Morning Report Essentials for Wednesday 4 June 2025
In today's episode, according to results out on Wednesday morning, the left bloc would have enough support to govern, the Privacy Commissioner says facial recognition technology in North Island supermarkets has potential safety benefits, despite raising significant privacy concerns, after a shareholders meeting on Tuesday media company NZME - which owns the New Zealand Herald and Newstalk ZB - has a revamped board and an historic ship at the Paihia waterfront in Northland has been 90 percent destroyed by fire.
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RNZ News
3 hours ago
- RNZ News
Fire crews fighting large building fire near Hokitika
Photo: RNZ / Nate McKinnon Fire crews are fighting a blaze in a large building - understood to be an unoccupied former mental health facility - in Seaview, north of Hokitika on Sunday. Emergency services responded to multiple 111 calls shortly after 7am. Seven fire trucks - from Hokitika, Cobden, Greymouth, Ross, Kokatahi and Kowhitirangi, and Moana were at the scene of the blaze Tankers were working in relays to bring water to the site. A Fire and Emergency spokesperson said there were no reports of injuries at this stage. They said there were no initial indications of a suspicious circumstances, but investigators would be working to determine the cause of the fire. Fire crews are expected to be at the scene "for some time". Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
Mediawatch: 'Surprise' rise in Trump's trade tariff?
One of many headlines calling the 15 percent tariff rate imposed by the US 'a surprise'. Photo: The Post "If the name of New Zealand is seriously so threatened, why didn't New Zealand First introduce this bill 12 months ago? Why not six years ago? Why not negotiate it into the coalition agreement when they formed a government?" Jack Tame asked on his Newstalk ZB show last weekend . He was talking about the New Zealand (Name of State) Bill freshly proposed by NZ First MP Andy Foster, which would legislate New Zealand as the official name of the country. "Could it possibly be that a few hours before ... Australia and the UK achieved lower trade tariffs with the United States, while our government's top officials were apparently surprised to learn that our tariff had been increased?" he asked. Party leader Winston Peters didn't like it. On social media, he pointed out that on the same show five years ago, Jack Tame had backed 'Aotearoa New Zealand' as the official name for our nation. In a long interview about the Bill on the alternative news platform The Platform, Peters said he was delighted his "counter-attack" on Jack Tame was getting good online engagement. The hike in US trade tariffs didn't come up until Peters himself mentioned it at the very end. "Before you go, you know, we've got this thing with the United States and everybody's alarmed. I've seen all the headlines on Radio New Zealand and all the newspapers today. We'll turn this thing around. You watch," the foreign minister said. Since 5 April, US importers of New Zealand products have been paying a 10 percent tariff on all goods - and 25 percent on steel and aluminium. While Tame said the 15 percent tariff the US confirmed late last week seemed to be a surprise to our government and trade officials, the media seemed surprised too. Many news stories - and many headlines - called it a 'surprise' rise . But ahead of that, Trade Minister Todd McClay himself said the tariff could rise to 15 percent. At a media conference earlier, President Trump himself told reporters that the universal tariff could increase to 15 or 20 percent for countries that had not struck deals with the US. Todd McClay also told reporters last week, if the tariff rate goes to 15 percent our exporters have already adjusted and will be able to deal with it. If so, they adjusted a bit better than the surprised media this past week. On Newstalk ZB, Mike Hosking told his listeners the lower rate charged across the Tasman was the real shock. "Australia can land their beef and their wine at 10 percent, we land ours at 15," he complained. But to those surprised by that, Scoop's Gordon Campbell said they shouldn't have been. "We sell them more than they buy from us. In Trumpland, any country that runs a trade surplus with the US is a bad country that is ripping the US off. How bad have we been? Pretty bad, in Trumpian terms," New Zealand is a victim of its own export success, Gordon Campbell said - a bit like butter buyers in our duopolistic supermarkets. Trade Minister Todd McClay also confirmed that 15 percent was no surprise on NZME's rural show The Country . "If we had run a trade deficit with the US like Australia, would we have got 10 percent?," host Jamie McKay asked McClay on Wednesday, in Bangkok en route to Washington to plead our case. "It is as simple as that," the trade minister replied, confirming he had been told as much previously by US trade representative Jamieson Greer. "He said it didn't matter if you had camped out here in Washington, if you'd had a trade deal or you're negotiating one. For any country that had a trade surplus against the US last year - it is 15 percent or more," McClay said. Todd MaClay dodged the next question, about whether we would agree to buy more stuff from the US to reduce our trade deficit. This week McClay and columnist Gordon Campbell both pointed out that the trade surplus has in previous years been flipped by one-off purchases of big-ticket items like aircraft. The deal Trump struck with the EU earlier this month included billions of dollars-worth of energy and military equipment. Many people in many industries are now watching this space, including the media - surely not so surprised by now. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
