Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Two people have been seriously injured after a crash this morning on State Highway 1 north of Kaikōura.
The section of the road near Ohau Point is blocked after the two-vehicle crash just after 9.30am.
Travellers are asked to plan ahead.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Campers at Totaranui Abel Tasman National Park had a near miss when a tree came down on some of their tents during Tuesday’s storm. Supplied / Warwick Fitzsimmons
Residents in parts of Horowhenua are being urged to conserve water immediately after recent heavy rain and strong winds caused power outages.
The Horowhenua District Council said there was ongoing pressure on water and wastewater systems due to earlier power outages.
People in Foxton, Foxton Beach and Tokomaru have been asked to take shorter showers, avoid watering lawns, delay non-essential water use such as washing cars and outdoor cleaning.
“Power loss to several water and wastewater treatment plants has meant council has had to rely on emergency back-up generators to maintain essential services. In some locations, this has placed additional strain on operations,” the council said.
“The key concern at present is the combination of the busy New Year period and high visitor numbers. Foxton and Foxton Beach are experiencing low reservoir levels as demand increases.”
The council was able to truck additional water into the network as a precaution to protect supply and ensure contingency for firefighting if required.
Fences and trees are down on Tuesday in the Summerhill area of Palmerston North after a windy night. RNZ / Jimmy Ellingham
“However, this is a costly measure, and council is asking residents and visitors to help by using water wisely,” it said.
People were also asked to “follow the golden rule – if it’s yellow let it mellow, if it’s brown flush it down”.
Meanwhile, a severe thunderstorm watch has been issued for much of the inland North Island Wednesday, from Northland through to Wellington.
MetService said conditions could become severe this afternoon, with downpours of up to 40mm per hour.
They were expected to affect Northland, Auckland, Waikato, through Waitomo and Taranaki, down to Manawatu and Kapiti-Horowhenua to Wellington.
The forecaster said driving conditions will be hazardous, and the rainfall could lead to slips and sudden flooding.
The watch was expected to be lifted at 10pm Wednesday night.
Power has now been partially restored in Shannon and Tokomaru townships, and work has been continuing across surrounding areas.
“Because a number of individual line and pole replacements are still required, some households may continue to be without power for a period while repairs are completed,” the council said.
More than 400 households in the North Island were still out of power due to the recent weather events, according to electricity distributor Powerco.
It said Manawatū and Thames-Coromandel are still the most affected regions and it’s unsure when power can be restored.
There were 202 households without power in Manawatū, and 198 in Thames-Coromandel through to South Waikato, the company said.
Crews from Electra respond to weather-related power outage damages in Tokomaru on Monday. Supplied / Facebook
Other affected areas include Wairarapa, Whanganui, Bay of Plenty and Taranaki.
A spokesperson from Powerco said field crews were out this morning and throughout the day conducting repairs, including clearing trees from lines and reconnecting downed lines.
“Due to the complexity of the repair work, Powerco is unable to give reconnection times to customers – we acknowledge this is frustrating especially for customers who have been without power since Monday,” the company said.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Patricia Allan Supplied
An Anglican priest who has advocated for the victims of sexual abuse for decades has been recognised in the New Year Honours.
Reverend Dr Patricia Allan has been made an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to the survivors of abuse.
In 1987 Reverend Allan was one of the first women to be ordained in the Anglican Church in New Zealand, and later became the West Coast’s first female vicar.
While she was preparing for ordination she learnt of sexual abuse and harassment within the Church, and started to act as an advocate for women who had been abused.
“I immediately recognised that my Church, like most others, was totally unprepared for such a revelation. The abuser was protected and the women blamed,” said Allan.
“So a lot of my work over the years has been trying to persuade them to be more open with their processes and things. And that came to a head with the Royal Commission.”
In 2018 Allan began a post-doctoral research project to look at how the Anglican Church in New Zealand had progressed in 30 years of dealing with sexual abuse.
That research was subpoenaed by the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care, and she gave public testimony to the commission.
She said it had been satisfying to see the issues looked at by the Royal Commission and to see the changes that have come from it.
“In the Anglican Church in Christchurch there has been quite a lot of work done making sure that our safeguarding procedures are in place and that the complaint process is much more open.
“There is still work to be done, but there has been a pretty widespread acknowledgment of, we call it lament, real sorrow over what has happened in the past and a real desire for a happier future.”
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Source: Radio New Zealand
A search is underway for a dog missing after a man was rescued from a capsized yacht in in Whananaki in Northland yesterday.
The police were called to the incident near Elizabeth Reef at around 5:10pm.
A police spokesperson said a dog was reportedly on the boat too, and to the best of their knowledge had not yet been located.
Reports on social media suggest the dog was a curly-coat retriever called Rimu who was wearing an orange life jacket.
Coastguard National Operations Centre confirmed it received reports from members of the public about the capsized yacht.
A spokesperson said the person onboard was assisted by a nearby vessel, so Coastguard Tutukaka was not required to launch.
A witness to the rescue described the man who went to help as a hero.
Paul Baragwanath, who was watching the sea with his mother Barbara from their accommodation, said they became concerned almost immediately.
“My mum was looking out at the sea and said the yacht shouldn’t be out there – it was too windy,” he said.
Rescuers came to the add of a capsized yacht on Sandy Bay Beach in Northland. Supplied
Moments later, the yacht appeared to strike the reef and come to an abrupt stop.
Baragwanath called police, but the vessel soon came free.
However about five minutes later, Baragwanath said the boat began pitching heavily before capsizing in rough seas.
Baragwanath rang police again as the situation escalated and a police helicopter was dispatched.
Before emergency services could reach the scene, Baragwanath said a man in a small runabout made its way across the open ocean toward the overturned yacht.
“He’s a very brave man because at any point his boat could have flipped.
“I think he’s a real hero.”
Police said the skipper was assessed by an ambulance on shore.
On Wednesday morning the yacht remained upside down on Sandy Bay Beach.
RNZ understands the search for Rimu continues.
Rescuers came to the add of a capsized yacht on Sandy Bay Beach in Northland. Supplied
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Actor George Clooney and his family have been granted French citizenship, official government documents show, after he has previously voiced concern about raising his children amid the glitz of Hollywood.
A gazette notice listing all new French naturalisations, released on Saturday, includes Clooney – as well as his wife, Amal Clooney, and their twin children, Alexander and Ella.
Clooney, who also holds US citizenship, and Amal, a British-Lebanese humanitarian lawyer, are already well familiar with their new adopted country. Though they also have homes in England and near his family in Kentucky, their primary residence is a farm in France, the actor told the New York Times in February.
“Growing up in Kentucky, all I wanted to do was get away from a farm, get away from that life,” Clooney told the paper. “Now I find myself back in that life. I drive a tractor and all those things. It’s the best chance of a normal life.”
He made similar comments in an interview with Esquire in October.
“I was worried about raising our kids in LA, in the culture of Hollywood,” Clooney said. “I felt like they were never going to get a fair shake at life. France – they kind of don’t give a s**t about fame,” he added.
“I don’t want them to be walking around worried about paparazzi. I don’t want them being compared to somebody else’s famous kids,” he said.
The actor and director has long been vocal about his privacy concerns surrounding his family, and in 2021 wrote an open letter urging the media to keep his children’s faces out of the press for their safety.
France has strong privacy protection laws: it’s illegal to photograph someone in a private place, or disclose personal information like their home addresses or phone numbers. It’s also illegal to publish pictures of celebrities in public places unless that appearance is related to their position as public figures.
When paparazzi in France try to photograph celebrities during their personal time, outside of media appearances, “the celebrity’s security or assistant will take a picture or video of the paparazzi,” litigation attorney Chassen Palmer wrote in a 2020 article in the California Western International Law Journal.
“Later, the picture and/or video are sent to the celebrity’s attorney, and the local media outlets are informed that the celebrity will seek civil damages if the photograph or video is published,” which has “largely deterred taking photographs of celebrities out in public,” he wrote.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Ex-All Black Eroni Clarke sings the national anthem before the All Blacks v Australia 2025 Rugby Championship test match at Eden Park om 27 September 2025 Photosport / Brett Phibbs
The New Year 2026 Honours List for Aotearoa includes eight Pasifika recipients this year.
Leading the accolades for the Member of The New Zealand Order of Merit MNZM is All Blacks great Saveatama Eroni Clarke for services to the Pacific community and rugby.
He is recognised for his continuing services to rugby, Pacific leadership and mental health services.
“This is such a humbling moment for me to even accept an award like this I mean it’s something that we’ve been handled the mantle from our previous generations to take on and run with it,” Saveatama said.
He said he is grateful for the acknowledgement and owes it all to his family especially his wife Siala.
“She’s been my right arm, she’s been my strength and my children have been the source of my motivation and my focus and for me I live and breathe them,” Saveatama said.
Also receiving the MNZM are Mrs Mokafetu Smith for Services to Pacific Art and Jade Carlo Farrar for services to people with disabilities and the Pacific community.
“For me it’s an acknowledgement that there is amazing insight, talent and skill within the disability community we have a lot to offer and we can have a positive impact on the future, that’s what it means to me,” an emotional Jade Carlo Farrar said.
The fourth recipient for the MNZM is Professor Tracie Mafile’o from Palmerston North who was recognised for contributions to Pacific and tertiary education.
“This is an encouragement I think to keep me going, it’s an affirmation of the work not only that I do but that others do in the space of working with and for our Pasifika spaces and community,” Professor Mafile’o said.
Pasifika recipients of the King’s Service Medal KSM this year are:
Ms Aere Anne Nicholas for services to the community.
Sailauama Cheryl Talamaivao for services to the Pacific community and education.
Reverend Wayne Saunoa Moegagogo Toleafoa for services to the Pacific community.
And Mrs Enatuleni Ikitoa Polima for services to the Niuean community.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / Marika Khabazi
One person has died following a single-vehicle crash in Waikato early this morning.
The police were called to the intersection of Orini Road and McConnell Road in Orini around 12:30am.
The sole occupant of the car was found dead at the scene.
Orini Road was closed overnight between Rutherford Road and Tenfoot Road, while the Serious Crash Unit conducted a scene examination.
The police enquiries into the circumstances of the crash were ongoing.
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Professor Helen Danesh-Meyer is made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to ophthalmology in the 2025 New Year Honours. Supplied
Dame Helen Danesh-Meyer works “at the intersection of where the eye meets the brain”.
As New Zealand’s pre-eminent authority, and an internationally recognised leader in this area of clinical science, she has been made a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to ophthalmology.
Dame Helen is one of seven new knights and dames appointed nationwide this New Year.
As a clinician scientist, she told RNZ she spent half her week with patients or in the operating theatre, and the other half on research, supporting students and working with a number of charities.
“When you see your patients, you understand the questions that need to be answered to improve their outcomes.”
Since her first honour, when she was appointed a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2023, Dame Helen had made further contributions on the international stage as president of the Neuro-ophthalmology Society of Australia – the first New Zealander to hold this post.
This year, she was ranked among the top 10 glaucoma leaders globally.
Her desire to help people began at university, when she was studying in Otago. “What struck me was how precious vision was,” she said. “Patients would mention all the time how precious their sight was.”
Now, her work involved using the eye as a biomarker for brain health.
In 2024, she was elected as a member of Academia Ophthalmologica Internationalis – a group limited to 100 scientists from around the world.
“New Zealand, in many areas, is at the forefront of research,” she said. “We have a strong group of researchers who manage to do extraordinary research that hits the international stage, and I’m fortunate to be part of that team.”
Professor and surgeon Helen Danesh-Meyer examining a patient’s eye. Supplied
She also sought ways to improve quality-of-life for patients through her charity work.
“A diagnosis is just a diagnosis,” she said – patient education and advocacy could go a long way to improving life for people with chronic disease, such as glaucoma.
She led Women in Vision, a national forum empowering female ophthalmologists, optometrists and students, and through Glaucoma New Zealand, which she had founded and now had 15,000 members, she sought to provide patients with meaningful, ongoing support.
The Vision Research Foundation, another organisation she founded and now led, “is a charity to give bright young researches the freedom to follow their curiosity, and to pursue bold, transformative research work in vision science”.
“So it means creating teams where people are trusted with challenges early in their career, and supporting them to move forward.”
Being made a dame was “a tremendous honour,” she said, “But it reflects the team work of many exceptional people.”
“The better work is still yet to come – it’s a platform to move forward.”
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Clockwise from top left, Lorraine Moller, Scott Dixon, Val Smith, Martin Guptill. Photosport
An Indycar icon, a name synonymous with bowls, and a long-distance runner who pushed for women’s equity in sport are among those who have been recognised in the New Year Honours.
New Zealand’s most successful modern motorsport champion, Sir Scott Dixon has been knighted.
Dixon has claimed six IndyCar Championships and four Daytona victories with Wayne Taylor Racing.
The Indycar driver has competed for Chip Ganassi Racing Teams since 2001, the longest tenure for a driver in the team’s history.
Of the current IndyCar drivers, he has the most wins with 59 victories, as well as the record of most career IndyCar podiums with 142. He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in March 2024.
Outside of motorsport, he supports various charities and is an ambassador for CanTeen, St Jude and Teen Cancer America.
Lorraine Moller, who competed internationally from 1973 to 1996 as a track, cross-country and marathon runner, has become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM).
Lorraine Moller Athletics NZ
Moller competed in the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the women’s marathon was included for the first time, following years of advocacy from female athletes.
Moller was the world’s top women’s master road racer in 1995 and 1996 and, at 41, the oldest woman to compete in the 1996 Olympic marathon.
Over her career, she won 16 international marathons including the Boston Marathon, an Olympic bronze medal, and Commonwealth Games silver and two bronzes.
Moller, who has been based in the United States for several years, still holds the New Zealand 50km record and the U20 800m record.
During and post her elite career, she pushed for women’s equity and professionalism in sport.
She was vice-president of a foundation which fundraised for prosthetics for land-mine victims and spearheaded a programme reinstating physical education in Cambodian schools post the Pol Pot regime.
Val Smith has also become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM).
Val Smith Photosport
Smith, who retired from international competition in early 2025, is New Zealand’s most internationally capped outdoor bowls athlete, playing 667 games for Aotearoa.
She was a member of the Blackjacks representing New Zealand in lawn bowls since 2003.
Her career includes two World Championship titles and nine World Championship medals. She participated in five Commonwealth Games, winning one silver and three bronze medals.
She has also contributed to the sport as an administrator and is one of Bowls New Zealand’s few performance coaches.
The Black Caps all-time highest run-scorer in T20 International matches has become a Member of the NZ Order of Merit (MNZM). Martin Guptill was one of New Zealand’s most dominant limited overs cricketers for almost 20 years.
He was a mainstay of the Black Caps batting line up in International One Day (ODI) and T20 matches until 2022. He is the only New Zealander to score a double-century with 237 not out in an ODI, which remains the highest score made in a World Cup match.
Former Black Cap Martin Guptill. PHOTOSPORT
Several volunteers, administrators, and leaders in sport governance have been recognised including Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit (CNZM) recipient Greg Barclay.
Barclay has held influential roles since the 2000s and was the Independent Chairperson of International Cricket Council (ICC) from 2020 to 2024. This year he became a board member of New Zealand Rugby.
Tony Quinn (CNZM) has been rewarded for his huge impact on the New Zealand motorsport scene. In 2021, he established the Tony Quinn Foundation and Hampton Downs New Zealand Racing Academy, nurturing young talent to succeed on the world stage, with Formula 1 driver Liam Lawson being the first to benefit from the foundation.
Brian Davies has become an Officer of the New Zealand Order of Merit (ONZM) for his 60-year contribution to motorsport.
Four time Olympian Rod Dixon (ONZM) has been recognised for services to athletics after a career that included a bronze medal in the 1500 metres at the 1972 Olympic Games.
Since 2005, Dixon has been patron and inclusion ambassador for Special Olympics. He has promoted physical activity, health, and wellness for young people and founded the Kids Marathon Foundation in 1990, a programme in schools which has impacted more than 1.5 million students worldwide.
Former Basketball NZ chief executive Iain Potter. Photosport
After retiring from a successful rowing career, Judith Hamilton (ONZM) turned to coaching. Hamilton has been an integral part of New Zealand’s rowing successes over the last 20 years and broke ground in 2018 when she became the first female high-performance director at Rowing New Zealand.
Shirley Hooper (ONZM) has contributed to netball over 50 years at just about every level and is the current vice-president of World Netball. As a former chair of Artistic Swimming New Zealand, she’s also been recognised for services to that sport.
Iain Potter (ONZM) was chief executive of Basketball New Zealand from 2012 to 2021, overseeing significant change and an increased participation in the sport in Aotearoa.
Potter was also a driving advocate behind legislation that removed tobacco industry sponsorship and commercial investments from sport and the hospitality industry.
He has held various volunteer roles in the Wellington rugby scene for over 20 years and is about to finish up as board chair of Hurricanes Rugby after six years.
