Seamer Matt Henry grabbed five wickets and came up clutch in the final over as the Black Caps saw off the United States by seven runs in a T20 World Cup warmup match in Mumbai.
It capped a difficult day for New Zealand, who couldn’t field ill batsmen Rachin Ravindra, with a viral infection having struck the team this week, according to coach Rob Walter.
Devon Conway was only cleared late to play the game while fellow-opener Finn Allen missed the game with a shoulder complaint.
Walter said he expected to have a fully fit squad to choose from for Sunday’s opening pool match against Afghanistan in Chennai.
Henry at least showed he was fit and firing, finishing with 5-32 as the US reached 201-8 off their 20 overs, in response to New Zealand’s 208-7.
The unheralded American side needed 12 to win off the final over but experienced seamer Henry halted them in their tracks, conceding just four runs and taking the wickets of Shubham Ranjane and Mohammad Mohsin off the second and fourth balls.
Earlier, Henry claimed the scalp of Andries Gous from the first ball of the chase and he later removed Milind Kumar for 43, while legspinner Ish Sodhi (2-27) dismissed top-scorer Saiteja Mukkamalla for 50.
New Zealand’s best with the bat was opener Tim Seifert, who blasted 66 off 31 balls before retiring to give others time at the crease.
Glenn Phillips struck a rapid 40 and Daryl Mitchell contributed 32.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
If you unwrapped an online ancestry DNA test for Christmas, you might be feeling curious – even excited – about discovering your cultural heritage and family tree.
But did the accompanying card warn it could also blow up your life?
Before you join the more than 26 million people globally who have undertaken ancestry DNA testing through direct-to-consumer companies, there are some important things to consider.
Public health genomics expert Dr Jane Tiller categorises ancestry testing as “recreational genetics” and says accuracy is not guaranteed.
Centenarians have strong genes on their side, but we can have “a very good shot” at reaching 93 with a healthy lifestyle and the right attitude, says longevity researcher Tom Perls.
Dive Wellington runs sessions in the Taputeranga Marine Reserve almost everyday. Supplied / Dave Drane
Wellington divers are not only worried about the environmental cost, but the financial fallout of having raw sewage spewing onto the south coast.
The beaches are off limits, after a “catastrophic failure” at the Moa Point Wastewater Treatment Plant flooded the site, and sent raw sewage spilling from an outfall close to shore at a rate of 70 million litres a day.
A couple of kilometres from the outfall is the eastern boundary of the Taputeranga Marine Reserve.
Since 1998 Dive Wellington has overlooked the reserve, with owner Dave Drane telling RNZ he was lucky to have it on his doorstep.
“It’s a jewel you know, but no one will be using it for the … forseeable future, and it’s a major part of our business taking people diving in it.”
Since the treatment plant’s failure was discovered – around 1am on Wednesday – Wellington Water has found 80 percent of its equipment damaged, with full repairs expected to take months.
In an update on Thursday evening, it said it was working to redirect the untreated wastewater into an outfall 1.8km offshore, as soon as possible, and put screening in to remove items such as sanitary pads.
But it warned the temporary fix would not completely stop periodic discharges from the outfall pipe close to shore.
A rāhui from Ōwhiro Bay to Breaker Bay remained in place, preventing people from going in the water, collecting seafood, or walking their dogs on the beach.
Drane said the dive and snorkelling business was used to navigating ‘no swim’ warnings following bouts of heavy rain, but the current situation would cost it severely.Supplied / Dave Drane
Drane said the dive and snorkelling business, between Ōwhiro and Island bays, was used to navigating ‘no swim’ warnings following bouts of heavy rain, but the current situation would cost it severely.
“It’s going to affect us financially, in lots of ways. Even the bad advertising from it, where people think, ‘well, I’m not going to learn to dive in Wellington’, but also the bookings that we’ll have to cancel.”
Drane said 30 students were lined up to dive in the Taputeranga Marine Reserve next week, which now would not happen.
Diving in the harbour was an option, he said, but it was nothing like the reserve, where divers were guaranteed to see crayfish, extensive fish life, and even octopuses.
The whole thing had left him feeling “pretty rubbish,” he said, and he believed water quality in the marine reserve was an ongoing concern.
The failure had come amid upgrades at the treatment plant that should reduce discharges according to Wellington Water, but in the meantime had limited the plant’s capacity.
“There’s been overflows everytime there’s a significant downpour of rain,” Drane said.
“We get a notification to say that you can’t go on the coast for the next two days or in the harbour or wherever. I think it’s good that they’re doing upgrades to the treatment plant … it’s long overdue, definitely, but I think it’s a bit late possibly and that’s half the problem.
“We’ve got this jewel right on our doorstep and we’re ruining it.”
Mountains to Sea Wellington provides lessons, a community snorkelling programme and marine education.Supplied / Mountains to Sea Wellington / Kristine Zipfel
Busiest time of year at risk
Following the news of the wastewater plant’s failure, Zoe Studd was scrambling to figure out what to do with “potential months” of beach closures.
The co-founder of Mountains to Sea – an organisation that aimed to connect people to nature – said it was their busiest time of year.
“We run a huge number of school programmes and they’ve all been impacted by the spill.”
Studd said a month of community snorkelling days were also up in the air.
“That’s 600 to 700 people, so they can’t take place. So we are scrambling to think about … some of the other locations where we can hold [them].
“A spill like this obviously really impacts us, but it’s really devastating to think about what some of those potential impacts might be for our coastal environment as well.”
She said it was hard to understand how a failure on such a scale had happened, but said the initial shock at the news had turned to sadness.
“Just really upset about it. That’s our backyard, we spend all our time in those waters, we absolutely love it – most Wellingtonians do.
“We won’t be the only people by any means who are feeling really distressed by the idea that they can’t be in and around their coastline.”
Studd was hopeful the issue would get resolved quickly, but until then said she would not be going anywhere near the water.
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
This is a story about two vintage wooden boat cultures, Māori and Pākehā, which come together every Waitangi weekend at the popular Lake Rotoiti Wooden and Classic Boat Parade.
It’s a story inspired by the 1911 hand-coloured photograph above, which was taken at Lake Rotoiti in the central North island by Rotorua photographer of the day C P Parkerson.
It was a time before Pākehā holiday homes on the lake. When simple wooden waka kōpapa carved out of totara logs – like the one pictured – were still common as a principal mode of transport. By the 1950s kōpapa were rare.
The culture around wooden boats is rich for both Māori and Pākehā at Lake Rotoiti – and both are under revival.
Every Waitangi for 28 years, the parade has gathered vintage wooden boats: dinghies, pleasure launches,steam boats, yachts, elegant 50s speedboats and – early prototypes of jetskis – hydrocycles.
The parade is the work of a key community organisation around the lake, the Classic Wooden Boat Association. Restoration of some seriously beautiful wooden craft having become a major part of contemporary lake culture. They follow in the wake of the wealthy families who built holiday homes here in the 1930s.
Local retiree Caroline Main – who lives a few bays along from the settlement of Ōtaramarae – recalls as a child when a visiting launch was the only contact they had with the outside world. Today having a stately wooden launch, ‘The Snark’, to sedately move around the lake is an important part of the Mains’ lives.
The Rotorua region is our lake district, with a series of interconnected lakes and waterways. Long before roads and rail, waka plied the waters here on the state highway of its day, into the central North Island.
Rotoiti and nearby Lake Okataina were places renowned for waka carvers with Ngāti Tarāwhai a nationally recognisedcarving school and the great totara harvested from the forest, says Jim Schuster at Ruato on the lake. Schuster is an acclaimed marae restorer, and great-great-grandson of renowned carver Tene Waitere.
In recent years the wooden boat parade is bringing together Pākehā and Māori, with two Te Arawa waka joining the flotilla.
While the the great Te Arawa waka taua (war canoe) often heads to Waitangi, says an organiser Eugene Berryman-Kamp, the paddlers are also practised to participate in waka tangata (“a people lover”) and waka tētē (fishing canoe).
Berryman-Kamp credits the rising popularity of waka ama with the young, since the 80s, as a big part of the revival of waka culture.
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon says ways to mitigate the risk of drowning include not doing water activities alone, wearing life jackets and to swim between the flags.Surf Lifesaving NZ
The number of people that have drowned across the country this summer is tracking higher than last year, Water Safety New Zealand says.
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon said in 2026 18 people had died in the water – seven more than the same time last year.
“Many of those have happened when the weather was last at its best, so earlier in January.”
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon.Water Safety NZ
Scanlon said often days of bad weather kept people away from the water, so it was weekends like the one ahead which were of particular concern to the organisation.
“It is often that people sort of underestimate the conditions when the weather comes clear again, and they unexpectedly find themselves in trouble.”
He said there were ways to mitigate the risk of drowning such as not doing water activities alone, wearing life jackets and to swim between the flags.
Water Safety New Zealand encouraged people to have a great time in the water this weekend, but to enjoy beaches and waterways safely, he said.
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
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon sits with coalition party leaders Winston Peters and David Seymour.RNZ/Mark Papalii
Analysis: For once, it was the opposition feeling some heat at Waitangi, as Te Pati Māori’s internal turmoil spilled out on the ātea.
The public airing of dirty laundry was one of the few moments of note at this year’s political pōwhiri, with Thursday’s events otherwise proceeding much as everyone expected.
Protesters’ plans to block ministers from the Treaty Grounds came to naught, squashed quickly by security. And the activists left well before the coalition leaders had even begun to speak.
The government speeches were met by some stray heckles, sure, and some sustained grumbling, but nothing like the theatre of the past two years.
Perennial agitators Winston Peters and David Seymour seemed almost disappointed at the muted response, with the former clearly trying to provoke a reaction from the crowd.
For his part, Prime Minister Christopher Luxon delivered a well-foreshadowed address, preaching the importance of working through differences with words and debate.
It’s advice that perhaps Te Pati Māori should have taken on board.
Anticipation was high ahead of the party’s Waitangi appearance, its first time fronting to the north since the co-leaders’ no-show at Ngāpuhi’s emergency hui late last year.
On Monday, the party was sitting in court, with its out-and-then-in-again MP Mariameno Kapa-Kingi fighting to reverse her expulsion and be permanently reinstated.
In the most blistering of speeches on Thursday, her son Eru Kapa-Kingi upbraided Te Pati Māori – “sort yourselves out” – lamenting the “silencing” of his mother and the wider region.
At first, Waititi appeared to offer an olive branch in response: “I can hear the anger and feel the pain”.
He even extended an apology of sorts: “If I have done you wrong, I offer you my head.”
But any such contrition was short-lived. The speech was immediately followed by a haka tautoko which saw Waititi’s wife Kiri Tamihere-Waititi advance on the host side.
As she squared off with Eru Kapa-Kingi, eyeballing him, Mariameno Kapa-Kingi shouted from the marae’s veranda: “hoki atu” or “go back”.
Any brief hopes of reconciliation were dashed.
Mariameno Kapa-Kingi underlined the point later as she stood to speak, defiant: “I’m not going anywhere.”
Speaking to media afterwards, Waititi said the party’s next steps would depend on the court’s judgement.
But he bristled at Te Pati Māori being singled out, claiming many parties had shown division before.
He turned his sights on others in the opposition, decrying Labour’s efforts to try win back the Māori seats.
“Labour don’t do MMP very well,” Waititi declared. “A vote for Labour is now a vote for New Zealand First.”
The comments could apply just as well to the Greens, who used Thursday’s events to unveil their own candidates in the Māori electorates.
Notably, they include a former lawyer for Te Pati Māori, Tania Waikato, and a former Te Pati Māori candidate, Heather Te Au-Skipworth.
Green co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson sit alongside ACT’s deputy leader Brooke van Velden.MARK PAPALII / RNZ
Greens’ co-leader Marama Davidson made short shrift of Waititi’s suggestion that they leave the Māori seats alone: “Nobody owns any seats. Nobody owns any votes.”
Labour and the Greens came to Waitangi, hoping to present a united front and to draw a contrast with the warring factions within the coalition. They leave further away from that goal than closer.
Asked what he made of the opposition’s showing at Waitangi on Thursday, Luxon dodged the question, saying that was not his focus.
But Finance Minister Nicola Willis could not help herself: “They looked messy,” she said, a smile on her face.
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
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon says ways to mitigate the risk of drowning include not doing water activities alone, wearing life jackets and to swim between the flags.Surf Lifesaving NZ
The number of people that have drowned across the country this summer is tracking higher than last year, Water Safety New Zealand says.
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon said in 2026 18 people had died in the water – seven more than the same time last year.
“Many of those have happened when the weather was last at its best, so earlier in January.”
Water Safety New Zealand chief executive Glen Scanlon.Water Safety NZ
Scanlon said often days of bad weather kept people away from the water, so it was weekends like the one ahead which were of particular concern to the organisation.
“It is often that people sort of underestimate the conditions when the weather comes clear again, and they unexpectedly find themselves in trouble.”
He said there were ways to mitigate the risk of drowning such as not doing water activities alone, wearing life jackets and to swim between the flags.
Water Safety New Zealand encouraged people to have a great time in the water this weekend, but to enjoy beaches and waterways safely, he said.
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
A picture of a Southern Brown Kiwi.TUI DE ROY / Minden Pictures / Biosphoto
A Tokoeka, also known as the Southern Brown Kiwi, from the Haast region has surprised conservation workers with laying two eggs this season, which is uncommon for the species.
Devon Collins from the West Coast Wildlife Centre, which helps to incubate and hatch Kiwis that are at risk to predators, said Tokoeka usually lay one egg per year due to the low food availability in the colder climate of the South Island. In comparison to the North Island Brown Kiwi, which can lay three to four eggs per a year.
He said the centre received three Tokoeka eggs this season, including two from the same mother.
Collins said the first egg from this mother was the second smallest Tokoeka they’ve ever successfully bred at the centre in 15 years, weighing 320 grams. Her second egg weighed 360 grams.
While there are tens of thousands of Tokoeka on Stewart Island and in Fiordland, the Haast region has a much smaller population of around 400, said Collins.
“Every egg means a lot, every egg we can get our of hands on and get out of the hands of introduced predators, that would otherwise probably take that egg or that chick, is really important for us, so the difference between two and three eggs coming in per season is pretty massive,” said Collins.
