61 percent stake in the telecoms infrastructure company - now rollout of ultra-fast broadband is complete. She says the money from a sale would be spent on hospitals and schools. But Chris Hipkins told Heather du-Plessis Allan that they've broken their word. He says National promised no asset sales - and this would fall into that category. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It's happened again, unfortunately - the Māori Party has hijacked Parliament once again with a haka. It played out like this: Oriini Kaipara, who's their new MP replacing the late Takutai Tarsh Kemp, delivered her maiden speech because today's her first day in Parliament. Afterwards, there was a song and the public gallery was involved. She stepped out of her seat into the aisle, onto the floor to receive the song. As soon as the song ended, someone - sounded like it was somebody up in the public gallery - started a haka and she started to haka back. From news reports I've read, one of the other MPs, Hana-Rāwhiti Maipi-Clarke, also started to haka. Speaker Gerry Brownlee said, “Oh no, not that.” He went on to say that was not the agreement that had been struck, but they didn't stop, they basically ignored him. He got to his feet, at which point the House is usually supposed to stop everything it's doing and go quiet to allow him to speak, and they just completely ignored him. He threw his hands in the air, he then suspended the House, walked off, and the camera feed cut. He's come back subsequently very unhappy about it, and I'm going to bring you up to speed on all of that. Now, the thing is, though - before you get angry about it - don't bother wasting energy on being angry at the Māori Party for doing this, because that's akin to wasting energy on getting angry at an alcoholic for getting drunk if you put beer in front of them, or getting angry at a toddler for packing a tantrum if they're tired. This is what the Māori Party does, right? This is the stuff that they thrive on. They thrive on performance, they thrive on sticking the middle finger to authority, it's basically what they would call their kaupapa. I'm just surprised that Gerry Brownlee got hoodwinked so easily into making an agreement with them and thinking this wouldn't happen. Or maybe he didn't, or maybe someone in Parliament didn't get hoodwinked, because it looks like someone was prepared for this. As soon as that haka started, the camera never cut back to the Māori Party or the gallery. It stayed on Gerry, and as soon as he suspended Parliament, the feed cut. Now, what that means is you never really see the Māori Party doing the haka or anyone doing the haka. You can just kind of hear it in the background, but you can't see it. That basically robs the Māori Party of the ability to do what they did previously - strip the crisp, professional parliamentary TV feed, put it on their social media, and hope the thing goes viral. It's not going to happen this time because that footage is not there for them. Now, it is not ideal, obviously, having Parliament's rules broken like this for obvious reasons, but it is not unexpected. So I think, given all things, the best outcome may be the one that was achieved today - which is just a blackout. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Good news - the Reserve Bank has finally done the thing many of us thought was necessary, and they've gone for a double cut in the OCR of 50 basis points. That's the good news. The bad news is that they've been forced to do it because they didn't do it earlier, as in, they haven't cut as quickly as they should have. I mean, think back to July when they actually chose not to cut at all, which was clearly a mistake at the time - but became even more of a mistake when we saw the shock GDP number that followed. We saw that in the three months before that decision, the economy had actually contracted by a whopping 0.9 percent and the Reserve Bank hadn't really noticed at all. And the bad news, I suppose, again, is that they could have done a double cut last time when two of them on the Monetary Policy Statement said we should go double cut. But more of them said, no, let's just go with the single cut. So they've gone with a double cut today - vindication for two, it would seem. We're gonna stick to the good news though, which is that, finally, the Reserve Bank has caught up with the rest of us. The economy is cooked, and we need to do something, so they have delivered it. They admit that this is a signal. The signal is it's okay to go out and spend and invest - because they've realized, finally, that people are freaked out, right? There have been too many predictions of green shoots just before the economy falls again, which freak people out, and there have been too many bad surprises which freak people out. Business confidence is shot, look at the QBSO yesterday. Consumer confidence is also slightly increasing, but still really negative. People are holding on to their money, they're saving instead of spending, they're worrying instead of investing. And this cut is a circuit breaker that's supposed to snap us out of our fear. Now, there are some who worry that we are actually already so freaked out that even this cut, given how big it is, could spook us all over again. It's possible, maybe it could happen. But I think what's more likely is that it's going to give the assurance that people need. And the assurance is that the people in charge of the economy actually realize how bad things are - and are prepared to be bold. And I'll tell you what, it's better late than never. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Good news - the Reserve Bank has finally done the thing many of us thought was necessary, and they've gone for a double cut in the OCR of 50 basis points. That's the good news. The bad news is that they've been forced to do it because they didn't do it earlier, as in, they haven't cut as quickly as they should have. I mean, think back to July when they actually chose not to cut at all, which was clearly a mistake at the time - but became even more of a mistake when we saw the shock GDP number that followed. We saw that in the three months before that decision, the economy had actually contracted by a whopping 0.9 percent and the Reserve Bank hadn't really noticed at all. And the bad news, I suppose, again, is that they could have done a double cut last time when two of them on the Monetary Policy Statement said we should go double cut. But more of them said, no, let's just go with the single cut. So they've gone with a double cut today - vindication for two, it would seem. We're gonna stick to the good news though, which is that, finally, the Reserve Bank has caught up with the rest of us. The economy is cooked, and we need to do something, so they have delivered it. They admit that this is a signal. The signal is it's okay to go out and spend and invest - because they've realized, finally, that people are freaked out, right? There have been too many predictions of green shoots just before the economy falls again, which freak people out, and there have been too many bad surprises which freak people out. Business confidence is shot, look at the QBSO yesterday. Consumer confidence is also slightly increasing, but still really negative. People are holding on to their money, they're saving instead of spending, they're worrying instead of investing. And this cut is a circuit breaker that's supposed to snap us out of our fear. Now, there are some who worry that we are actually already so freaked out that even this cut, given how big it is, could spook us all over again. It's possible, maybe it could happen. But I think what's more likely is that it's going to give the assurance that people need. And the assurance is that the people in charge of the economy actually realize how bad things are - and are prepared to be bold. And I'll tell you what, it's better late than never. