For the love of leaks
Editor of
Politik.co.nz
Richard Harman joins Emile Donovan to talk about receiving leaks, how journalists can use them, and what leaks say about the government agencies they originate from.
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Reece Baker/RNZ
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RNZ News
12 minutes ago
- RNZ News
Te Pāti Māori announces Ikaroa-Rāwhiti candidate
Te Pāti Māori candidate Haley Maxwell. Photo: Supplied Te Pāti Māori has announced Haley Maxwell will stand for next year's general election - for the one Māori seat currently held by Labour. Maxwell helped organise the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti in the region last year. "Haley Maxwell spearheaded the historic Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti from Te Tairāwhiti right through to Kahungunu. Haley embodies the fierce compassion and courage that Ikaroa-Rāwhiti is famous for" Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said in a written statement. "She has stood on the marae, in the courts and on the streets for our people. Parliament will be a stronger house with her voice echoing the roar of Te Tairāwhiti." The statement described Maxwell as a wāhine Māori, māmā and nanny whose life's work centred on rangatahi justice, reo revitalisation and tangata-whenua drive community development. It said her campaign would focus on "tackling sky-high food costs, unaffordable housing, and low incomes across Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, while championing Te Pāti Māori's justice, housing, and mana motuhake policies". The party did not respond to questions about the timing of the announcement during a by-election for Tamaki-Makaurau, which Labour is also contesting. In a statement, Labour's MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, said the region deserved choices. "I acknowledge the Te Pāti Māori candidate announcement of Hayley Maxwell, and commend her for putting herself forward," she said. "Ikaroa-Rāwhiti deserves to have choices and will ultimately choose their voice in Parliament. In the meantime it's my honour to continue to serve the region." Te Pāti Māori has announced Haley Maxwell will stand for next year's general election - for the one Māori seat currently held by Labour. Maxwell helped organise the Hīkoi mō te Tiriti in the region last year. "Haley Maxwell spearheaded the historic Hīkoi mō Te Tiriti from Te Tairāwhiti right through to Kahungunu. Haley embodies the fierce compassion and courage that Ikaroa-Rāwhiti is famous for" Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi said in a written statement. "She has stood on the marae, in the courts and on the streets for our people. Parliament will be a stronger house with her voice echoing the roar of Te Tairāwhiti." The statement described Maxwell as a wāhine Māori, māmā and nanny whose life's work centred on rangatahi justice, reo revitalisation and tangata-whenua drive community development. It said her campaign would focus on "tackling sky-high food costs, unaffordable housing, and low incomes across Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, while championing Te Pāti Māori's justice, housing, and mana motuhake policies". The party did not respond to questions about the timing of the announcement during a by-election for Tamaki-Makaurau, which Labour is also contesting. In a statement, Labour's MP for Ikaroa-Rāwhiti, Cushla Tangaere-Manuel, said the region deserved choices. "I acknowledge the Te Pāti Māori candidate announcement of Hayley Maxwell, and commend her for putting herself forward," she said. "Ikaroa-Rāwhiti deserves to have choices and will ultimately choose their voice in Parliament. In the meantime it's my honour to continue to serve the region." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
42 minutes ago
- RNZ News
Will the government's changes bring down building costs?
Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk said the change would have the potential to reduce total building costs by thousands of dollars. Photo: RNZ / Samuel Rillstone Opposition parties say while the devil will be in the details on the government's latest building products changes, they support in principle what looks like a "sensible" change. But Labour and the Greens are also criticising the coalition's cancellation of hundreds of construction projects, saying that is what has led to a downturn in the industry. They also say delaying changes to the Building Code will mean New Zealand lags behind the rest of the world. The government on Sunday announced it would be releasing a list of overseas certification schemes that would automatically qualify products for use in New Zealand . Building and Construction Minister Chris Penk said the list would "have the potential to reduce total building costs by thousands of dollars when building a home". "There are thousands of well-made, high performing products that have been tested against rigourous international standards but have faced barriers for uptake here, purely because they have not been specifically tested against our own standards. From tomorrow it will be much easier to use plasterboard manufactured in New Zealand, Australia, UK, Europe and the United States," he said. "This is just the beginning of our work to open the door to more building products, lower the cost of homes and turbo charge the construction sector and there will be more to come." He also announced a pause on "any new major changes to the Building Code system" and shifting instead to a "predictable three-year cycle for Building Code system updates". "This new approach will give businesses the clarity they need to prepare in advance, rather than constantly having to react to unexpected rule changes." The government will be releasing releasing a list of overseas certification schemes that would automatically qualify products for use in New Zealand. Photo: 123RF ACT's Building and Construction spokesperson Cameron Luxton was a builder in 2022 during the plasterboard crisis that saw some builders paying six times the standard price for 'GIB' branded plasterboard. "I had designers trying to get changes to the existing consents so that we could use other types of wall lining ... if we could have recognized overseas plaster boards and the components around their systems, we would have been able to get things built in New Zealand a lot easier and a lot quicker during that time," he said. "Those crazy days of the post-Covid building construction boom with us at the moment but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be focusing on getting the price of all building down." ACT's Building and Construction spokesperson Cameron Luxton Photo: VNP / Phil Smith He said the government's approach was almost exactly the same as what ACT campaigned on. "What we campaigned on was a recognised list of products. The bill came into the house as that, it's been through select committee, we've come out the other side with it being schemes, standards and products. "Minister Penk has done an incredibly good job engaging with the industry and making sure that this bill works - it's so close to ACT's you couldn't find much air between our original policy and this one, it's the same principle, called some different things." Both Labour and the Greens supported the bill through the legislative process. Labour's Building and Construction spokesperson Arena Williams said it was likely to make it easier for building products to get into the New Zealand market, and increase competition - but that doing so was one of the recommendations of the Commerce Commission study launched under Labour. "We think this is an important step, but the government has talked a big game on lowering the cost of building because that's an excuse for absolutely collapsing the building and construction sector and seeing 17,000 jobs lost since the day of the election." She pointed to a range of projects that had been cut - Kāinga Ora public housing, school builds, the downgrading of hospital builds - saying that had directly led to those jobs being lost. Labour's Building and Construction spokesperson Arena Williams. Photo: VNP / Phil Smith The minister was now admitting the solution would not be a silver bullet for the sector, she said. "Now they're saying this will only be part of the solution and it won't do everything that's needed to bring costs down ... they have no answer for a building and construction sector that's on its knees, it's slumped lower than it did in the global financial crisis, and we're seeing thousands of young Kiwi builders going offshore." Announcing the change without releasing the detail until the next day was "an unusual way to do things," she said. Williams said she planed to carefully examine the standards when made public, to ensure they were sensible. Green Party Building and Construction spokesperson Julie Anne Genter took her criticism of the approach further. "We see every week pretty much announcements on a Sunday don't have any substantive new actions or information, and in the last few weeks, it's been related to the building sector or infrastructure, because the government is desperate to turn around the narrative. "This is very much a government that is focused on PR spend more than substance." She said the changes themselves "could be great or it could be terrible, depending on which building products and which licensing schemes they're looking at". "The devil will be in the detail. The detail hasn't yet been released. But I really can say that the government has put the construction sector in a terrible position by cancelling hundreds of projects related to public homes, which we need now more than ever. I saw last month, one third of company liquidations for construction firms, and that was up on last year." She criticised the pause on Building Code changes. "That is a huge lost opportunity. The previous government had a work programme on building for climate change and it was going to address a lot of the issues that we have in terms of energy efficiency, resilience," she said. "The certainty is we're not moving forward with our Building Code, they're providing the certainty that we're going to lag behind most other countries and have a much longer period before we have sustainable, healthy buildings." "Ultimately, this is not enough to help New Zealand with the problems we're facing when they've cancelled so many public home builds." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