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
Celebrations getting underway for Waitangi Day, starting with a dawn service which we are livestreaming on this page. Plus, follow our live coverage of all the action through the day from Waitangi and around the rest of Aotearoa on our liveblog below.
Follow our live coverage of all the action through the day at the top of this page.
The people of Ngāpuhi deliver a powerful haka, welcoming parliamentarians onto the upper Waitangi Treaty Grounds.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
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
Tai tamariki from Te Wharekura o Tauranga Moana at Waitangi hold a paraikete (blanket) gifted to rangatahi MP Tamatha Paul, inscribed with ‘Ka hao te rangatahi’ – a message that the next generation will take up the work and responsibility.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
Rangatahi at Waitangi say the decisions being made today must be grounded in the wellbeing of future generations, with many calling for stronger action on climate change and greater Māori participation in decision-making.
Taane Aruka Te Aho, who has been attending kaupapa alongside iwi leaders in Te Tai Tokerau, said being present in those spaces was about preparing the next generation of leaders.
“It’s important for us to understand what sort of mahi goes into the iwi chairs forum because we are the next generation of leaders,” he said.
“Because we want to be a part of it. We want to make a difference to ensure that our mokopuna, to ensure that our uri whakatipu are living in flourishing futures.”
Te Aho was one of the rangatahi leaders of Te Kāhu Pōkere – the group that travelled to Brazil for COP30 last year on behalf of Te Pou Take Āhuarangi, the climate change arm of the National Iwi Chairs Forum.
Taane Aruka Te Aho was one of the rangatahi leaders who travelled to Brazil for COP30 last year.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
Tumai Cassidy, a Ngāi Tahu rangatahi leader who is also attending Waitangi this year, said caring for the environment was central to that future.
“Something that’s quite close to my heart is around our environment and how do we look after the environment and how do we stop these impacts from climate change that are battering our communities,” he said, adding that rangatahi had a crucial role to play.
“I think it’s important for rangatahi to be at the table, to listen, to learn, so that when they’re of that age where they’re leading their iwi, they have a broad range of experiences, all that history, those kind of things to inform our future decision making,” he said.
“But I think it’s good for rangatahi to be at the table and offer a different perspective as well.”
Tumai Cassidy (Ngāi Tahu) says caring for te taiao is key for future generations.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
Iwi leaders say that involvement is already being seen on the ground.
Pou Tangata chairperson Rahui Papa said rangatahi were not just observing this year’s iwi chairs forum, but actively helping run them.
“Some of the rangatira, especially from Te Kahu o Taonui, have designated some of their rangatahi, and they’re wandering around, they’re being the hosts, they’re taking part in actually the facilitation of the hui, which is awesome,” he said.
“So you have some of the older folk that sit as chairs and things like that, but they’re actually bringing an air of succession into the facilitation of these hui.”
Papa said rangatahi from across the country had also travelled to Waitangi to help shape what their own future pathways could look like.
“They will be the stewards, they will be the custodians and the guardians of all aspects of te ao Māori in their time.”
Three kōtiro gift rangatahi MP Tamatha Paul a paraikete (blanket) inscribed with the kupu ‘Ka hao te rangatahi’ – a message that the next generation will take up the work and responsibility.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
Ngāti Kawa Taituha, Te Tii Marae chair said rangatahi involvement reflected a long line of intergenerational responsibility.
“It’s just again, adding and enhancing the mana of our tūpuna, the signatories, and then down to us, the descendants,” he said.
“And here we are today, carrying out all that mahi of our forebearers. Putting in all the effort to set up our next generation. Obviously, that’s what it’s all about for us.”
He said rangatahi were playing roles both behind the scenes and in visible leadership spaces during the commemorations.
“I think this is kind of really cool to see these groups of rangatahi coming to the marae, being part of the pōwhiri,” he said.
“These groups here are really organised leadership groups, and specifically honing in on really being in tune with our taumata, and capturing all this kōrero.”
Te Rangitukiwaho Edwards, Rangatahi MP for Te Tai Tokerau, welcomes Parliamentarians to Waitangi.Layla Bailey-McDowell / RNZ
‘Haere ki te pōti’
With an election year approaching, some rangatahi also linked their hopes for mokopuna with political participation.
Aruka Te Aho encouraged whānau to focus on their own communities and lift Māori voter turnout.
“We have three options,” he said.
“One is to elect a government and work with a government that prioritises te iwi Māori and the environment to increase climate funding.
“Two, we stop moaning about what this government can’t do for us and seek funding opportunities globally or elsewhere to ensure that we get that ‘moni’ motuhake. Or thirdly, we just keep doing what we’re doing and suffer the consequences.”
He said increasing Māori participation in voting was key.
“What we need to do is look at our own backyard, look at our own rohe and see what we can do to get soldiers out in terms of getting the voting up to ensure that Māori have a seat at the table so that we can make real change,” he said.
“Haere ki te pōti.”
Cassidy’s focus this election was centred on the environment.
“Vote for the taiao, vote for the environment. Without the environment, we’re not going to be here,” he said.
The focus on mokopuna and future generations is also being carried by a group of rangatahi taking part in a six-day hīkoi from Cape Rēinga to Waitangi, due to arrive on 6 February.
Many of the young people involved say they are marching to stand up for future generations and to send a message about honouring Te Tiriti.
The hīkoi is expected to make its way across Waitangi following waka celebrations.
The hīkoi made its way through Kerikeri on Wednesday morning, on is way from Cape Rēinga to Waitangi.RNZ / Peter de Graaf
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
Kansas City Chiefs Wide Receiver Demarcus Robinson jumps on the confetti as he celebrates winning the NFL Super Bowl LIV game against the San Francisco 49ers in in 2020.Photosport
Seattle Seahawks v New England Patriots
Kick-off: 12:30pm, Monday 9 February
Levi’s Stadium, Santa Clara, California
Live blog updates on RNZ Sport
Part sport, part spectacle, part national holiday.
Whether they are tuning in for the iconic halftime show, the unforgettable ads, or maybe even some football, one hundred million eyes glued to screens during Super Bowl 60.
The Vince Lombardi Trophy goes on the line in the biggest day of the US sporting calendar.
Here is everything you need to know.
Who, where and when?
The Super Bowl returns to Levi’s Stadium for the first time in a decade as the Seattle Seahawks meet the New England Patriots at 12:30pm NZT Monday 9 February. Home of the San Francisco 49ers, the Silicon Valley stadium boasts a capacity of just under 70,000 and is hosting the Super Bowl for only the second time.
The teams
New England Patriots
It’s no exaggeration to say that the Patriots experienced a massive and unexpected turnaround this season. After consecutive 4-13 seasons, they finished the regular season with an impressive 14-3 record, earning first place in the AFC East and first division title since 2019.
Both offence and defence were excellent, going undefeated 8-0 on the road and posting their best winning percentage (.824) since their 2016 Super Bowl season.
The Patriots defeated the LA Chargers 16-3 in the Wild Card Round, then the Houston Texans 28-16 in the Divisional Round. In the AFC Championship Game, they pulled out a hard-fought 10-7 victory over the Denver Broncos.
That earned their first Super Bowl appearance since the Brady-Belichick era, an ominous sign to everyone that had consigned the perennial powerhouse franchise to history.
Seattle Seahawks
The Seahawks finished with a 14-3 record, good enough for top seed in the NFC and their best regular-season mark in franchise history.
They carried that momentum into the playoffs, securing their first playoff win since 2019 and advancing through to defeat the LA Rams 31-27 in the NFC Championship Game.
The win marked their first Super Bowl appearance since the 2014 season and only the fourth in franchise history. They will be desperate to make up for the last time they made it this far, when they lost in dramatic fashion to the Patriots in Super Bowl XLIX.
Key players
Patriots quarterback Drake Maye has thrown for over 4000 yards and became an MVP candidate. Strategic additions like wide receiver Stefon Diggs elevated the team’s playmakers, while rookie running back TreVeyon Henderson also made a major impact, rushing for 911 yards and nine touchdowns.
Meanwhile, Seahawks quarterback Sam Darnold, who signed a major free-agent deal, has delivered one of the best seasons of his career. Darnold has also thrown for over 4000 yards and came up clutch in the postseason. Wide receiver Jaxon Smith-Njigba led the league in receiving yards with 1,793 and broke the Seahawks single-season receiving record. Cornerback Devon Witherspoon and safety Nick Emmanwori’s big seasons have helped the Seahwaks defence rank among the league’s top units.
Any Kiwis?
There is! Seahawks runningback George Holani was born in Auckland and moved to the US at three-years-old.
Holani is of Tongan heritage and is one of 11 children. His football journey started at the age of eight, before also trying his hand at rugby.
Holani has been with the Seahawks since 2024 after joining as an undrafted free agent.
The 24-year-old is second on the depth chart and should get a few carries on Monday.
Halftime
It’s no secret that the halftime show is often more anticipated than the game for the many bandwagon fans.
This year will see the most streamed artist in the world take centre stage, the “King of Latin Trap”, rapper, singer, and songwriter, Benito Ocasio, better known as Bad Bunny.
The choice has been met with some backlash in conservative circles, who have lashed out with ugly rhetoric against the Puerto Rican, in a similar vein to what Kendrick Lamar dealt with in 2025.
Whether or not you’re familiar with his music, expect a spectacle, as the man knows how to hype a crowd.
Fans will also get a dose of nostalgic punk rock courtesy of Green Day, who surged to popularity in the early 2000’s with his such as American idiot and Boulevard of Broken Dreams.
Trump and Bad Bunny
Just as he inserted himself into the Super Bowl narrative in 2025 due to his feud with Taylor Swift, president Donald Trump has again bogarted headlines with his staunch opposition to Bad Bunny.
To the utter horror of a certain portion of American fans, spurred on by the president, the selection of a an artist who almost exclusively sings Spanish to perform at halftime is a crime against their country, Ironically ignoring the fact that Bad Bunny is a US citizen.
The Puerto Rican has been an outspoken critic of Trump, and the President in turn has boycotted the Superb Bowl.
“I’m anti-them,” Trump said. “I think it’s a terrible choice. All it does is sow hatred. Terrible.”
Bad Bunny hit back at the president and his ICE squad during his Grammy acceptance speech.
“We’re not savages, we’re not animals, we’re not aliens. We are humans and we are Americans,” he said deriding the recent wave of latino deportations.
History
The game came about due to there being two competing football competitions, the American Football League and the National Football League. The first AFL/NFL Championship game was held in 1967 after numerous attempts to make it work throughout the decade but it wasn’t officially named the ‘Super Bowl’ until 1970 when the leagues merged. Each edition became denoted by Roman numerals two years later.
The numbers
By the time the ball is kicked, billions will already have been banked. Tickets are starting at around $6000 NZD for the ‘cheap seats’, ad slots are selling for more than $12 million for 30 seconds, and Americans are set to spend north of $20 billion on Super Bowl Sunday.
Spare a thought for the poultry, with more than a billion chicken wings to be eaten and washed down with 300 million gallons of beer.
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
New Zealand Prime Minister Christopher Luxon faced sustained heckling and had to fend off questions about a revived Treaty Principles Bill as he returned to Waitangi this year.
ACT leader David Seymour predictably attracted his own jeers, and NZ First’s Winston Peters focused on a return serve.
The opposition was not spared criticism either yesterday, with Labour accused of backstabbing, and Te Pāti Māori given a stern word to sort out their internal problems and finish the work it started at Parliament.
But Luxon was clearly the one attracting the most ire.
Even before MPs walked onto the upper Treaty Grounds, a group of 40 or so protesters led by activist Wikatana Popata gathered as he made a rousing speech beneath the flagstaff — calling the coalition “the enemy”.
“These fellas are accountable to America, they’re here on behalf of America e tātou mā. Don’t you see what my uncle Shane [Jones] is doing?” he said.
“My uncle Shane, he’s giving the okay to all the oil drilling and the mining because those are American companies e tātou mā. So wake up.
‘Not scared of arrests’ “We’re not quite sure who our enemy is, well let me remind us: those people that are about to walk in, that’s our enemy . . . we’re not scared of your arrests, we’re not scared of your jail cells or your prisons.
“We’ve been imprisoned . .. we kōrero Māori to our tamariki at home, we practise our tikanga Māori at home, so you will never imprison us.”
The group performed a haka in protest against the politicians’ presence amid the more formal haka welcoming them to the marae. A small scuffle broke out as security stopped some of the protesters — who were shouting “kupapa”, or “traitor” — from advancing closer.
Speaking from the pae in te reo Māori on behalf of the haukāinga, Te Mutunga Rameka paid tribute to retiring Labour MP Peeni Henare and challenged Māori MPs working for the government, asking “where is your kotahitanga, where is your unity?”.
The next speaker, Eru Kapa-Kingi, acknowledged the protesters outside — saying he had challenged from outside in the past and now he was challenging from within the marae.
“Why do we continue to welcome the spider to our house,” he asked.
“This government has stabbed us in the front, but others stabbed us in the back,” he said, referring to Labour.
“Sort yourself out,” was his message to them, and to Te Pāti Māori, which in November ousted two of its MPs.
His criticism of Labour highlighted the departure of Henare, who he said had been — like his mother — silenced by his party.
Henare soon rose to his feet, saying according to custom those named on the marae were entitled to speak — and he spoke of humility.
“We must be very humble, extremely humble. And so that’s why I stand humbly before you . . . Parliament kept me safe over the years.
“We have reached a point in time where I have completed my work. And so I ask everyone to turn their thoughts to what was said this morning: the hopes, aspirations, and desires of our people.”
Henare and his soon-to-be-former boss, Labour leader Chris Hipkins, have both batted away speculation about other reasons behind his departure — not least from NZ First deputy Shane Jones.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins . . . faces the media following the formalities of Waitangi 2026. Image: Mark Papalii/RNZ
Hipkins himself acknowledged Henare in his speech, saying “our hearts are heavy today. We know we are returning you to your whānau in the North, but you are still part of our whānau. And we know where to find you”.
‘Lot of rubbish’ He later told reporters Kapa-Kingi was talking “a lot of rubbish”, that the last Labour government did more for Māori than many others, and Labour had already admitted it got the Foreshore and Seabed legislation wrong.
Seymour was up next and spoke of liberal democratic values; dismissing complaints of colonisation as a “myopic drone”; and saying the defeat of the Treaty Principles Bill was a pyrrhic victory because — he believed — it would return and become law in future.
