Reserve Bank expected to pause OCR cuts
The Reserve Bank is expected to put a pause on its series of cuts to the Official Cash Rate on Wednesday. Realestate.co.nz chief executive Sarah Wood spoke to Melissa Chan-Green.
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Khandallah murder trial: Victim's eerie message played in court
Helen Gregory was killed in her Khandallah home in January 2024. Photo: Supplied "Not that I'm thinking of dying tomorrow or anything," said 79-year-old Helen Gregory, who would be killed in her home in the Wellington suburb of Khandallah the following day. The audio comes from a phone call to her bank, made on the evening of 23 January 2024. It was played to the High Court on Monday, where her daughter Julia DeLuney is charged with her murder. The trial is now in its fourth week. The court previously heard that DeLuney invested a large sum of money on her mother's behalf into crypto currency , which she had been trading in for years. In an email sent on 22 January - two days before her mother's death - DeLuney told her mother her money had made a profit of more than $268,000 - "not a bad investment for six months", she wrote. She recommended they withdraw the profit, and leave the initial investment of $100,000 there to keep growing. DeLuney then told her mother she needed to pay $30,000 in exchange fees and tax liability to be able to withdraw the money. She said she could cover half, but needed her mother to pay the rest. The following morning, Gregory wrote back that she agreed it was a good idea to cash up. Julia DeLuney is on trial for her mother's murder. Photo: RNZ / Mark Papalii DeLuney urged her not tell anyone about the profit. "Please please please don't show this to your friends, once people know that you've made some money they will change," she said. And in a later email: "Don't tell the bank about your crypto profits, they won't lend you a thing if you tell them that." On 23 January - the day before her death - Gregory went to the bank and deposited $6000 cash into her daughter's account, according to written evidence from the bank assistant who served her. Later that day, she phoned up to take money out of her KiwiSaver. "We're pre-paying a funeral thing," she explained. "Not that I'm thinking of dying tomorrow or anything." This part of the recording was met by a collective intake of breath from the public gallery. But the Crown says DeLuney misrepresented her mother's money having made a profit. Attached to her initial email, DeLuney sent her mother a screenshot of her account's profit and loss for the past three months. But the screenshot was of someone else's earnings, the Crown says. Crown witness Detective Constable Tobias Weavers, who investigated DeLuney's crypto accounts, told the court on Monday the screenshot matched a graph of a different user's account, publicly available on the leaderboard of crypto-trading platform WOO X. Crypto-currency expert Nicolas Turnbull told the court on Monday afternoon the withdrawal fees were "totally false". "This is just a common tactic we see, especially overseas, where Kiwis get manipulated... especially older people... into paying these fees," he said. The Crown's case is that DeLuney attacked her mother and staged it to look like a fall, but the defence says, in the 90-minute window when she went to get help after the fall, someone else caused fatal injuries to her elderly mother . DeLuney cried quietly in the dock while her mother's voice played to the court. The trial continues, with only a handful of Crown witnesses to go. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
5 hours ago
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New Plymouth residents say proposed water charge changes will be unfair
One resident says every dwelling should have its own meter just as they did for electricity and for gas. Photo: LDR / Emily Ireland New Plymouth councillors have been told proposed changes to how water is charged for will be unfair to people living in apartments or on cross-lease sections with multiple dwellings. Currently ratepayers are charged a flat $547 for water, but from 2027 they will be billed at least in part according to volume of water used. Council is considering three options for how those charges would be levied. Fixed charge plus a volumetric charge or a fixed charge plus a volumetric charge with a daily allocation of water (100 litres) or fully volumetric charging. Council received more than 1000 written submissions on the proposals and heard oral presentations at a hearing on Monday. Elaine Gill spoke on behalf of the residents of the Liardet Apartments in the inner-city. She said the 25 apartments - a mix of one to three bedroom apartments, nine of which were rentals, one an AirBnB and 15 owner-occupied - would have just one water meter installed for the whole building. "We want individual council-supplied water meters for each apartment... and there is space where our water is supplied for a meter to be installed." If that wasn't possible the block's residents wanted a fixed charge - based on average residential use in New Plymouth - with volumetric charging. Gill worried about how water use would be calculated . "It's totally unfair. There is a need to recognise that each apartment is different, each has a different number of people living there. "We have one apartment with three bedrooms and one person living in there and one apartment with two bedrooms that has five people living there, and obviously their water usage is going to be very different." Councillor Sam Bennett asked Gill if the apartment owners would be willing to pay to install individual meters. Gill didn't think that was a fair solution either. "If we are talking about equity, if we had 25 individual dwellings in Westown they would all have their own water meter [installed by council]. "Why is it that because we are all packed up one on top of the other that we can't have the same consideration." John Staddon owned rental properties on a cross-leased section and had received a letter from council saying only one meter would be installed and water costs shared between the dwellings. "My concern is that the definition of shared needs some further clarification. For example, where there are two properties on a cross-lease section would sharing be on a 50-50 basis? "If so, what consideration would be made should one of the properties have a family of four, both parents working, two cars, maybe a spa pool, and the other occupant a widow on superanuation? "The use of water by the family would be far higher than the other occupant. A 50-50 share in this scenario is not equitable. Unless there is a formula that recognises the size of the dwelling and number occupants 50-50 sharing is wrong." Staddon said every dwelling should have its own meter just as they did for electricity and for gas. "Payment for electricity or gas is not shared and neither is phone or internet connection, so why then should water charges be." Staddon said as a landlord he would be willing to drop rents if part of the water charge was removed from his rates bill, but he was not willing to pay for the installation of additional meters. Veronica Edwards also owned a cross-lease section with two independent households on it. "Under the current plan we're stuck with one meter. I believe this approach is neither fair or just for people living in multiple dwellings." Mayor Neil Holdom said that for every dollar invested in meters, council expected to make savings of between $4 and $5 over the life of the meter "but in some cases to install meters in every property it may cost us $4000 to $5000 in plumbing, maybe more". Submitter Hannah-Miriam Knuckey said if council insisted that additional meters be paid for by property owners it should pay the upfront costs and allow people to pay the meter off via their rates - interest free - over five to 10 years. Council had so far installed more than 23,000 roadside water meters at a cost of $24 million. It was envisaged they would eventually save council $40 million in capital expenditure by encouraging efficient water use and identifying leaks. The meters had already been credited with identifying 180 leaks, saving 1.75 million litres of water daily in New Plymouth, where water usage was up to two times that of other similar-sized communities. Council would decide on a charging system in August. A year-long "mock billing" trial would start in July next year to allow households to monitor water use, fix leaks and prepare for volumetric charging in beginning July 2027. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
5 hours ago
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Auckland hospice thirds number of patients due to funding shortfalls
An Auckland hospice is having to cut the number of people it cares for by almost a third because it's short of funding. Totara Hospice gets $8.8 million from the Government, but that doesn't even cover the wage bill, so it fundraises on top of that. Faced with a shortfall of $3.6 million, Chief Executive Tina McCafferty sounded the alarm bell to try and ward off cuts. But with no solution a month later, the South Auckland community the hospice serves is going to start feeling the impacts. Totara Hospice chief executive Tina McCafferty spoke to Melissa Chan-Green. To embed this content on your own webpage, cut and paste the following: See terms of use.