New members of the New Zealand Order of Merit (MNZM) include Eroni Clarke for his contribution to the Pacific community and rugby. The former All Black has made significant contributions to Pacific leadership and mental health services.
Dedicated local rugby league volunteers Jenny Nahu and Gary Whittle have also become MNZM recipients following decades of service.
Nahu, who has held executive roles in the sport, is credited with influencing the culture and sustainability of rugby league in the Bay of Plenty. Whittle has had a similar influence on the sport in Northland, Waikato and Auckland, across various roles.
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Emma Main in action for the Phoenix. Marty Melville
The Wellington Phoenix women have jumped from ninth to fourth in the A-League standings following a 3-nil win at Western Sydney Wanderers.
Emma Main scored in the seventh minute of each half with Sabitra “Samba” Bhandari bagging the visitors third goal.
Wellington’s first away win of the season lifts them into the top four, ahead of the defending champion Central Coast Mariners on goal difference, with a game in hand.
The result also ensures they retain the Sister City Cup.
Phoenix coach Bev Priestman was pleased with the result.
“Sometimes you’ve got to just win a football match,” Priestman said.
“Was it the prettiest game that you’ve seen? I don’t think so, but…to go on the road, to come away with a clean sheet and to get three goals I’ve got to be happy.”
Sabitra Bhandari. Masanori Udagawa / PHOTOSPORT
As well as finding the back of the net, Samba produced the assist for both of Main’s goals as she was cheered on by a large and vocal Nepalese crowd.
“It was incredible. We gave out Phoenix flags as well and it really made a big difference.Samba was electric every time she got the ball tonight and she’s really feeling the love from her community.
“She’s finding her rhythm now after coming off that injury. All credit to the club to bring such a marquee player. It helps us on the road too in terms of home support.”
Bev Priestman made one change to the XI which started the record breaking 7-0 win over Sydney FC before Christmas with Lara Wall replacing fellow Football Fern Manaia Elliott at left wingback. New signing Emma Pijnenburg was named amongst the substitutes.
The Wellington Phoenix will celebrate New Year’s Eve in Australia before turning their attentions to Saturday night’s match against the Roar in Brisbane, where they’ll join the Phoenix men for a double header against the hosts.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
RNZ / REECE BAKER
A person has been brought back to shore safely after a boat capsized in Whananaki in Northland yesterday evening.
The police were called to the incident near Elizabeth Reef at around 5:10pm.
The person was also assessed by the ambulance, according to the police.
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Professor Graham Le Gros, Coral Shaw, Dorothy Spotswood and Scott Dixon are four of the seven being named Dames and Knights. RNZ
A philanthropist, an art collector and a medical scientist are among those made knights and dames in this year’s New Year Honours. Nationwide, three new dames and four knights have been announced – and the capital is home to three of them. Reporter Kate Green spoke to the Wellingtonians about their work, their motivation, and their new titles.
Supplied
Sir Graham Le Gros is on his gap year.
It’s a little later than most, but the recently retired director of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research told RNZ he firmly believed in taking time to “calmly” think through his next step.
“I very much believe one has to retire from the job and let the other younger ones come over and do things before they get too old, so it’s been great passing on the role to Kjesten Wiig, who’s the new director.”
Now, with a little more free time, he spent his days trapping pests in the Orongorongos and catching up on 30 years of home maintenance – while still maintaining a seat on the institute’s trust board.
On Wednesday, Sir Graham is being appointed a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to medical science.
He said it was those young patients with cancer – one 30-year-old mother of three still stuck with him – that pushed him to explore what was, at the time, a novel concept: using the immune system to treat cancer, and help people who “don’t deserve to die so young”.
“Science was the way to solve problems,” he said.
Under his directorship at Malaghan, which began in 2014, the institute more than doubled in size to some 130 staff, and grew its operating budget from $7.5 million to more than $30m by 2024.
Malaghan developed major new programmes in cancer immunotherapy, vaccine development, inflammatory disease and RNA technologies. Sir Graham’s leadership in bringing CAR T-cell therapy to New Zealand to build the institute’s cancer immunotherapy capability was a defining achievement.
“Now, you take it for granted that of course you use the immune system to fight cancer. But 30 years ago, there was a whole lot of people who thought, no, it may work in mice Graham, but it won’t work in humans.
“We just put our heads down and found part of the whole wave of new immune therapies for cancer.”
The Covid-19 pandemic brought a whole new set of challenges – but also, opportunities.
Sir Graham played a key role in the local development of vaccines, and under his leadership the Vaccine Alliance Aotearoa New Zealand was established.
“I was very proud to be a part of that coming together of a group of New Zealand scientists to make a vaccine for Covid, on-time, have it in the fridge ready if we needed it in case the Pfizer vaccine didn’t work – you know, we had to stand up for ourselves.”
In a statement alongside the announcement, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Sir Graham had “helped shape a generation of scientific leadership in New Zealand”.
Chris Parkin, arts philanthropist Photography By Woolf
For Sir Christopher Parkin, it was a successful property development career that fuelled decades of support for the arts – from visual arts, to music and film, theatre and dance.
On Wednesday, he is being made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philanthropy and art.
“I was brought up in a family that was inclined to be generous, I suppose,” he said. “The arts itself has always been in my life.”
In 2013, he established the Parkin Drawing Prize, a national art competition which has awarded more than $300,000 in prize money, mostly to emerging artists, and he’s the principal financial supporter of the arts funding website Boosted, which has so far raised more than $16m for more than 2000 creative projects.
But his initial response to the news was disbelief.
“They basically send you an email saying that you’ve been recommended [for a knighthood], and they’re going to recommend you to King Charles. My immediate reaction was this is just another scam – I was just waiting for the line that says if you just send us your bank details…” he laughed.
“It was a pretty emotional experience really when it comes out of the blue like that,” he said. “A very warm feeling – obviously you start reflecting on your life, and what you’ve done to deserve it.”
As an art collector, more than 150 pieces of a 250-strong art collection are displayed at the QT Hotel Wellington, which he previously owned as the Museum Art Hotel, and still lives in today.
Some of it hung in his Wellington apartment and the hallway outside (“much to the delight of our neighbours”), and throughout a property in Martinborough.
A career highlight, he said – or perhaps the moment that really “turned a few lights on” – was a speech by New Zealand painter and graphic artist Robyn White, who gave a stirring address about the arts at Te Papa and strong desire to paint being one of her earliest memories.
Why the arts? Parkin said he, too, had spent a long time pondering this exact question.
In the end, he’d steered away from platitudes like “art for art’s sake”, and instead took a practical view.
“We’re unique as a species in that we put an enormous amount of effort into the arts for, really an activity, in terms of preserving life, [that] is almost completely pointless. It doesn’t feed us, it doesn’t strengthen us.
“I’ve come to the conclusion that the artistic way of thinking contributes to our intellectual capabilities in other areas that in fact allows us to make the incredible scientific breakthroughs that really do contribute to our quality of life.”
Luxon in his comments called Sir Christopher’s contribution “significant”.
RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
News of her honour might have been “very surprising” for Dame Dorothy Spotswood, but for anyone who knows the extent of her philanthropic work, both alongside her partner Sir Mark Dunajtschik and independently, it’s no surprise at all.
The couple donated $53m for the build of the Wellington Children’s Hospital, Te Wao Nui, which opened in 2022, and earlier this year, they announced $10m for the base build of a new charity hospital – to be known as the Dorothy Spotswood Charity Hospital.
Dame Dorothy told RNZ it was about giving back to the city. On Wednesday she is being appointed a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to philanthropy.
“As Mark said, it’s been a kind city to him, and a kind city to me – we’ve always had work,” she told RNZ. “So we repaid the city with a children’s hospital.”
Sir Mark was made a knight in 2022.
The couple had made their money through property development. “When we started off, we had flats. Mark had his business, and I was working for an insurance company,” Dame Dorothy said.
In their spare time, they worked on their properties and kept investing.
“Mark is a very hands-on person, we did all the renovations ourselves, the fixing ourselves, and if we built new, we did the building ourselves. I’ve poured concrete. We were a hands-on couple.”
More recently, Dame Dorothy had bought land and funded several homes for the Hōhepa Trust, to help establish care facilities for children and adult residents with intellectual disabilities in Kāpiti.
That was a cause close to her heart – the Spotswoods’ adult niece, who had Down Syndrome, died earlier this year.
The Prime Minister said: “In honouring Dame Dorothy as a Dame Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit we are reflecting the enormous contribution she alongside Sir Mark have made to New Zealand, particularly the Wellington region.”
The country “remains humbly grateful” for their contributions, he said.
To all the recipients, Luxon expressed his appreciation.
“Thank you for your dedication, hard work, and service to New Zealand. I would like to congratulate all 177 recipients of this year’s New Year honours and on behalf of the thousands of people who have benefited from your efforts, please accept my personal thanks.”
Read the full list of recipients here
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Erin and her horse Scooter. Supplied
Auckland rider Erin Swainston knew she had to let go of the reins, or be crushed by her beloved horse when it lost its footing.
“Waves were kind of throwing us around, Scooter was thrashing and trying to get his feet up underneath him and started rolling a bit.”
All she could see after the sudden fall into the surf, and her horse Scooter’s desperate efforts to right himself, was his belly and feet.
“And I was like, oh my goodness, if I don’t let him go he won’t be able to really get up on his own and he could potentially end up rolling onto me,” she told RNZ.
“So I needed to let him go, so then I did.”
Swainston and Scooter were with a friend and her own horse on Auckland’s Muriwai Beach on Sunday for what would be the start of a 24-hour ordeal.
It would involve hundreds of people online and on the ground, frantically spreading the word and searching the beach and forest.
The weather was good, “a lovely day”, and Swainston had guided Scooter into the waves so he could cool down his legs.
“And then all of a sudden this massive rogue wave came out and hit us,” Swainston said.
They tried to get out as quickly as they could but the large wave had spooked 14-year-old Scooter and the pair crashed into water.
The waves, eventually, pushed Swainston away from the horse she’s had for seven years – the horse she calls her boy.
He took off on his own in fright.
Beloved horse Scooter before he went missing. Supplied
“Honestly it was the scariest thing, I felt my panic just rising and rising and rising… he was just so panicked that he just started to run around and then he started heading towards the dunes, and I was like ‘oh God, oh God, oh God… and then he just, he eventually found himself on the other side of the dunes.”
Swainston’s friend went after him and followed Scooter’s tracks for as long as she could, but to no avail.
Scooter was gone, and Swainston did not know if they would ever be reunited.
What began as a few desperate messages snowballed into a groundswell of support and help, her lost horse took over social media.
Swainston, who is president of the Massey Pony Club, messaged close friends and family asking if they could come to help look for him.
She put a message into the club committee’s online chat, and club members soon joined the hunt.
“And then posts were starting to go up as well on social media, like my friends were posting on social media and they started going into community groups and things like that as well, so then it just started really growing and growing and growing,” Swainston said.
She was blown away by the response, soon there was a Facebook group created to help find Scooter with about 200 members with many joining the search on the ground.
About 150 were searching on Muriwai Beach and combing nearby Woodhill Forest.
Posts with photos of Scooter, pleading for any sightings, kept popping up on social media.
“Honestly, how the community banded together, like the horsey world, the horsey community and the locals and non-locals and the iwi, and everybody that came together and also, like, how much awareness everybody had about it, everyone throughout the country knew about it and people from Aussie and the UK knew about it,” Swainston said.
“It was so scary because we went for over 24 hours without spottings, the only thing we really found was fresh horse poo on the ground which, we’re like, ‘oh this is a good sign’, but there was no sightings for hours.
“And so I was starting to really lose hope, this is such a massive area, there’s so many places he could have gone,” Swainston said.
“But then, I think it was really pure luck and just a miracle really, I was trying to find him, a needle in a haystack.”
Two women among those looking for Scooter in Woodhill Forest, Liz and Rachel, found him down one of its trails in some undergrowth, and he came rushing down a path.
Rachel and Liz, the women who found Scooter, leading him out. Supplied
It was only about 20 minutes from an equestrian park but roughly two hours or so from where this story started at Muriwai Beach, Swainston estimated.
“Once they’re scared they go into full flight mode and they just run blind for hours so then once he kind of regained a little bit of sense he would have been just really lost and turned around, so he wouldn’t have known how to get back, so he just kind of kept wandering around really.”
The two women led Scooter out, and a call was made to Swainston’s mother.
Swainston, still desperately searching for him herself, was in the forest on an e-bike at the time.
“So then my mum just told me ‘he’s back, they’ve got him’, and honestly we both started bursting into tears when we found out that news.”
Swainston called local iwi who picked her up and drove her and her friends through the forest.
“And once I got there, I started crying again, put the halter on him and walked him back,” she said.
“Every horse owner knows it, it’s literally the worst nightmare that you could ever be in.”
Swainston said riders and their horses had a special bond and connection, and that they were loved like children.
“He’s like my heart horse, when I lost him it was just the most devastating thing ever and then going the whole 24 hours with no sightings, it was really hard to kind of keep hold of hope and stay strong, and then I had maybe two hours sleep that night, it was exhausting.”
Scooter after he was safely back and reunited. Supplied
But what Swainston called a nightmare was now over.
Scooter had been checked by a vet and was in good condition with no cuts, no scrapes and no dehydration, despite his ordeal.
“He’s great, he was super happy in his paddock grazing with his friends, he gave me a little neigh when I walked up to him and then got him out.”
He has been pampered with a massage rug back at the pony club.
Swainston said she and Scooter would probably not venture into waves again.
“We might just stick to the estuary or the lakes.”
She wanted to thank the hundreds of people who spread the word or tried to find him, saying she and her mother could not thank them enough.
“The kindness, time and care shown going above and beyond in rain and shine meant more to us than we could ever explain,” she said.
“We are incredibly grateful.”
She also said the sharing of posts and messages being sent helped them hold onto hope when it felt impossible to do so.
“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you again.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Milad Haghani, Associate Professor and Principal Fellow in Urban Risk and Resilience, The University of Melbourne
You’ve probably heard the phrase “the house always wins” when it comes to casino gambling. But what does it actually mean?
After all, people do hit jackpots, and casino games are supposed to be fair – so what guarantees the casino still comes out ahead?
The answer lies in a simple but powerful mathematical idea called “the house edge”: a small, systematic statistical advantage built into every casino game. It’s the invisible force that ensures the numbers will always tilt toward the house in the long run.
So, let’s unpack the science behind that edge: how it’s constructed, and how it plays out over repeated bets.
Roulette looks like one of the fairest games in the casino. A spinning wheel with numbered pockets, half coloured red and half coloured black, and a single ball sent careening around the outside to eventually land in one pocket at random. If you bet the ball will land in a red pocket (or a black one), it feels like a 50–50 gamble.
But the real odds are a little bit different. In most Australian casinos you’ll find 38 pockets on the roulette wheel: 18 red, 18 black, and two “zero” pockets marked 0 and 00. (In Europe roulette wheels have 37 pockets, with only a single 0.)
The zero pockets are what creates the house edge. The casino pays out as if the odds were 50–50 – if you get the colour right, you get back double the amount you bet. But in reality, on a wheel with two zero pockets your chance of winning is 47.37%.
When you bet on a colour, the house has a 5.26% edge – meaning gamblers lose about five cents per dollar on average. A single-zero wheel is slightly kinder at 2.7%.
You don’t see the house edge in the course of a few spins. But casinos don’t rely on a few spins. Over thousands of bets, the law of large numbers takes over. This is a fundamental idea in probability that implies the more times you repeat a game with fixed odds, the closer your results get to the true mathematical average. The short-term ups and downs flatten out, and the house edge asserts itself with near certainty.
The law of large numbers is why casinos aren’t bothered by who wins this spin, or even tonight. They care about what happens over the next million bets.
Another way to see why the house always wins is through the so-called Gambler’s Ruin problem.
The problem asks what happens if a player with a limited bankroll keeps betting against an opponent with effectively unlimited money (even in a fair game).
The mathematical answer is blunt: the gambler will eventually go broke.
In other words, even if the odds are perfectly even, the side with finite resources loses in the long run simply because random fluctuations will push them to zero at some point. Once you hit zero, the game stops, while the house is still standing.
Casinos, of course, stack the odds even further by giving themselves a small edge on every bet. That tiny disadvantage, combined with the fact the house never runs out of money, makes ruin mathematically inevitable.
Say you walk into a casino with a simple goal. You want to win $100, and you plan to quit as soon as you hit that target.
Your approach is to play roulette, betting $1 at a time on either red or black.
How much money do you need to bring to have a decent chance of reaching your $100 goal? A thousand dollars? A million? A billion?
Here’s the surprising truth: no amount of money is enough.
If you keep making $1 bets in a game with a house edge, you are practically certain to go broke before getting $100 ahead of where you started, even if you arrive with a fortune.