Deputy Prime Minister and ACT leader David Seymour at Waitangi yesterday. . . defended his comments on colonisation. Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
Defending his comments on colonisation later, he said it had been more good than bad, as “even the poorest people in New Zealand today live like Kings and Queens compared with most places in most times in history”.
Conch shells and complaints about growing sick during Seymour’s speech clearly fired up the next speaker, New Zealand First leader Winston Peters — who said he did not come to be insulted or speak about politics.
“There’s some young pup out there shouting who doesn’t know what day it is,” he said, calling for a return to the interests of “one people, one nation”.
As the shouting started, Peters repeated his line there would come a time where they wanted to speak to him long before he wanted to speak to them.
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson then rose to speak from the mahau, echoing the words of the late veteran campaigner Titewhai Harawira, urging the Crown to honour the Treaty, “it is not hard”.
Green co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick (centre) and Marama Davidson (in white) sit alongside ACT’s deputy leader Brooke van Velden . . . urging the Crown to honour the Treaty – “it is not hard”. Images: Mark Papalii/RNZ
Green candidates The party announced during the events yesterday it would be standing candidates in three Māori seats, including list MP Huhana Lyndon, lawyer Tania Waikato, and former Te Pāti Māori candidate Heather Te Au-Skipworth — and Davidson staked out her party’s claim to those seats.
“When the giants, the rangatira of our Green Party — before the Pāti Māori was even formed — were the only party in the 2004 Foreshore hīkoi to meet the people, the masses, to uphold Te Tiriti,” she said.
With the government trampling treaty and environment while corporations benefited, she said giving land back was core.
While her speech was welcomed with applause, the government’s hecklers soon turned up the noise for the Prime Minister.
After skipping last year’s pōwhiri amid tensions over the Treaty Principles Bill, Luxon began by saying it was a tremendous privilege to be back, someone already shouting “we’ve had enough”.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon at Waitangi . . . “It speaks so highly of us that we can come together at times like this.” Image: RNZ/Mark Papalii
He spoke about the the meaning of the Treaty as he saw it, and the importance of discussing and debating rather than turning on one another.
“It speaks so highly of us that we can come together at times like this, but it is also relevant on Waitangi Day as we think about how we’ve grappled and wrestled with other challenging issues as well,” he said.
Shouts and jeers Shouts and jeers could be heard throughout, but he ploughed on undeterred.
“. . . I think we have the Treaty to thank for that, because that has enabled us to engage much better with each other and we should take immense pride in that.”
One person could be heard yelling “treason” as Luxon spoke. He later said it was “typical of what we expect at Waitangi . . . I enjoyed it”.
Asked if his government was honouring the Treaty, he said “yes”.
“We take it very seriously. It’s our obligation to honour the Treaty, but we work it out by actually making sure we are lifting educational outcomes for Māori kids, we work it out by making sure we are lifting health outcomes, we work it out by making sure we’re making a much more safer community.”
The Prime Minister has reiterated his stance several times in the lead-up to Thursday’s pōwhiri, and did so again: “David can have his own take on that but I’m just telling you, it ain’t happening,” he said.
Referendum ‘divisive’ Ahead of the 2023 election, he had said redefining the Treaty’s principles was not his party’s policy and they did not support it, that a referendum — as the bill proposed — would be “divisive and unhelpful”, and a referendum would not be on the coalition table.
He was asked, given that, how ironclad his guarantee could be with an election campaign still to come and governing arrangements yet to be confirmed.
“We’ve been there and we killed it, so we’re done,” he said, clearly hoping for finality on the matter.
Te Tai Tokerau kaumātua and veteran broadcaster Waihoroi Shortland bookended the speeches.
Beginning with a Winston Churchill quote — that democracy is a bad form of government but the others are worse — Shortland said it was easy to remark on how divisive Māori were “when you all live in the most divisive house in the country”.
He called for Henare to be allowed to leave politics with dignity, but extended no such luxury for Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi . . . “It’s alright to have problems. But we must experience those problems in our own house.” Image: Mark Papalii/RNZ
“Rawiri, I cannot allow you to come away. Your work is not done. It is crushing to see and to hear what the House does kia koutou, kia tātou, ki te Māori — but we sent you there nevertheless, and that work is not done. Find a way.”
‘Feel the pain’ Waititi had spoken earlier, thanking Eru Kapa-Kingi for what he had said.
“I can hear the anger and I can feel the pain. And the courage to stand before the people and say what you had to say,” he said.
He said the party wanted to meet with Ngāpuhi but had been “scattered” when invited to a hui in November, and indicated an eagerness to meet.
“We are still eager to gather with you but we must make the proper arrangements before we can,” he said.
“It’s alright to have problems. But we must experience those problems in our own house. If those problems go outside, the horse will bolt.”
He said the current government was “nibbling like a sandfly” at the Treaty, and there was “only one enemy before us, and it is not ourselves”.
But that fell short of what Mariameno Kapa-Kingi had hoped for, telling reporters she initially thought an apology was coming.
She said she was disappointed Waititi did not fully address their stoush in his speeches, and she was committed to standing in Te Tai Tokerau — presumably, regardless of her party affiliation.
“I’m not going anywhere until our people tell me otherwise. I’ve got much to do.”
This article is republished under a community partnership agreement with RNZ.
The next few months may be the most crucial Jim Chalmers has faced as treasurer, at least for judgements about his ability to drive change.
They could tell us whether Chalmers really is as committed to serious economic reform as he claims, and how much influence he has to take Prime Minister Anthony Albanese with him on a journey that might involve spending political capital.
As the education year gears up, think of it as Chalmers preparing for his first personal assignment of Labor’s second term.
The background to Chalmers’ test is economically grim, but the political context provides wide-open opportunities.
Last week’s inflation hike (to 3.8% in the year to December), and this week’s interest rate rise (to 3.85%) brought a jolt of economic reality.
Pre-election, things felt more positive. Inflation had been artificially held down through the energy rebates. Real wages had been creeping up. Labor had more handouts on the way. All that (as well as an inept opposition) helped the government glide through the election to its massive majority.
But now the immediate future has darkened for many households. Inflation is forecast to remain high. Interest rates are widely expected to rise further. Real wages are not expected to grow until mid-next year.
Is this the time for ambitious reform, which often comes with short-term pain and losers? But then there is that old question: if not now, when?
The May 12 budget will be the first of this parliamentary term, in theory the best time for hard decisions. The government has not only a huge lower house majority but a fairly pliant Senate, where it can get tough measures through with the support of either the Greens (if they’re attractive to the left) or the conservatives (on the right flank). The opposition is a shambles and is likely to remain so for the foreseeable future, so its attacks will have little impact.
Economists would mostly agree reform needs to include significant cuts to, and containment of, spending. Chalmers is very sensitive to the argument Labor’s high spending is contributing to inflationary pressures, but he knows action has to be taken to improve the fiscal situation. The government this week announced an extensive sell-off of defence assets to produce some modest revenue that it says will go into the defence budget.
Chalmers flags the budget will contain savings. To get the budget into better shape these need to be substantial, without smoke and mirrors. One should be suspicious if once again the government lauds cuts to consultants, which have been a go-to bucket for past savings.
Yet here is the dilemma. While many economic observers believe the budget has to be put in a better position, the public wants more and more from government, in services, benefits and other spending. Attempts to curb the growth of programs can come with a lot of blowback, as did the efforts to bring NDIS spending growth to manageable proportions.
So, the first test for Chalmers will be whether he can achieve adequate structural savings.
Pre-budget messaging is often Delphic, but Chalmers is sending some signals, in addition to the one on savings.
First, he believes he has a strong mandate from last year’s economic reform roundtable to embark on tax reform.
Second, he is focused on finding ways of tackling intergenerational inequity, particularly in relation to housing.
One way of pursuing intergenerational equity broadly would be to commit to a medium-term fiscal strategy of balancing the budget over the economic cycle. This avoids loading debt onto future generations.
In terms of specifics, speculation is running hot that the capital gains discount could be reviewed. This discount means people are taxed on only 50% of the capital gain from the sale of assets held for more than a year. The debate is particularly centred on housing properties, given the affordability crisis.
While saying the government’s attention is on boosting supply, Chalmers has carefully not ruled out trimming this tax break. If the government went down this path, which would tilt the advantage away from investors, it would have to decide whether to confine the change to housing, rather than including other assets. It seems more likely it would.
Changing the capital gains discount would make only a limited difference to housing affordability. It would be emblematic rather than dramatic.
The other main tax option affecting housing would be to limit negative gearing in some way (such as by capping the number of properties an investor could negatively gear). Given his past promises, this would be highly problematic for Albanese.
Very much in the too-hard basket is a non-tax reform: shaking up industrial relations in the construction sector, where productivity has been going backwards in recent years. This is particularly needed in non-housing construction, but benefits would flow on to housing. If Chalmers could persuade his colleagues to take some measures here he’d be a miracle-worker, but this would have Labor’s union base up in arms.
Circling back to tax, a far-reaching reform that would help younger people (though not directly related to housing) would be to bring in tax indexation. But governments are loath to go down this road because they want to keep control of when to give tax cuts, and how to frame them.
Before, during and after the economic roundtable, Chalmers highlighted, as a reform priority, reducing excessive regulation. His reading text at the time was Abundance by left-leaning authors Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, who (counterintuitively for those on the left) set out a deregulatory agenda.
At the end of the roundtable, Chalmers listed actions that had been endorsed, including to finalise the long-stalled reform of the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. The government landed the EPBC changes late last year. It also announced an AI plan, which was on the meeting’s agenda. But the new road user charge remains in negotiations and many other measures discussed at the summit are still in progress. Come budget time, Chalmers will be aiming to have more of his homework from the roundtable completed.
Michelle Grattan 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.
A key part of the negotiation was $2 billion designed to help hospitals move more than 3,000 patients stranded in hospital waiting for discharge to a more appropriate aged-care facility.
However this wasn’t included in the final agreement. Instead, the states will need to dip into their overall funding allocation to pay for any changes.
Being stuck in hospital is not good for older people or their families. Stranded older people are at risk of getting an infection in hospital. Their families are under pressure to find and agree to long-term support.
It’s also bad for hospitals, which end up allocating scarce resources to patients who could be much more efficiently looked after in a residential care facility or with home support.
This results in unhappy patients and families, much higher health-care costs, and longer waits for others who need hospital care.
So how did we get into this situation? And what might happen next?
Why are patients stranded?
Most older people waiting for discharge need a pathway to rehabilitation and ongoing support. That includes transition care to facilities such as rehabilitation centres or units and ongoing support at home, or residential care.
About 60% of older patients discharged from hospital through transition care go home; the remainder need residential care.
Discharge is more likely to be delayed when this transition care is unavailable or poorly planned, and there is a shortage of home and residential care.
The broader problem is the disconnect between the Commonwealth-run aged care and disability programs and the state and territory-run public hospital system.
Rising demand and long waits
Demand for aged care is increasing dramatically as more people reach older age. The proportion of population aged 65 and over has increased from 14.7% to 17.3% over the past decade and it is projected to increase to 19.3% over the next.
At any one time, about one-quarter of those aged 65 and over use either home care or residential care.
But the supply of support at home and residential care has not kept up with growing demand. Despite the introduction of a new aged care system in November last year, unacceptably long waiting times for aged care support at home and residential care persist.
In 2024-25, the average waiting time for a home care package for eligible older people was a staggering 245 days, double what it was a year earlier.
The wait for residential care was little better. On average older people eligible for residential care waited for 162 days.
Shifting costs to patients
The Commonwealth is determined to reign in the cost of its long-term care programs for older people and people with disabilities.
Government has been unwilling to consider levies, taxes and insurance models to underwrite the costs of aged care.
Instead, it has introduced a user-pays model. So at the same time as waiting times have increased, out-of-pocket costs have risen.
With the new aged care model introduced last November, for residential care:
the maximum cost of buying or renting a place has increased by nearly 40%
the lifetime cap on out-of-pocket costs has increased by about 60%
part-pensioners and self funded retirees must now pay a new “hotelling” contribution
providers are increasingly charging optional extra service fees.
For the new Support at Home program, all new users, including full pensioners, will now pay mandatory out-of-pocket contributions for everyday services such as cleaning, laundry and gardening, and independent living support including showering and toileting.
Effectively, the Commonwealth funds and regulates aged care from Canberra, and lets the local market of providers and consumers sort out the price of services and where they are provided. The Commonwealth has no direct involvement in their planning or management.
The result is a postcode lottery of fragmented home and residential care providers. These are difficult to navigate and have little connection to hospital services.
About a quarter of the 700 residential care providers report they are breaking even or making a loss. Their return-on-investment isn’t sufficient to encourage enough capital investment to address the shortfall of 10,000 aged care beds per year.
Meanwhile, cost pressures are driving increasingly larger “big box” corporatised institutional facilities to maximise their profits.
Without either a low-cost capital investment fund from the government or higher returns on investment, providers will be unwilling to take the risk of investing in new beds to meet the shortfall.
The Commonwealth is betting that increased charges for residential aged care users will improve the return on investment and encourage new building.
Home-care providers are also feeling squeezed
Similarly, around 25% of support at home providers report breaking even or losing money and putting up their hourly rates to make ends meet.
For the increasing number of self-funded retirees, these costs are high and may discourage them from using home care when they need it.
What might happen next?
It’s unclear the new user-pays model will deliver the necessary uplift in return on investment to increase the supply of aged care services in the near future.
If it doesn’t, some of the hospital agreement funding will need to be used to increase the supply of residential and home care.
Western Australia is already taking action to encourage more investment in residential care. Whether others do so remains to be seen.
The states may also invest funds in their own transition care, hospital-in-the home and rehabilitation facilities to ease pressure on hospitals.
Hal Swerissen has received government funding and grants to investigate and provide advice on health and aged care services. He is currently the Deputy Chair of the Bendigo Kangan Institute and a director of the Victorian TAFE Association.
Sweeping cuts by one of most iconic investigative newspapers in the United States, The Washington Post, now owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, apply to about one-third of the newsroom, with sport and international coverage largely gutted. Another major blow to media freedom in the US that came after the following CPJ editorial was published. EDITORIAL:By the Committee to Protect Journalists Board
Over the past year, those liberties have come under threat in ways not seen in generations.
