Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

A bill that would have required all primary and intermediate schools to offer second language tuition from among 10 priority languages has been torpedoed by Labour despite the party originally supporting the bill.The Labour-led parliamentary committee examining the bill, originally proposed by ex National MP Nikki Kaye, oppose making 10 languages a priority. It says that te reo Māori and sign language should be the priority languages because they are both official languages.And it said Cook Island Māori, Niuean and Tokelauan and other Pacific languages needed to be valued and taught.National education spokesperson Paul Goldsmith said Labour are too focused on Māori - Pākehā relations."Fundamentally, what's happened is Labour have decided that yes, it's a good idea to learn a second language, you can learn any language you like, but it must be te reo."LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Christabel Williams has been crowned the winner of Popstars 2021, taking out the $100,000 prize and proving she is well on her way to living out her music dream.The 20-year-old from Auckland was chosen by Popstars panellists Kimbra, Nathan King and Vince Harder as the deserving winner after careful consideration of her vocal ability, song-writing skills and stage presence.And Christabel's brand-new single 'If You Ain’t Looking', has already hit number one on the New Zealand iTunes charts.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A lot of jobs require the wearing of body cams; parking wardens, SPCA inspectors, conservation rangers, a whole host of them.  And yet our police don't. Race Relations Commissioner Meng Foon has called for body cameras to be used by our police, not to protect them or keep them safe necessarily, but as a tool to prevent unconscious bias from entering into police decision making. Body cameras, says Foon, could offer context to any problematic interaction and, as he says, in this day of social media and cell phone footage, context is everything. Police Association president Chris Cahill, says bring it on.Police have trialled body cameras previously. A police research project into the use of the cameras started in March 2018, and was due to report back in December 2019, but was shelved with little hoopla by police bosses a few months earlier. At the time, police cited the cost of the project. Cameras are more than one thousand dollars each, but that's only the beginning.  Footage has to be stored, analysed, made available under OIAs and prepared for trial. The cost involved in that was better used in other areas, police said at the time. So do they work?  Depends who is asking. When it comes to reducing violent interactions, no. When it comes to protecting police officers from false complaints, yes. When it comes to helping police recognise that they targeting certain groups over others, when it comes to stopping on suspicion, yes. But then that's more a diagnostic tool, rather than a tool for the front line. If I was a police officer, I think I'd rather wear one than have highly selective social media snippets being the official record of what went on.  But if the money and resources spent on body cameras could be better allocated elsewhere, I'll trust in the police judgement.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Further to the cycling discussion on Monday, Kerre McIvor was reading a Listener piece by the Chair of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission, Dr Alan Bollard.Within the article, Dr Bollard says the proposed Northern Pathway Auckland Harbour Bridge cycleway project has been forecast to cost many times its initial capital cost estimate of 67 million.  It will move less than 1% of the bridge traffic while subsidising some of the wealthiest suburbs in the country.  He says, it does not add up.Coincidentally, it's the second day of the Infrastructure 2021: Looking Ahead Symposium that looks at Infrastructure NZ's work on a 30-year strategy and discusses some of the most critical infrastructure issues we’re facing as a country.  New Zealand Infrastructure Commission Chief Executive Ross Copland spoke to Kerre McIvor.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Further to the cycling chat yesterday, just a follow up.  Reading the Listener and there's a piece in there by Alan Bollard - chair of the New Zealand Infrastructure Commission. It's a fabulous piece and I do recommend it - hopefully we will have Alan Bollard on the show tomorrow to talk infrastructure, but within the article is a piece that is relevant to the conversation we were having yesterday. He said the proposed Northern Pathway Auckland Harbour Bridge cycleway project has been forecast to cost many times its initial capital cost estimate of $67 million.  It will move less than 1% of the bridge traffic, while subsidising some of the wealthiest suburbs in the country. It does not, says Alan Bollard, add up. But in the meantime, I was interested in Jarrod Gilbert's piece in the Herald applauding Don Brash for choosing to work with a Mongrel Mob trust.  It's a gang education trust which might, said Gilbert, prove to be a game changer in changing the future of these kids with an extremely high risk of becoming the worst sorts of statistics. I know we've had these conversations before about gangs - and in fact I was rung by a very irate Louise Hutchinson, PR consultant for the Mongrel Mob Kingdom, saying the gang members were good people and trying to change and for heaven’s sake I was living in the past - they'd been ordered to cease and desist from pack rape ages ago. Jarrod Gilbert says it's worth a try, particularly in addressing the issues of family violence and meth addiction.  The flow on effects of those are hugely damaging particularly to the children, so if they can be given alternatives by working with the gangs he says that's worth doing. Muldoon famously tried to get alongside the gangs.  He tried to get the leadership to encourage their members into the make-work schemes that were being run at the time, thinking that getting the gangs into work would decrease their anti-social activities. That idea went out with all the other Muldoonisms - protectionism, Think Big, when the eighties swept in and since then, or until recently, gangs have been seen as a police issue. The arrival of Andrew Coster seems to be heralding in that back to the future, let’s work with them, not against them, approach and thus perhaps Don Brash joining a Mongrel Mob trust is just part of the zeitgeist.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I was heading over to the North Shore on Sunday morning - in the never ending search for the perfect inter-generational home - and thought how lovely to see so many families out cycling. There seemed to be far more than usual - mums, dads, little kids, babies strapped in the back - and although it was a little irritating, doing 5 ks down Herne Bay's side roads, it was Sunday morning these people were having lovely family time and what the hey. Then, as I got closer to the park, I saw hundreds of them.  Like a swarm of lycra clad rats, coming out of every side street and road. I had to wait while a policeman directed traffic - hordes of cyclists crossing on the road in front of me, and after four or five minutes, I was allowed to drive onto the Curran Road on ramp.  