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We need to talk about why we're persisting with having so many local body politicians. We clearly have too many positions, don't we? I mean, just look at how many people are winning their seats at the moment. The elections are this weekend - look at how many people are winning their seats without any elections, without anybody standing against them. With more than 200, that's 1 in every 7 council races. So Hurunui already has its mayor, even though the elections are this weekend. It's Marie Black, no one's standing against her. Manawatū already has its mayor, Michael Ford, no one's standing against him. There are more than 80 councillors who are already elected across the country, there are several on the Southland Regional Council already elected. Lower Hutt, Southland, Buller, Stratford, Marlborough councils, two of Auckland's councils already elected - unopposed - as well as 3 of Christchurch's. There are also empty seats that no one wants to fill in community boards in the Rotorua Lakes, New Plymouth's Kaitake, Clifton as well, rural Hastings, Hanmer Springs, Twizel, and Mataura. What that tells you is that you have more positions to fill than you have people who want to fill those positions. Now, please have a look at your voting papers and vote if you can. I voted in Auckland already, right? I had 1 vote for mayor, I had 1 vote for council, and then I had up to 7 votes for my local board. I didn't vote 7 times for my local, I didn't know who all of those people were. I knew about 5 of them and at least 2 of them I knew for bad reasons, so I didn't want to vote for them. So, you know, I think we clearly are asking too much. And by the way, in Auckland, we have 172 local board politicians by the end of this process, and I'm not even counting the local licensing board. The most junior of which, the ward councillors, get paid more than $54,000 each. Now, I think looking at all of this, we are well overdue tipping all of this up and changing it and massively reducing the number of people that we're paying to do probably not a lot. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

On these protesters who've been harassing Winston and his neighbours - even as recently as last night - they really have to call this nonsense off. Turning up at someone's house in the evening, or as the Prime Minister said to Mike this morning, at 11 at night or 4 in the morning is not protesting. That's actually just intimidating. Particularly, I think, in the case of Winston, who I know has been actually dealing with this for a number of months. Now, I don't think he's actually gone public yet. Even when I asked him, I don't think he's gone public with the extent of the harassment that he's been dealing with - and it was probably because he didn't want to encourage it to continue. But I have been aware for months that this has been going on outside his house. What makes it worse is that like with many heritage suburbs in central Auckland, Winston's house is right on the roadside. He doesn't have a yard out the front between him and the protesters. He doesn't have a long driveway between him and them. If you stand outside his house, you're basically touching his porch and his front door is about 1.5 to 2 metres away. I think that makes the intimidation even greater. And what these protesters need to understand is that they're not drawing attention to Gaza by harassing a senior politician - just like with the flotilla kids, right? Because they're not drawing attention to Gaza. They are only drawing attention to themselves and getting us talking - not about Gaza, but about whether the thing that they are doing as their protest or their activism is appropriate. They're simply drawing attention to themselves. Now, there is a planned law to stop this business about the protesting outside people's houses. It's in the submissions phase, so it hasn't passed yet and it's a while away from passing Which means, of course, that in the meantime these protesters can pretty much do what they like by the looks of things. But what they should understand is that it is inappropriate and most New Zealanders with families will look at this and think this is inappropriate, and so all they're doing is risking goodwill towards their cause. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I reckon we shouldn't panic too much on behalf of those three New Zealand citizens who've been intercepted by the Israeli military and the flotilla. Obviously, we want international law to be followed, but it's pretty clear that these guys knew what they were getting themselves into and did it anyway. I mean, they are absolutely milking this for all that it's worth with the social media posts claiming they've been kidnapped and all that kind of stuff - by the Israelis, by the way. But they knew this was gonna happen, and they were prepared for it because this is what happened to Greta in June. She was on the flotilla that got stopped by the IDF- and they took her to Ashdod and they kept her for a few hours and then they tried to make her watch a video of the October 7 massacre, she didn't want to. And they put her on a plane in the back row, right in front of the toilet, so there wasn't even any reclining space for her, and then they packed her off home. And that was fine. So they got on some more ships and they tried to do it again. So it was always going to play out in exactly the same way. And for that reason, I think it is fair to call this a stunt, because what they're doing is something that they know has no reasonable chance of success - which is delivering aid to Gaza, but they're doing it anyway, to draw attention to Gaza. That's a stunt. Now, I'm not going to criticize them for wanting to draw attention to Gaza because it is horrific and intolerable what's happening there. And if there is any doubt that the Israelis are deliberately constraining the flow of aid, I think that was quite obviously dispelled this week when the Trump peace plan was released and it promised that if Hamas accepts the deal, then full aid will be immediately sent into the Gaza Strip. Which is essentially, I think you can see, an admission that full aid is currently being withheld from the Gaza Strip. So I understand why they want to draw attention to it, but I still don't have much time for stunts like this because generally, they don't actually draw attention to the thing that they're trying to draw attention to - which is the starvation in Gaza. They only really draw attention to themselves - which is Greta and her mates. That's what we're talking about. Because we're not talking about Gaza today, are we? We're talking about Greta and her mates. The whole thing becomes about the safety and the treatment of the activists, not the safety and the treatment of the people of Gaza. And frankly, they are, in my opinion, of no value whatsoever to the people of Gaza right now. Now, obviously, I do hope the IDF treats these kids well. Our diplomats have asked for as much, but they knew this was going to happen. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