In fact, the probability of gaining $100 before losing $100 million with this strategy is less than 1 in 37,000.
You could walk in with life-changing wealth and still almost certainly never hit your modest $100 goal. (The full mathematical proof is beautifully demonstrated in the video below.)
So how do you create a real chance of success? You must either lower your target or change your strategy entirely.
If your target were only $10, you’d suddenly have over a 50% chance of going home happy, even if you started with just $25. A smaller goal means fewer bets, which means less opportunity for the house edge to grind you down.
Or you can flip the logic of Gambler’s Ruin: instead of making hundreds of small, disadvantageous bets, you can make one big bet.
If you put $100 on red all at once, your chance of success jumps to roughly 47%. This is far higher than the near-zero chance of trying to grind your way up with $1 bets.
The long-run strategy is mathematically doomed, while the short-run strategy at least gives you a fighting chance.
Roulette is the clearest place to see the house edge, but the same structure runs through every casino game. Each one builds in a varying degree of statistical tilt or bias.
Some games, like roulette, have fixed, rule-based house edges that don’t change from one player to the next. But others, like blackjack, have a variable house edge that depends on how the game is played. But no game is exempt from the underlying structure.
Small edges don’t stay small when you expose yourself to thousands of bets. In the long run, the variance fades, and the outcome converges to the house’s advantage with almost certainty.
That’s why the house always wins. Because mathematics never takes a night off.
Milad Haghani does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. The science of the casino: why the house always wins in the long run – https://theconversation.com/the-science-of-the-casino-why-the-house-always-wins-in-the-long-run-268300
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation
Donald Trump has sounded the alarm, over and over again, that the United States is facing an “invasion” by dangerous gang members. He blames immigrants for the country’s economic problems and claims protesters are destroying US cities.
Trump is not the first would-be autocrat to manufacture a crisis to seize extraordinary powers.
As Natasha Lindstaedt, an expert in authoritarian regimes at the University of Essex, says in episode 3 of The Making of an Autocrat, a strongman “loves a crisis”.
A crisis is the way that they mobilise their base, the way that they can depict themselves as the saviour, as this messianic type of figure that is going to save people from this chaotic world.
So, is the United States really facing a national emergency? Or is this just a tactic on Trump’s part to amass more power?
Listen to the interview with Natasha Lindstaedt at The Making of an Autocrat podcast.
This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.
Newsclips in this episode from KATU ABC News, Al Jazeera, The New York Times, Al Jazeera, British Pathé, CNN and APT News.
Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feedor find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.
Natasha Lindstaedt does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Like strongmen the world over, Donald Trump’s power grab required a crisis – and a scapegoat – https://theconversation.com/like-strongmen-the-world-over-donald-trumps-power-grab-required-a-crisis-and-a-scapegoat-272064
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Justin Bergman, International Affairs Editor, The Conversation
Every autocrat needs a clan of loyalists, strategists, masterminds – these are the figures behind the scenes pulling the strings.
They’re unelected and unaccountable, yet they wield a huge amount of power.
This is the role Stephen Miller has played for Donald Trump – he is the architect in chief for the second Trump administration. He has so much power, in fact, he’s reportedly referred to as the “prime minister”.
So who is Stephen Miller? And why are architects so important in helping a would-be autocrat amass power?
As Emma Shortis, a Trump expert and an adjunct senior fellow at RMIT University in Melbourne, explains in episode 2 of The Making of an Autocrat:
[Miller] is the kind of brains behind particularly Trump’s hardline stances on immigration and the Trump administration’s ability to use the levers of power, and expand the power available to the president.
I think what Stephen Miller demonstrates and, and history has demonstrated over and over again is that autocrats cannot rise to power by themselves. They often require a singular kind of charisma and a singular kind of historical moment, but they also need architects behind them who are able to facilitate their rise to power.
Listen to the interview with Emma Shortis at The Making of an Autocrat podcast.
This episode was written by Justin Bergman and produced and edited by Isabella Podwinski and Ashlynne McGhee. Sound design by Michelle Macklem.
Newsclips in this episode from CNN, CNN, ABC News, and Timothy Snyder’s Substack.
Listen to The Conversation Weekly via any of the apps listed above, download it directly via our RSS feedor find out how else to listen here. A transcript of this episode is available via the Apple Podcasts or Spotify apps.
Emma Shortis is director of International and Security Affairs at The Australia Institute, an independent think tank.
– ref. All autocrats require an ‘architect’. Meet the man pulling the strings for Donald Trump – https://theconversation.com/all-autocrats-require-an-architect-meet-the-man-pulling-the-strings-for-donald-trump-272063
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Dan Jerker B. Svantesson, Professor specialising in Internet law, Bond University
Law affects beer, and beer affects law. The connection between the two is stronger than you might think, as we have illustrated in the recently published book Beer Law.
So as you pour a nice cold one during the summer holidays, here are a few things to think about.
1. Beer was a trigger for civilisation
It is common knowledge that humans transitioned from a “hunter-gatherer” type of life to civilisation and settling down to cultivate wild grains. But why did our ancestors take this life-changing step?
Many have assumed they wanted the grains to bake bread and make porridge. But modern science suggest the harvests would have been inadequate as a reliable food source, and that it was for the production of alcohol in the form of a type of beer that our ancestors became farmers.
So perhaps humankind became civilised by beer? That fact alone may be worth a toast.
2. Once upon a time, beer laws were very, very tough
People have been brewing beer for at least 13,000 years and as it turns out, beer law is also a very old discipline. Nearly 4,000 years ago, the Code of Hammurabi, an ancient Babylonian law from around 1755–1751 BCE, regulated the serving of beer.
For example, if a person selling beer watered down the beer, they could be drowned. This sort of consumer protection law makes the Australian Consumer Law look weak indeed.
3. A little beer money
The most obvious way beer drinkers feel the impact of the law is when it comes time to pay. A healthy (or indeed, unhealthy) portion of the price you pay for you beer goes straight to the government. And this is not a new phenomenon.
Beer consumption has been a relatively stable factor in society for thousands of years. Politicians who have wanted to raise revenue have taxed it. At the same time, those wishing at least a temporary popularity, for example before important elections, have lowered the beer taxes.
Throughout history, beer has been taxed in many different ways. Beer has been taxed when consumed, and also when produced. And the individual ingredients have been taxed. Sometimes this has resulted in brewers changing the styles they brew – a very direct way that law affects beer.
4. Prohibitions and restrictions
Another obvious way in which the law has had an impact on beer is through prohibitions. Luckily, that is not something we have to worry about these days, but it is worth remembering that not everyone is so lucky. Beer, along with other alcohol products, is banned in many Muslim countries. And prohibitions have lasted into modern times in some surprising places – for example, Iceland had a beer ban until March 1 1989.
These days, the harmful effects of excessive drinking are well known. We are used to restrictions on where and when beer may be produced, marketed, and sold. But history shows us that, whether beer is considered healthy or unhealthy has changed over time and in different contexts.
At many different points in history, beer (a product that has been produced by boiling ingredients that contain nutrients and natural antibacterial properties) has been viewed as an essential source of energy. It has historically often been much safer than dirty town water or stronger alternatives like gin.
For example, sailors on the ill-fated Vasa ship that sank in Stockholm’s harbour in 1628 were to be given two to four litres of beer per day. Sounds like a recipe for disaster? Perhaps not, as the beer was weak. It’s also worth noting that at the same time, the nuns at Solberga Abbey in Sweden were given five litres of beer per day.
5. Classic brew or peanut raspberry porter?
Perhaps the most famous beer law in the world is the German (Beer) Purity Law, especially in the version from Bavaria 1516. It prescribes that beer may only contain water, hops and barley.
But what do you get if you combine these three ingredients? Well, not beer – you also need yeast to convert the barley’s sugars into carbonation (fizziness) and alcohol. Perhaps modern day lawmakers can learn from this – it is important to understand the technical realities of what you are trying to regulate.
In any case, brewers, and also beer drinkers, have tended to split into two camps. On the one hand, we have the traditionalists who work to preserve this focus on purity, and on the other we have the pioneers wanting to maximise creativity.
Do you favour a traditional German pils, or do you prefer a peanut raspberry porter?
6. An important part of our culture
Beer is a unique product with an incredible history. It is much more than a just a drink, and beer has shaped our culture in different ways around the world.
Belgian beer tradition, and Czech hop growing have made it onto the UNESCO lists of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity and World Heritage respectively.
Many other countries, such as Germany, are also true “beer countries”. But perhaps the Finns take the cake with their concept of Kalsarikänni which has been explained as “getting drunk at home in your underwear without any intention of going out”. Cheers to that!
I am a co-author of ‘Beer Law’ https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/beer-law/3792228C55FFDD5C2DA841C7841EF910
– ref. No small beer: how the famous drink affects law (and law affects beer) – https://theconversation.com/no-small-beer-how-the-famous-drink-affects-law-and-law-affects-beer-271520
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Ray Nickson, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Newcastle Law School, University of Newcastle
In 1919, Japanese migrants in Sydney gifted a silver cup to the New South Wales Baseball Association.
The cup was “in appreciation of the friendship and good feeling accorded to the Nippon (Baseball) Club since it joined the association”.
The Nippon Baseball Club was a team of Japanese migrants who played in the NSW Baseball Association from 1917-1919.
My new research published late in 2025 reveals how sport helped them overcome prejudice and discrimination.
Previous Australian research on sport’s ability to foster inclusion has typically focused on migration after the second world war.
It has also emphasised the experiences of European migrants playing sports such as soccer.
The forgotten history of the Nippon Baseball Club provides a much earlier example of integration during a hostile era.
By 1917, Australia’s discriminatory White Australia policy was in its second decade.
The federal government passed the Immigration Restriction Act (later nicknamed the White Australia policy) in 1901, mainly over concerns about Japanese and Chinese migration to Australia in the 1800s, coupled with beliefs of racial superiority from Australia’s European colonists.
Asians in Australia encountered discrimination and prejudice at this time.
Previous research shows Australians were more welcoming when they saw values they recognised in the lives of Japanese migrants. Nowhere were these values more obvious than on the sports field.
In 1917 the NSW Baseball Association had tried to arrange a game against visiting Japanese Navy sailors to raise money for the war effort. When this fell through, Japanese businessmen in Sydney offered to play.
Only four of the Japanese people had played baseball before. In pouring rain, an enormous crowd turned up, so play went ahead despite the conditions.
From this game, the Nippon Baseball Club emerged.
Throughout the 1917 season, the club played in front of large and enthusiastic crowds. Their games were frequently used to raise money for Australia’s war efforts.
During the next two seasons, the club was warmly received. Newspapers in Sydney and beyond discussed the team affectionately.
Australian Test cricketer Monty Noble, president of the NSW Baseball Association, formally thanked the club that season.
The next year, the team was presented with a “handsomely framed illuminated address”: a hand-decorated, ornate manuscript popular in the late 1800s and early 1900s to formally express gratitude and thanks.
The text of the address read:
The New South Wales Baseball Association, on behalf of all interested in the sport, desire to express the appreciation of the part taken by the representatives of the Japanese Empire residents in Sydney, in the baseball games played during the season 1917, also of the chivalrous manner in which the operations generally of the Nippon team were conducted. Japan and Australia have many common interests which are enhanced by association of this description.
In 1919, the club gave NSW Baseball the Nippon Cup. It became the competition’s most prized trophy for 20 years. It would be awarded to the champion of the top tier of NSW’s most senior and competitive baseball league.
When the association noted its appreciation of the gift, the official minutes noted:
Your Association feels it is on the right track in thus helping to build up a firm friendship with the Sydney representatives of the ‘little brown people’ who are surely destined to become a great nation.
The racism in those remarks reflected a wider cultural attitude in Sydney.
While coverage of the team was largely positive, references to racial stereotypes about height and skin colour appeared. The offensive slur “Jap” was used, even when journalists meant it to be complimentary.
In 1919, the Nippon Baseball Club stopped playing. The club never had many players and absences for work and migration caused difficulties in consistently fielding a team.
Then the impact of the influenza pandemic of 1918 and 1919 caused more disruption.
The club’s gift of the Nippon Cup was a lasting, positive memory for the next two decades.
In 1941, after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbour, the Nippon Cup became controversial.
There was talk of melting it down and selling it for its metal value.
One member of the NSW Baseball Association suggested a new inscription be added to the cup, which would read:
this trophy was presented by the Japs when they had a little appreciation of sportsmanship left.
It is unclear what happened to the Nippon Cup. The contributions of the Nippon Baseball Club and the Japanese immigrant community that supported it, however, were effectively erased.
Now, more than 100 years later, their story has been rediscovered in the archives as part of a larger study of how sport has mediated Australia’s relationship with Japan.
It offers new insights into the lives of Asian migrants to Australia before the second world war.
It also emphasises sport’s power for inclusion in otherwise hostile spaces.
Ray Nickson does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. How baseball helped shape Japanese migrants’ experiences during the White Australia policy – https://theconversation.com/how-baseball-helped-shape-japanese-migrants-experiences-during-the-white-australia-policy-270054
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Timothy Byron, Lecturer in Psychology, University of Wollongong
You’re reading a report and trying to concentrate. The room is silent. But despite your best efforts to focus, a little snatch of melody – an “earworm” – keeps circling inside your head.
Research suggests most people get earworms regularly – and they’re more common among people who listen to a lot of music. One Finnish study found more than 90% of people report experiencing earworms at least weekly. About 60% of people experienced them daily.
Why does your brain insist on inflicting snippets of tunes like Jingle Bells, Bohemian Rhapsody or Golden when you try to clear your mind or at random times during the day?
And how are people with conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) affected?
A song is more likely to become an earworm when you’ve heard it often or recently.
In a 2015 study, we played an unfamiliar song to participants either two or six times, and then contacted them at random times during the three days afterwards to ask if the songs were stuck in their heads.
About one-third of participants reported experiencing an earworm at the time of contact. We also found that earworms of the songs in the experiment were more common if participants heard the song six times, and were most common in the day afterwards.
Read more:
Earworms: why some songs get stuck in our heads more than others
Research shows brain function is broadly similar when people listen to music and when they experience musical imagery like earworms. The word imagery here refers to the imagined nature of the earworm – it’s not a sound that we are hearing out loud, it is instead within our minds.
But part of the brain called the auditory association cortex (which does more complex brain tasks related to music listening) seems to be playing a bigger role with musical imagery than the primary auditory cortex (which does more of the basic tasks).
Another interesting finding concerns people with congenital amusia, a condition which means they don’t hear music as effectively as everyone else. This might mean they’re not good at telling if something is out of tune, and struggle to remember melodies they just heard.
Researchers found that while their brains might not be as good at analysing music, they still experienced earworms, though less frequently.
What earworms seem to be doing when we experience them is getting into a part of our cognitive architecture called working memory. We use working memory when we have to remember something someone just told us, or when we do maths in our head.
Australian researchers have found that people doing tasks that test their working memory aren’t as accurate at remembering things if they have a song stuck in their head. The earworm is crowding out other information in working memory.
In another study, the same Australian researchers found that the more familiar people were with the songs, the more likely it was that the song stuck in their head was interfering with their working memory.
While the earworms we don’t like can be really annoying and stand out, research suggests most earworms are a relatively pleasant experience.
German researchers have argued earworms are essentially a sort of withdrawal response to not hearing music. Sometimes we want to listen to music but can’t, which might mean that your withdrawal symptom is an earworm.
British researchers also found the earworms people experience reflect the reasons why those people listen to music. So if people often listen to music to rev themselves up, their earworms will often also be songs that would rev them up.
Earworms can sometimes be troubling for people with conditions such as obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD), who have unwanted thoughts come into their head. Earworms can be just another unwanted thought.
However, research is mixed on whether people with OCD experience more earworms than other people as a result of their condition. Some research suggests that, while people with OCD are more troubled by earworms, they don’t usually experience them more often than anyone else.
Other research does find they experience earworms more often. But it’s possible that people with OCD are just much more aware of their earworms, and such results can reflect that awareness.
Researchers have suggested the best therapeutic approach for people with OCD troubled by earworms is in context of broader treatments such as exposure and response prevention. This aims to reduce the negative response patterns that occur in response to intrusive thoughts.
Some some British researchers have found that chewing gum might be the answer to getting rid of unwanted earworms, as odd as that sounds.
If earworms are going around our working memory, this actually makes sense – our memory is partly held in our “inner voice”, which involves using the throat to “subvocalise”.
So if you engage your throat muscles by chewing on some gum, this may disrupt the looping earworms just enough for them to end. If your earworm is bothering you, it’s worth a try.
Or try listening to something else, as people tend not to experience earworms when listening to other music. That can work for getting the song out of your head right now – but then you might get earworms of all the other songs.
But there’s little evidence that listening to the whole song will get rid of an earworm. Research suggests that listening to the song increases the likelihood the song will then get stuck in your head.