The events of recent weeks — including the arrest of two journalists for covering protests in Minnesota, and the raid on the home of a Washington Post reporter — represent a dangerous escalation.
These are not isolated incidents. They are the latest in a sustained pattern of actions that are systematically undermining press freedom and the public’s right to know.
Such actions are unacceptable and intolerable.
The board of directors at the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) stands unequivocally in defence of a free and independent press — one that can report the facts and hold power to account without intimidation or interference.
For more than 40 years, CPJ has been consistent in its defence of journalists. As a nonpartisan, nonprofit organisation, we stand with journalists whenever they are threatened or placed in peril, anywhere in the world — including in the United States.
We hold all political leaders to the same standard. We will not be silenced by pressure, harassment, or efforts to punish journalists and those who support them.
A free press and the factual information journalists provide are essential to democracy, public safety, and social stability. Without them, the public is at greater risk.
This role is explicitly recognised and protected by the First Amendment to the US Constitution. Journalists have the right to report the news. Efforts to obstruct, punish, or deter them from doing so violate not only their rights, but the rights of all Americans.
CPJ stands with Don Lemon, Georgia Fort, Hannah Natanson, and all journalists targeted for doing their jobs in the United States.
Today we call on leaders across political, civic, and business life—especially those who lead media organisations — to speak out clearly and publicly in defense of press freedom.
That was reported at the same time the project application to be considered by the Fast Track Panel was approved.
In a draft decision released on Thursday evening, the panel found that there would be a credible risk of harm to Māui dolphins, kororā/little penguin and fairy prion.
The panel also found there was uncertainty as to the scale and extent of the sediment plume and underwater noise generated from the project.
It said the adverse impacts of the plan were sufficiently significant to be out of proportion to its regional and national benefits.
In May, the head of Kiwis Against Seabed Mining Cindy Baxter said she was “livid” at the approval of the project to the panel.
She said there was “massive opposition” to the project and seabed mining in general.
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
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon speaks at Waitangi on Thursday.RNZ / Mark Papalii
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has faced sustained heckling and had to fend off questions about a revived Treaty Principles Bill as he returned to Waitangi this year.
ACT leader David Seymour predictably attracted his own jeers, and NZ First’s Winston Peters focused on a return serve.
The opposition was not spared criticism either, with Labour accused of backstabbing, and Te Pāti Māori given a stern word to sort out their internal problems and finish the work it started at Parliament.
But Luxon was clearly the one attracting the most ire.
Even before MPs walked onto the upper Treaty Grounds, a group of 40 or so protesters led by activist Wikatana Popata gathered as he made a rousing speech beneath the flagstaff – calling the coalition “the enemy”.
“These fellas are accountable to America, they’re here on behalf of America e tātou mā. Don’t you see what my uncle Shane [Jones] is doing? My uncle Shane, he’s giving the okay to all the oil drilling and the mining because those are American companies e tātou mā. So wake up.
“We’re not quite sure who our enemy is, well let me remind us: those people that are about to walk in, that’s our enemy… we’re not scared of your arrests, we’re not scared of your jail cells or your prisons. We’ve been imprisoned… we kōrero Māori to our tamariki at home, we practise our tikanga Māori at home, so you will never imprison us.”
The group performed a haka in protest of the politicians’ presence amid the more formal haka welcoming them to the marae. A small scuffle broke out as security stopped some of the protesters – who were shouting ‘kupapa’, or ‘traitor’ – from advancing closer.
Speaking from the pae in te reo Māori on behalf of the haukāinga, Te Mutunga Rameka paid tribute to retiring Labour MP Peeni Henare and challenged Māori MPs working for the government, asking “where is your kotahitanga, where is your unity?”.
The next speaker, Eru Kapa-Kingi, acknowledged the protesters outside – saying he had challenged from outside in the past and now he was challenging from within the marae.
“Why do we continue to welcome the spider to our house,” he asked.
“This government has stabbed us in the front, but others stabbed us in the back,” he said, referring to Labour.
“Sort yourself out,” was his message to them, and to Te Pāti Māori, which in November ousted two of its MPs. Kapa-Kingi was arguably a central part of those ructions, however, having been employed by his mother Mariameno – one of those ousted MPs – and leading some of the criticism of the party’s leadership.
His criticism of Labour highlighted the departure of Henare, who he said had been – like his mother – silenced by his party.
Henare soon rose to his feet, saying according to custom those named on the marae were entitled to speak – and he spoke of humility.
“We must be very humble, extremely humble. And so that’s why I stand humbly before you… Parliament kept me safe over the years.
“We have reached a point in time where I have completed my work. And so I ask everyone to turn their thoughts to what was said this morning: the hopes, aspirations, and desires of our people.”
Henare and his soon-to-be-former boss, Labour leader Chris Hipkins, have both batted away speculation about other reasons behind his departure – not least from NZ First deputy Shane Jones.
Labour leader Chris Hipkins faces the media following the formalities of Waitangi 2026.Mark Papalii
Hipkins himself acknowledged Henare in his speech, saying “our hearts are heavy today. We know we are returning you to your whānau in the North, but you are still part of our whānau . And we know where to find you”.
He later told reporters Kapa-Kingi was talking “a lot of rubbish”, that the last Labour government did more for Māori than many others, and Labour had already admitted it got the Foreshore and Seabed legislation wrong.
Seymour was up next and spoke of liberal democratic values; dismissing complaints of colonisation as a “myopic drone”; and saying the defeat of the Treaty Principles Bill was a pyrrhic victory because – he believed – it would return and become law in future.
David Seymour at Waitangi.RNZ/Mark Papalii
Defending his comments on colonisation later, he said it had been more good than bad, as “even the poorest people in New Zealand today live like Kings and Queens compared with most places in most times in history”.
Conch shells and complaints about growing sick during Seymour’s speech clearly fired up the next speaker, Winston Peters – who said he did not come to be insulted or speak about politics.
“There’s some young pup out there shouting who doesn’t know what day it is,” he said, calling for a return to the interests of “one people, one nation”.
As the shouting started, Peters repeated his line there would come a time where they wanted to speak to him long before he wanted to speak to them.
Green Party co-leader Marama Davidson then rose to speak from the mahau, echoing the words of the late veteran campaigner Titewhai Harawira, urging the Crown to honour the Treaty, “it is not hard”.
Green co-leaders Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson sit alongside ACT’s deputy leader Brooke van Velden.MARK PAPALII / RNZ
The party announced during the events on Thursday it would be standing candidates in three Māori seats, including list MP Huhana Lyndon, lawyer Tania Waikato, and former Te Pāti Māori candidate Heather Te Au-Skipworth – and Davidson staked out her party’s claim to those seats.
“When the giants, the rangatira of our Green Party – before the Pāti Māori was even formed – were the only party in the 2004 Foreshore hīkoi to meet the people, the masses, to uphold Te Tiriti,” she said.
With the government trampling treaty and environment while corporations benefit, she said giving land back was core.
While her speech was welcomed with applause, the government’s hecklers soon turned up the noise for the prime minister’s.
After skipping last year’s pōwhiri amid tensions over the Treaty Principles Bill, he began by saying it was a tremendous privilege to be back, someone already shouting “we’ve had enough”.
Christopher Luxon at Waitangi.RNZ/Mark Papalii
He spoke about the the meaning of the Treaty as he saw it, and the importance of discussing and debating rather than turning on one another.
“It speaks so highly of us that we can come together at times like this, but it is also relevant on Waitangi Day as we think about how we’ve grappled and wrestled with other challenging issues as well,” he said.
Shouts and jeers could be heard throughout, but he ploughed on undeterred.
“… I think we have the Treaty to thank for that, because that has enabled us to engage much better with each other and we should take immense pride in that.”
One person could be heard yelling “treason” as Luxon spoke. He later said it was “typical of what we expect at Waitangi … I enjoyed it”.
Asked if his government was honouring the Treaty, he said “yes”.
“We take it very seriously. It’s our obligation to honour the Treaty, but we work it out by actually making sure we are lifting educational outcomes for Māori kids, we work it out by making sure we are lifting health outcomes, we work it out by making sure we’re making a much more safer community.”
The prime minister has reiterated his stance several times in the lead-up to Thursday’s pōwhiri, and did so again: “David can have his own take on that but I’m just telling you, it ain’t happening,” he said.
Ahead of the 2023 election, he had said redefining the Treaty’s principles was not his party’s policy and they did not support it, that a referendum – as the bill proposed – would be “divisive and unhelpful”, and a referendum would not be on the coalition table.
He was asked, given that, how ironclad his guarantee could be with an election campaign still to come and governing arrangements yet to be confirmed.
“We’ve been there and we killed it, so we’re done,” he said, clearly hoping for finality on the matter.
Te Tai Tokerau kaumātua and veteran broadcaster Waihoroi Shortland bookended the speeches.
Beginning with a Winston Churchill quote – that democracy is a bad form of government but the others are worse – Shortland said it was easy to remark on how divisive Māori were “when you all live in the most divisive house in the country”.
He called for Henare to be allowed to leave politics with dignity, but extended no such luxury for Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi.
Te Pāti Māori co-leader Rawiri Waititi.MARK PAPALII / RNZ
“Rawiri, I cannot allow you to come away. Your work is not done. It is crushing to see and to hear what the House does kia koutou, kia tātou, ki te Māori – but we sent you there nevertheless, and that work is not done. Find a way.”
Waititi had spoken earlier, thanking Eru Kapa-Kingi for what he had said.
“I can hear the anger and I can feel the pain. And the courage to stand before the people and say what you had to say,” he said.
He said the party wanted to meet with Ngāpuhi but had been “scattered” when invited to a hui in November, and indicated an eagerness to meet.
“We are still eager to gather with you but we must make the proper arrangements before we can,” he said.
“It’s alright to have problems. But we must experience those problems in our own house. If those problems go outside, the horse will bolt.”
He said the current government was “nibbling like a sandfly” at the Treaty, and there was “only one enemy before us, and it is not ourselves”.
But that fell short of what Mariameno Kapa-Kingi had hoped for, telling reporters she initially thought an apology was coming.
She said she was disappointed Waititi did not fully address their stoush in his speeches, and she was committed to standing in Te Tai Tokerau – presumably, regardless of her party affiliation.
“I’m not going anywhere until our people tell me otherwise. I’ve got much to do.”
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
New Zealand-born film maker Taratoa Stappard didn’t set out to make a horror film. But as he took a dive into the history of colonisation in Aotearoa, it became clear he was writing a ‘Māori gothic’.
“It became apparent to me very quickly as I was writing it and developing it and learning more and more about the colonisation of Aotearoa that it was a horror film,” he said.
“It’s about the horror of colonisation, about the horror of cultural appropriation, perhaps, or theft.”
Untreated water is leaking onto the capital’s south coast beaches due to the Moa Point Treatment Plant flooding.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Sewer robots are being used to patrol pipes elsewhere in the world to keep them from blocking, but what about in New Zealand?
Wellington Water has suggested the main outfall pipe into the Cook Strait was blocked, causing a back-up into the Moa Pt treatment plant, but it did not know how.
“Catastrophic” flooding has damaged perhaps 80 percent of the plant’s equipment and may take months to fix, chief executive Pat Doughtery told Midday Report on Thursday.
It was “as bad as we feared”, he said.
RNZ asked the agency if it used robots in sewers or had looked into using them.
A spokesperson responded, “No. Would it work?That’s probably not an approach we are considering at the moment.”
The pipe has not been inspected internally since its construction almost 30 years ago in 1998.
Dougherty told both RNZ and the Herald they suspected the cause but were checking.
“We have got a TV camera on the site and we will be getting that to have a look at the outfall pipeline to try to understand what went wrong that caused a backup into the building,” Doughterty told Midday Report.
Earlier, he told the Herald, “The outfall wasn’t able to cope with that volume and backed up into our worksite.”
It was inspected annually by divers, but it is hard to get into a pipe that was carrying high volumes of wastewater every day, Dougherty said.
“So I don’t think we have … any regular inspections of that pipe,” he said.
Dougherty agreed that it was a problem.
The agency later on Friday told RNZ it was still working through what happened and there needed to be a thorough investigation.
“It would be inappropriate at this stage to speculate. The outfall pipe is just one of several areas under investigation – ultrasonic cameras and divers are being deployed over the weekend,” it said.
“The long outfall pipeline is only one part of the overall investigation.”
Ultrasonic cameras were being deployed with divers.
Inspection robots
The sewer robot industry has been expanding rapidly.
While using them in an ocean outfall, like in Cook Strait, might be complicated, the robots have been used widely in cities overseas.
Arlington in the US in 2021 completed a survey of 80km of land-based big sewers in 2021 using robots with cameras, laser and sonar.
China has floating robots to both spot damage and others to do repairs.
In London, experts in December held an online forum about using AI to boost robot inspections of the Thames Tideway super-sewer.
“The pipe inspection robot market will expand rapidly between 2025 and 2035 owing to the increasing demand from oil and gas, water and wastewater, sewage and industrial manufacturing industries,” said Future Market Insights.
Online promos for one robot said the data was collected and stored on-board for a “fast and objective profile of 900mm to 3,000mm pipes, and information about corrosion, debris under the flow line and surface damage on top of the standard systems deliverables, without the need for anyone to enter”.
Aside from adverts like this, though, a scientific review in December said both that “research on sewer defect detection has grown significantly” and that “research on robotic systems for sewer pipe inspection is still limited”.
It only looked at robots using CCTV – not much use in an outfall – and said they had obvious limitations but also that some of these AI models demonstrated “outstanding performance” for speed and accuracy.
Very highly crictical assets
Wellington Water said it last inspected the outfall in March last year, 11 months ago.
“This is an external inspection for structural integrity (visual) of the exposed portions of the outfall pipe, condition of the diffuser ports, and assessed for erosion or scour around the exposed sections of the pipe,” said a spokesperson.
There was an annual assessment of the rust protection system.
“It is not our standard practice to internally inspect a pipe of this type and age.”
While it regularly used floating cameras to inspect sewer lines elswhere, this was a “different scenario” to an outfall.
These sewer lines were “more prone to blockages” from debris and fat/scum especially in smaller or low-flow pipes. But the outfall discharge came after the treatment processes that removed such debris, scum, and fats.
The agency, which is about to morph into a new government-mandated entity, already had huge stresses on its finances from having to do big fixes to avert more crises, before the biggest one ever hit on Wednesday at Moa Pt.