Well lucky I wasn't ten minutes later setting off. Had that been so, I would not have been able to make the appointment because the cyclists whipped up by perennial spinning wheeler Julie Ann Genter went from a lawful rally at Point Erin Park, to a law breaking ride across the Harbour Bridge, backing up traffic for hours on State Highway 1. I have no problem with cycling proponents wanting a way to get from the North Shore to Auckland City.  Hell, if we end up buying a house over there, I might have actually used it. But right now, I don't feel like ever being supportive about cyclists or cycling lanes ever again. There is absolutely no difference between these law breaking, entitled, demanding gits and the law breaking, entitled gits on motorbikes who take over the roads and the highways when they feel like it - other than the fact that the motorcyclists pay to be on the road and the cyclists don't. With all the immature reasoning and rationale of four year olds, the cyclists took over the bridge because they want something and right now, this minute, they can't have it. Bike Auckland chair Barb Cuthbert addressed the protesters after they returned from their bridge crossing. 'Ooooh, how did you like our lane?'  I bet they were ever so thrilled with their smug, lycra clad moment of derring-do and bravery in taking on the police. Later that night, sitting around Auckland's leafy suburbs with a median house price of around 3 million dollars, they would have sipped their chardonnay or pinot noir or for the younger ones, kombucha, and thrilled to the excitement of telling the story of the day they took over the Harbour Bridge - a story that will be told and retold in years to come as they push around the gourmet sausages on the BBQ at the beach pad in Omaha. That they won't have cycled to mind, because how would they get the toys and the Farro hampers up there if they were biking, but by crikey, the grandkids will know and their kids will know too of the day their courageous forebears took on the authorities and won.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Today is Gumboot Friday.Mike King says research tells us that the number one support that can be offered to help an at-risk young person is to give them face-to-face counselling.His charity Key to Life, which pays for free counselling for youth, aims to raise $5 million through Gumboot Friday to meet a demand they simply can’t keep up with.Kerre McIvor heard from numerous family members who are struggling to help their children with their illness.Nuroscience educator Nathan Wallis told Kerre McIvor he thinks children these days often don’t have the support networks available to him when he was a kid"We've got a much less resilient generation of children, they're in crisis."LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

There is a prediction that house prices won't rise much from here.The Reserve Bank is forecasting zero upward price movement for the next year from June onwards.The Reserve Bank announced yesterday they are keeping the Official Cash Rate unchanged at a record low 0.25 percent, but point to increases sometime next year.The Treasury is expecting house price growth between 2021 and 2022 to be 0.9 per cent.It jumps slightly to 2.1 per cent the next year, 2.1 per cent the year after that, and 2.5 per cent between 2024 and 2025.One Roof commentator Ashley Church told Kerre McIvor he thinks that putting such specific figures on these predictions is dangerous."It's an extraordinary thing to do; I'd go as far as to say I think it's a foolish thing to do."LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Remember BBQ man?  Man, I wished we'd kept that clip. Our conversation is seared into my memory and those of you who heard it will have remembered it. Basically, he was off to the beach with his portable BBQ to spend a day there with his daughter, swimming, sunbathing and BBQ-ing because he could. He was on the bene - he wasn't going to go to work because he couldn't find work that paid him what he thought he was worth, and he thought we were all idiots for slaving away when we could be at the beach. Slaving away to look after ourselves - and people like him. He was utterly unrepentant and do you know what? He's probably not the one amongst us who will die of a heart attack. I remember a conversation I had with another young man, God, about twenty years ago. He had a university degree and was on the dole because he said no one would pay him what he was worth. I was incredulous - until you prove you CAN work, how do you show your worth? But he was adamant he wasn't going to work for minimum wage when he knew he was worth so much more than that. It’s an attitude I simply don't get.  But then I'm a peasant. I'm absolutely certain if I go back through my family tree, we were all toilers and hefters and hewers. No fannying around in draughty castles doing the embroidery - I would have been downstairs scrubbing coppers pots and having liberties taken by footmen. Working defines me, and I really don't care what it is I do. Whether it’s working as a house cleaner, in the local fish and chip shop, in restaurants or on the telly - I'll work. But are we the mad ones? I'm lucky that I enjoy what I do, but if you don't love coming to work, what is it that gets you up in the morning, out the door and through the grind? Especially if you have children. What keeps you going and stops you from pulling a BBQ man, saying to the kids let’s sleep in tomorrow.  You don't have to be at preschool at 7, sleep in, I'll make you breakfast when we wake up and then we're off to the beach for the day. If you're educated, fit and well and not working, why not? Is it that you have spent tens of thousands of dollars on your degree and don't see working just above minimum wage as a return upon your investment?I'd love to get inside the psyche of the 122,871 people in this country who are job ready but have been off work for more than a year. I'm not talking about people who can't work, or people who have disabilities and would love to work but simply cannot. I'm talking about people who are fit and healthy and just simply won’t.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Many countries around the world are seeing a Covid-19 surge, which some are saying should be a warning for Australia and New Zealand.Nations like Taiwan, Singapore, and Thailand, once celebrated for their response to the coronavirus pandemic, are now grappling with a sudden surge in cases, with large swathes of their populations unvaccinated.As long as less than half the population is vaccinated, New Zealand and other elimination countries remain vulnerable to outbreaks.  Auckland University Professor of Medicine Des Gorman told Kerre McIvor he has a few reservations about our Covid-19 response of late."There are a number of reasons why I'm very worried about our immunisation strategy. The software is not good, the booking system is a joke at the moment, sadly, we don't have enough vaccinators. The fact we've kept telling ourselves for so long how good we are has led to complacency."LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.