Timothy Byron does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Why do we get snippets of songs stuck in our heads? And are earworms more common with OCD? – https://theconversation.com/why-do-we-get-snippets-of-songs-stuck-in-our-heads-and-are-earworms-more-common-with-ocd-263209
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Rhys Ashby, Lecturer in Marketing, Swinburne University of Technology
We’ve all been there – splitting a bill at dinner, covering a mate’s coffee, or sending a quick transfer for concert tickets. It’s part of modern social life. As money becomes increasingly digital and instantaneous, we no longer need to worry about doing maths in our heads or fussing about changing notes and coins.
Now, we’ve got an app for that. Yet the way we exchange money is changing more than just our bank balances. It’s reshaping trust, communication, and even the dynamics of friendship.
We often don’t think about it, but money does have an emotional weight. We experience what psychologists call the pain of payment, a negative emotional response to parting with money. It’s not just large amounts of money that feel uncomfortable or stressful – paying always carries some negative feeling.
So, the next time it comes to splitting the bill, what’s the best way to approach it? Just because we can ask for money with an app doesn’t mean it’s good for our friendships – sometimes there are better ways to go about it.
Money is also one of those slightly taboo subjects, like religion or politics. When money comes up, we often prefer to change the subject, even with our partners.
While “I’ll get you next time” might seem harmless, new payment technologies like PayID, Tap and Go, and instant transfers mean there’s less excuse for delay, and more potential for tension when people don’t pay up. A quick transfer request can feel efficient and convenient to one person, but uncomfortable and impersonal to another.
When we ask for payment, we alter the social dynamic. A whole mix of psychological reactions and insecurities comes into play.
These reactions can also damage the image we want to project to others. If we see ourselves as generous and caring, we might not be comfortable asking for payment for that coffee.
Casual IOUs between friends often exist in a grey area – too small to make a fuss about, but significant enough to stick in our minds.
Taking turns to pay when going out to dinner or coffee is more likely to make us happier, as we don’t mind paying for those closest to us. Spending money on experiences with others actually increases our happiness, making us feel good to give them a little treat or gift.
However, for someone we’re not close with, not splitting the bill can cause issues.
Reciprocity, the expectation of getting something in return, can be encoded as a type of debt. Being paid for, then having a social debt, can feel unpleasant. On the flip side, some people will feel they have been unfairly taken advantage of when there isn’t reciprocity.
The fear of judgement can sometimes stop people being honest about financial struggles, even with a close friend. A recent survey revealed that one-third of people lied about being in a better financial situation than they really were to protect their social status.
The same survey found this can impact relationships, with one-third of people admitting they had ended a relationship over money. Moreover, nearly seven in ten people said they had opted out of a social gathering because they were concerned it was too expensive. Of those, four in ten did not tell the real reason why.
The social etiquette around money has struggled to keep pace with technology.
It can seem quite abrupt to message a close friend via an app like Beem (the Australian equivalent of Venmo) or even text to ask to be paid back.
PayID has allowed us to send money to registered mobile numbers since 2018, doing away with the barriers of swapping BSB and account numbers.
Although it’s quicker and easier than ever to transfer money, it’s the social barrier, not the admin barrier, that is really holding us back.
Ultimately, how we manage these exchanges, whether by politely reminding a friend or quietly letting it go, can reveal a lot about our social comfort zones. The closer the friendship, the more likely we are to ask in person, or just let it go.
It can help to briefly mention money upfront, for instance, “Do you mind if we split this?”. This is socially easier than a discussion after someone has paid or as you both go to pay. It feels natural to pay half the bill at a restaurant, but can feel uncomfortable to either hand over cash later or transfer money to a friend.
If we think of these exchanges as an investment, rather than a debt, we feel better about them.
So, the next time you’re anxious about asking to be paid back, think of it as an investment in a friendship or connection. That’s more likely to help you enjoy the experience and your friendship too.
Rhys Ashby does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. In a world of digital money, what’s the right etiquette to split the bill with friends? – https://theconversation.com/in-a-world-of-digital-money-whats-the-right-etiquette-to-split-the-bill-with-friends-270971
Source: Radio New Zealand
Founder of accounting company Xero, Rod Drury. RNZ / Diego Opatowski
Founder of accounting company Xero, Sir Rod Drury, who has been made a Knight Companion in the New Year Honours, says he has loved using his business skills to help the community in recent years.
Drury has been made a Knight Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to business, the technology industry and philanthropy.
Drury co-founded Xero in 2006 and helped develop it into a billion-dollar global company.
Drury moved to Queenstown in 2019 after he retired as chief executive of Xero.
He said since then he has enjoyed using his business skills to help the community in Queenstown in a variety of ways.
“Working on getting a hospital down to the Southern Lakes, putting in a lot effort into that,” said Drury. “And working on solving the public transport problems with a new gondola, and those are projects that if you were sitting inside a normal company it would be hard to do, but if you have the time and resources to throw at thing, you can do things a lot more quickly.”
Drury has also been involved in environmental restoration through Mana Tāhuna and Project Tohu, funded equipment and facilities for Surf Lifesaving New Zealand, and supported Ngāi Tahu students and artists.
He established Southern Infrastructure to support Queenstown public infrastructure projects and Tāhuna Ride and Conservation Trust which supports regenerative planting along with creating mountain bike trails.
Drury said the accomplishment he was most proud of was twice taking his company public, with Xero listing first on the New Zealand stock market and then in Australia.
“One of the things I have learnt over time is if you take a company public it gives a whole lot of other people the opportunity for financial security,” said Drury.
“If you do list a company it creates a product that people can put money in, and they can move themselves ahead forward too.
“It’s a pretty noble cause. So of all the highlights I think creating a public company that still lives today, 20 years later, is something I am very proud of.”
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon said Drury was a titan of New Zealand business.
Christopher Luxon visits Xero’s London headquarters earlier this year. RNZ / Soumya Bhamidipati
“While at the helm of Xero, it became New Zealand’s second largest tech exporter, generating thousands of jobs and supporting more than four million customers worldwide. The company were pioneers in mental health and diversity. Since 2020 he has spearheaded public good infrastructure and philanthropic projects. His entrepreneurial career has seen New Zealand benefit in the fields of education, the environment, and renewable energy.”
Sir Rod Drury is one of four new knights, and three new dames named in the New Year Honours.
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Konstantine Panegyres, Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History, The University of Western Australia
Parties in ancient Greece were wild, with evidence of copious alcohol and sex. That’s the popular idea that endures today.
But there were different types of parties at the time. Not all involved lots of alcohol and debauchery. Some featured moderate eating and drinking, and intellectual conversation.
So what actually went on at these parties? And how exactly do you party like an ancient Greek?
Ancient Greek historian Idomeneus of Lampsacus (4th–3rd century BCE) tells us the Greeks began partying in the 6th century BCE. He said that’s when two members of Athens’ ruling class started the trend:
Hippias and Hipparchus invented parties and wandering the streets drunk; this is why they were surrounded by a large number of horses and many friends.
The Greek writer Athenaeus (2nd century CE) provided more evidence for the role of alcohol at parties. He wrote that the Greek Macedonian nobleman Proteas (4th–3rd century BCE) declared at a party he once attended:
he who drinks most will be happiest.
There was also evidence of sexual debauchery at parties. Scenes of sex at parties, between male guests, and male or female prostitutes, appear on numerous vases.
Other parties were regarded as a good venue for debating ideas with friends. In fact, a few of the greatest works of ancient Greek philosophy supposedly stem from intellectual conversations at parties.
For example, in Plato’s Republic (written around 380 BCE), the intellectual debate about the nature of justice takes place at a party hosted at the house of a wealthy man named Cephalus.
There’s one detailed eyewitness account of a party from the ancient Greek world. Hippolochus of Macedon (4th–3rd century BCE) left behind a letter containing a lengthy description of a party he attended.
It was the wedding party of Caranus, a wealthy Macedonian nobleman. There were 20 guests, all male.
The walls of the room are lined with white linen curtains and the room filled with couches.
When the guests enter, they receive many gifts and lie down on the couches, rather than stand up, and start drinking from bowls:
The moment they lay down, each of them was given a silver libation bowl to keep. Even before they came in, he had garlanded them all with gold tiaras, each worth five gold coins. After they drank the contents of their libation bowls, each man was given a loaf of bread on a bronze platter of Corinthian workmanship (the loaf was as big as the platter).
After guests receive more gifts, a prominent member of the group gives a toast.
By this time, says Hippolochus, “we had now happily escaped sobriety”.
The next stage of the party involves musical entertainment:
Some pipe-girls, female singers, and Rhodian harp-girls came in – they looked naked to me, although some of the guests claimed that they were wearing tunics – and after playing a prelude, they went out again. Other girls came in after them, each carrying two perfume-flasks, one made of gold and the other of silver […] and they gave a pair to all of us.
After this comes the first main dish. A “huge roast piglet” is brought in.
This is followed by more gifts: baskets and bread trays made of strips of woven ivory, as well as flower garlands and an additional pair of gold and silver perfume flasks.
After these gifts, there are more performances, including from naked female acrobats:
who did tumbling tricks among swords and blew fire from their mouths.
As the drinking continues, a chorus of 100 men started singing a wedding hymn. Then there were more dancing girls, followed by:
the clown Mandrogenes [… who] made us break into laughter repeatedly; after that he danced with his wife, who was over 80 years old.
The party ends with the guests filled with wine and drink and amazed at the expensive gifts they have received:
Finally the after-dinner tables came in, and everyone was given […] snacks in ivory baskets, along with flat-cakes of every kind […] along with the special cake-containers for each. After this we got up and left.
Hippolochus doesn’t mention the guests at this party playing games. Some parties, however, included games such as kottabos. This involved throwing dregs of wine at targets on top of poles to try to dislodge them.
You now have a blueprint for your next party, whether it features bowls of alcohol, lavish gifts of gold and silver, naked fire-breathing acrobats, or intellectual conversation.
Just remember one rule: absolutely no togas. The ancient Greeks would’ve raised an eyebrow – and then sent you to Rome.
Greeks wore a chiton (a type of tunic) and himation (a mantle or wrap, sometimes worn over a chiton). None of these looked much like a bedsheet.
Konstantine Panegyres does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. How to party like an ancient Greek – https://theconversation.com/how-to-party-like-an-ancient-greek-270060
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Morteza Hajizadeh, Hajizadeh, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
For centuries, literature from Islamic regions, especially Iran, celebrated male homoerotic love as a symbol of beauty, mysticism and spiritual longing. These attitudes were particularly pronounced during the Islamic Golden Age, from the mid-8th to mid-13th centuries.
But this literary tradition gradually disappeared in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, under the influence of Western values and colonisation.
Attitudes towards homosexuality in early Islamic societies were complex. From a theological perspective, homosexuality started to become frowned upon from the 7th century, when the Quran was said to have been revealed to the Islamic Prophet Mohammad.
However, varying religious attitudes and interpretations allowed for discretion. Upper-class medieval Islamic societies often accepted or tolerated homosexual relationships. Classical literature from Egypt, Turkey, Iran and Syria suggests any prohibition of homosexuality was often treated with leniency.
Even in cases where Islamic law condemned homosexuality, jurists permitted poetic expressions of male–male love, emphasising the fictional nature of verse. Composing homoerotic poetry allowed the literary imagination to flourish within moral boundaries.
The classic Arabic, Turkish and Persian literature of the time featured homoerotic poetry portraying sensual love between males. This tradition was sustained by poets such as the Arab Abu Nuwas, the Persian masters Saadi, Hafiz and Rumi, and the Turkish poets Bâkî and Nedîm – all celebrating the beauty and allure of male beloveds.
In Persian poetry, masculine pronouns could be used to describe both male and female beloveds. This linguistic ambiguity that further legitimised literary homoeroticism.
In Sufism – a form of mystical Islamic belief and practice that emerged during the Islamic Golden Age – themes of male–male love were often used as a symbol of spiritual transformation. As professor of history and religious studies Shahzad Bashir shows, Sufi narratives frame the male body as the primary conduit of divine beauty.
Religious authority in Sufism is transmitted through physical closeness between a spiritual guide, or sheikh (Pir Murshid), and his disciple (Murid).
The sheikh/disciple relationship enacted the lover–beloved paradigm fundamental to Sufi pedagogy, wherein disciples approached their guides with the same longing, surrender and ecstatic vulnerability found in Persian love poetry.
Literature suggests Sufi communities developed around a form of homoerotic affection, using beauty and desire as metaphors for accessing the hidden reality.
Thus, the saintly master became a mirror of divine radiance, and the disciple’s yearning signified the soul’s ascent. In this framework, embodied male love became a vehicle for spiritual annihilation and rebirth within the Sufi path.
The legendary love between Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and his male slave Ayaz exemplifies this. Overwhelmed by seeing the beauty of a naked Ayaz in a bath, Sultan Mahmud confesses:
When I saw only your face, I knew nothing of your limbs. Now I see them all, and my soul burns with a hundred fires. I do not know which limb to love more.
In other stories, Ayaz willingly offers himself to die at Mahmud’s hands. This symbolises spiritual transformation through the annihilation of the ego.
The relationship between Rumi and Shams Tabrizi, both 13th-century Persian Sufis, is another example of male–male mystical love.
In one account from their disciples, the pair reunited after a long period of spiritual transformation, embraced each other, and then fell at each other’s feet.
Rumi’s poetry blurs spiritual devotion and erotic attraction, while Shams challenges the idea of idealised purity:
Why look at the reflection of the moon in a bowl of water, when you can look at the thing itself in the sky?
Homoerotic themes were so common in classical Persian poetry that Iranian critics claimed
Persian lyrical literature is essentially a homosexual literature.
By the late 19th century, writing poetry about male beauty and desire became taboo, not so much on religious injunctions, but because of Western influences.
British and French colonial powers imported a Victorian morality, heteronormativity and anti-sodomy laws to countries such as Iran, Turkey and Egypt. Under their influence, homoerotic traditions in Persian literature were stigmatised.
Colonialism amplified this shift, framing homoeroticism as “unnatural”. This was further reinforced by the strict administration of Islamic laws, as well as nationalist and moralist agendas.
Influential publications such as Molla Nasreddin (published from 1906 to 1933) introduced Western norms and mocked same-sex desire, conflating it with paedophilia.
Iranian nationalist modernisers spearheaded campaigns to purge homoerotic texts, framing them as relics of a “pre-modern” past. Even classical poets such as Saadi and Hafez were reframed or censored in Iranian literary histories from 1935 onward.
A millennium of poetic libertinism gave way to silence, and censorship erased male love from literary memory.
Morteza Hajizadeh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
– ref. Literature from Islamic societies embraced homoerotic love until the 19th century. What happened? – https://theconversation.com/literature-from-islamic-societies-embraced-homoerotic-love-until-the-19th-century-what-happened-266357
Source: Radio New Zealand
Sir Scott Dixon. David Allio/Icon Sportswire / PHOTOSPORT
New Zealand’s most successful modern motorsport champion has been knighted – but Sir Scott Dixon is still a bit uncomfortable with his new title.
“Just Scott is fine.
“I thought it was maybe some spam or something,” the Indycar icon told RNZ.
“But then it instantly made me reminisce of a young Scott starting out, my dad and mum starting me on go-karts at the age of seven and then ballooning to what has become and what I’ve been able to be a part of throughout my career.
“I’ve been called a lot of things, but I never thought that ‘Sir’ was going to be one of them.”
Sir Scott has claimed six IndyCar Championships and three 24 hour of Daytona victories.
2008 Indianapolis 500 winner Scott Dixon drinks the milk. LAT Photographic / PHOTOSPORT
He won North America’s greatest race – the Indianapolis 500 – in 2008.
He has competed for Chip Ganassi Racing Teams since 2001, the longest tenure for a driver in the team’s history.
Of the current IndyCar drivers, Dixon has the most wins with 59 victories, as well as the record of most career IndyCar podiums with 142. He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame of America in March 2024.
“I think what has enabled me through my career is such a widespread outlook on life. I’ve been lucky enough to have the longevity. But outside of that, whether it’s the community outreach programmes, it really makes you look at your own life and how fortunate you are and how lucky I’ve been.”
Outside of motorsport, he supports various charities and is an ambassador for CanTeen, St Jude and Teen Cancer America.
But he is not planning to leave the Indy scene anytime soon.
“I’d really like another Indy 500 or two. It’s still the largest one day sporting event in the world and I am going for title number seven, which will tie me with the amazing A.J. Foyt, the legend of our sport. The fire still burns strong, the passion is very strong at the moment.”
Dixon will spend a rare summer in Aotearoa to close out 2025 ahead of his 25th year in IndyCar.
“It’s so good to be back. The kids haven’t been back for about three years. We’re definitely going to have to start spending a lot more time in New Zealand.
“I miss the Big Ben mince and cheese, and the L&P. So it’s a good time to chill with some barbecues and all that kind of stuff. And have a hot Christmas. Typically we’re in the Northern Hemisphere so it’s either snowing or cold and damp in the UK.”