However, it had recently undertaken what it called a successful if partial assessment of “failure modes” of critical assets.
“The focus of this project meant that all potential ‘showstoppers’ were identified and assessed,” said an internal report.
“By tailoring asset management approaches towards assets that are most critical, Wellington Water is aiming to avoid large scale disruption to communities and environmental damage.”
Another “potential showstopper”, the Seaview outfall, runs from the Hutt to Eastbourne and on to Pencarrow.
Built in the 1962, it had been running at half-capacity and “needs renewing or upgrading with no budget provision for physical works – expected to be around $700m,” said an asset management plan last year.
Both Moa Pt and Seaview treatment plants were “very highly critical” assets, or VHCAs.
They were built and operated under 25-year contracts that expired in 2020.
“The expected lives of many of the mechanical and electrical assets means that a significant renewals burden has arisen post termination of these contracts.
“Failure of these assets heightens the risk of consent non-compliance and unplanned discharges to the environment,” it said.
Seaview’s problems meant higher operating costs and an increase in treated discharges to Waiwhetū Stream, the latest around the same time this weak that Moa Pt failed so drastically.
Moa Pt was rated “poor” and significantly non-compliant with its discharge consents, local residents were told by the agency last December.
The 2025 plan also said “critical wastewater mains are in very poor condition”.
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
Last year, Te Awakairangi School Stationery Drive delivered 220 stationery packs for the start of year, meeting every single request.
But already demand is well up and that could mean some tough decisions.
Organiser of the stationery drive Nicky Smith told Checkpoint they’ve already had just under 200 requests, and she expected the number to rise.
“Schools are back from next week and teachers and schools start to realise where gaps might be.”
However, the stationery drive had already exhausted all funds and the donations they had received this year to meet growing demand.
“We collected about $3000 through our Givealittle campaign, and we’ve also collected about $1400 worth of donations in physical items that have come through the community.
“But if we were to take these 200 requests and price them at standard store rates, that’s $9000 worth of stationery. So, if anything further does come through, we’ve got nothing really to fund it with.
“It does keep me awake at night knowing that I might have to turn some families away.”
Te Awakairangi School Stationery Drive has already exhausted all funds and the donations they’ve received this year.RNZ/Bella Craig
Smith said it cost on average $50-55 per student for their stationery needs. The ‘cheapest’ school list she knew of was $26 and the most expensive was $149.
If she had to turn families away, it would be the first time she’d done so.
“I can’t imagine having to do it. I want to be optimistic that we can continue to do this good work and that the community will come through and help us meet every target.”
She said the drive had received more requests this year because of the cost of living, but it also meant that less businesses were able to donate.
“Businesses I feel have been a little bit hesitant this year. We have some supporters who have come back year on year and we’re really grateful to them. But you know we’re not picking up new sponsors.
“That sort of indicates to me that there’s some hesitancy that maybe [with] economic conditions, [it’s] not favourable for a lot of businesses right now and that’s why we’re not really seeing the support.”
Every stationery pack the drive gave out was tailored to each student, she said.
“If a student is attending a school, we will go and find the stationery list for that school and that classroom, and we’ll pack it exactly to what’s on their list because we want to make sure that the kids are arriving at school with everything they do need.
“Things like a range of books, glue sticks, scissors, pens, pencils, colouring pencils.”
This year so far, the drive has distributed 6,500 thousand items. Of those, 1700 of were books, 1500 were pencils and 850 were pens.
A note from the drive.RNZ/Bella Craig
Smith said the drive often received messages from families who they had supported with school stationery.
“They talk about how receiving a pack has almost reduced them to tears because it has lifted a huge weight off their shoulders.”
The stationery drive was inspired by Smith feeling the financial strain herself, during the back-to-school season.
“There was a period there after the COVID years, where getting stationery for my own children was stressful and we went a couple of weeks without having stationery in class.
“Just that feeling of the kids coming home and saying, ‘hey mum, my teachers hassling me because I don’t have all the stuff that I need’. It makes you feel like you’re letting your kids down.”
The drive also received positive feedback from schools, she said.
“Being able to lift that from parents feels really good. But we also hear from schools because we know that we’re helping to reduce some of those really complex barriers to to coming back to school, like attending.”
Te Awakairangi School Stationery Drive has their own website, Givealittle page and Facebook page.
They also have donation points for physical items across all Hutt City Libraries.
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
Screenshots taken from the internal investigation done by Haeata Community Campus into mouldy lunches being distributed to students on 1 December.Haeata Community Campus
The Christchurch school where mouldy lunches were served to students says an internal investigation has found no evidence to support the Ministry for Primary Industries’ claims that contaminated meals came from the school.
New Zealand Food Safety, a business unit of MPI, is standing by its findings that “the most plausible explanation” was the accidental mixing of fresh meals with lunches meant to be served the week before.
The report by Haeata Community Campus, obtained by RNZ under the Official Information Act, said that claim was unfounded because the school only received the required number of lunches each day and did not have a facility to reheat food or store meals.
The report said questions needed to be raised with MPI and Compass Group, specifically about two different batches of meals identified at the school on Monday, 1 December, when they were prepared, by who, the dates they were distributed to schools, and why contaminated meals were found to be interspersed with uncontaminated meals.
NZ Food Safety acting deputy director-general Jenny Bishop said it received the internal investigation report from Haeata Community Campus last week and responded to the school.
“We carefully reviewed the report and note that it does not introduce any new evidence beyond what was considered in the NZFS investigation released publicly on 10 December 2025,” she said.
School investigation results
The report said when the mouldy meals were discovered on 1 December, eight Cambro boxes containing lunches were delivered to the main building Te Tai o Mahaanui at 9.16am where they were received by a member of the school lunch distribution team. Dietary-specific meals were identified and removed for distribution separately.
The report said all lunches handled by staff during distribution on 1 December were hot to touch.
Camera footage then showed eight Cambro boxes being picked up by the Compass Group delivery driver at 2.26pm.
The investigation also looked at the meals delivered and collected the previous school day, Thursday 27 November. There were no meals delivered on Friday, November 28 because it was a teacher-only day.
The report said eight Cambro boxes were delivered at 9.20am and nine were picked up at 2.26pm on 27 November, because an empty Cambro had been left on the lunch table for students to put their lunch containers in once they were finished.
CCTV screenshots show the Cambro boxes containing meals being delivered on the morning of 1 December and collected that afternoon. Haeata Community Campus
Staff recount finding the mouldy meals
According to the Haeata report, a school nurse said she was walking through the main building on 1 December when she overheard other staff members talking about a “health issue”, with someone saying “we could have a bunch of sick children”, so she went to see if she could help.
“The ladies were opening all remaining lunches to check if there were more rotten ones. I suggested that there must be some processing batch number, and we should identify this rather than just opening all remaining lunches,” she said.
The nurse said a batch number was visible on the plastic lid above a time stamp, but both were difficult to read because of condensation on the inside of the containers as the meals were warm.
Staff identified two different batch numbers, separated the meals by number and then opened those labelled 25297 and found they were all in a state of decay.
“I estimate there were about a couple of dozen or so rotten meals but could not be sure. We checked several of the other batch numbers, and all meals were fine so we decided opening all of them would be unnecessary,” she said.
She checked the rubbish bin located by the tables but did not find any remnants of rotten food or containers with the bad batch number.
The report said a teacher aide was in reception at lunchtime on 1 December when she saw the meals another staff member had opened and asked what it was because it looked grey.
“Two staff members and I looked through the Cambros to see if there were any more of the mouldy meals. As we started looking we were finding more hot mouldy meals spread throughout the good ones, this was the case for all of the Cambros we went through,” she said.
“We noticed that all the mouldy meals had the same batch number, which was different from the good meals. Once we had gone through all the Cambros and taken out all of batch number #25297 we opened all of them and saw they were all grey and mouldy and smelt the putrid odour coming from them.”
The report also said an admin staff member went to get a lunch at around 1.50pm and noticed one of the meals was greyish in colour.
“It was hard to tell as all the meals had condensation on the inside of the lids. So, I opened it and saw a fermented/mouldly meal,” she said.
She said she looked for other meals in the same condition and found some, then took them to the principal. She said both were the same temperature.
Another admin staff member walked into the SLT office that day to find the principal and other staff members inspecting the meals, according to the report.
“An odour was coming from the lunches, I picked one of the lunches up to bring it to my nose to smell and nearly dry retched. It was definitely spoiled. The lunch was still warm when I picked it up. I then picked all three of the lunches up off the table and took them out to the atrium to discard them,” she said.
She later sent a message to alert whānau of the spoiled lunches.
Once learning about the mouldy meals, the staffer asked the lunch team if they were positive the meals had not been left from the prior week and accidentally handed out, the report said.
“I asked two of the administration team to check what was for lunch and if there was any possibility there could have been a mix up. They were absolutely sure that there were no lunches here before they arrived that morning and there was no way the lunches were leftovers as they were hot and condensation from the heat was still seen on plastic film,” she said.
Haeata Community Campus principal Dr Peggy Burrows said no food provided by the Compass Group on 27 November had been left behind for three days.
“I highlighted to investigators that one Cambro containing rubbish, not meals, was left temporarily on site on Wednesday 26 November 2025 but was properly collected the following day by the property staff and was uplifted and returned to the the Compass Group distribution facility by the delivery driver the next day,” she said.
“Haeata’s records, supported by property staff checks of the campus on Thursday 27 November, confirm no Cambros remained on site.”
Haeata Community Campus has been approached for comment.
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
He saved the family from the water in Kai Iwi Lakes in Northland.RNZ / Peter de Graaf
The man who rescued a family from the water in Kai Iwi Lakes in Northland says he’s not a hero and he would do it for anyone.
Haruru man Aaron Stott was walking along the beach last month with his family when they saw two kids in the water, and something “didn’t look right”.
He watched as their mother ran into the water, screaming, and dropped under the surface.
Stott pulled the mother and child out of the water before hearing screaming and shouting from the shore.
“Someone said to me ‘no, there’s two more’,” he told RNZ.
Stott turned around but was unable see anyone else, so he dived down and found a father and child at the bottom of the lake.
“One boy was just sitting there and the father was trying to get back up, but it was like he was moving in slow motion,” he said.
“I managed to dive down and grab them and bring both of them back up.”
When he and others got the pair back to shore, the boy was blue, Stott said.
” got him up on the beach, and put him in the recovery position and whacked his back a bit, and he wasn’t really responding,” he said.
The child suddenly took a deep breath and started breathing again.
“Ten seconds either way, they wouldn’t have made it,” Stott said.
Stott said he was comfortable in the water and had spent his younger days surfing.
“It’s a bit hard when you’re trying to take two people out of the water,” he said.
Stott said after the rescue, he was thinking of all the things in his day that had led him to that moment.
“It was a pretty strange feeling really.”
He said he wasn’t worried for his own safety; he just had to get them out of the water.
“I just knew I had to get them up, I didn’t even think about it really.”
Police Senior Sergeant Dave Wilkinson described Stott as a hero, but that was not how he saw himself.
“I would do it for anyone, you know, I’d do it for anyone that was in trouble or anyone that needed help, I would help them,” he said.
“I wouldn’t say I’m a hero, I guess I just don’t want to see people suffering at the end of the day.”
He hoped his story would encourage others to be safe around water.
“If it stops anyone else going in the water, I’d be grateful,” Stott said.
Working as a chef, Stott said this evening, he was preparing dinner for the Prime Minister.
Water Safety NZ’s Gavin Walker said the rescue was incredible, but he wanted people to know how risky it can be.
“When you have a situation like this and your first instinct is to react, just take a few seconds to scan the situation,” he said.
“The safest way to help people is to try and do it from land or from something else like a boat.”
Walker suggests throwing a boogie board, throwing a rope or getting someone in a boat to help out in a situation like that.
“If you make the call that you have to go in, none of those options are there, make sure you have a quick look at the conditions to make sure that you’re not putting yourself into a situation that you might not be able to cope for,” he said.
“Super important if you’re going in the water, make sure you take some form of floatation with you, so that could be somebody’s chilly bin from nearby, a chilly bin lid, a ball, a boogie board, a life jacket. Actually having something with you that’ll help you float when you try and help this other person out can make the difference between life and death in these situations.”
Walker hoped those people getting out in the water over the long weekend would be mindful of the dangers.
“Tragically, we’ve seen 16 New Zealanders already lose their lives in the water since the start of the year, and this weekend looks like it’s going to be an amazing long weekend,” he said.
“So as Kiwis go out and make the most of their time in the water, make sure they’re thinking and acting safely so that everybody comes home after the long weekend.”
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
Despite being unapproved by Medsafe, synthetic peptides can be bought online “for research purposes”.THOM LEACH / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRA / TLE / Science Photo Library via AFP
The drugs are designed to mimic naturally occurring peptides in the human body.
Some can be prescribed by a doctor to fight conditions such as type-two diabetes and sleep apnea. But there’s a growing online market for unregulated peptides that are being used as performance enhancing drugs.
*Bill, a 25-year-old Southland man, first discovered he could buy peptides about six months ago.
“I managed to source a local supplier in New Zealand; from there I managed to source a few different suppliers in China that actually have third part testing along with what you’re buying.
“I’m not going to say it’s 100 percent the safest way to do it, obviously it’s not a chemist.”
Bill said he used a mixture of anabolic steroids in combination with a specific peptide to try and make his muscles look more defined.
He acknowledged that taking unregulated substances came with risks.
“99 percent of peptides out there, you don’t actually know the full effects of what they do in humans, maybe animals if you’re lucky.”
Other peptides on the market claim to enhance melanin and collagen production.
Kai, a 23-year-old man from Auckland, said peptide use was openly talked about at his local gym.
“There’s a trend and everyone’s saying peptides are good for you, take this one for better muscle mass, take that one for better skin, take this one to burn fat.”
Advertising unapproved or prescription-only drugs… including on social media in New Zealand and Australia is illegal.
But Kai said his social media feeds were filled with influencers talking about using peptides.
“You look at one gym clip and then you get like five within the next 10 slides and then it just evolves from there, the more interactions you have.
“At the moment mine is just mostly influencers that are on substances.”
‘There are far too many risks’
Emeritus professor in sports medicine Dr David Gerrard from the University of Otago said using unapproved drugs was dangerous.