If you were looking forward to today to learn how the Government would rescue the country from the energy crisis we face, you are already disappointed by now because you've looked at it and you've seen there's nothing here. There is nothing here that is going to stop us going through what we are going through right now. For months and months every winter for the last two winters we've seen the closing down of mills, extremely high power bills, and a shortage of gas - and all of that's going to continue. The disappointing thing is that we have waited two whole winters for this package of ideas, and yet the best idea seems, to me, to be a kooky idea, which is that the Government may be backing the construction of an LNG import terminal. That was an idea that sounded great last winter, but in the months since, when we've actually had a look at the thing and had some reports done and it has been debunked for being quite expensive for not a lot of gain. To set up one of these terminals, most likely at the port of Taranaki, it would cost somewhere between $200 million and $1 billion dollars, which is not money that we have. The gas that we would then import from offshore to basically make up for the shortage of gas that we have in the country at the moment would be very expensive. Have a look at what you're paying for your gas right now - and add 25 percent to that. The second best idea in this seems to be the Government throwing taxpayer money at the partially owned gentailers in order that they can raise capital to build more generation. Which is not capital that they appear to be asking for. They do not seem to have a shortage of money, as evidenced by the fact that they keep paying out massive dividends. The upshot for all of this - as in how much we're going to save - Simon Watts reckons he might be able to drop power prices by two percent a year. Two percent. Now, I'll tell you the problem with this plan is that it appears - and from what I hear - they haven't spent much time understanding the problem and thus understanding what it would take to fix it properly. So what they've done is, in haste, cobbled together a series of what sounds like maybe decent announcements if you're half listening. But they're really things that will not do that much. Unfortunately for them, we have an energy crisis, and it is massive. It is probably the biggest thing that is facing business in this country right now. A crisis of this size demands a proper fix. This is becoming a theme for this Government - having lots of really big things to deal with, and they're not really dealing with them properly. This is not really a fix. So unfortunately, and I'm so sorry to say this, strap yourself in because it looks like for next winter and the winters to come, the deindustrialization of New Zealand will continue. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now, we need to talk about the Reserve Bank's excuses for how it completely stuffed up its job and let inflation get away on it during Covid. We spoke about this on the show yesterday, it's done the review and it says, quote, - "in hindsight, an earlier and more aggressive tightening might have reduced inflation sooner." Yeah. Really, Sherlock? But this would have been difficult given the data available at the time. Now, basically what they're saying is: yeah, we could have done better if we could see what was happening at the time, but we couldn't see what was happening at the time. Which is a crock, isn't it? Because there were people who could see at the time what was happening, and they said so. They said it publicly, they said the Reserve Bank needs to start tightening up - in some cases, months, if not even more than a year, before they did. I mean, the New Zealand Initiative first identified that Covid could cause inflation in April 2022 - that's a year and a half before the Reserve Bank started tightening. Brad Olsen called on them to start lifting the OCR in July 2021, that's about three months before they started. They started in October 2021. Now, that's good on them for - at that point - starting to move, but they were doing it. They were pumping the brake ever so slightly while still pushing the accelerator in a big way, because they did not stop pumping the economy and they kept their cheap money for banks program going all the while. In February 2022, the following year, the New Zealand Initiative was warning them and saying - hey, listen, this inflation is a thing here. But that lending continued, that cheap money to the banks continued all the way through to December 2022. When it stopped, inflation was already at 7.2 percent, which is nutso. Now, to be fair to the Reserve Bank, it wasn't just their fault. Grant Robertson was doing a fair bit, right? He was spending like crazy, and even though he was warned by Treasury, he just kept on spending too. But that doesn't exonerate the Reserve Bank, it just makes their job harder. But they cannot pretend that they didn't see what was happening, because others did see what was happening, and they needed to see what was happening - because that is what they are paid for. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can I just come to the defence of Winston Peters for a minute? Winston has been labelled a coward for the position that he took on Palestine on Saturday, which I do not think is fair because it appears to me that what he's done is actually the opposite of cowardice. The easy thing would have actually been for him to just go with the crowd, just say, yep, we recognize the Palestinian state, because that's what everybody else is doing. The hard thing for him to do is go against the crowd and go against what everybody at the UN is doing, go against the domestic media opinion, go against the commentator's consensus. So actually, when you think about it, he's not being cowardly at all - and I agree with his analysis at the moment. Set aside whether there should be a Palestinian state - because of course there should be a Palestinian state, and I think most of us think that, right? If it's possible, it should happen. But that's not what this is about. It is about whether you do that right now, because doing it right now is rewarding Hamas and they themselves have made it clear that they see the recognition of a state of Palestine as a vindication of the massacre that they carried out on October 7th. You cannot reward terrorists for taking innocent lives, but also, and probably more importantly, it's not gonna do anything to end the war. If you really want to end the war, if Trump's current peace plan fails, then what we need to do is punish Israel for what they're doing. They should be sanctioned and they should be isolated from the international community until they stop. And we've been saying this for weeks on the show. For every day that we talk about whether we recognize a Palestinian state, we are wasting a day that we could be talking about what we actually should be doing, the things that would actually end this war, like punishing Israel for what they're doing - which again, is another day that we've wasted talking about the wrong thing. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Concern over predatory parking companies after a man got a ticket for being in a park for eight seconds. Christchurch man Bailey Smith won his case in the Disputes Tribunal, for the 95 dollar parking ticket. Smith says he pulled into the Kauri Street car park and then reversed out again within eight seconds, when he realised it was private. NZ Parking Association Chairman Mike Kelly told Heather du Plessis-Allan operators should be transparent with their rules. He says as soon as you enter a private car park you enter a contract, but it has to be fair and reasonable. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A law expert thinks an injunction suppressing key details in the Tom Phillips case will be difficult to keep in place. Media and authorities have been suppressed from discussing certain details related to the case since the Marokopa fugitive and his children were found last Monday. Media lawyers have been advocating for the right to report and the Wellington High Court will hear the matter again next month. Senior Law Lecturer Nikki Chamberlain told Heather du Plessis-Allan that it's very difficult to stop individuals discussing the details on social media. She says unless you can make each individual subject to the injunction, you'd have to make the entire social media platform a party in the court order. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The rising number of people on electronically-monitored bail is being used to explain a surge in absconders. Figures released to Newstalk ZB through the Official Information Act show cases of a breach rose from 64 in 2015, to 832 last year. Corrections Chief Probation Officer Toni Stewart told Heather du Plessis-Allan over the last 10 years the courts have granted more electronically monitored bail. She says they report signs of breaches to police, and is assuring the public they have a zero tolerance for non-compliance. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, I think it's fair to say that the GDP print has come in at something of a shock. The Reserve Bank was picking a contraction of 0.3 percent. The consensus was a contraction of 0.4 percent. The worst-case prediction from one of the banks was a contraction of 0.5 percent. It's come in at a contraction of 0.9 percent, which is basically twice as bad as most of us thought. Now, the immediate problem that we have is what this is going to do to confidence, because people are already scared. That is why it's taking this country so long to come out of recession, because every single piece of bad news like Trump's tariffs earlier this year freaks us out all over again, so we keep our wallets shut for longer. There are people out there who absolutely can afford to spend more money, but they're choosing not to because they do not know that they can trust that we're through the worst of it. This is part of the reason, if not one of the bigger reasons, why the Reserve Bank's cuts to the OCR are not stimulating the economy like the bank thought that they should be. And this number that we see today, I fear, is going to do this all over again. And it's gonna freak us out all over again. And I think the reason we're going to be freaked out all over again by this is that we think that the people who are in charge, mainly the Reserve Bank, but also the Government who keep telling us that the economy is definitely recovering, really have no idea how bad this is. Now, I think it is a little unfair to blame anyone but the Reserve Bank right now because they really deserve it. The verdict is in on this now, isn't it? They have well and truly stuffed this up, they have no idea what is going on in this economy. In July, which was only one month after Q2 ended, we'd just gone through this massive contraction - and the next month, they decided they didn't need to cut the cash rate anymore. They held the cash rate. That now should blow your mind. Just a month ago, they released their monetary policy statement forecasting the contraction at only 0.3 percent They got it wrong by a factor of 3 percent. Now, what them getting it so badly wrong now means is that the pressure is on them to fix this and fix this fast and do a double cut in October, really more to restore confidence than anything, because confidence is what we are very much lacking at the moment. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, Shanan Halbert from the Māori Party doesn't like the fact that Rawiri Waititi answered all his media questions about Takuta Ferris in te reo Māori. Now, if you haven't caught up on this, this is what happened yesterday when the Māori Party came face to face with the press gallery. It was the first time since Tākuta Ferris has doubled down and then tripled down for his anti-immigrant comments and then ignored his leader's orders to delete the video. And then the leaders started, by the looks of things, ignoring media requests for interviews. So yesterday, when the media finally had a chance to ask Rawiri about it for the first time, he refused to speak English and he would only answer in Māori, because he said it's te reo Māori week. And Shanan Halbert from the Labour Party didn't like it because he thinks that Rawiri is creating an "exclusive bunch" of Māori. Which is presumably Māori who can speak Māori, and that, by the looks of things, excludes him. Well, tough bickies. If Shanan doesn't want to feel left out, he should go and learn Māori like everyone else who's spending their Wednesday nights in Māori language classes. Look, just for the record, so before you think I'm now on Rawiri's side, I'm not. I don't like that Rawiri is doing this, because he's obviously weaponizing the language and hiding behind it to avoid answering tough questions, and then is pretending that he's doing it for some noble reason of celebrating Māori language week. That's not what he's doing. But set aside his childishness, he is entitled to speak Māori exclusively if he wants to. It is a national language and the man is fluent in it. If this was a multilingual European nation instead of predominantly monolingual New Zealand, this would not be a problem. I mean, to be fair, Rawiri probably wouldn't be able to do what he's doing because the press gallery would also be multilingual and would be able to understand what he's saying. But Shanan's complaint is a uniquely New Zealand complaint, isn't it? Which is - don't speak the language because I can't understand it. Again, tough bickies. It's really weird for me to hear this from a Labour Party MP, by the way. And I would encourage Shanan to take up some Māori language classes with his free time, which there is a lot of, because he's not doing a lot in opposition. And maybe if there is a silver lining in Rawiri being this juvenile, it is a gentle reminder to the rest of us that if we also don't want to feel like Shanan - left out - there are classes. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

First of all, can I start by offering an apology to TVNZ? I gave them a bit of grief last night for starting the news bulletin with the peaches, but it turns out I was wrong and they were right. This has sparked a flurry of debate over whether we prefer our Wattie's peaches from Hawke's Bay or whether we don't really care if it comes from China or not. It's also prompted a statement from Wattie's asking us to support local growers. In other words, can we please buy New Zealand made? Now, that is a very nice sentiment, but let's be honest, that's all it is. It is a sentiment and it's not going to work. I mean, this is me, this is not me being cavalier about how hard this must be for the Hawke's Bay peach growers who are losing their Wattie's contracts. For them, this must be absolutely devastating and I feel terrible for them. But this is me being realistic about the prospect of any 'Buy New Zealand Made' campaign working. Wattie's New Zealand peaches, according to Pak'nSave's online store, are $3.90 a can. Pam's cheap peaches are 99 cents a can. That's a no-brainer, you're gonna buy the 99 cent can. Who is buying the $3.90 can? Grey Lynn? That makes no sense whatsoever. I mean - look, maybe if I thought about it a little bit, which I don't, but if I did, maybe I would pay 10, 20 cents, 40 cents at a push, more for a New Zealand made product. But I would not pay four times as much, it's far too expensive. And I wouldn't even do it in the first place because buying New Zealand made never works, does it? It never has. If it did, we would still be wearing Bata Bullets and buying Juliet Hogan and eating Sanitarium peanut butter. We wouldn't be reading about the closure of manufacturing businesses every other month, which today, by the way, is the Carter Holt Harvey mill in Tokoroa. I do the shopping in our house 90 percent of the time and I don't even know the provenance of the food I'm buying. I do not know where the canned food comes from, I absolutely do not know where the dried goods come from. And often, I'm not even really looking where the fresh fruit comes from. Yep, I know where the meat comes from, but that's basically a given, isn't it? It's simple economics, it always will be. And even if Wattie's has this tiny little hope that there might be a last-minute public rally for the New Zealand grown peaches, I think they already know the outcome, which is why they've already cut the contracts. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Are we sure that Scott Barrett should be the captain? This is the thing that I've been thinking about for the last two weeks watching the games, it's what struck me when I watched the game at Eden Park and the ceremony for Ardie Savea's 100 tests, and the fact that the team clearly rallied not only to defend the fortress, which I think was predominantly what they were rallying for, but also they rallied to give Ardie Savea a fitting win. Watching that happen and watching the ceremony afterwards and clearly seeing the love that the team had for him, did you not think it at any point during that - I wonder if that man should actually be the captain? And then this week, I saw the press conference with Razor and Scott Barrett sitting next to him, and I had the same thought, but the mirror of it, which was - should that man really be the captain? It just didn't feel the same, you know what I mean. And this is nothing against Scott Barrett, who clearly comes from a lovely family and seems like a fun guy. But I can't understand Razor's commitment to him. There should be no question about a captain's selection, right? There was no question that Richie McCaw would be the one named at #7. There was no question that Kieran Read would be the one named at #8. But is Scott as convincing? Are you sure he's going to be the one named in his position? Are you sure that his discipline is good enough to warrant being the captain, or are there too many red cards and too many yellow cards week in, week out that suggest that maybe when he's under pressure, he just crumbles a little bit? Is he the right leader on field when the team starts falling behind? Given the fact that his record as a captain has largely been with the formidable Crusaders, has he actually had enough losses and enough knocks in his career to know what to do when your team is on the underside and absolutely on track to lose the game, and you need to turn it around, you need to get a win under your belt? Because is that actually what happened, what went wrong on Saturday night? When they started losing, and you saw it on the field, they just all gave up at a point. Did they all give up because their captain had given up? Now, there is an argument that the coaches should come under scrutiny first before the captain, and maybe that is the correct order of things. And frankly, I don't know enough about the assistant coaches to really have an opinion one way or the other. But I think when it comes to the captain, many of us have already come to the right conclusion and the same conclusion here, which is that they may have the wrong captain. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Police say protest organisers made the right call, by postponing tomorrow's Auckland Harbour Bridge protest due to weather. Southbound lanes were to close to accommodate the tens of thousands of pro-Palestine protestors.. The march will now take place from Aotea Square to Victoria Park, while a new bridge crossing date is decided. Acting Waitemata District Commander Stefan Sagar told Heather du Plessis-Allan that he acknowledges the organisers for heeding their advice. Saga says with winds potentially reaching over 70-kilometres an hour, it's not a feasible environment for pedestrians. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Public Service Commissioner says teachers are putting themselves ahead of students as they again vote to strike. Brian Roche says the pay offer to teachers -which includes a 4.7 percent pay rise over 12 months - was a very good one. PPTA president Chris Abercrombie told Heather du-Plessis Allan that teachers have many sticking points with the latest offer. But he won't say exactly how many teachers supported the strike. He says that's the union's policy - but there was overwhelming support from members to take industrial action. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Frustration over claims police overruled the Transport Agency by allowing tomorrow's pro-Palestine march to take place on the Auckland Harbour Bridge. Tens of thousands of protestors are expected to cross the bridge in the morning, disrupting travel. Auckland Councillor Maurice Williamson told Heather du Plessis-Allan that the agency told him they said no to the protest, but Police intervened. He says Police told them the bridge had to close, to maintain civil obedience. Williamson says protestors should have chosen to march elsewhere. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, I wonder how those netball players who complained about Dame Noeline feel today, because what they've done has probably, let's be honest, ended her career. And also brought out a swell of support that I can't imagine they foresaw. Silver Ferns legend Laura Langman's gone on social media and called this 'the saddest day in New Zealand netball history'. Gordon Tietjens, the Sevens rugby legend, called us at Newstalk ZB to convey his support for Dame Noels, and former coach Yvonne Willering says Noels is not old school at all and she does listen to her players. Now, the details of what has happened to get to this point are fairly sketchy. Everybody's trying to keep things quiet, but what we know is that two players complained on behalf of a group of players and that sparked a review - and that review has led to her being stood down. And what these players have complained about is her communication style, and that they were 'psychologically unsafe'. Now, you can probably figure out what's going on here, can't you? We've got a generational problem, don't we? This looks to me like a generation of young players who don't like tough feedback and hard words. For whatever reason that is, I don't know - maybe because they are the generation raised through gentle parenting techniques where mum and dad didn't want to have to say no to them, so didn't say no to them, didn't want to tell them they're being bad kids and being naughty. And maybe they're the generation that came through the education system, the current one, where everyone gets a pass and no one experiences failure. They are the ones who've gone and complained because they're 'psychologically unsafe'. To which I think most of us who've experienced a little bit of life and didn't go through this nonsense with parenting and schooling would say - do you know what you need to do? You need to grow up, you need to get hard, life is tough. You're an elite athlete, if your welfare is getting in the way of your excellence, get out of the squad. Unfortunately for us, the person who is out of the squad is someone who understands excellence and has actually achieved a hell of a lot of excellence. And unfortunately, she will probably stay out of the squad, even though she's only been stood down at the moment. I mean, think about it - I can't see her coming back in. If they have to pick between one coach and several players, they're gonna choose the several players, aren't they? And frankly, I don't think that Dame Noels should want to come back - because if her excellence and her skills aren't appreciated by this generation of players, why bother? LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The people who helped Tom Phillips should absolutely be packing themselves because the cops are making it pretty clear they're coming after them - and in a big way. Cops