The Weekly Hoon: Insurance retreat; Gugong deaths; NZ becoming a 7th Australian state & critical minerals

The podcast above of the weekly ‘Hoon’ webinar for paying subscribers on Thursday night featured co-hosts Bernard Hickey & Peter Bale talking with regular guests Cathrine Dyer and Robert Patman, along with special guest David Farrar, talking about his Op-Ed in the The Post-$ arguing it’s time New Zealand became the seventh state of Australia.

We talked about:

* The water treatment plant problems in Christchurch and Wellington;

* The gutting of the Washington Post’s newsroom;

* The effects of climate change on biodiversity, including the deaths of dugongs in Thailand, the deaths of bats in Western Australia, the freezing of iguanas in Florida;

* Insurance retreat in New Zealand; and,

* Rare earth minerals and a possible deal between New Zealand and the US;

The Hoon’s podcast version above was recorded on Thursday night during a live webinar for over 200 paying subscribers and was produced and edited by Simon Josey.

The Hoon won the silver award for best current affairs podcast in last year’s New Zealand Podcast awards.

(This is a sampler for all free subscribers and anyone else who stumbles on it. Thanks to the support of paying subscribers here, we’re able to spread my public interest journalism here about housing affordability, climate change and poverty reduction other public venues. Join the community supporting and contributing to this work with your ideas, feedback and comments, and by subscribing in full. Remember, all students and teachers who sign up for the free version with their .ac.nz and .school.nz email accounts are automatically upgraded to the paid version for free. Also, here’s a couple of special offers: $3/month or $30/year for under 30s & $6.50/month or $65/year for over 65s who rent.)

Ngā mihi nui.

Bernard

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