“Don’t go there, there are far too many risks without medical supervision and determining what your body is normally producing anyway.
“To supplement that with a synthetic form of the same chemical messenger carries a significant risk.”
“”They are dangerous.”
Dr Gerrard said many peptides talked about on social media didn’t mention the negative consequences.
“I think it’s been trivialised by the people who are in the process and in the marketplace for distributing these drugs and claiming that they will give you new vigour, better complexion and you’ll feel less stressed.
“I think there definitely needs to be a crackdown on the promotion through social media of these unqualified statements, that have come from people who [want] a financial and pecuniary gain from distributing these things.”
Dr Gerrard said athletes in the past have tried to use types of peptides to increase their red-blood cells, but the consequences were life threatening.
“The more red-blood cells you have, the sticker your blood becomes and these athletes, in an unsupervised way were using these drugs.
“They ended up having strokes and heart attacks and problems associated with circulation to brain and heart.”
Many peptides are also on the World Anti-Doping Agency’s prohibited list, he said.
“They are tested for and they could mean that a young athlete could commit an anti-doping rule violation and lose their ability to compete in their sport. “
Casey Spearin from drug checking clinic Know Your Stuff said they were seeing an increasing amount of performance enhancing drugs, including peptides.
“We heard about these kinds of substances, maybe five, six times in the course of a year. Now we’re getting several inquiries into our inbox per week, asking ‘can you check peptides and where can I go to get these checked?”
But Know Your Stuff’s clinics don’t have the technology to be able to check these kinds of drugs. Spearin said if people buy drugs online, they couldn’t be sure of what’s actually in them.
“I’ve talked to people that are interested in importing and distributing these types of things and they are seeking ‘can I actually get testing on these; can I know that the product I’m offering is safe”.
“It’s a really big gap, especially as we see these getting more and more popular.”
The New Zealand Drug Foundation said it had also seen a sharp rise in the number of people asking them to test peptide drugs.
Since December last year, many peptides in New Zealand have been classified as prescription medicines. That means it’s illegal to sell them for therapeutic purposes.
Medsafe’s manager compliance manager Derek Fitzgerald said many new peptides were experimental, so there was little known about any benefits or potential harm.
Peptides imported without a prescription are seized and destroyed at the border.
*Name changed to protect identity
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
Nine days after it happened, police have declared an alleged attempted bombing at an Invasion Day rally in Perth an act of terrorism.
A 31-year-old man is accused of throwing a homemade fragment bomb, filled with ball bearings and screws, into a crowd protesting on Australia Day. The bomb failed to detonate.
He has been charged with engaging in a terrorist act: the first time such charges, which carry a maximum sentence of life in prison, have been laid in Western Australia. This is in addition to previously laid harm and explosives charges.
Law enforcement and the media have been criticised for not calling the incident a terrorist attack sooner. But terrorism isn’t always cut and dry, and it’s crucial authorities get the necessary proof to have the best chance of successful prosecution.
What do we know about the attack?
WA Police, ASIO and the Australian Federal Police have been working together on the investigation, under the Joint Counter Terrorism Team arrangements.
They allege the man, who can’t be named for legal reasons, engaged in an “attack on Aboriginal people and other peaceful protesters”. They allege it was “motivated by hateful, racist ideology”.
He is accused of disguising the bomb in a child’s sock. It was allegedly intended to detonate on impact.
Authorities say they have evidence the man was accessing “pro-white male, pro-white material online”.
Why did it take 9 days?
When intelligence and law enforcement authorities investigate incidents like these, they must pursue every relevant line of inquiry.
In the immediate aftermath, it wasn’t clear whether the man police had taken into custody had any ideological motivation: a key distinguishing factor for terrorism as opposed to other (equally serious) offences, such as hate crimes.
Under the Australian Criminal Code, terrorism is violence and conduct done for the purpose of advancing a “political, religious or ideological cause”.
In an event such as the Bondi terror attack, the ideological motivations were relatively clear. Authorities found two Islamic State flags in the car that belonged to the accused gunmen.
In Perth, however, police had no such immediate evidence. They would have had to investigate every other conceivable possibility.
The man could have been having a severe psychotic episode, as in the tragic Bondi Junction stabbings. He could have been acting out of hate for Indigenous people that didn’t have an organising ideological framework behind it.
Police are clearly confident they’ve found enough evidence to meet the criteria for a terrorist act. While nine days may seem a long time, given the likely breadth of the investigation, the time frame is quite efficient.
Was he acting alone?
Part of what authorities would have had to establish was whether the alleged attacker was linked to other people or terrorist groups.
WA Police Commissioner Col Blanch said “we understand he’s accessing and participating in the ideology, but not having conversations about what was going to happen on January 26”. He said the man was engaging with ideology on Facebook.
So while he wasn’t formally linked to a specific terrorist group, police allege he was on the periphery.
Academic evidence shows this is quite common. Terrorism, especially in Western nations, is generally less centrally organised and far more fragmented.
On the far-right, they call this approach “leaderless resistance”. For Islamic extremists, it’s often referred to as “lone Jihad”.
Terrorists actively encourage this sort of decentralised structure because it helps them avoid detection by intelligence organisations. If a person is planning an attack, no leader need know about it. Both in Jihadist and extreme right-wing contexts, encouraging lone actor methodology is, in part, to maintain operational security.
We also know people on the edges of an ideology are more likely to act than key leaders and organisers. Often, lone-wolf actors see themselves as avoiding getting bogged down in a movement’s politics and bureaucracy. In their eyes, they’re the ones getting the job done.
These movements, however different in their politics, are less formal groups and more social movements. People believe in the cause, the aesthetic and the social scene, but there’s no formalised membership structure, at least for those operating in Western nations.
This makes it harder for counter terrorism operations to track key people and prevent incidents. It can also make investigations after an event longer and more complicated.
But conversely, while not always the case, it also can mean a perpetrator’s capacity for harm is smaller. Someone who has been radicalised online and is acting with whatever they can get their hands on is often less likely to pull off a mass-casualty event than an organised, trained fighting force.
The path ahead
It should be noted, however, that even if this hadn’t been designated as terrorism, it wouldn’t have lessened its severity. This could have been a mass casualty event, as was highlighted by WA Police. People rightly feel unsafe and emotional, and want to see the threat taken seriously.
Indeed, it was taken very seriously. The Joint Counter Terrorism Team was involved almost immediately.
But the job of law enforcement is to find the evidence to successfully prosecute. Nobody would want to see someone escape harsh punishment because of a flimsy police case, nor would they want to citizens detained on terrorism charges without a thorough investigation.
There’s still a lot we don’t know about this terror attack, the man allegedly behind it, and what his precise beliefs are. As the matter is proceeding through the courts, a lot of these details will come to light in the weeks and months ahead.
Levi West is employed under a National Intelligence and Security Discovery Grant, administered by the Office of National Intelligence.
That’s the word from Minister for Māori Crown Relations Tama Potaka, who sat down with MATA host Mihingarangi Forbes in Waitangi for a wide-ranging interview on issues affecting Māori.
Asked what it was like as a Māori to watch his own party support the controversial Treaty Principles Bill through its first reading the Minister for Māori Crown Relations, Māori Development, Whānau Ora, Conservation and Associate Minister for Housing admitted it was difficult.
“He uaua,” he said
“But my understanding of the National Party position was very firm that we would take it to a certain point in time but we would ultimately cremate and bury it and that’s what we did.”
A recent Mata-Horizon poll asked Māori voters if they thought Aotearoa New Zealand had become more racist, less racist, or stayed the same on the current coalition government. Seven percent of respondents said it was less racist, 28 percent said it was the same, while 58 percent said the country had become more racist.
Tama Potaka says the National Party’s position has always been that it would support the Treaty Principles Bill to a certain point but would then bury it which is what the party has done.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Asked what he thought about the results, Potaka said he did not support racism or prejudice in “any way, shape or form”.
“My intention and aspiration in the matters that I’m involved in is to remain very impartial and objective and I don’t get caught up in this air of racism or prejudice.
“I take responsibility for supporting iwi, Māori and other related organisations around their economic development, around their social and cultural development, around a range of matters and we work very hard in a constructive, positive and meaningful way to give effect to the aspirations of Māori.”
Pushed again on how he could not support racism but still be part of a party that supported the bill, Potaka said it was not a “binary matter”.
“I don’t think it’s mutually exclusive to be part of a government that actually is responsible for discussions of bills that many, many people don’t agree with. Previous governments have been like that too, no matter what the political hue of the previous governments,” he said.
Tama Potaka and Mihingarangi Forbes pose for a photo after their interview in the lead-up to Waitangi Day in 2026.RNZ
Tama Potaka was also asked about his work decreasing the number of people in emergency housing and a subsequent rise in homelessness.
Asked why the government did not know where the one in five people who previously lived in emergency housing ended up, Potaka said New Zealand was not a “police state”.
“I think that we don’t run a police state, Mihi. We’re not responsible to know where everybody that moves around in this country [is], we [don’t] know where they are at every single hour of the day.
“We’re actually comfortable with the work that we’ve done to ensure that the numbers of whānau living in emergency housing have considerably reduced,” he said.
Potaka also paid tribute to departing senior Labour MP Peeni Henare, who announced he was stepping down from the party after 12 years in politics.
“I am surprised, very surprised. Mihi ana kia Peeni,” he said.
“He’s a formidable force in the Labour Party [and] he’s done some outstanding mahi as a representative of his people… he’s been a massive contributor for the Labour Party and in New Zealand politics generally.”
The full interview is available on the RNZ website.
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
One of the major talking points around the start of Super Rugby Pacific next weekend are tweaks to the laws, designed to make for a better viewing experience. While it does seemingly push the competition just that much farther away from the rigours of test rugby, the changes are being warmly received by the players themselves.
“I think it’s going to be good for the game,” said Brumbies and Wallabies fullback Tom Wright, at the competition launch in Auckland.
Tom Wright of the Brumbies.Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
“Those two rules in particular, the ‘use it’ and the 50/22, you have to do your own homework and have to be switched on. Does it take one or two (penalties) early in the season where it pulls someone’s pants down? I hope it’s not mine or someone else in the Brumbies’ pants that get pulled down.”
The changes include a new sanction for joining a ruck after the referee has called ‘use it’, which should mean the ball is cleared quicker. Accidental offsides and teams delaying playing the ball away from a ruck are now free kicks, with quick taps given more room to occur.
It’s no longer mandatory for the referee to issue a yellow or red card to a player on the defending team when awarding a penalty try, while teams can pass the ball back over the halfway line when attempting a 50/22 kick.
Highlanders and All Blacks lock Fabian Holland said he reckoned the changes were “exciting”.
Fabian Holland (Highlanders) and Patrick Pelligrini (Moana Pasifika).Alan Lee / www.photosport.nz
“It speeds up the game, it brings a different way of thinking around the way we play the game.”
Holland had sympathy for the officials and the job they do in controlling an increasingly confusing game. He said that the other change that sees the TMO’s influence further reduced was a positive.
“Everyone’s just trying to do their job, the TMO’s are just trying to do their job. No one is intentionally interfering with anything, they’re just trying to make the game better. But it’s good to see some laws coming in to speed up the game again and play fast footy.”
While this is not the first time a Super Rugby season has included law variations, these latest ones seem to be going down positively with fans. The same can’t be said about former test referee Mathieu Raynal on Sud Radio this week.
“They want more passing, more tries, less time spent in mauls and scrums, whereas we defend these specific elements and are against directions being set by the Southern Hemisphere,” he said.
Mathieu Raynal.Inpho / www.photosport.nz
“Our [French Top 14] championship works. Our stadiums are full, rugby is more watched than football in the country. We don’t want to follow directions coming from countries where stadiums are empty, where they are trying to recreate spectacle at any cost, even if it means sacrificing fairness and the principle of player safety.”
Ironically, Raynal is most remembered in this part of the world for his highly controversial call at the close of the 2022 Bledisloe Cup test in Melbourne, one that was justified as an act to punish time-wasting. With the Wallabies ahead and time up, Raynal awarded a free kick to the All Blacks after Bernard Foley was adjudged to have taken too long to kick a penalty to touch. The subsequent possession saw the All Blacks score a try to win the match 39-37.
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
The Prime Minister and other parliamentarians have been welcomed to the lower Treaty Grounds at Waitangi.
A pōwhiri was held at 11am, before they gathered for speeches.
Christopher Luxon, who was absent from the Treaty Grounds last year, had promised to bring a message of unity.
After meeting with Māori leaders at the Iwi Chairs Forum on Wednesday, he said they were “aligned” on issues like localism, devolution and lifting Māori outcomes in health, education and law and order.
Follow how the day unfolded in our liveblog below:
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
The boss of a health organisation believes a rural equivalent of Tinder targeted at health professionals could be the key to solving the doctor shortages in rural communities.
A Royal College of GP workforce survey in 2024 found 35 percent of rural GPs and 21 percent of rural hospital doctors intended on retiring in within five years.
There’s a shortfall of at least 130 rural GPs nationwide.
Federated Farmers, Rural Women and the Rural Health Network are backing the Golden Key, a project to attract health professionals to rural areas.
Its secret weapon is a well-organised welcoming committee and match-making could be the next step, according to Mark Eager, who is CEO of Mobile Health Group and on the board of Hauora Taiwhenua Rural Health Network.
Eager told Checkpoint there was one commonality that keeps people in rural areas.
“You can recruit as much as you want, you can do a whole lot of things, but there’s got to be a connection with the town,” he said.
“Love and sex seem to go hand in hand, and it keeps people grounded in rural areas.”
Eager wants an app, similar to Tinder, to help doctors find their perfect match in rural towns.
“I’ve been speaking with Health New Zealand about it, but for some reason, they’re not keen. But I am sure we could get reasonably entrepreneurial about this and make that work because it would help.”
Eager said rural communities tend to get locum doctors that come in temporarily for six weeks or so, and it would be beneficial to get people to stay long term.
“We joke about the whole love thing, but just having an interest in a rural town and connecting to it. So, ultimately, we would love for someone to fall in love with someone and stay in a rural town long term, but it’s more than that. It’s about welcoming people to rural areas.”
He said the welcoming committee, which includes organised local support and hospitality, was important to make people stay and develop routes to the area.