Scott Dixon after winning his sixth Indycars championship. Photosport / 2020 Michael L. Levitt
As for what lies beyond 2026 and a potential fulltime return home?
“I think it’s all about the right opportunities at the right time for me. I’ve wholeheartedly decided to focus on racing at the forefront.
“I think if you start looking into too much other stuff, then it’s a distraction and you’re not giving it your all.
“As for as coming back, we’ve always had a foothold in New Zealand. I love home and I’m always so proud to fly the flag of New Zealand wherever I can and hopefully produce some good results for it.
“I’m a proud Kiwi man and for sure at some stage we’ll be based out of New Zealand.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Source: Radio New Zealand
Dame Coral Shaw has been recognised for her work, among other things, as a Commissioner on the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Libby Kirkby-McLeod/RNZ
Teacher, lawyer, judge and head of a royal commission – Dame Coral Shaw’s career has always been about giving back to those most vulnerable.
The 78-year-old has been made a Companion of the New Zealand Order of Merit and is enjoying her second retirement, volunteering at her local Citizens Advice Bureau.
The first time she tried to retire, she was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care. Partway through she was made chair.
The findings, released in June 2024, ran to 2500 pages and catalogued a litany of abuse inside state and religious institutions between 1950 and 1999.
She told RNZ she was accepting the honour on behalf of the various organisations she had worked with.
“I hope just by having this honour, I can continue to advocate for the systemic changes needed [that] are vital if we’re not to repeat the errors of the past.”
New Years Honours are shrouded in secrecy with strict embargoes being enforced until the last day of the year.
So, after learning she was being considered for the honour, Dame Coral kept it a secret from family – even from her husband. She said her family’s love and pride would have resulted in the secret getting out.
“I’ve kept it entirely to myself … In a way it has been very difficult, but in another way it has kept it very easy because I haven’t had to explain myself … just a few white lies about where I was going and what I was doing,” she laughed.
Coral Shaw during the Abuse in Care inquiry. Supplied / Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care
Dame Coral was born in Lyttelton in 1947 – before it was “the trendy place it is now”.
Her father, a returned soldier, married her mother who worked in the family drapery business on the main street.
“It was a very hard working life. Mum worked in the shop and dad was a carrier.”
The eldest of three children, she loved music and sang in the Lyttelton Main School choir.
“I also learned to be rather resilient because, let’s say, it wasn’t the most genteel of schools and I had to learn to hold my own in that environment. But, of course, I learned about difference and I learned about people who came from different lifestyles.”
After completing her education at Christchurch Girls High School, she spent a year volunteering in the Solomon Islands before returning to New Zealand to study teaching where she met her now husband.
While teaching in Thames, Dame Coral came across a newspaper article about a woman who studied law late in life.
“I thought: ‘Hmm, that’s something I’m interested in.”
She did some law papers by correspondence.
“I realised I really enjoyed that world of analysis, probing. The rigour of the law really appealed to me.”
The family moved to Auckland where her three children went to school and Dame Coral completed her degree.
Her law practice was varied, working with refugees and doing some treaty work with Māori.
In 1992, Dame Coral was made a judge, sitting in the busy, urban West Auckland District Court.
“Nothing really prepared me for the nature and volume of work in West Auckland.”
She soon saw areas in the justice system that needed immediate attention.
“I read once that to be a teacher you had to be an optimist because you stand in front of a group of children and you think, ‘what can I do to make their lives better and fulfilling and help them learn?’ So, you’re always looking for the future, for hope for them. And I think I carry that into my judicial work and my whole life, really.”
Dame Coral was instrumental in the founding of the Waitakere Anti-Violence Essential Services (WAVES) Trust which provided a voice for victims in court.
And with the help of the government and the local community, it raised funds and employed a “victim advocate” who supported victims.
Together, with later chief District Court Judge Russell Johnson, it created a fast-track court list for family violence cases and one of the first anti-violence court programmes.
“We gave balanced justice – with all the rights to the defendant to defend their case if they wished, to provide therapeutic programmes if they needed it but mostly that the victims felt supported through the process.”
The other area was young Māori men coming to court with little support or advocacy.
“They were just being shunted off to prison or periodic detention and it seemed when I spoke to them, it was just going straight over their heads.”
Dame Coral called Pita Sharples at the nearby Hoani Waititi Marae.
The phone call was the first step in hammering out an alternative marae-based justice programme that connected defendants to tikanga and lessons in te reo Māori and challenged them to improve themselves.
From there, Dame Carrol was asked to fill in on the bench of the Employment Court. She was the first woman to be appointed to the role.
“I wasn’t drawn [into it], I was kidnapped … it was a gradual, gentle kidnapping into the world which I was very happy to do.”
She went on to sit on an internal UN tribunal that heard disputes raised by the organisation’s staff of approximately 60,000.
The job took her to Geneva, New York and Nairobi while still being able to live in New Zealand.
After seven years, Dame Coral thought she was retiring.
“I didn’t want to become stale … and that’s when my real work started.”
She was appointed a commissioner of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Abuse in Care and was made chair when Sir Anand Satyanand resigned.
Dame Coral Shaw and others at the unveiling of Validation Park. RNZ / Nate McKinnon
The inquiry heard hundreds of submissions from survivors of physical and sexual abuse in state and religious organisations.
“Many tears were shed, both by the commissioners and by the people, but what really overwhelmed that pain was the privilege of hearing … my wonderment at their courage and determination to finally be heard.”
She said although it was exhausting, it was worth it as the commission built a picture. That picture showed systemic failings of state and religious institutions to protect young people between 1950 and 1999.
“Every time I heard somebody I was thinking ‘what was I doing at that time? Where was I living?’ I was living a comfortable, loving, protected, and fulfilling life with lots of potential…
“And yet just down the road – sometimes in my school or in my church or in my community – there were people who were not having this life that I was having. And in fact they were being subjected to cruelty, violence, degradation, racism and all the rest.”
She said that revelation was a source of great shame.
Those experiences, were born out of post-war New Zealand where if a child was not being cared for at home, the church or state would step in.
“So the context was a rather narrow society that was trying its best to look after children but which was failing terribly because the great lesson was the state was no parent, the state should never be the parent to children.”
The inquiry found that at least 200,000 had been abused and many more neglected in state and religious institutions. It found that both state and faith-based institutions had failed to respond to abuse.
The commission called for widespread law reform and an overhaul of institutions.
A year and-a-half on, Dame Coral said despite some positive changes, many of the same problems remained.
“If you go into the records of the Independent Children’s Monitor, the rates of abuse remain high, that the proportion of Māori children who are still ‘in care’, still being abused and are still in that pipeline of poverty, disentitlement, ‘care’ and into the prison system is still happening,” Dame Coral said.
The inquiry’s report resulted in a formal apology from Prime Minister Christopher Luxon in which he told survivors a new independent redress scheme would be created and promised the government would “do the right thing by you”.
However, there was no such scheme in the 2025 budget. Instead, the government increased redress payments for survivors by about $10,000 bringing the average to $30,000 – about a third of what survivors in Australia got.
Dame Coral said the report was “a pathway of hope” for survivors.
“We’ve got to keep momentum on changing the system that led to the abuse in the first place.”
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Source: Radio New Zealand
Erin and her horse Scooter. Supplied
Auckland rider Erin Swainston knew she had to let go of the reins, or be crushed by her beloved horse when it lost its footing.
“Waves were kind of throwing us around, Scooter was thrashing and trying to get his feet up underneath him and started rolling a bit.”
All she could see after the sudden fall into the surf, and her horse Scooter’s desperate efforts to right himself, was his belly and feet.
“And I was like, oh my goodness, if I don’t let him go he won’t be able to really get up on his own and he could potentially end up rolling onto me,” she told RNZ.
“So I needed to let him go, so then I did.”
Swainston and Scooter were with a friend and her own horse on Auckland’s Muriwai Beach on Sunday for what would be the start of a 24-hour ordeal.
It would involve hundreds of people online and on the ground, frantically spreading the word and searching the beach and forest.
The weather was good, “a lovely day”, and Swainston had guided Scooter into the waves so he could cool down his legs.
“And then all of a sudden this massive rogue wave came out and hit us,” Swainston said.
They tried to get out as quickly as they could but the large wave had spooked 14-year-old Scooter and the pair crashed into water.
The waves, eventually, pushed Swainston away from the horse she’s had for seven years – the horse she calls her boy.
He took off on his own in fright.
Beloved horse Scooter before he went missing. Supplied
“Honestly it was the scariest thing, I felt my panic just rising and rising and rising… he was just so panicked that he just started to run around and then he started heading towards the dunes, and I was like ‘oh God, oh God, oh God… and then he just, he eventually found himself on the other side of the dunes.”
Swainston’s friend went after him and followed Scooter’s tracks for as long as she could, but to no avail.
Scooter was gone, and Swainston did not know if they would ever be reunited.
What began as a few desperate messages snowballed into a groundswell of support and help, her lost horse took over social media.
Swainston, who is president of the Massey Pony Club, messaged close friends and family asking if they could come to help look for him.
She put a message into the club committee’s online chat, and club members soon joined the hunt.
“And then posts were starting to go up as well on social media, like my friends were posting on social media and they started going into community groups and things like that as well, so then it just started really growing and growing and growing,” Swainston said.
She was blown away by the response, soon there was a Facebook group created to help find Scooter with about 200 members with many joining the search on the ground.
About 150 were searching on Muriwai Beach and combing nearby Woodhill Forest.
Posts with photos of Scooter, pleading for any sightings, kept popping up on social media.
“Honestly, how the community banded together, like the horsey world, the horsey community and the locals and non-locals and the iwi, and everybody that came together and also, like, how much awareness everybody had about it, everyone throughout the country knew about it and people from Aussie and the UK knew about it,” Swainston said.
“It was so scary because we went for over 24 hours without spottings, the only thing we really found was fresh horse poo on the ground which, we’re like, ‘oh this is a good sign’, but there was no sightings for hours.
“And so I was starting to really lose hope, this is such a massive area, there’s so many places he could have gone,” Swainston said.
“But then, I think it was really pure luck and just a miracle really, I was trying to find him, a needle in a haystack.”
Two women among those looking for Scooter in Woodhill Forest, Liz and Rachel, found him down one of its trails in some undergrowth, and he came rushing down a path.
Rachel and Liz, the women who found Scooter, leading him out. Supplied
It was only about 20 minutes from an equestrian park but roughly two hours or so from where this story started at Muriwai Beach, Swainston estimated.
“Once they’re scared they go into full flight mode and they just run blind for hours so then once he kind of regained a little bit of sense he would have been just really lost and turned around, so he wouldn’t have known how to get back, so he just kind of kept wandering around really.”
The two women led Scooter out, and a call was made to Swainston’s mother.
Swainston, still desperately searching for him herself, was in the forest on an e-bike at the time.
“So then my mum just told me ‘he’s back, they’ve got him’, and honestly we both started bursting into tears when we found out that news.”
Swainston called local iwi who picked her up and drove her and her friends through the forest.
“And once I got there, I started crying again, put the halter on him and walked him back,” she said.
“Every horse owner knows it, it’s literally the worst nightmare that you could ever be in.”
Swainston said riders and their horses had a special bond and connection, and that they were loved like children.
“He’s like my heart horse, when I lost him it was just the most devastating thing ever and then going the whole 24 hours with no sightings, it was really hard to kind of keep hold of hope and stay strong, and then I had maybe two hours sleep that night, it was exhausting.”
Scooter after he was safely back and reunited. Supplied
But what Swainston called a nightmare was now over.
Scooter had been checked by a vet and was in good condition with no cuts, no scrapes and no dehydration, despite his ordeal.
“He’s great, he was super happy in his paddock grazing with his friends, he gave me a little neigh when I walked up to him and then got him out.”
He has been pampered with a massage rug back at the pony club.
Swainston said she and Scooter would probably not venture into waves again.
“We might just stick to the estuary or the lakes.”
She wanted to thank the hundreds of people who spread the word or tried to find him, saying she and her mother could not thank them enough.
“The kindness, time and care shown going above and beyond in rain and shine meant more to us than we could ever explain,” she said.
“We are incredibly grateful.”
She also said the sharing of posts and messages being sent helped them hold onto hope when it felt impossible to do so.
“From the bottom of our hearts, thank you again.”
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Professor Graham Le Gros, Coral Shaw, Dorothy Spotswood and Scott Dixon are four of the seven being named Dames and Knights. RNZ
Seven new Knights and Dames have been named on the New Year Honours list.
They include Dames Helen Danesh-Meyer, Carol Shaw and Dorothy Spotswood and Sirs Scott Dixon, Rod Drury, Graham Le Gros and Chris Parkin.
They were among 177 people who received recognition in the honours list this year.
Professor Helen Danesh-Meyer became a Dame Companion to the New Zealand Order of Merit for her services to opthalmology , with Prime Minister Christopher Luxon noting she was ranked among the top ten glaucoma specialists in the world this year.
Professor and surgeon Helen Danesh-Meyer was now a Dame. (File photo) Supplied
“Her contribution is significant globally,” Luxon said.
Dame Carol Shaw was recognised for her services to public service, the judiciary and the community. She chaired the Royal Commission of Inquiry into historical abuse in state care and in the care of faith-based institutions from 2019 to 2024.
She had been involved with voluntary initiatives including prisoner rehabilitation, services to seniors, marae based and local community services and the Citizens Advice Bureau.
“Dame Coral’s work on the Royal Commission of Inquiry was the culmination of a lifetime of service to the judiciary and the community. She has chaired sector reviews of the Human Rights Commission and Fire and Emergency New Zealand and has served as a judge on the District Court, Employment Court and United Nations Disputes Tribunal,” Luxon said.
Coral Shaw at a hearing of the Royal Commission into Abuse in Care inquiry. (File photo) RNZ / Patrice Allen
Dame Dorothy Spotswood was recognised for services to philanthropy and together with her partner, Sir Mark Dunajtschik, had contributed to causes and charities for more than 50 years.
The couple contributed $53m to build the Wellington’s Children’s Hospital and a further $10m for the Dorothy Spotswood Charity Hospital.
Sir Scott Dixon, one of New Zealand’s most successful drivers, was recognised for services to motorsport. He was inducted into the Motorsports Hall of Fame in the US in 2024 and outside of racing regularly supported various charities.
“Sir Scott is a hero to young New Zealand motorsport fans and his work fundraising for children’s charities is invaluable,” Luxon said.
Scott Dixon celebrating his Indycar win in Detroit. (File photo) Indycar
Sir Rod Drury, the founder of global small business accounting platform, Xero, was recognised for services to business, the technology industry and philanthropy.
Luxon said he was a “titan” of New Zealand business and through Xero, he had generated thousands of jobs and supported more than four million customers worldwide.
“The company were pioneers in mental health and diversity. Since 2020 he has spearheaded public good infrastructure and philanthropic projects. His entrepreneurial career has seen New Zealand benefit in the fields of education, the environment, and renewable energy.”
Founder of Xero Rod Drury. (File photo) RNZ / Diego Opatowski
Professor Graham Le Gros, was named a Sir for his services to medical science. He had been director of the Malaghan Institute of Medical Research from 1994 until 2024.
The institute developed major new programmes in cancer immunotherapy, vaccine development, inflammatory disease and RNA technologies.
Luxon said he had helped shape a generation of scientific leadership in New Zealand.
Sir Chris Parkin was recognised for his services to philanthropy and the arts. He established the Parkin Drawing Prize which was an art competition which had awarded more than $30,000 in prize money to mostly emerging artists and was the principal financial supporter of the arts funding website Boosted which had raised $16m to fund more than 2000 projects.
Chris Parkin was now a Sir due to his services to philanthropy and the arts. (File photo) Photography By Woolf
“To Dame Helen, Dame Coral and Dame Dorothy – and to Sir Scott, Sir Rod, Sir Graham and Sir Chris, thank you for your dedication, hard work, and service to New Zealand,” Luxon said.
“I would like to congratulate all 177 recipients of this year’s New Year honours and on behalf of the thousands of people who have benefited from your efforts, please accept my personal thanks.”
Of the 177 recipients this year, 55 percent of them were men and 45 percent were women.
The largest area of contribution was community, voluntary and local services.
Most of the recipients were from Auckland (43 percent) and some of the prominent names included racer Scott Dixon (KNZM), women’s health academic Professor Bev Lawton (CNZM), investigative journalist Donna Chisholm (MNZM), former All Black Eroni Clarke (MNZM), former Black Caps batter Martin Guptill (MNZM) and Commodore Andrew Gilchrist Brown (DSD) who led the recovery operation of the wreck of the Manawanui.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Festival goers at Rhythm and Vines are off to a soggy start after the region was wiped with heavy rain. Lucy Parkinson
Much of the country is in for another rainy day on Wednesday, after severe wind and rain battered the North Island and upper South Island.