have said today that it is clear that Tom Phillips had help recently, judging by the stuff that's lying around in the second camp. And what police are planning to do is to trace where that stuff came from. So if it's not stolen, where did it come from? Who gave it to Tom Phillips? If it's bought, who bought it for Tom Phillips, who were the guns registered to? Now, this is incredibly frustrating to talk about because as of Monday, there is a suppression order in the courts, which means the full picture here is not out. But even without that full picture, I think that what we already know is serious enough for his accomplices to understand that they are in big trouble if they get caught. One man is dead, a police officer almost died, and those children were put in harm's way - basically every single day that they were in the bush. At any time, they might have come across a police officer. Now imagine how much more dangerous it would have been if it wasn't just one child, but all of them who were with him when he was confronted by a police officer and pulled a weapon on that officer and kicked off a gunfight. He took a child to rob a bank, he took a child to burgle a dairy, he took a child to burgle PGG Wrightson, he gave his daughter a gun. She pointed it at someone during the bank robbery. At any one of those moments, who knows if they come across a cop, he pulled his gun and kicked off a gunfight. Now, the accomplices cannot say that they didn't know. This has been going on for years. If they were helping him as recently as police believe, then they knew - and they deserved to be dragged before the courts for it. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Well, it now transpires that the police are allowing a documentary to be made about Tom Phillips and their hunt for him. It's being made by Julie Christie, who's produced lots of great television in the past, particularly reality TV. There are camera crews following police officers and being given access - if you want to call it that - behind the scenes, the kind of access that the average media crew can't get. Now, personally, I think this documentary needs to be killed off immediately. I do not blame the police for saying yes to this documentary in the first place. If it hadn't ended this way - with Tom Phillips trying to kill a police officer and then being shot dead in response in front of his daughter - it might have actually been a good idea to do this documentary. It might have shown the efforts that the police have gone to over the last four years to track him down, the consideration that they've put into it, the care that they've taken. It might actually have been really good PR for the police. But now, what it is, is mainly just a threat to these kids' future. It is going to be hard enough for these children to find a way to be normal in a country that is obsessed with what has happened to them over the last four years. By the time that this documentary comes out - it might be two years, five years, ten years, who knows, because documentaries aren't put together fast - who knows? Hopefully, we will have moved on as a country and be interested in other things. And all a documentary like this is going to do is remind us - and the world, who are fascinated by what happened to the Phillips kids - about this case all over again. And we will hit Google and we will remind ourselves of what the kids looked like and what their names are and what happened to them in the bush. Children should never be punished and tortured for the stupid things that their parents do and the bad decisions that their parents make. They deserve the right to as much anonymity as possible and just the chance to live a life free of what their parents have done. I don't think that the media, that I belong to, should publish their photos anymore. No one should take a photo of them as they look right now, having come out of the bush, and this documentary needs to be called off. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Stuart Nash turning up at the conference over the weekend - that was quite a coup for New Zealand First. Now, clearly what New Zealand First is trying to do is emulate what Reform - Nigel Farage's party - in the UK is doing. If you've been following what they're up to, they have had a huge number of politicians defect to Reform. And every single time it happens, the news media covers it and it makes Reform look like the party with the momentum. That is what New Zealand First is trying to do. That's why you had both Stuart Nash, formerly of Labour, and Harete Hipango, formerly of National, at the conference over the weekend. Now, despite the circumstances of Stuart leaving Parliament, he's actually a really big defection from Labour because he's a very capable politician. He managed to turn Napier into a red seat in 2014, despite the popularity of the Key Government at the time. He was one of the few ministers in the Ardern administration that voters on the right actually had time for. He is, and I think that's because he's a proper centrist in the Labour Party - not crazy left like a lot of them are, a little bit more to the right - which is why he's probably going to find a better home for himself in New Zealand First than the Labour Party of 2025. Now, I don't know if Labour realizes what they've lost with Stuart Nash leaving. I mean, of course, he's really been out of Labour since the moment Chippy fired him, but I don't think they even realized then what they'd lost because they haven't replaced him. And what I mean by that is they haven't gone looking for another true centrist politician. Back in the day, Labour had heaps of them. They had Phil Goff, David Shearer and just going back through time - Richard Prebble, Roger Douglas, Mike Moore - it wasn't that unusual to have a good little centrist or righty sitting in the Labour Party. Now, name one for me. I mean, you might have once been able to say Chippy, but he's allowed himself to be pulled so far to the left, I'm not sure you could call him a centrist anymore. Now, you cannot, as a Labour Party, win over the centre voter if you do not have politicians that the centre voter likes. And Stuart Nash, I think, was probably the last one of them. I would say: total coup for New Zealand First. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Better, faster, cheaper's the aim of the newly announced refresh to Auckland's transport governance. The government's introducing legislation to strip Auckland Transport of many of its powers - handing responsibility for major roads to Auckland Council, and local roads to community boards. Auckland Mayor Wayne Brown told Heather du Plessis-Allan the council should be able to make decisions, as going through Auckland Transport is frustrating. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The senior doctors' union says the Health Minister's proposal of arbitration, would've taken away their members right to decide. Simeon Brown wanted Health NZ and the union to let a third party decide the terms of the contract. The Association of Salaried Medical Specialists rejected this and called his proposal a breach of employment law. Executive Director Sarah Dalton told Heather du Plessis Allan that there were a lot of unknowns around the proposal. She says the minister signalled they didn't see the pot of money as being any different and that's a situation they didn't want to enter into. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Can you please stop letting the Springboks get into your head? Cause that is clearly what they're up to. That's why Rassie Erasmus has expressed all surprise at Razor's selections. He wants the team to second guess themselves. Who cares what he thinks? Now, he said, Oh, I'm surprised Fabian Holland's on the bench. It's designed to make Razor and all the lads think they've got this wrong already. And this is why he's called in Fuff de Clark - he doesn't need Fuff de Clark. That means he's got 4 halfbacks. What do you need 4 halfbacks for? He's just trying to remind the All Blacks that he's got 4 more halfbacks than they've got. That's what he's up to. It's just getting inside the head. It's niggling them, and it's working, isn't it? Cause go and have a look at the polls that there are today. The 2 polls on 2 different news websites asking if we think that the All Blacks are gonna win. And both of them have got the All Blacks winning, but jeez, only by just that, it's by a tiny margin. It's only like 53%, 54%, to the Boks winning 46, 47%. Normally, we've got way more confidence. Like, normally, we've got confidence that is a little OTT. But this is Eden Park. This is the fortress. If you're gonna win anywhere, you're gonna win at Eden Park. Where's our confidence? Even the ABs are nervous. If you heard Scottie Hansen, the assistant coach on with us yesterday, he admitted that. Now look, I don't think the All Blacks are gonna lose. I think they're gonna win. Because this game is more important to the All Blacks than it is to the Springboks, because to the Springboks it's just another game. That's all it is, right? But to the All Blacks, it's defending the fortress and defending the fortress when they can see that the country doesn't think that they're gonna be able to, and the ABs thrive on this stuff. Remember when Fozzie was about to get the sack? Mark Robinson from NZR flew over to Joburg to give him the sack. Remember when that was about to happen? Suddenly, the All Blacks just rallied and beat the Springboks to stop him getting the sack because they had something to play for. And the same is true here, they've got something to play for. Plus, as Scotty Hansen said yesterday, the All Blacks seem to play better when they're nervous. It's when people expect them to win, when they expect to win that they weirdly drop the ball. Now, don't forget, we might have been beaten by the Argies, but the Boks were beaten by the Wallabies. So they're not on that much of a streak, are they? Relax. The All Blacks have got it.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So I'm going to suggest that Erica Stanford is on the right track with wanting to make it easier to deport criminals, but maybe she doesn't go far enough. So at the moment, the rules are that we cannot deport criminals if they've been here on a residence visa and they've been residents for more than 10 years. An example of this is the Mama Hooch brothers. These guys are not Kiwis. You know the ones I'm talking about, down in Christchurch. They're not Kiwis, they're Aussies and they don't have citizenship here, they don't have Kiwi passports. But even though they are two of the country's worst sexual offenders, we cannot deport them back to Australia because they've been here in New Zealand as residents for longer than 10 years. Now, Erica Stanford is proposing to change the rules so that that gets moved out to 20 years for anyone who's committed a serious crime like murder, rape, or manslaughter. Now I would say, scrap the time limit altogether. It doesn't matter how long you've been here - 20 years, 25 years, 30 years, 50 years. If you decide that you want to rape or kill someone, you go home and you lose the privilege of being here. Maybe we need to look outside of rape and murder and manslaughter as well. Perhaps we have lower time limits for other crimes - but further than 10 years, if you know what I mean. We take a line on those crimes, we push it out a little bit further. Because the key here is that it is a privilege to be in New Zealand and not a right. And I suppose what I'm suggesting is that we take a leaf out of Australia's book and get rid of other countries' criminals. As much as I don't always love what what Australia is doing, what I love a lot less is looking after other countries' criminals. So I reckon no time limit on those big crimes. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now, we need to talk about that Amazon announcement yesterday. These guys have taken us for fools in this country. They've looked at us in New Zealand and they've gone, let's take these guys for fools. That $7.5 billion wasn't new, it was already announced by Jacinda 4 years ago. It's not even actually a convincing number, because it looks like what they've done here is included their power bills. Now power bills are not an investment, they're an operating cost. The 1000 jobs that Amazon now tells us that they're supporting also looks questionable. It looks like they've included people who already work in the electricity sector - and some say the real number is more likely a few dozen jobs. Amazon's not building anything. All the data centres they tell us are now live, have actually been built by other companies, which means that you could argue that they haven't actually added anything material to the New Zealand economy. Because if they didn't use those existing data centres, someone else would just be using those existing data centres. In fact, you could argue that Amazon running those data centres is actually not the best outcome for New Zealand, because Amazon does not pay tax on all of their revenue here, which means if another local company used those data centres and paid full tax like they do, we'd all be better off. We'd be better off than Amazon using the centres and then sending hundreds of millions of dollars overseas like Google and Facebook do. Now, being critical of that announcement by Amazon yesterday is not the same as being ungrateful for the good that they're doing. I think you should interrogate an announcement just a little bit more than simply taking it at face value, because that is what Amazon wants you to do. They want to play us for fools. They want to make us believe that they're doing good when what they're actually doing is just making money off us. And that's fair. I don't mind them making money off us, they're a business, we're customers, but let's see it for what it is. Let's not be grateful for them doing business. I still like Amazon's product, but to be honest with you, I like it a little bit less than I did yesterday when they assumed that this country was full of stupid people who would just simply believe anything. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Finally, we have a serious party who has spent time thinking about it - and is now seriously suggesting that New Zealand should pull out of the Paris Climate Agreement. Now, that was what came from that ACT Party announcement that I told you would be coming today that you needed to keep an eye out for. ACT says Paris isn't working for New Zealand and it says we should push for the agreement to be reformed - and if it isn't reformed, then we should pull out of it. It isn't working, ACT says, because it's pushing up our food prices and it's pushing up our power prices and it's forcing the farmers off the land to make way for trees. And you can add to that list something that we've seen a lot of this winter and last winter - it is shutting down industry because of those high power prices. Now, there will be a lot of people who hear this from ACT and write it off as nutty climate change denier stuff. It is not. Think about the Paris Agreement critically, right? Set aside, you know, your vibes, whether you want to help the climate, set all of that stuff aside. Just think about this critically as to whether it works or not. And you can see it doesn't work. I mean, I stand to be corrected, but I cannot see any country that is meeting the targets. We will not meet the targets. The US, one of the world's biggest polluters, has pulled out. China, the