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
The beaches are off limits after Wellington’s Moa Point waste water treatment plant failed, flooding the facility and sending massive amounts of untreated waste into the city’s south coast and Taouteranga Marine Reserve.
There are plans to redirect the overflow much further out to sea during the plant’s repair, but that could take months.
Meanwhile the environmental impacts of the discharge could have significant consequences for marine life.
Department of Conservation’s principal marine science advisor Shane Geange told Checkpoint DOC were “extremely concerned”.
“From an ecological perspective, raw sewage and waste water entering a marine environment poses an immediate and serve threat to a wide range of ecological functions and species, but I think the primary concern is around the public health concern which greater wellington health authorities are actively managing.”
He said raw sewage carried bacteria, viruses and parasites that could impact sponges, muscles and fish that eat particles in the water.
“They can also accumulate in shell fish which make them unsafe for consumption.”
He said the sewage could also impact penguin and how they regulate their bodies.
“Potentially you could get significant implication for the penguin population.”
‘Pretty disappointing’
Geange said DOC was working with Greater Wellington Regional Council to figure out how far the sewage had spread.
“In the process of undertaking a bunch of sampling to determine the concentration of contaminates within the sea water and how far they have spread at the moment…”
The marine reserve is 2km from the waste water pipe.
He said the sea water would “rapidly” dilute the sewage, but not enough to destroy the contaminates.
The environmental impacts of the discharge could have significant consequences for marine life.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Geange said mass fatality was his worst fear, but was highly unlikely.
“It’s pretty disappointing from an environmental perspective,” he said.
‘Environmental disaster’ – Wellington Mayor
Wellington’s mayor Andrew Little earlier told Morning Report there must be an independent inquiry into what happened, which he’s labelled a “catastrophic failure” and an “environmental disaster”.
“This is a sewage plant processing the sewage for a big city, and it has completely failed, it just completely stopped,” he said.
“Plants like this should not suffer the kind of catastrophic failure that we’ve seen.”
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
It quickly became apparent the newly discovered object was a member of a group called the Kreutz sungrazing comets. These include many of the brightest and most spectacular comets ever seen.
Comet MAPS is moving on an extreme, highly elongated orbit around the Sun, and is diving towards a fiery date with our star. In early April the comet will pass within just 120,000km of the Sun’s surface.
If the comet survives, it could become a spectacular sight in the evening sky in early April. It may even become visible in broad daylight as it swings closest to the Sun – unless it falls apart before then.
So what makes these sungrazers so exciting, and what can we expect?
Fragments of a mega-comet
Over the past 2,000 years, a series of spectacular comets have graced our skies. Without fanfare, they appear seemingly from nowhere, shining remarkably close to the Sun in the sky. Some even become bright enough to be visible in broad daylight.
Historically, the brightest comets often become known as “Great Comets”. The Great Comet of 1965 – C/1965 S1 (Ikeya-Seki) – was the brightest comet of the 20th century. Discovered just one month before its closest approach to the Sun, it got as bright as the full Moon, and was easily visible with the naked eye during the day.
The Great Comet of 1882, C/1882 R1, was even more impressive. At its brightest, it was a hundred times brighter than the full Moon, dazzling in the sky for several months.
We now know that all these bright comets from the last two millennia – the Kreutz sungrazing family – share a common origin. At some point in the past (potentially in the 3rd or 4th century BCE), a giant cometary nucleus, more than 100km in diameter, came perilously close to the Sun’s surface. Some time after that close approach, far from the Sun, that comet split into two major fragments and shed lots of smaller pieces.
In the eleventh century, the two largest remaining pieces of the ancient mega-comet swung by again, becoming the Great Comets of 1106 and 1138. Once again, the pieces fragmented – and the products of those fragmentations have been seen as a series of comets through the past two centuries.
Today, the Kreutz sungrazing family contains a vast number of smaller comets which fall apart en-route towards the Sun, as well as larger pieces that can put on a fantastic show.
NASA’s Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, has spotted thousands of Kreutz fragments over the years – tiny icebergs just metres or tens of metres across. Larger fragments swing by more rarely.
Comet Lovejoy seen from the International Space Station, December 22 2011. NASA
That comet would be a sibling to the Great Comets of 1965 and 1882, and a fragment of the Great Comet seen by Chinese observers in 1138.
Enter comet MAPS
Which all brings us to the newly discovered comet C/2026 A1 (MAPS). It’s moving on an orbit typical of Kreutz sungrazing comets, and already holds one record. At the time of its discovery, comet MAPS was farther from the Sun than any previous newly discovered sungrazer.
That suggests it might be a larger-than-usual fragment – perhaps.
The previous holder of this record was comet Ikeya-Seki in 1965, which proved to be the brightest of the 20th century. However, technology has moved on significantly in the past 70 years, and it seems very unlikely the nucleus of comet MAPS is as large as that of Ikeya-Seki. In turn, that makes it unlikely comet MAPS will be as bright.
Nevertheless, the fact we’ve caught it so early means it’s either a reasonably large Kreutz fragment, or it’s currently in outburst – already falling apart. Fortunately, recent observations have shown it steadily brightening, which points to the former theory.
What can we expect from the new comet?
Overall, it’s too soon to tell. If – and that’s a big if – the comet survives its closest approach to the Sun (known as perihelion), it could put on a great show in early to mid-April.
If it holds together, it might get bright enough to be visible in broad daylight. Even if that doesn’t happen, the SOHO spacecraft will provide great images of the comet.
In the days following perihelion, the comet will move into the evening sky. Thanks to its orbit, like all Kreutz comets it will be far easier to see from the southern hemisphere.
If the comet survives until perihelion, then fragments as it passes the Sun, it could brighten suddenly and unexpectedly. A late break-up might therefore be the best-case scenario for a dazzling show.
For now, we watch and wait.
Jonti Horner 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.
Untreated waste water is leaking onto the capital’s south coast beaches due to the Moa Point Treatment Plant flooding.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Some businesses along the Welington’s South Coast say the major sewage spill is a “kick in the teeth” and they are already losing business.
An equipment failure at the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant on Wednesday flooded the site and is sending raw sewage spewing directly into the ocean at Tarakena Bay – rather than through a longer pipe, nearly 2 kilometres into Cook Strait.
Wellington Water hopes the long pipe would be fixed by the end of the weekend, but said it would likely be months before the plant was fully repaired.
A graphic from Wellington Water shows the beaches that are affected. A rāhui has been placed on the area.Wellington Water
People are being urged not to enter the water, collect seafood, or walk their dogs on the beach, and a rāhui is in place from Ōwhiro Bay to Breaker Bay.
Some local businesses already seeing the impact
Jonathan Dunbar, who works at the Onepu Coffee & Icecream Shack, said he usually sees people surfing on his walk to work, but on Thursday he said it was “a ghost town”, and they had also noticed a “substantial drop in business.”
He expected business on Waitangi Day to be a bit dull.
“I would anticipate that we’ll probably be opening later and closing early because everyone’s going to be at Oriental Parade or Petone.
Jonathan Dunbar.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
“Since yesterday we’ve definitely noticed a decrease in customers,” said manager of the Botanist cafe and restaurant, Kais.
With good weather forecast, he hoped over the long weekend that people still came to the area for a walk
Cass, a barista at Centennial Coffee House, said they hadn’t noticed a reduction in customers but were concerned what foot traffic would be like over the long weekend.
“I think if people are staying away from the beach, then yeah, we’ll definitely lose customers.”
She said several customers she’d spoken to had been “appalled” by the situation.
Vicky Shen from Seaview Takeaways said she hadn’t noticed a difference in customer levels and hoped it would stay that way over the next few days.
Vicky Shen.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Josh Bird, manager at Dive Shop Ocean Hunter, said Moa Point was a a popular area for people to dive and gather seafood or shellfish.
He said people did appear to be steering clear of Moa Point and they were also telling customer to go other places.
“It’s just another kick in the teeth for us,” he said
“We’ve been smashed by bad weather and all that sort of stuff,” he said. “So we just haven’t had any opportunities to really get out.”
He said they’d been hoping the back half of summer would be good, because their business had been affected by the poor conditions.
“So we’ve already been quiet beforehand and now we’re finally starting to get some [good] weather and it’s just another factor as well on top of it, preventing people from getting out in the water and feeding their families.”
Where Wellington was lucky, he said, was in that they had quite a bit of coastline still that wasn’t affected.
RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
Divers deployed to investigate pipe
Wellington Water said it was deploying divers over the weekend to investigate the condition of a major pipe at the plant that got blocked up
The Moa Point plant’s lower floors completely flooded when sewage backed up in the 1.8km outfall pipe, which normally sends treated wastewater into the Cook Strait.
Raw sewage is spewing from a five metre pipe directly into the southern coastline, closing beaches to the public.
In an update to media, Wellington Water said cameras will be sent down the beginning of the long outfall pipe, and divers will check the end of it underwater.
Teams were working “as quickly as possible” to divert as much sewage from the short outfall to the long outfall pipe, the update said, as well to put screening in pace to remove items like sanitary pads from the wastewater being discharged.
Wellingtonians could expect to see discolouration around the coastline for about a week as teams emptied clarifiers and primary settling tanks to reduce odour.
The main street of Island Bay.RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
They can also expect an increase in smell due to the plant being offline and work taking place on site.
“We will do all that we can to mitigate the impacts of odour,” Wellington Water said.
Wellington Water said the rāhui is still in place and covers anything the water can touch with the high or low tides.
“While it is in effect, no public activities should be undertaken on or around the beaches on the southern coastline.”
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
The Kapuni gas plant in South Taranaki.RNZ / Robin Martin
Five years after almost $20 million of funding was announced for a green hydrogen facility in South Taranaki construction is set to begin this month.
The project includes supplying renewable electricity to the Ballance Agri-Nutrients’ Kapuni facility – via four 206-metre wind turbines – and producing green hydrogen for emissions-free transport at Hiringa Energy’s refuelling operations.
Around 50 construction jobs will be created and seven permanent roles.
The former Provincial Growth Fund made the $19.9m investment in 2020. Its full cost is up to $112.3m with the additional co-funding supplied from the project partners.
In a statement, Regional Development Minister Shane Jones bemoaned delays to the project.
“We’ve waited more than five years for this project to begin, after it was delayed by years of red tape and appeals under the previous Resource Management Act consent process.
“A delay like this, for a project so important to a regional economy, shouldn’t have happened. I welcome the economic benefits, jobs, and alternative energy source this initiative will bring to Taranaki.”
Te Korowai o Ngāruahine Trust, the representative body for Ngāruahine iwi, including Ngāti Manuhiakai and Ngāti Tu, the two hapū with uncontested mana whenua over the land, appealed against the project on Treaty, cultural and environmental grounds, with support from Greenpeace.
The High Court and subsequently the Court of Appeal ruled against the appeal.
Jones said the project would be one of the first in New Zealand to integrate wind, industrial renewable electricity supply and zero-carbon green hydrogen fuel production at scale.
“The initiative unlocks significant local investment and will be a vital contributor to long-term, development in the region and will help diversify the Taranaki economy by supporting new, innovative clean energy industries,” Jones said.
The project is a partnership between the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, Ballance Agri-Nutrients Limited, Hiringa Energy Limited, Parininihi ki Waitōtara, and Todd.
Construction starts at the facility this month.
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
A woman is before the courts accused of stealing more than $5000 from elderly women living alone in Hamilton and Auckland.
Police claim the 37-year-old targeted the women deliberately, entering their homes under false pretences and taking their bank cards to withdraw cash.
Detective sergeant Mike Mead said the woman faces four charges of burglary, three charges of using a bank card for pecuniary advantage, and shoplifting.
He said all the victims were in their 80s.
The woman is expected to appear in Waitākere District Court tomorrow.
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
The view towards the proposed mine site between Bendigo and Ophir.RNZ / Tess Brunton
Fast-track panel members are expected to make a decision on a proposed open-cast mine near Cromwell by late October, while Kā Rūnaka has signalled that granting approvals could be in breach of Treaty settlements.
Santana Minerals applied in November for consent to tap into a gold deposit between Bendigo and Ophir.
When fast-track panel convenor Jane Borthwick sought the company’s views on a 110-120 working-day decision timeframe in December Santana Minerals insisted that officials aim towards the default timeframe of 30 working days.
In a statement released on Thursday, Santana Minerals said the panel convener had confirmed a 140 working-day timeframe.
In a memo posted online, Borthwick said the longer time frame was partly because of Kā Rūnaka concerns about potential Treaty settlement breaches.
“Kā Rūnaka say their concerns are significant and immutable,” she said.
A seven-member panel had been appointed to assess the application and would start work on 25 February.
Santana Minerals chief executive Damian Spring said while a shorter timeframe was preferable, the confirmation of a decision by 29 October was a “critical transition point”.
“This is an important step forward and confirmation of a firm statutory decision date which gives the project clear line of sight through the fast-track process,” he said.
The panel will be chaired by former High Court judge Matthew Muir KC and includes Gina Sweetman, Philip Barry, Roger MacGibbon, Tim Mulliner, Peter Kensington and Douglas Johnson.
Santana said the members had expertise across mining, environmental science, planning, hydrology and geotechnical engineering.
Borthwick said Kā Rūnaka had sought a hearing on cultural evidence and legal issues.
The timeframe also included six weeks for expert conferencing.
Borthwick said she had appointed seven panel members instead of the usual three because of the wide range of subject-matter expertise required.
If approved, the project would carve out a 1000m by 850-metre open pit, plus three smaller satellite pits and a tailings dam.
Santana previously told shareholders that the company planned to extract its first gold by about March 2027.
The project has had [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/571161/otago-locals-range-from-curious-to-staunchly-opposed-on-giant-gold-mine fierce pushback from some residents who argue it could threaten local tourism and viticulture, and cause irreparable harm to the environment, making it unsuitable for fast-tracking.
Santana Minerals said the work to support its consent application was “one of the most intensive and comprehensive studies ever conducted on the Dunstan Mountains”, with environmental considerations central to project planning.
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
When the World Wide Web went live in the early 1990s, its founders hoped it would be a space for anyone to share information and collaborate. But today, the free and open web is shrinking.
The Internet Archive has been recording the history of the internet and making it available to the public through its Wayback Machine since 1996. Now, some of the world’s biggest news outlets are blocking the archive’s access to their pages.