Tuesday’s wild weather downed trees and powerlines, causing road closures and widespread power cuts.
MetService meteorologist Alec Holden said a calmer day was in store, but showers were still forecast for both islands.
“It does look like they could be quite heavy in localised areas all the way up from Northland in a seatbelt down through the spine of the North Island all the way to the bottom of the North Island.”
A heavy rain warning is in place for the ranges of Tasman District west of Motueka from 6am Wednesday, heading into Thursday. Thunderstorms are also possible.
MetService predicted 100-130 mm of rain for the region, with peak rates of 10-25 mm/h on Wednesday morning, and again from Wednesday night.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Supplied/ Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet
Here is the full list of everyone receiving a 2026 New Year Honour:
DANESH-MEYER, Professor Helen Victoria, CNZM – for services to ophthalmology
SHAW, Coral May – for services to public service, the judiciary and the community
SPOTSWOOD, Dorothy Myrtle – for services to philanthropy
DIXON, Scott Ronald Glyndwr, CNZM – for services to motorsport
DRURY, Rodney Kenneth (Rod) – for services to business, the technology industry and philanthropy
LE GROS, Professor Graham Stephen, CNZM – for services to medical science
PARKIN, Christopher Wilton (Chris), CNZM – for services to philanthropy and the arts
BARCLAY, Gregor John (Greg) – for services to sports governance
BATEUP, Neil Frank, ONZM – for services to the rural sector
COMER, Leith Pirika, QSO – for services to Māori, governance and education
DE VILLIERS, Professor Charl Johannes – for services to accountancy
HAYWARD, Dr Bruce William, MNZM – for services to geology, particularly micropaleontology
LAWTON, Professor Beverley-Anne (Bev), ONZM – for services to women’s health
MARTIN, Distinguished Professor Gaven John – for services to mathematics and education
MOUGHAN, Distinguished Professor Paul James – for services to science
QUINN, Anthony Zan (Tony) – for services to motorsport and the community
ROA, Professor Thomas Charles (Tom), JP – for services to Māori language and education
TAULELEI, Rachel Emere, MNZM – for services to business, Māori and governance
TROTT, Donald Stanley Mackintosh, ONZM, JP – for services to opera
ALLAN, Reverend Dr Patricia Ann – for services to survivors of abuse
CARR, Graham – for services to the deer industry and the community
CORNER, Matthew David (David) – for services to people with intellectual and learning disabilities
COWAN, Christina (Chrissie) – for services to Māori, particularly blind and low vision people
DAVIES, Brian Rex – for services to motorsport
DIXON, Rodney Phillip Mathew (Rod) – for services to athletics
DOWNING, Lloyd Walker – for services to agriculture and governance
EGAN, Anthony Richard (Tony) – for services to the agricultural industry and the community
ESPINER, Deborah Ann – for services to people with disabilities and education
GARDINER, Ian Donald – for services to the communications industry and mountain safety
GERMANN, Stewart Lloyd – for services to franchise law
GREENWOOD, Neville Charles – for services to the sheep industry
HAMILTON, Judith Helen – for services to rowing
HARMAN, Richard Michael Arthur – for services to journalism and broadcasting
HART, Julie Anne – for services to women and victims of family violence
HARTNETT, Frances Margaret (Fran) – for services to people with disabilities
HAZLEHURST, Sandra Glenis – for services to local government
HETARAKA, Te Warihi Kokowai – for services to Māori and art
HODDER, Jack Edward, KC – for services to the law
HOOPER, Shirley Gail – for services to netball and artistic swimming
HOTERENE, Waihoroi Paraone (Waihoroi Shortland) – for services to Māori and Māori language education
LLOYD, Lynley Elizabeth (Lyn) – for services to renal nutrition
MACFARLANE, Andrew Webster (Andy) – for services to the deer industry
MACLEOD, Professor Roderick Duncan (Rod), MNZM – for services to palliative care
MILLER, James Bruce – for services to corporate governance
MOLLER, Lorraine Mary, MBE – for services to athletics
MUELLER, Professor Dr Jens Helmut Friedrich, MNZM – for services to education
PORTER, Suzanne Jane – for services to the arts and event management
POTTER, Iain George – for services to sport and health
POWELL, Tenby George Bolland, ED – for services to business, governance and humanitarian aid
RITCHIE, Karen (Karen née Campbell) – for services to people with HIV/AIDS and Rainbow communities
ROBINSON, Cecilia Charlotte Louise – for services to business and women
SAEID, Dr Mohammad Arif (Arif) – for services to refugees and youth
SMITH, Valerie Christine (Val) – for services to outdoor bowls
WRIGHT, Paul Bertram – for services to the real estate industry and philanthropy
BURGESS, Kevin John – for services to governance, the community and sport
CHISHOLM, Donna Elise – for services to journalism
CLARKE, Eroni – for services to the Pacific community and rugby
CULLEN, Peter John – for services to law, governance and youth
DIXON, Rosemary Helen – for services to schools debating
DRUMMOND, Roger Bruce Douglas – for services to rugby and Māori
DYNES, Dr Robyn Ann – for services to agricultural science
EADE, Dr Lorraine Shirley (Lorr) – for services to Māori, governance and the community
EDGAR, Judene Louise, JP – for services to governance, local government and the community
EYNON-RICHARDS, Jane Frances, JP – for services to the community
FARRAR, Jade Carlo – for services to people with disabilities and the Pacific community
FORRESTER, Beverley Riverina – for services to the wool and fashion industries
FRASER, Deborah Kaye (Deb Fraser-Komene) – for services to mental health and youth
GEDDES, Donald George (Don) – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand, Land Search and Rescue and the community
GILLIES, Malcolm John – for services to business
GUPTILL, Martin James – for services to cricket
HADLEE, Martin John – for services to the community
HARRINGTON, Janine Michelle – for services to education
HARRISON, David John – for services to the insurance industry and the community
HOBBS, John Gordon (Jack) – for services to horticulture
HOBBS, Susan (Sue) – for services to people with disabilities
HOPE, Gerald Anthony – for services to local government, business and the community
JOHANSEN, Kāren Eirene, JP – for services to education and human rights
KENNETT, Richard William, JP – for services to conservation and Search and Rescue
KERR, Jillian Anne (Jill) – for services to choral music and music education
KING, Dr Murray Alexander – for services to transport, logistics and railway heritage
LIMACHER, Mark Henri – for services as a restaurateur and to the hospitality industry
MAFILE’O, Professor Tracie Ailong – for services to Pacific and tertiary education
MASKELL, Terence Ronald – for services to choral music
MCARTHUR, Nichola Rosemary (Nicky) – for services to conservation and the community
MCKEE, Malcolm Ian – for services to sport
MCMILLAN, Dawn Mary – for services to children’s literature
MILFORD, Katharine Eleanor (Kate) – for services to people with aphasia
NAHU, Jennifer Louise (Jenny) – for services to rugby league
NAPIER, Vivien Lewanna (Viv), JP – for services to local government and the community
NEVILLE, Dr Stephen John – for services to gerontology research and seniors
NIELSEN, Kevin – for services to the community and people with disabilities
OLIVER, Dr Caroline Ann – for services to cancer research and the community
PARATA, Hori Te Moanaroa – for services to conservation and Māori
PASLEY, Alexandra Anne (Sandy) – for services to education
PLUCK, David Stephen – for services to education
POKAIA, Andrew Ruawhitu (Pāpā Ruawhitu) – for services to Māori and education
POOLE, Gaye Annette – for services to the performing arts and education
POULTER, Ian Douglas – for services to education
POWAR, Ravinder Singh, JP – for services to ethnic communities
ROBINSON, John Dempster – for services to orienteering
ROBINSON, Valerie Jean – for services to orienteering
ROUGHAN, John Francis – for services to journalism and the community
SAEID, Dr Fahima – for services to refugees
SHALDERS, Bruce Douglas – for services to railway heritage
SMITH, Leighton Irwin – for services to broadcasting
SMITH, Mokafetu (Matafetu) – for services to Pacific art
STIRLING, Arihia Amiria, QSM, JP – for services to education and Māori
STOCKLEY, Professor Andrew Peter – for services to schools debating
TAN, Dr Audrey Melanie – for services to mathematics education
THOMPSON, Gail Henrietta Maria – for services to Māori and conservation
TUTEAO, Helena Audrey – for services to people with disabilities and Māori
WATTS, Senior Constable Grant William – for services to the New Zealand Police and youth
WELCH, William Ian (Ian) – for services to rail heritage
WHITING, Elizabeth Robyn – for services to costume design
WHITTLE, Gary Selwyn – for services to rugby league
WICKENS, Sarah Jane – for services to business
ZINTL, Shirley Jane (Jane) – for services to youth
HARAWIRA, Mark Joseph (Joe) – for services to Māori education, arts and conservation
NICKELS, Kerry Ann – for services to the Red Cross
ANGLAND, Carol – for services to the community and theatre
BIGHAM, Bonita Joanne – for services to local government and Māori
BRENSSELL, Douglas James – for services to the community
BRUCE, Robyn Ann – for services to youth and sport
BURGESS, John Randall (JR) – for services to the community
BURGESS, Marin – for services to heritage preservation and education
CALDWELL, Emily Myra (Myra) – for services to the community and music
CARR, Marjorie Eleanor – for services to netball and the community
CLAUSEN, Lloyd Bertram, MStJ – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the community
COOKE, Edwin Frederick Ruthven (Ed) – for services to music
COOKE, Juliet Anne – for services to music
COOPER, Helen Rose – for services to the community
CRAIG, Richard John – for services to the Coastguard
DINNINGTON, Anneke Jacoba – for services to seniors and the community
DRAKE, David Alyn – for services to the community
EADEN, John Matthew – for services to the arts
ELLIOT, Graeme Leslie – for services to the community and outdoor recreation
ELLIS, Marion Kennedy – for services to hockey
FLETCHER, Elizabeth Mary (Libby) – for services to the community, particularly wastewater advocacy
FULLER, William Robert, JP – for services to the community
GAMBITSIS, Leonidas Angelos (Leo) – for services to the Greek community
GOUDIE, Trevor James – for services to theatre and the community
GRANTHAM, Jocelyn Mary – for services to education and the community
GUNDRY, Sheridan Isobel Patrice – for services to historical research and heritage preservation
HARRIS, Paul David, JP – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the community
HENRY, Elizabeth Janet (Liz) – for services to the community and sport
JURLINA, David John – for services to rugby and the community
JURLINA, Nada Linda – for services to rugby and the community
KAUR, Gurpreet – for services to the Indian community
KNOWLES, Barbara Joy, JP – for services to the community and to Members of Parliament
MAUNDER, Peter Alan – for services to athletics
MAUNDER, Sylvia Mary Joyce – for services to athletics
MILLS, Laurie Owen – for services to theatre
MISTRY, Mohan Durlabh – for services to the Indian community
MYER, Gordon Leonard, JP – for services to the community
NICHOLAS, Aere Anne, JP – for services to the community
O’ROURKE, Patrick Gerard – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the community
PINFOLD, Dr Tania Anne – for services to youth health
POLIMA, Enatuleni Ikitoa (Ena) – for services to the Niuean community
ROBERTSON, Jacqueline (Jackie) – for services to science education
SCOTT, Stanley Donald (Don) – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and civil defence
SHARP, Christopher (Chris) – for services to Search and Rescue and outdoor recreation
SHAW, Ruth Philliss – for services to conservation
SINCLAIR, Dr Leonie Kaye – for services to health
SINGH, Harjinder (Harjinder Singh Basiala), JP – for services to the Punjabi community
SMITH, Brian Douglas – for services to rowing
TALAMAIVAO, Cheryl (Sailauama Cheryl), JP – for services to the Pacific community and education
TOLEAFOA, The Reverend Wayne Saunoa Moegagogo, JP – for services to Pacific communities
TOMS, Paul Gregory (Tomsie) – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and football
TROW, Russel Walter – for services to wildlife conservation
TROW, Teresa Anne (Tee) – for services to wildlife conservation
USHER, Jonathan – for services to the community and entertainment
VAN DE RHEEDE, Norma-Jean, JP – for services to the community
WATTS, Ian Arthur – for services to Land Search and Rescue
WHEELER, Henry Joseph – for services to Fire and Emergency New Zealand and the community
WHYTE, Delano Shane De Graffe (Del) – for services to sport and the community
WILSON, Isabella (Ella) – for services to the community and theatre
BROWN, Commodore Andrew Gilchrist – for services to the New Zealand Defence Force
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Think about how a great album is made, and it’s hard to escape the image of musicians notching up hundreds of hours of studio time crafting their masterwork, or engineers hunched over mixing boards, deliberating over every beat and chord.
Some albums are made that way, but it isn’t the only way. The Only Game In Town by The Warratahs is one that could hardly have come together more quickly or simply.
What’s interesting about that The Warratahs’ debut album is that it wasn’t originally intended to be an album at all.
Essential New Zealand AlbumsSeason 5 / Episode 7
The original Warratahs line-up. Left to right: John Donoghue, Wayne Mason, Barry Saunders (seated), Marty Jorgensen, Nik Brown.
Trevor Reekie Collection
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Source: Radio New Zealand
The invasive gold clams. Supplied / MPI
Te Arawa Lakes Trust and local councils are banding together in the battle against invasive gold clams.
The trust is worried about the lakes in its area and the boaties coming to use them.
A hui at Lake Ōkāreka has resolved to stand up volunteers at boat ramps at several lakes to guide and greet visitors and help make sure boaties are playing their part.
The volunteers will not, the trust says, be restricting access.
“We’re not saying saying to anybody, look, you can’t come onto the lakes,” Te Arawa Lakes Trust chairperson said.
He said volunteers would help ask if boats were clean and if they had been on the Waikato River.
That’s where there is now a large stretch of the clams, after they were first found in May 2023 at Lake Karāpiro.
They have since been found elsewhere – in November at Lake Rotomanu in New Plymouth, which was then drained.
The find prompted a warning for boaties on the Whanganui River.
Adam Hartland has written for The Conversation about why the clams pose such a danger.
It’s all hugely concerning for Te Arawa Lakes Trust which oversees 14 lakes in the Rotorua area.
“Given the significant number of boats that come into our area we have decided to be proactive to prevent any carriage of this invasive species into our lakes, because the impact is quite significant,” Haumaha said.
Lake Ōkāreka, where the hui was held, has a number of boats taking to it for wakeboarding, water-skiing and other recreation activities, he said.
The meeting was between the Trust, Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Rotorua Lakes Council with government minister Todd McClay also in attendance.
The councils will be pitching in, Haumaha said.
“So we decided that, you know, this is about a community action… this is about the future of our lakes and protection of our waterways.”
On the lake having to be drained in New Plymouth, “God forbid we ever have to do that here in Rotorua,” he said.
Volunteers will be put at boat ramps to tell people of the importance of checking their boats and cleaning and drying them before coming onto the water.
Boaties will also be asked if they have been on Waikato River.
“We’re not saying to anybody, look you can’t come onto the lakes,” he said.
Haumaha said the area’s lakes were pristine and needed to be safeguarded for future generations.
He also urged arriving boaties to be kind to volunteers.
“People have just come out of the woodwork ready to step up, to make sure that they can stand alongside everyone for the protection of our lakes over the Summer period.”
A roster will be drawn up for volunteers.
He said 11 lakes that are used by boaties have been identified, with about 29 boat ramps.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
The invasive gold clams. Supplied / MPI
Te Arawa Lakes Trust and local councils are banding together in the battle against invasive gold clams.
The trust is worried about the lakes in its area and the boaties coming to use them.
A hui at Lake Ōkāreka has resolved to stand up volunteers at boat ramps at several lakes to guide and greet visitors and help make sure boaties are playing their part.
The volunteers will not, the trust says, be restricting access.
“We’re not saying saying to anybody, look, you can’t come onto the lakes,” Te Arawa Lakes Trust chairperson said.
He said volunteers would help ask if boats were clean and if they had been on the Waikato River.
That’s where there is now a large stretch of the clams, after they were first found in May 2023 at Lake Karāpiro.
They have since been found elsewhere – in November at Lake Rotomanu in New Plymouth, which was then drained.
The find prompted a warning for boaties on the Whanganui River.
Adam Hartland has written for The Conversation about why the clams pose such a danger.
It’s all hugely concerning for Te Arawa Lakes Trust which oversees 14 lakes in the Rotorua area.
“Given the significant number of boats that come into our area we have decided to be proactive to prevent any carriage of this invasive species into our lakes, because the impact is quite significant,” Haumaha said.
Lake Ōkāreka, where the hui was held, has a number of boats taking to it for wakeboarding, water-skiing and other recreation activities, he said.
The meeting was between the Trust, Bay of Plenty Regional Council, Rotorua Lakes Council with government minister Todd McClay also in attendance.
The councils will be pitching in, Haumaha said.