RNZ News
4 hours ago
- RNZ News
Mediawatch: Media applauds old school move on NCEA
TVNZ's Simon Dallow with a blunt assessment of NCEA, after the government announced proposals to dump the system. Photo: TVNZ 1 News "Old school grades are set to return," 1 News host Simon Dallow told 6 pm news viewers on Monday evening at the top of the show. Earlier that day, breakfast news shows had been primed for an imminent "massive announcement." As is often the case with government policy announcements, the nation's major newsrooms already knew about it. For them, it was not so much 'breaking news' as lifting the embargo on news the minister's media minders had already given them a heads-up on. It turned out to be abolishing all levels of NCEA - and new national qualifications for secondary school students to be phased in over the next five years. On Sunday, 24 hours before the big reveal, TVNZ's Q+A kicked off with Crimson Education founder Jamie Beaton calling for change in national education culture. "NCEA basically is not a rigourous curriculum. Students graduating often are two years behind in core subjects like maths and science, so there's a massive gap for most New Zealanders," said Beaton, the holder of ten degrees by the age of 30, viewers were told. "There's a real movement against testing and exams, which I think is quite poisonous. And that actually puts us further and further behind, you know, leading education systems like Singapore or Korea or the kind of elite schools in California." But whether underachievers were being held back by NCEA rather than high-achievers was not discussed so much. While some in the media had not expected the complete - albeit staggered - scrapping of NCEA, the New Zealand Herald's political reporter Jamie Ensor wasn't one of them. "It is in line with the government's general position on education," he wrote on Monday . "As far as public opinion goes, it is likely to be popular if parents' confusion with the current system is anything to go by. According to the Education Review Office, about half of parents don't understand it." The same seemed true of most broadcasters and commentators airing their reckons after the announcement. RNZ education correspondent John Gerritsen pointed out on Morning Report that the returning A-E grades were not really a big change. "If you think about it - Achieved, Merit, Excellence - well that's C, B and A. A change in the nomenclature, but that's maybe a little bit easier for parents and so forth to understand." MR's Ingrid Hipkiss admitted she was one of them. She upbraided herself for reverting to what she called "old person-speak," referring to 'the fifth form' and 'School Cert'. But she wasn't the only one that day. For its youth-focussed Now You Know video explainer, The Spinoff deployed an 'old man' to explain - with tongue-in-cheek - that A means good and E is bad. There was plenty more old-mansplaining about NCEA in the media this week. "Along with the mad open classrooms, isn't it fascinating how forward the old days appear to be," ZB's Hosking said on his morning show. "You're going back to the 1980s (when) you couldn't go ahead to the next year until you passed whatever it was you were going for. I took up music in the fifth form because I failed tech drawing in the fourth form," he said. The ability to get some credit, or switch courses before an end-of-year exam failure is a feature of NCEA that might have helped him back in his school days. Later that day, ZB's veteran political correspondent Barry Soper was also more comfortable with what he remembered. "This is going back to what it was in the olden days when I was at school. At least you've got a good yardstick for employers to look at," he told ZB listeners. A yardstick would be a 91.4 cm stick today, but Soper knew in his own mind what students of today need. "We can't have this namby-pamby standard in education where we don't like winners and losers," he told ZB listeners. Across the media there was consensus in commentary that NCEA had not achieved - and actually diffused educational achievement in 20 years since its introduction. "How does this work? It seems to be so broad and so vast and you get bits for this and bits for that. Just give them a foundation to move forward," said Sarah Henry, Are Media editorial director