Major publishers – including The Guardian, The New York Times, the Financial Times, and USA Today – have confirmed they’re ending the Internet Archive’s access to their content.
While publishers say they support the archive’s preservation mission, they argue unrestricted access creates unintended consequences, exposing journalism to AI crawlers and members of the public trying to skirt their paywalls.
Yet, publishers don’t simply want to lock out AI crawlers. Rather, they want to sell their content to data-hungry tech companies. Their back catalogues of news, books and other media have become a hot commodity as data to train AI systems.
Robot readers
Generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini require access to large archives of content (such as media content, books, art and academic research) for training and to answer user prompts.
In response, some tech companies have struckdeals to pay for access to publishers’ content. NewsCorp’s contract with OpenAI is reportedly worth more than US$250 million over five years.
Similar deals have been struck between academic publishers and tech companies. Publishing houses such as Taylor & Francis and Elsevier have come under scrutiny in the past for locking publicly funded research behind commercial paywalls.
Now, Taylor & Francis has signed a US$10 million nonexclusive deal with Microsoft granting the company access to over 3,000 journals.
Publishers are also using technology to stop unwanted AI bots accessing their content, including the crawlers used by the Internet Archive to record internet history. News publishers have referred to the Internet Archive as a “back door” to their catalogues, allowing unscrupulous tech companies to continue scraping their content.
The Wayback Machine has also been used by members of the public to avoid newspaper paywalls. Understandably, media outlets want readers to pay for news.
News is a business, and its advertising revenue model has come under increasing pressure from the same tech companies using news content for AI training and retrieval. But this comes at the expense of public access to credible information.
When newspapers first started moving their content online and making it free to the public in the late 1990s, they contributed to the ethos of sharing and collaboration on the early web.
In hindsight, however, one commentator called free access the “original sin” of online news. The public became accustomed to getting their digital editions for free, and as online business models shifted, many mid- and small-sized news companies struggled to fund their operations.
The opposite approach – placing all commercial news behind paywalls – has its own problems. As news publishers move to subscription-only models, people have to juggle multiple expensive subscriptions or limit their news appetite. Otherwise, they’re left with whatever news remains online for free or is served up by social media algorithms. The result is a more closed, commercial internet.
This isn’t the first time that the Internet Archive has been in the crosshairs of publishers, as the organisation was previously sued and found to be in breach of copyright through its Open Library project.
The past and future of the internet
The Wayback Machine has served as a public record of the web for more than three decades, used by researchers, educators, journalists and amateur internet historians.
Blocking its access to international newspapers of note will leave significant holes in the public record of the internet.
Today, you can use the Wayback Machine to see The New York Times’ front page from June 1997: the first time the Internet Archive crawled the newspaper’s website. In another 30 years, internet researchers and curious members of the public won’t have access to today’s front page, even if the Internet Archive is still around.
Today’s websites become tomorrow’s historical records. Without the preservation efforts of not-for-profit organisations like The Internet Archive, we risk losing vital records.
Despite the actions of commercial publishers and emerging challenges of AI, not-for-profit organisations such as the Internet Archive and Wikipedia aim to keep the dream of an open, collaborative and transparent internet alive.
Tai Neilson 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.
Bad Bunny is on a roll. Among the three wins at the 68th Grammy Awards, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS (I should have taken more pictures) became the first Spanish-language record to win Album of the Year. On Sunday, Bad Bunny will be the first Latino and Spanish speaking artist to perform as solo headliner at the Super Bowl halftime show.
Born Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, and raised in Borinquen (the Taíno-language name for Puerto Rico), Bad Bunny’s life and music has been marked by political, social and economic crises affecting the archipelago: government corruption, failing infrastructure and debt.
Bad Bunny has used his voice to protest in both his music and public statements against national crises and the ongoing effects of colonialism, while celebrating Latinx and Puerto Rican identities.
Bad Bunny started posting songs on SoundCloud in 2016. In 2018, he released his first album, X 100PRE. Sung in Spanish, the album reached number 11 on the Billboard charts.
His third album, 2020’s El último tour del mundo (The Last World Tour), became the first Spanish-language album to reach number one in the Billboard charts. His fourth record, 2022’s Un Verano Sin Ti (A Summer Without You) also topped this chart, this time for 13 weeks.
DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS stands out against Bad Bunny’s previous albums for its focus on Puerto Rican identity and ongoing fight against colonisation. This is reflected in the album through national symbols, genres and, of course, language. Bad Bunny addresses these themes through companion videos explaining central aspects to the collective memory of Puerto Rico.
In the current climate in the United States of interventionism and mass deportations, DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS has made the domestic Puerto Rican experience resonate among global audiences.
Language and genre
Puerto Rico is an unincorporated territory that belongs to the US, and Puerto Ricans are US citizens, but the territory is not counted as one of the country’s states. The US exerts control over the military, politics and economy of the archipelago.
Spanish plays a complex role in Puerto Rico, as a colonial language that was imposed in the archipelago. More recently, Spanish has been embraced as a resistance to English dominance.
Bad Bunny speaks Puerto Rican Spanish, which combines influences from indigenous Taíno language, African languages, Spanish and English. Studies have found Spanish speakers may consider this variety as incorrect because its characteristics are seen as distant from the Castilian Spanish norm: perceptions anchored in colonial ideologies that privilege Castilian Spanish.
Among other genres, Bad Bunny sings reggaeton, a Caribbean genre that draws on Jamaican dancehall, American hip-hop and Dominican Republic dembow.
Reggaeton is popular music with underground roots and explicit lyrics. In the 1990s, Puerto Rican reggaeton was subject to government prosecution (including confiscation, fines and negative media campaigns) due to its alleged obscenity. That did not stop its increasing popularity among young audiences in the Caribbean, and beyond.
The international popularity of reggeaton artists such as Don Omar, Daddy Yankee, Young Miko, Ozuna and Bad Bunny has changed the perception of Puerto Rican Spanish from a history of deficit views to more social prestige. In the past, the distance from the Castilian Spanish norm was considered something negative, but there is now a strong interest among students of Spanish to learn this variety.
Fluid use of language
Bad Bunny’s language does not reflect a purist vision of language with rigid boundaries. Instead, he embraces a creative use of language with fluid boundaries.
The Puerto Rican slang Bad Bunny uses on DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS features numerous Anglicisms, or words borrowed from English – a feature of Puerto Rican Spanish.
He uses unadapted borrowings – such as the words shot, pitcher, flashback, follow, blondie, glossy, brother, bestie, eyelash, underwater and movie. And he also uses hybrid realisations, compound words that combine English and Spanish components such as janguear (adapted from the English “hang out”), girla (girl), ghosteó (ghosted), stalkeándote (stalking) and kloufrens (close friends).
Bad Bunny embraces his Puerto Rican identity in the pronunciation of lyrics and in public commentary. For example, he pronounces the letter “r” as the letter “l” in songs like NUEVAYoL (New York) and VeLDÁ (Truth).
The letter “l” becomes a strong identity feature of NUEVAYoL when compared to other iconic renditions to the city, such as from Frank Sinatra.
By using his voice to celebrate characteristics of Puerto Rican Spanish previously not perceived as prestigious, Bad Bunny is contributing to the values of linguistic diversity and fighting language ideologies inherited from colonialism.
Music as defiance
The way Bad Bunny uses language has been described as an act of defiance and survival. Bad Bunny does not break down language and make it easier for listeners. Rather, listeners have to make the effort of decoding it.
Notably, the lexicographer Maia Sherwood Droz created a Spanish dictionary for DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, including definitions of words, phrases and cultural references to decode the meanings in the album.
In an album loaded with references to the ongoing fight to preserve Puerto Rican identity, he evokes community symbols of “pitorro de coco” (homemade clandestine rum) to “la bandera azul clarito” (the light blue flag, referring to a 1895 Puerto Rican emblem.
When accepting an award at the Grammys, Bad Bunny said:
We’re not savage. We’re not animals. We’re not aliens. We are humans, and we are Americans.
Bad Bunny’s acceptance speech is explicitly rejecting dehumanisation in a ceremony where, finally, music in language other than English and, importantly, in Puerto Rican Spanish, was honoured and celebrated as the best album of the year.
Beatriz Carbajal-Carrera 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.
A new Pacific Media research publication and outlet for academics and community advocates has now been added to the Informit database for researchers.
Two editions of the new journal, published by the Aotearoa-based independent Asia Pacific Media Network (APMN) and following the traditions of Pacific Journalism Review, have been included in the database’s archives for institutional access.
Most university and polytech journalism schools in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific subscribe to Informit which delivers expert-curated and extensive information from sectors such as health, engineering, business, humanities, science and law — and also journalism and media.
Informit also offers an Indigenous Collection with a broad scope of scholarship related to Indigenous culture, health, human geography in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific.
Pacific Media offers journalists, journalism academics and community activists and researchers an outlet for quality research and analysis and more opportunities for community collaborative publishing in either a journal or monograph format.
While associated with Pacific Journalism Review, the new publication series provides a broader platform for longer form research than has generally been available in the PJR, featured here at ANU’s Development Policy Centre. The full 30-year archive of PJR is on the Informit database.
Earlier editions of Pacific Journalism Monographs have included a diverse range of journalism research from media freedom and human rights in the Asia-Pacific to Asia-Pacific research methodologies, climate change in Kiribati, vernacular Pasifika media research in New Zealand, and post-coup self-censorship in Fiji.
Managing editor Dr David Robie, who founded both the PJR and PM, welcomed the Informit initiative and also praised the Tuwhera DOJ platform at AUT University.
“There is a real need for Pacific media research that is independent of vested interests and we are delighted that our APMN partnership developed with Informit is continuing with our new Pacific Media journal,” he said
The first edition, themed on “Pacific media challenges and futures”, was partnered with the The University of the South Pacific and edited by Associate Professor Shailendra Singh and Dr Amit Sarwal and published last year.
The second edition, themed on “Media construct, constructive media”, was partnered with the Asian Congress for Media and Communication (ACMC) and edited by Khairiah A Rahman and Dr Rachel E Khan, and was also recently published.
Oli Sail’s Auckland FC debut was shortlived after he was stretchered off the field with a knee injury on Saturday.Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
In one fateful hour, Auckland FC went from having goalkeeping riches to needing to go to market in a global search for a new shotstopper.
All White Oli Sail had played back-up to Michael Woud between the sticks for 14 consecutive games in the A-League this season.
Sail finally got a call-up off the bench on Saturday, against his former side Perth Glory, a game he was subbed out of just after the hour mark with a season-ending knee injury.
The 30-year-old had surgery on Wednesday and coach Steve Corica said Sail could be sidelined for six to seven months.
With Sail out and the team’s other contracted goalkeeper, Joe Knowles, also injured, as well as Reserves goalkeeper Eli Jones battling glandular fever and the club’s OFC Pro League keepers in Papua New Guinea, Corica said the club was actively looking for another goalie to join the ranks.
“There’s a lot of goalkeepers around, but a lot of them are unavailable at the moment,” Corica said.
A-League experience was not critical in the search for the replacement, but if they knew the league, Corica did see that as a bonus.
“The window’s open so we can bring players in. We can look overseas as well to bring a young goalkeeper back, the search is wide.”
After getting dropped, Woud was not benched for long and could now be crucial to turning around Auckland’s defensive lapses.
“He had a good start to the season, I think the last couple of games he’s made a couple of errors which was the decision to change him.
“But he knows what he’s done and how good he can play. I spoke to him [on Thursday] and he seems in good spirits and he’s going to have to be.
“He’s got his second chance really quickly so it’s up to him now.”
Confidence as a cure-all
Logan Rogerson is being called on by his coach to get on the scoresheet this season.RNZ / Marika Khabazi
Corica sees confidence as a cure-all to the situation Auckland FC are in.
Third on the A-League ladder with one win from six games in January, the team has conceded 10 goals in the calendar year and scored eight.
Corica has identified the next three games on the schedule – Sydney FC home, Sydney FC away and Wellington Phoenix away – as important for the team’s spirits.
He believed double success against Sydney would buoy them for the third and final New Zealand derby of the season.
Auckland’s leading goalscorers look different this season from last.
Jessie Randall, Lachie Brook and Sam Cosgrove are joint leaders on the club’s goalscoring tally this season with six each.
Guillermo May and Logan Rogerson who were leading that tally last season, have yet to make much of an impact on the scoresheet, with May slotting one goal and Rogerson still goalless.
Corica wanted more from that duo to ease the load on Randall, Brook and Cosgrove.
Sam Cosgrove of Auckland FC celebrates his goal with Jesse Randall.Andrew Cornaga/www.photosport.nz
“Football is all about confidence and some players are confident players and if they’re feeling a little bit hard done by or not getting in the right positions to score that’s up to them to change that.
“We can try and help them in that department as well but we do have players that can score more goals and the more goals we score then we maybe aren’t in that situation that we let teams back into games.”
In Auckland’s first season in the A-League the club was known for scoring late winners or salvaging results after the 90-minute mark. In season two, late in the game is where Auckland have dropped points, especially of late.
“It really only started against Melbourne City, which was three weeks ago and that was the first time we’ve ever lost from a leading margin but since then the Central Coast game they came back and got a draw out of it but we expected to win that game at home and obviously against Perth it happened again so it’s a confidence thing as well.
“It’s like winning, when you’re winning games it just comes naturally and when you’re conceding goals late on and that period comes again this weekend they’ll start to think about it and it’s how we deal with it and the mentality and the strength we have to get through that period.”
Corica rued some missed opportunities to put distance between them and the other clubs earlier in the season but was up for the challenge of getting back to the top of the ladder with 11 games still to play.
“We’re still in a good position right now and I think the league is a lot closer this year from top to bottom, so the team that wins the league probably won’t get as many points as we did last season because everyone is beating everyone.”
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
Police said Alexander Bennett was walking on Leeston Road near Springston when he was hit about 3.30pm on Wednesday.
He died at the scene.
Bennett was a pupil at Springston School.
In a statement, the Springston School Te Kura o Makonui board said its thoughts were with the child’s family, and staff and students were being supported.
“We have had a tragic passing of a student of our school. We are unable to provide any further details at this point as the police investigation is continuing,” they said.
Police said enquires into the circumstances of the crash were ongoing.
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
_boven_Rotterdam_-_11028-A-B_-_Museum_Rotterdam.jpg){kind=link}