“So we decided that, you know, this is about a community action… this is about the future of our lakes and protection of our waterways.”
On the lake having to be drained in New Plymouth, “God forbid we ever have to do that here in Rotorua,” he said.
Volunteers will be put at boat ramps to tell people of the importance of checking their boats and cleaning and drying them before coming onto the water.
Boaties will also be asked if they have been on Waikato River.
“We’re not saying to anybody, look you can’t come onto the lakes,” he said.
Haumaha said the area’s lakes were pristine and needed to be safeguarded for future generations.
He also urged arriving boaties to be kind to volunteers.
“People have just come out of the woodwork ready to step up, to make sure that they can stand alongside everyone for the protection of our lakes over the Summer period.”
A roster will be drawn up for volunteers.
He said 11 lakes that are used by boaties have been identified, with about 29 boat ramps.
Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Source: Radio New Zealand
Kitchen Things went into receivership mid-year. Google Maps
It’s been another tough year financially for many New Zealand households and businesses.
While some commentators said in 2024 that businesses needed to focus on the mantra “survive til 2025”, for some it was a case of battling to survive through the year, too.
Some high-profile names didn’t make it.
Here are 10 that did not see out the year, in no particular order.
Grab One left a lot of voucher-holders worried when it went into liquidation in October, owning more than $16.5 million.
GrabOne was launched in 2010 and offered discounts on goods and services for local businesses. It was sold to Global Marketplace New Zealand by former owner NZME in 2021, for $17.5m.
But marketing expert Bodo Lang, of Massey University, told RNZ that GrabOne’s problem was that it failed to provide value to its target market.
“In other words, its vouchers, which were once upon a time exciting, had lost their appeal.
“A closely related second reason for GrabOne’s liquidation is that it suffered from declining top of mind brand awareness. While GrabOne was on everybody’s mind and in every dinner conversation some years ago, a lack of brand investment meant that the brand was slowly buried amongst advertising by other brands.”
Even suppliers of bougie kitchen supplies couldn’t make it through the downturn unscathed.
Kitchen Things went into receivership in August, citing weak consumer demand and tough competition.
Kitchen Things was founded in 1986 and dealt in high end international appliance brands including Smeg, Miele, Asko, and Bosch.
The Hamilton shop was not affected because it was run by an independent franchisee.
Smiths City was placed into voluntary administration in September, sending shockwaves through Christchurch in particular.
The company, which was founded in 1918, has nine stores across the country and an online shop.
Administrators BDO said the company had faced increasing financial pressures amid a challenging economic environment.
Queen St landmark Smith & Caughey closed its doors for the last time on July 31, after almost 150 years.
It had already closed its Newmarket branch in 2024 and reduced the inner-city shop to one floor.
The retailer cited increased competition from new shopping malls, continued economic uncertainty and low consumer confidence and spending power as problems that led to the closure.
It also said Queen St foot traffic had decline and parking was more expensive for shoppers.
Wellington brewery Fortune Favours announced in August that it would close its Wellington bar by the end of the month.
The company said the cost of living crisis had become too difficult to navigate.
Garage Project took over the site.
NZSale closed to New Zealand orders at the end of November. The Australian business, OzSale, is set to close in the new year.
Timeless Events, the company behind the Juicy Fest music festival, was placed into voluntary liquidation in March.
Juicy Fest was cancelled in New Zealand this year after it was declined a liquor licence in Auckland.
Millennials across the country mourned the end of dewberry-scented The Body Shop when it went into liquidation in April.
All of the New Zealand shops closed and 70 jobs were lost.
The Body Shop was founded in the UK in 1976 by Dame Anita Roddick, but problems with the UK business spelled the end locally, too.
It went into liquidation with millions of dollars in liabilities.
In November, it was announced that the brand had a new franchise owner and a shop in Richmond, near Nelson.
School lunch provider Libelle Group went into liquidation in March.
It had been contracted to Compass to supply lunches for the beleagured scheme.
DFS, in Auckland and Queenstown, closed at the end of September.
The downtown Auckland shop, which stocked high end brands such as Armani and Burberry, had been open for decades.
It went through a revamp in 2018.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
There were a plethora of bizarre, quirky, and eye popping moments in the world of sport in 2025. Photosport
What happened in the unpredictable world of sport in 2025? Jonty Dine takes a look back.
Whistling Webby
Sick of a lack of accountability for referees, Warriors coach Andrew Webster was not going to tolerate the same from Kiwi journalists, blowing his whistle every time a ‘shit’ question was asked at this memorable press conference.
Reece Walsh drinks toilet water
There was no evidence to support his claim of toilet water being a performance enhancer, but based on Walsh’s performance in the NRL final, who would argue the point?
Marlborough Boys’ cheeky try
Whether they called it innovation, or against the spirit of the game, this audacious MBC try had people across the country talking and certainly would have made Rassie Erasmus proud.
Connor Zilisch breaks collarbone celebrating
Hard to say whether the pain from the break or the embarrassment was worse for the NASCAR driver.
Alan Bunting serenades crowd with ‘Levitating’
Bunts came in clutch with this crowd pleaser at a Black Ferns farewell at Manurewa Intermediate.
Raiders wrestling goes wrong
A bit of team bonding turned into a battle for alpha status in a Las Vegas hallway as Hudson Young and Morgan Smithies tussled into an elevator, forcing police to be called to deal with what was believed to be a dangerous weapon, but was later revealed as an inflatable baseball bat.
Phone falls out of cricketers pocket
When the screen addiction is very real, Lancashire’s Tom Bailey dropped his phone while running between the wickets during a match against Gloucestershire.
Rohit gets fat-shamed
A sure fire way to alienate yourself from the Indian public and tank re-election odds, politician Shama Mohamed decided to attack the nation’s cricket captain, calling Rohit Sharma “fat for a sportsman” and “unimpressive”.
Boisson gets smell-shamed
British tennis player Harriet Dart was forced to say sorry after commenting that her opponent, France’s Lois Boisson, “smells really bad.”
Serena’s Superbowl crip walk
As if we couldn’t love the tennis superstar any more, she went and threw shade at Drake in the most epic way possible as well as the stuffy elitists who derided her for performing the Compton-born dance move at Wimbledon.
Dog eats passport
Leroy Carter’s canine was clearly not too chuffed with his owner’s All Black call-up, all while validating generations of student excuses.
Woakes bats in a sling
A defiant act of bravery, England bowler Chris Woakes, who had dislocated his shoulder earlier, strode onto the Oval with his left arm strapped under his jersey and a bat in his right hand in a heroic bid to save the test against India.
Hangman’s backyard scraps
Beloved UFC veteran Dan Hooker kept himself busy while sidelined with a hand injury as he launched his one minute scraps Youtube series hosted in his Auckland backyard. The events attracted international headlines, police attention, and heavy criticism from boxing purists.
Gallen no-shows press conference
Billed as the biggest grudge match in Australasia since Cameron vs Tua, former NRL enforcer Paul Gallen continued the mind games when he skipped the press conference with Sonny Bill Williams, further fuelling the flames.
Ioane claps back
The All Blacks answer to Regina George, Reiko Ioane was a symphony of sass this season, putting fans firmly in their place in response to criticism over his performances.
Cow bells banned
Chiefs supporters were unceremoniously silenced at the Super Rugby final in Christchurch, unable to bring their primary weapon, a blunted Chiefs side was bested and the Crusaders empire returned.
Penrith trainer cuts off conversion
In a pathetic display of poor sportsmanship, Panthers trainer Corey Bocking ran in front of Jayden Campbell as he was about to take a kick at goal, the club being slapped with a $50,000 for the childish act.
No shirt, no play
Liverpool’s Hugo Ekitike was shown red after scoring the winner against Southampton for removing his shirt in celebration. If only the same rule applied to Phoenix fans at the Cake Tin.
Bringing back the bite
Paying homage to some of her male counterparts of the past, French forward Axelle Berthoumieu took a bite of Ireland’s Aoife Wafer during the 2025 Women’s Rugby World Cup quarter-final, copping a 12 match ban.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
One person has died after a single vehicle crash on State Highway 2 near Tangoio.
The single vehicle crash was reported just after 11:40am today.
The sole occupant of the vehicle died at the scene.
It is the first death on New Zealand roads in this holiday period, although a man died in hospital yesterday after being struck by a car in Napier on Friday.
State Highway 2 was closed for several hours, but has now re-opened.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
The Port Hills fire on 14 February 2024. Stuff / Kai Schwoerer
Off the back of two devastating wildfires in Tongariro National Park, the country is facing another summer of increased fire risk. And while our wildfire history pales in comparison to our neighbours in Australia, New Zealand has had its share of raging hillside infurnos. Our reporter Kate Green takes a look back at some of the big ones, and a look forward at future risk.
It’s early February, 1946, and a long drought has left Taupō hot, and dry.
On one unassuming roadside, a dropped cigarette butt is about to light a fire that burns for days, fanned by a strong northerly wind, through more than 100,000 hectares of land, including 12,000 of pine forest.
“Where it is strongest, little can be done,” proclaimed one Newsreel special, which came out on 10 February. “Only rain can end it.”
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The blaze was extinguished in due course – although little information is available online about how this was done.
After destruction comes new life. Come autumn, an unexpected surge of life was observed when radiata pine sprung up in dense patches over burnt plantations; the fire had opened cones which were normally closed and liberated the seeds.
Victoria University ecologist Nicola Day said fire could often have unexpected or unseen effects, particularly for the soil below the fireground.
Her work has involved analysing firegrounds in Canada, and more recently, the sites of wildfires at Lake Pukaki and Lake Ōhau in 2020.
Media were allowed to look at the damage the week after the Lake Ōhau fire happened. RNZ / Nate McKinnon
Historically, Aotearoa had experienced a low fire-risk and its plants hadn’t evolved to survive them – but Day said they’d found a number of natives were hardier than they looked.
“If you go into a site like that it looks like everything’s dead,” she said. “But actually, the top of the plants have burnt off and died, but the inside of them, the part that controls the growth of them, has survived.”
Woody species were the slowest to recover, she said, but even they could regenerate and look alive again within a year or two.
The charred ground and trees after a fire at Lake Pukaki in the Mackenzie District on 31 August 2020. RNZ / Nathan Mckinnon
But in the meantime, it left a gap for exotic species – which tended to grow much faster than native species – to take over, making it even harder for natives to repopulate.
It happened at Lake Ōhau in 2020. The fire was lit by an electrical short circuit on a power pole, and it raged for nine days, destroying 48 homes and buildings and damaging 5043 hectares of land, making it one of New Zealand’s most significant wildfires in recent history.
Day said it took the landscape a couple of months to look green again, and for a while, the main species were exotic. But given another couple of years, nearly all the same species had returned, albeit in different quantities.
A helicopter drops water on a fire near Lake Pukaki on 31 August 2020. RNZ / Nathan Mckinnon
Let’s step back again in time: 25 November, 1955.
Over the next three days, a fire fanned by gale-force winds destroyed a third of the Balmoral State Forest in North Canterbury – 2400 hectares of timber.
News reports from the time described it as a “disastrous experience” for its owner, the Canterbury Forest Conservancy.
According to a booklet published by the New Zealand Forest Service in 2005 (The Balmoral Forest Fire of November 1955), the first signs of trouble came when residents heard “pistol-like cracks” and, “on investigation found the old mill burning fiercely” at about 10pm.
The only telephone nearby was in that very building, and very much on fire. So, one Mr Bailey drove six kilometres to the Forest Service headquarters to raise the alarm.
Burnt Corsican pine (Pinus laricio), Balmoral Forest, Canterbury, 1955. John Johns. Purchased 2003. © Crown Copyright. Licensed by Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI). CC BY 4.0. Te Papa (O.027913)
The booklet’s author John Ward, who worked as a forest ranger and a rural fire mediator, mused on this question in its final pages: “Would we have done better in 2005? I think yes, and no.”
“No amount of helicopters could have stopped that fire [in its early stages] but perhaps we could have made some real progress in aerial suppression when the wind dropped [on day three]. But would we have had enough men to patrol the Balmoral road and keep the main forest block safe?”
FENZ wildfire manager Tim Mitchell said while firefighting techniques had changed since those days, it still came down to “putting water on the red stuff”.
Water was still the most effective way of dousing fire, but now there were additives available that could made it more effective at cooling or stopping its spread.
Aircraft had also become more powerful, he said, meaning they could carry more water more safely.
Fire crews battling the Port Hills fire in Christchurch for a second day, on 15 February 2024. RNZ / Angus Dreaver
And a good thing, too – Mitchell said going by the data on large wildfires (that is, anything larger than 1000 hectares) the risk was increasing.
In the five decades from 1964 to 2015, there had been 19 such fires. In the past decade from 2015 to present day, there had already been 13.
“Still quite a reasonable number, but over a much smaller timeframe,” Mitchell said. “On that basis, yes, you could say that certainly the trend is suggesting that the number of large wildfires is increasing.”
It was likely caused by a number of factors, he said: warmer, dryer, windier conditions at times due to climate change, but also, “where we’re living, and how we’re living”.
New developments meant towns were spreading outwards into rural areas with lots of vegetation and slopes which increased fire risk, and increased recreation ability meant people were accessing off-grid areas more often.
Farm and forestry equipment, too, was more powerful and ran hotter, making it more likely to cause a spark or ignite dry grass.
In fact, Mitchell said the data showed humans caused 98 percent of New Zealand’s wildfires.
Hugh Wallace, team lead for fire and atmospheric sciences at the Bioeconomy Science Institute, said that fact was actually a bright spot for him – something we had the ability to change.
People watch Port Hills fires. Matthew Rankin
“Unlike North America, unlike Australia, we don’t really get those lightning-caused fires. So basically, where you get more people, you get more fires.”
Wallace said climate change was complicated, but some areas would definitely be in for more hot, dry, windy days, “which is the kind of conditions you do get fires on”.
“My gut instinct is that we probably would get more big fires.”
Firefighter Lieutenant Oli Barnfather of the New Zealand Army fights an underground hotspot on the Port Hills of Christchurch. Supplied / NZ Defence Force
The Port Hills have seen two major events in the past decade – the first, in February 2017, was when two separate blazes burned through more than 1600 hectares, claimed the life of a helicopter pilot, nine homes and damaged five others, and took 66 days to extinguish.
The cause of one of the fires was deemed to be an electrical fault, and the other remains unknown.
Seven years later almost to the day, the first calls came in just after 2pm on Valentines Day in 2024.
Firefighters continue their efforts as they work to dampen down remaining hot spots and create a buffer zone around the 24km perimeter fire ground in Christchurch’s Port Hills. CHRIS SKELTON
At its peak, more than 130 firefighters, 15 helicopters and two aircraft fought the blaze, as it burnt about 470 hectares across the Port Hills in three weeks.
One home – a tiny house built out of a shipping container – was destroyed.
Stats NZ expects the risk of fire to increase in many parts of the country due to higher temperatures, stronger winds, and less rainfall associated with climate change.
Using data from the last census in 2023, Stats NZ said there were 4683 wildfires per year on average in the five years to 30 June 2022.
Fire and Emergency NZ said the 2019/2020 and 1998/1999 years remained the worst on record for number and area burnt, respectively.
Mitchell said better awareness was needed of how individuals could prevent fires – even things as simple as choosing not to mow the lawns or burn rubbish on a hot day, and pouring water on ashes after a bonfire.
“It’s such an easy way to avoid a lot of the wildfires that we’re having,” he said.
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Festival goers at Rhythm and Vines are off to a soggy start after the region was wiped with heavy rain. Lucy Parkinson
After a soggy start, festivalgoers at Rhythm and Vines can expect to spend the next two days drying up in a gentle breeze.
The three-day music festival in Gisborne started yesterday as thousands turned up in gumboots and ponchos, with the city’s airport MetService station recording its wettest December day since 1937.
Lucy Parkinson – who is at the festival for the second time – was disappointed by the rain.
“I was originally put off going again but I thought that surely it wouldn’t happen for a second year in a row.”
She said she was worried about slipping risks after the heavy rainfall.
“The mud particularly around the toilets, water fountains and high traffic areas is really bad. With the weather last night, the staff were really good at making sure people were okay and preventing attendees from going up the hill during the massive downpour, but I think the grounds are in dire need of some wood chips! The grounds are a slip hazard and I’m worried that people will get injured.”
Festival goers at Rhythm and Vines are off to a soggy start after the region was wiped with heavy rain. Lucy Parkinson
After a muddy experience at the 2024 festival, Parkinson equipped herself this year with a gazebo, gumboots and a decent tent, but it still felt insufficient against the heavy rain.
And after two consecutive soggy festivals, Parkinson said organisers could have communicated better.
“I also think the organisers could’ve prepared festival goers better with more warnings about the weather, as there’s lots of young people who came unprepared.”
Festival director Kieran Spillane said they had alerted festivalgoers on the possible weather condition and asked people to dress to the conditions.