said on the Herald Now show on Monday. She said she had been to parents' meetings and read NCEA literature but was still confused by it. That was music to the ears of panel guest Tim Wilson, the former TVNZ journalist now at the Maxim Institute think tank which has long campaigned for change. "I need to see the education system smarten up. I need to see a reduction in the size of the curriculum and core subjects and standardised tests so I know that our boys are doing well and can continue to do well," the father-of-four said. The Herald Now panel that day all agreed too many students were gaming the system in too many courses for them to count credits. "One I saw the other day was that you must have knowledge of the inner workings of an espresso machine," laughed host Ryan Bridge. But making coffee - and understanding coffee machines - can only generate a few NCEA credits. And, arguably they are more useful skills today than the woodwork and tech drawing that seemed to make middle-aged radio hosts misty-eyed for the clarity of the assessment system of their school days. Scepticism, concern and confusion about NCEA credits and the standards is real. Likewise, concerns about under-educated students turning up in work and university in recent years. Opposition politicians, teachers representatives, school principals and parents all voiced concerns in the media coverage this week. "Mike Hosking loves it. Apparently parents and principals love it. Erica Stanford certainly loves it," Mike Hosking's producer Glenn Hart said on his daily highlights podcast ZBeen last Wednesday]. "I just feel like there's one group of people we haven't talked to about what they want. Oh yeah - the kids, the students. But who cares? Who cares what they think?" he said. A good point well made. TVNZ's 1News did vox pop some school students in their reports. On Tuesday RNZ asked tertiary undergraduates about it. And on Monday, The NZ Herald featured Brynn Pierce, a Year 12 student at Newlands College recently in the news as a Youth Parliament MP. He said NCEA was "overly confusing" for him in his first year, and "vague in terms of course endorsement" afterwards. Meanwhile on ZB's drive show, host Heather du Plessis-Allan eagerly endorsed the Minister of Education Erica Stanford. "She's smashing it out of the park" she said approvingly. But the Otago Daily Times was not so sure this week. Its editorial on Thursday said there was too little detail about exactly what will replace NCEA to give the minister an 'A' for it just yet. The Herald's Audrey Young this week credited Stanford with "a momentous change with relatively little dissent." Partly that was due to her own confidence and drive - and ability to identify problems, find solutions and push them through, she said. But Young also said the widespread lack of confidence in the current system - shared by many of the media pundits - was the other main factor. And though you wouldn't know it from much of the coverage this week - consigning NCEA to the dustbin of educational history isn't a done deal just yet either. The proposals are in a discussion document PDF open for consultation during the next six weeks. In the media discussion so far, any drawbacks have not had much attention. But more students are likely to come out of education with less or even nothing to show for it under the proposed new system. After the NCEA announcement coverage peaked, RNZ's John Gerritsen pointed to new stats that show school leavers with no qualifications are at the highest level in a decade. 16 percent of last year's leavers - and 28 percent of Māori students - left school with no qualification last year. Every teacher RNZ spoke to also warned the timeline for introducing a new curriculum next year, followed by the new qualification from 2028 through to 2030, was tight and would require a lot of support. While most school principals backed the change when the media asked for their views, AUT senior lecturer in education Stuart Deerness warned: "The loudest voices calling for educational change don't always represent what all students need." "The story of NCEA shows how powerful the actions of elite institutions can be, even when they don't intend to cause system-wide change," he wrote for The Conversation . "Since NCEA was introduced between 2002 and 2004, these prominent schools have increasingly opted for alternative assessment systems. This effectively undermined trust in the official assessment system," Deerness said. While the flexibility of NCEA has been portrayed as a weakness by many people this week, it has been a benefit for some students, Annabelle Lee-Mather said on The Spinoff's politics podcast Gone By Lunchtime . "(NCEA) gives students' families time to course-correct. You can see from early in the year how they're tracking, where they need to focus and where they can build up their credits - instead of your kids working all year at school and then flunking out at the end and you don't have time to fix it," she said. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