world's biggest polluter, is still building coal-powered plants. I mean, we are fretting about the one coal-powered plant that we've got and they're building heaps of them. India, another one of the biggest polluters, is also doing the same with coal-powered plants. In which case, why would a country responsible for 0.17 percent of the world's emissions - or something like that - continue to persist with the Paris Agreement? Because we're not saving the planet, we're just making Kiwis poorer. And power is so expensive that we now have people who cannot turn on the heater every time Huntley burns expensive coal. Coal, by the way, which is not expensive, but which we have decided to artificially make expensive in order to save the planet. Now, the Nats have shot this down already and say it's not happening. That's smart politics for them, because they've got to hold on to the swing voters who might react badly, you know, without thinking things through to anything that looks like climate change denial. The Nats might want to be careful about what they rule in or out hard before the election, because they might need flexibility afterwards, given both of their coalition partners want out of Paris. ACT officially wants out unless things change, New Zealand First keeps hinting at it. And if National is honest with itself, they should want to get out of it too, because Paris is making us poorer, but not doing anything to save the planet. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We've got to talk about Cornwall Park. So over the weekend, it was quite windy in Auckland. If you're in Auckland, you know what I mean - that was some crazy-ass wind that was going on out there, definitely found the drafts of my house. If you're out of Auckland, it was kind of like a day in Wellington, but in Auckland. So it was unusual for us. Now, I don't know where we got to in the end, but the forecast was for gusts of up to 120 km per hour. So the people who run Cornwall Park closed it on Sunday because of flying wood. They were worried that staff and punters might be struck by flying wood, so they shut the gates and they closed the toilets and they closed the café and they closed the creamery, and they closed everything - closed the big store, closed everything - because of the flying wood. Meanwhile, on Sunday, when Cornwall Park was closed, I went to another park, which was Victoria Park in the central city - which is also actually incidentally full of really old trees, and therefore bits of wood, lots of branches and twigs and stuff lying around. And despite the fact that there were three of us at the park and it was quite windy, none of us was struck by flying wood, remarkably. We also walked to the park down a road which is lined with old plane trees that have been there for at least 100 years. So if you're going to be struck by a flying tree - you know, like one of them falling down on your head - it'd be one of those. None of them fell on our heads, nor did any of their branches or any of their flying wood. Now, obviously, it's their park. So the Cornwall Park Trust board can shut the park if they like. And probably what they will say is that they didn't want to put their staff at risk. And there'll be a lot of people in this country who'll nod their heads and say - “Look, that is the wise thing to do. After all, it is windy and there could be wood flying all around, and it might hit a staff member right in the eye and blind them forever. You never know. Better to take care.” I look at this and think that's ridiculous that we are so worried and anxious - and frankly neurotic - that even wind is freaking us out now. I would urge the people who run Cornwall Park to get a grip. Farmers, they may be shocked to discover, often work outside in the wind, and there are lots of bits of wood flying around. The Department of Conservation probably want to reconsider this, but at the moment, they still allow us to walk around in the bush in high wind. There are definitely lots of bits of wood lying around in the bush, if you know what I mean. I mean, some people also have old trees in their backyards, and they're still there when it's windy, shockingly, and the trees don't always fall down in the wind. This, I think, is the perfect example of how we are getting to be ridiculous over safety. Yes, of course, you should reduce your extreme risks. Don't take unnecessary risks. But you don't want to be reducing every single risk. Otherwise, you're just gonna be sitting in your house all day. I don't think flying wood in a park on a windy day in Auckland is so extremely risky that staff must be sent home and members of the public must be banned from entry. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Reserve Bank board chairman Neil Quigley has resigned “with immediate effect” in the wake of the shambolic handling of Adrian Orr's resignation as Governor. Finance Minister Nicola Willis made the announcement just before 6pm on Friday - the day after the Reserve Bank revealed Orr temporarily stepped down as Governor a week before the public was told he resigned The Finance Minister says she did not ask the Reserve Bank Chair to quit, following news he's resigned with immediate effect. Nicola Willis told Heather du Plessis-Allan that having completed key work streams with the bank, Quigley said the timing was appropriate. Willis says she raised criticism around the board's handling of information relating to the former Governor's exit. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now, I've got a huge amount of respect for the police, and I very much, almost weakly appreciate what it is that they do for us, but I think we have to call it. Tom Phillips is embarrassing them. I mean, the fact that he is still out there with his kids coming up 4 years now is embarrassing for the police because it looks like they're having rings run around them by a skinny guy from Mara Koppa. He makes a mockery of them every single time he pops up to nick milk from a dairy or shop in full view of the public in Bunnings, or do a job on a bank. Every time someone in the family pleads for him to come home, every time an international media outlet writes another fascinated piece about him being out there. Every winter, when our own media remember that the family are still out there and draw attention to it again, every time that happens, we are reminded that our police cannot find a guy and his kids in the bush around Mara Koppa. Now, I don't know what's going on here. I have a suspicion, I've shared it with you before, that the police are deliberately just leaving him to it.Cause if they wanted to, they could get him out. And you know that. We're a country of people who understand the bush, he's not the only guy in New Zealand with bush skills. The cops have got specialist teams, and if they don't want to use those teams because they don't wanna have a shootout, well, then we've got the Defense Force. The defense force can be used here - they've actually been used in the search beforehand. And you cannot tell me that our SAS can handle the Taliban, but can't track down a guy in the bush and be on him before he knows that they're there. You cannot tell me they can't do that. I suspect the police have made the decision to not find him, which, by the way, I actually think may be the right decision given how messy I think the family court business could in fact be in this case, but they are not trying to find him. And I just wonder if maybe they should say that out loud. Maybe they should just be upfront that he is out there until the day that Tom Phillips decides to come back, just so that every single passing winter doesn't make the police look like they're being beaten by Tom Phillips.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.