He said more wood chips were out on Tuesday morning, which will help reduce slipping risks.
Festival goers at Rhythm and Vines are off to a soggy start after the region was wiped with heavy rain. Lucy Parkinson
But with the weather set to clear, Spillane was confident the grounds will dry up in hours.
“The forecast for today is a very nice pleasant 25, 26 degrees with no rain for the remainder for the festival. We knew the rain was coming so we were prepared for it. The sites are actually holding up very, very well. It’s in as good condition as you would expect.”
The rain was good for business at The Warehouse.
Store manager Brett Mitchell said the festival season was their busiest time of the year.
“Yesterday was torrential rain, a lot of wet people coming in looking for ponchos, tents and towels. So it’s been really full on.”
Gisborne weather has finally cleared up after a soggy start for Rhythm and Vines festival-goers. Supplied / Brett Mitchell.
Mitchell said due to the often wet weather and big crowds, they hired a local cleaning company during the festival for extra support.
“Just to help us keep the store tidy and public toilets clean.”
The store begin preparing stock for the festival nine months ahead and based orders on what was popular the previous year, but rain gear had been a staple.
“We always factor in there’s gonna be rain, because it seems that every year there is at the moment.”
But with the weather clearing up, he was still optimistic.
“We definitely got lots of bodyboards and beach stuff so if the weather does come right, people can certain come in to get all all the stuff for going to the beach, sunblocks. We’ve got plenty of that ready to go as well.”
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Source: Radio New Zealand
The elderly hiker was in the Kauaeranga Valley when he got into trouble.. Supplied/DOC.
Police are looking to publicly recognise the family who helped save an elderly lost tramper who collapsed in the Coromandel.
At the end of his ordeal, the 80-year old was taken to Thames Hospital in a moderate condition.
But that rescue was hours in the making, with the mother and her two teenagers the first to reach him when bad weather meant rescuers – and helicopters – could not.
The man was wearing only a singlet and shorts when he got lost while hiking on Sunday. He had also run out of water.
But he did have a mobile phone he used to call family, who then alerted police.
While they were able to pinpoint his location, the weather thwarted efforts to get two helicopters to him.
Police did have another option – the family staying in Crosbies Hut about 100 metres away.
“That’s six hours he could have been by himself if these members of the public hadn’t stepped up and help us out,” Waikato West area commander Mike Henwood said.
“It’s already being looked at higher up in terms of giving them some public recognition in terms of an award for their bravery and their actions to save somebody else who definitely needed it,” he told RNZ.
After being tasked with finding the man, the woman and her teenage children formed a human circle around him to keep him warm.
It was not until first light that search and rescue teams could reach them on foot several hours later.
“Definitely lucky, really it comes down to the fact that he was in close vicinity to one of the DOC huts and there were people staying in there at this time of year,” Henwood said.
“You have to expect that with the temperature and injuries they’ve certainly saved him in some shape or form,” he told RNZ.
“I suppose I would just like to think that any member of the public, any Kiwi would try to step up if they could to help somebody that was in trouble.”
Technology and the mobile location capability used to help find exactly where the man was also key to the rescue.
“Once we were able to obtain that we were able to actually work out it was very close to the Crosbies Hut location,” Henwood said.
“We were able to check with DOC if anyone had made bookings for that hut, and luckily because it’s a busy time of year, there was.”
Henwood had not spoken to the man’s family directly, but was aware they were “a little bit disappointed he had gone off on this mission and got himself in trouble”.
“Which often happens but you can’t tell some people, they like to be adventurous,” Henwood said.
He said a lot of people took more risks than they should while trying to squeeze things in during a busy holiday time.
“Often the weather is not right for them to do it, it can change really fast, and if you have to cancel the trip or the plan that you’ve been waiting months or even a year for sometimes you just have to do it when the weather is how it is,” he said.
Having warm clothes, extra food, a charged mobile and a plan with friends or family were also important.
So too was picking a right activity for your physical ability, Henwood said.
“If we hadn’t have had the family nearby it definitely would have increased his risk of more health issues and the inability due to the weather of helicopters to get in there.
“It took several hours, I think the LandSAR team managed to walk in at 4am in the morning after us initially being made aware at 10pm,” he said.
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The Warriors hopes suffer a crippling blow, as star halfback Luke Metcalf falls to a season-ending knee injury. Tertius Pickard/www.photosport.nz
Under the Go Media Stadium stand, with the bravado of hope finally stripped away, NZ Warriors coach Andrew Webster confronted reality.
After a season that saw them off to a best-ever 7-2 start, sitting second on the table after 11 rounds, damn near selling out their Mt Smart home for every game and reaching the postseason for just the 10th time in their history, the Warriors’ journey had abruptly ended, with a sixth-place finish and clinical, one-and-done exit to four-time defending champions Penrith Panthers.
A campaign that looked so promising mid-season lost much of its momentum down the stretch, with a 4-7 closing run against the easiest draw on paper of any playoff team.
For two months, the players and coach seemed to be running on fumes, as they unsuccessfully defended their long-held spot in the top four and flirted with the possibility of missing the finals altogether.
Even when they were winning, Webster insisted they hadn’t played their best and, in the end, they ran out of chances to deliver on that promise.
“I just feel we’ve built some great stuff, but that last piece is missing.” he lamented. “I feel like we’ve handled adversity and stayed really tight, but there’s a piece missing.
Warriors captain James Fisher-Harris and coach Andrew Webster rue their early playoff exit against Penrith. Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
“We could launch, if we take those lessons and go to the next step, or we could stay exactly where we are, which is just a top-six team.
“I just think we can be better.”
So this wasn’t the Warriors’ year after all – sigh! – but it may just turn out to be an important step towards their first NRL championship.
Here are some of the highlights of 2025 and a humble suggestion on how to take that next step in 2026.
When veteran winger Roger Tuivasa-Sheck was handed the Simon Mannering Medal at the club prizegiving, he tried mightily to pass it on to a teammate he considered had a better year.
We’ll endorse that opinion.
Erin Clark was probably destined for a bench role, before captain Tohu Harris retired over the summer, but grabbed the No.13 jersey in the pre-season and never surrendered it.
He played every game and finished top five across the competition for total post-contact metres.
Erin Clark played every game at lock for the Warriors. NRL / www.photosport.nz
Clark proved so reliably consistent, he was considered one of the best off-season pick-ups by any club across the competition and deservedly won Dally M Lock of the Year honours.
He had one game for the Warriors as a teenager, when he admits to being “young and arrogant”, but his maturation during his time away has been a joy to behold and should hold the club in good stead for a while.
Leka Halasima was still a teenager, but his impact on the Warriors belied his years, as he headed RTS for club tryscoring honours, with many of them coming from his aerial ability on attack.
‘Leka the Wrecker’ became one of the breakout performers in the league, but ultimately, he was headed by Auckland-born Sydney Roosters centre Robert Toia for Dally M Rookie of the Year.
Leka Halasima emerged as the Warriors’ top tryscorer for the season. Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
Halasima starred off the bench or starting in the second-row, before he was eventually named at centre for the playoff game against Penrith. Conditioning let him down at times, but he’s surely a superstar in the making.
Named Warriors Rookie of the Year.
Jackson Ford looked like he was slipping out of the rotation at the end of last season, when he was competing for an edge position, but he re-invented himself as a middle forward this time round and could not be left out of the line-up.
He started the campaign off the bench and embraced the ‘impact’ nature of that role, but was promoted to start, after skipper Mitch Barnett’s knee injury, and put in some massive shifts.
Ford was one of the few players across the league to lead their teams in running metres and tackles in the same game – 209 and 43 against Canberra Raiders, when both Barnett (Origin) and James Fisher-Harris (injury) were missing.
Jackson Ford converted himself into a trustworthy middle forward. Brett Phibbs/www.photosport.nz
He was badly missed during his three-game suspension for a ‘crusher’ tackle that went largely unnoticed and unpenalised against St George Dragons, but bounced back with a 61-tackle performance against Penrith, which was a season high for his team.
The Warriors rolled into Shark Park on 7 June, faced with the massive task of covering Barnett’s extended absence.
“We’re gutted, because he’s such a good player, but there’s optimism that somebody gets to stand up and take his spot,” Webster said. “It’s a challenge for the whole group.”
The response was a season-defining performance against Cronulla Sharks.
After a series of close wins, the 40-10 result was their most convincing of the campaign, as they scored 28 unanswered points after halftime.
Warriors celebrate a try to Dallin Watene-Zelezniak against Cronulla Sharks. David Neilson/Photosport
While Ford had been named to start in the No.10 jersey, he was shifted back to the bench before kickoff, with Marata Niukore moved to the middle and Jacob Laban making his first NRL start in the second row.
Centre Rocco Berry had succumbed to another injury, while hooker Wayde Egan dropped out of the line-up late with a hip complaint, presenting back-up Sam Healey with a dream debut against the club that couldn’t find a place for him in its first-grade squad.
Halfback Luke Metcalf also tormented his old outfit, while Chanel Harris-Tavita had a try double, and Fisher-Harris battled the man he replaced at the Warriors – Addin Fonua-Blake – to a draw in the much-anticipated ‘Clash of the Titans’.
Perhaps the most worrying aspect of the display was the looming bye week, which threatened to derail any momentum gained – and so it proved.
As they had after their first bye week, when they sleepwalked through a first half against Melbourne Storm, the Warriors were completely duped by a Panthers team without five Origin stars – perhaps their worst performance of the season – and then struck more disaster against Brisbane Broncos a week later.
No-one will ever forget this finish, as the Warriors trailed Newcastle Knights into the final minute, desperately seeking a field goal to force extra time.
Halfback Tanah Boyd missed three attempts and a penalty that could have won it in the dying moments, but when his third pot was charged down, something amazing happened.
The bounce fell to Halasima about 40 metres out, and he simply charged that distance to the tryline to break the hearts of Knights fans and players.
Warriors celebrate Leka Halasima’s gamewinning try against Newcastle. David Neilson/Photosport
“I’ll take it,” Webster said. “I’ve been on the end of a few of those – I think every team has at some stage.
“We just came up with a freakish play from a young guy that’s got heaps of talent – that’s what he’s got in his toolkit.”
In the ‘what comes around goes around’ department, two weeks later, Webster and his team were indeed on the opposite end of one of those finishes, when the Dolphins ran in a try at the death for a 20-18 win at Mt Smart.
You could argue the Warriors were two injuries (maybe three) away from a very deep playoff run in 2025.
Losing both Barnett and star half Metcalf to season-ending knee injuries left big voids the club could never quite fill. Add to that a nightmare run of injuries to Berry, which forced Webster to play Kurt Capewell, Charnze Nicoll-Klokstad and Halasima out of position, disrupting the team balance.
Barnett will return for the start of the 2026 season and Metcalf has recommitted to the Warriors through 2028, but somehow, the coach must find a way to keep him healthy.
Warriors reserve celebrate their NRL State Championship. David Neilson
Across three seasons at Mt Smart, Metcalf has managed just 34 games – less than half – due to a variety of injuries. The Warriors are undoubtedly better with him – over his tenure, they are 23-11 (68 percent) with him, but just 17-1-23 without him.
While the first-grade team limped into the post-season and were quickly dispatched, the Warriors reserves were head and shoulders above their rivals in NSW Cup competition, and captured the NRL State Championship crown.
Out of necessity, Webster used 28 players this year, offering valuable experience to his fringe performers.
Here’s a crazy idea – let’s utilise that depth to rotate the premier line-up, spreading the load, and minimising wear and tear on the frontliners.
Metcalf isn’t the only one that needs preservation. Egan invariably starts the season fresh and full of energy, pushing for Origin selection early, but inevitably ground down by heavy minutes.
Wayde Egan succumbed to heavy usage and niggly injuries as the season wore on. Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
In 2025, he led the league in dummy half runs through the early rounds, but at the business end of the schedule, he made none against Manly Sea Eagles and none in the first half against Penrith.
He now has an able deputy in Healey, so let’s give him some time off, before it’s forced through injury.
While the men were negotiating their path to the NRL playoffs, the club’s women were blazing a very different trail, returning to the NRLW after a five-year, Covid-enforced hiatus with a very makeshift roster.
Under the direction of two-time premiership coach Ron Griffiths, most of the squad had never played at this level before, plucked from the local club competition, or switching from union or sevens.
The campaign struggled for consistency of performance, and suffered from injury, suspension and pregnancy, but unearthed some exciting talent that should hold the wāhine in good stead next season, when they will be bolstered by more established stars fresh from grand final glory with Brisbane Broncos.
Ivana Lauitiiti added to her family’s Warriors legacy. David Neilson/Photosport
Rugby convert Payton Takimoana finished second among the league’s top tryscorers, while Patricia Maliepo, Tysha Ikenasio and Shakira Baker became double and triple internationals, based on their progress throughout their debut seasons. Teenager Ivana Lauitiiti emulated club legend dad Ali with her big-tackling exploits.
Annetta Nu’uausala, Gayle Broughton and Mele Hufanga will bring added firepower across the Tasman from the Broncos, while Stacey Waaka returns to league, after dedicating herself to a Black Ferns World Cup stint.
Don’t be surprised if they claim the club’s first championship in 2026.
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Source: Radio New Zealand
Campers at Totaranui Abel Tasman National Park had a near miss when a tree came down on some of their tents. They had moved into a caravan shortly before due to bad weather. Supplied / Warwick Fitzsimmons
Wild weather continued to batter much of the country today, leaving thousands without power.
MetService reported that the wettest weather has moved off Gisborne and Hawke’s Bay, with just the odd shower remaining.
However, rain has moved further south, while several Heavy Rain Watches and Warnings remain in place for the next couple of days.
Gusty southeasterlies continued today, especially over the South Island where an Orange Wind Warning remains in place this afternoon.
A strong wind warning was in place for Marlborough Sounds, Nelson and the West Coast north of Fox Glacier for much of the day, with Wellington under a wind watch until 9pm.
Heavy rain watches were in force for the Tararua District and Wairarapa until 4pm, and the Kaikoura Coast until 9pm.
While Wednesday does not see winds as strong as the past few days, winds will still be noticeable for most.
Thunderstorms will be something to keep an eye on throughout Wednesday, with localised intense rain and strong gusts possible.
This includes Northland, Auckland, Waikato, Taranaki, Manawatu-Whanganui, Kapiti, and Wairarapa, and northern Wellington in the North Island, as well as the West Coast Region in the South Island.
Electra was reporting power cuts on the Kapiti Coast affecting Paekakariki, Foxton and Shannon on Tuesday morning.
On the West Coast, Buller Electricity said the power was off to Karamea, Little Wanganui and Karamea Bluff.
Tauranga City Council has cancelled all five of its community New Year’s Eve events because of the bad weather forecast.
The council said weather reports indicated heavy rain and strong winds during event set-up, with conditions highly likely to continue into Wednesday. It said fireworks displays would hopefully still take place from various locations around the city on New Year’s Eve.
In the parts of the South Island, strong winds brought down trees overnight.
Fire and Emergency said State Highway 7 over the Rahu Saddle, between Reefton and Springs Junction, was affected.
State Highway 6 also had trees coming down, particularly through the Whangamoa Hills between Nelson and Blenheim.
Firefighters were still being called out into the evening across the North Island, taking the total number of weather-related jobs to about 140 in Auckland, Northland, Waikato and the Bay of Plenty.
PowerCo said hundreds of properties remain without power north of Whanganui, and around Palmerston North and Feilding.
The roof of an unoccupied home in the Auckland suburb of Hillsborough came off in high winds and scattered debris down the road. RNZ / Kim Baker Wilson
Campground managers in the North Island are hoping for sunnier weather leading up to New Year’s after a lashing of wind and rain.
Wild weather battered much of the North Island on Monday, disrupting campers, causing power outages and downing trees.
In Auckland a roof was torn off an unoccupied home in Hillsborough, as fire crews responded to more than 100 weather-related callouts.
The manager of Kūaotunu Campground on the Coromandel Peninsula, Yvette Davey, said the weather had caused a bit of disruption on Monday.
“We have had a couple of campers that their tents were destroyed so they had to go home, other than that people are hunkering down, it’s settled down here,” she said.
Leanne Mills, the owner of Long Bay Motor Camp in Coromandel said campers were not too put off by the wet weather.
Campground managers in the North Island are hoping for sunnier weather leading up to New Year’s. Ruth Kuo
“We’ve had a bit of rain [on Monday] but we’ve been lucky campers have just used it as a crash day, just chill out, read a book, sleep,” she said.
“We’ve just got continued support from our regulars, mostly 90 percent Kiwis, so they’ll come and just meet up every year with the same people year after year and they don’t really care if it rains.”
Festivalgoers for New Year’s events such as Rhythm and Vines in Gisborne have been warned to watch out for wild weather on the roads.
See how today’s weather events unfolded with RNZ’s live blog:
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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
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