42 minutes ago
- RNZ News
Schools in literacy crisis, advocacy group warns
Educators say recent cohorts of teenagers entering secondary schools have had unusually numbers of students who badly need extra help with reading and writing. Photo: Unsplash/ Simeon Frank Schools have told advocacy group Lifting Literacy Aotearoa they are struggling with record numbers of students with poor literacy. They say teens are wagging classes and schools are blowing their budgets on extra lessons because they are unable to cope with tough new NCEA reading and writing tests . A snapshot of school experiences gathered by Lifting Literacy and shared with RNZ showed some students were so far behind in their learning their teachers did not know what to do with them. Lifting Literacy said the situation was a crisis and the government needed to develop a five-year plan to help schools help teens learn to read and write. Principals and teachers from 29 secondary schools responded to an informal Lifting Literacy survey. Their comments revealed the introduction of high-stakes NCEA literacy and numeracy tests called "corequisites" had coincided with the worst-prepared cohort of teenagers some schools had ever seen - thanks to Covid. "It's an enormous issue. We have an increasing number of students who are very limited in both reading and writing," wrote one respondent. "Each year students who come to us at Year 9 are showing increasingly low literacy levels and increasingly high learning needs. The impact is huge," said another. The respondents said teachers were struggling to teach classes that ranged from the barely literate to high-achievers and schools were "scrounging" for funding. "Most high school teachers do not have qualifications to address this," said one respondent. "Pressure has fallen on high schools with little or no support," said another. "We are now operating in planned deficit budgets to fund the high level of need and high stakes for students due to NCEA changes," said one principal. Several respondents said their schools bankrolled literacy catch-up classes and training from the Kahui Ako scheme that gave some teachers release time for specialist work with other teachers in their school or across groups of schools. An English teacher from a large, low-decile school who RNZ agreed not to name, said that arrangement allowed her to work with four classes of Year 9 students who could not read. She said the school would have to cover the cost itself next year because the government axed the scheme in its May Budget . Despite the relatively high numbers of struggling Year 9s, the teacher said her school's current Year 11s had entered the school with the lowest level of education of any Year 9 cohort before or since. "They're the ones that are really struggling with the corequisites because they're expected to pass but as they're failing their identity of their ability is dwindling," she said. The teacher said teaching teenagers to read was often "quite a quick fix", with most requiring only three or four "structured literacy" lessons to learn how to decode words by learning which sounds went with each letter. "Teaching kids how to read and read longer words, which seems to be the biggest problem, that's quite a quick fix," she said. "Teaching younger kids takes a longer time, teaching these older kids, even kids who really struggle and some of them who are dyslexic, once they're shown a certain way some of them are off within three or four lessons, they're gone," she said. "Some might take a lot longer, but the majority of them in high school there's nothing wrong with them other than they haven't been taught that A-U is an "or" sound or O-U-G-H can have 6-7 different sounds, or how to split up longer words," she said. She said the government could achieve great results if it funded similar programmes across the country. Another teacher who worked with others across a major city said secondary schools had been left in the lurch. She said teachers were having to figure out themselves how to help their students. "We have a cluster of people who are all working in the literacy space and we're working together and sharing our ideas and sharing with each other because we've got no support from the ministry and no guidance," she said. Janice Langford provided structured literacy training for primary schools, but recently started working with secondary teachers because of the need. She told RNZ English teachers were being asked to do the work of specialist literacy teachers and they were not trained for it. Lifting Literacy Aoteroa chair Jennie Watts said in five or 10 years, improvements the government was making in primary schools would flow through to secondary. But in the meantime, students were not getting a fair deal. "There's an urgent gap. We can't let those kids, the kids who are struggling right now and the ones who are about to hit secondary school, we can't just let them fall through the cracks. She said secondary schools needed a five-year strategy including training and funding to improve teens' literacy. It should introduce a new optional literacy subject separate to English, and remove the co-requisite numeracy and literacy requirement for NCEA. Watts said the government should also provide funding for literacy lead teachers, targeted intervention for the students who needed them, and resources aimed at teenagers. 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