Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

You can take the girl out of Waihi, but you can't take the Waihi out of the girl, I tell you.  News that Oceana Gold's Waihi North project has been approved makes good sense, as far as I'm concerned. The permit that was confirmed yesterday guarantees the securing of 350 existing jobs, the creation of 100 plus new roles, the project to be in operation until at least 2042, so that gives some continuity, some certainty, which is fantastic, and a billion-dollar investment from Oceana Gold.  Now, having lived there for five years when I was growing up, gold is a huge part of who Waihi was and is. It was also a really strong union town as well. Gold was first discovered in Waihi in 1878 and by 1905, Waihi not only possessed the most productive gold mine in New Zealand, but was the third largest inland town in New Zealand because of the gold. You had the 1912 Waihi miners' strike. That was a six-month pitched battle that ended in violence and a miner killed by police, and shaped New Zealand politics for the next 60 odd years. And that's very much a part of the town. It's a gold mining town, it's a working town. It's a beautiful town.  The Martha Mine was and is living proof that there is gold in them there hills. The Martha Mine extracted 174 tons of gold, and the total district surrounding district, there was more than 31 million pound in gold value in the old currency from 1882 to 1954. So this is an area that has been mined for more than 100 years and is a community that knows mining, that is mining. When Dad was the bank manager in Waihi, I'm pretty sure, and it's not me making things up, but memory is an unreliable witness, I used to work in the bank in the school holidays and there were gold ingots in there, and that was fascinating, in the vaults, like you see in the cartoons.  So this is an area that knows mining and for any kind of permit to be denied, it would make no sense whatsoever.  Anti-mining activists have their place, and nobody wants to see pristine conservation parks torn up and destroyed, but that's not modern mining anyway. Even if they were to go into a conservation park, you don't tear it up and destroy it. That's not how you mine these days. As Oceana Gold president and CEO Gerard Bond says on the Heather Du Plessis-Allan show this morning, it shows that the new fast-track consenting process is working well.  GB: I think New Zealand has the best development permitting system globally presently. It's rigorous. It is difficult to get something permitted anywhere in the world, and New Zealand is no different. Our application was substantial. We did a lot of work, but the great thing about this process is that it's done in a timely way.  GB: New Zealand leapt up the mining attractiveness index in a annual global survey this year already off the base basis of that legislation being passed, and I think our success will further solidify New Zealand as a place that you can do business in.  HDPA: Part of the problem in New Zealand though is attitudes towards mining. Do you think that's changing?  GB: Well, we have tremendous support where we mine from local communities, and I understand during the course of last year, we saw the public support for mining has improved dramatically in New Zealand. And I think that's because people see that we do it safely, we do it responsibly, have done so for 35 years, and will continue to do so. And this is an industry that generates real high-paying jobs that are very, very productive. So, I'd like to think that New Zealanders would welcome the fact that they have a a robust mining industry.  So, yes. I just simply cannot see the problem. Had the permit been denied, it would have made no sense whatsoever. And those who do live in towns where there are where mining is an industry, do well. You know, people have good jobs. They're not subsistence jobs, they're not service jobs, they're not tourism jobs depending on the season. They are all year-round jobs. I think we've got so hung up on mining and it's like the no nukes movement. It becomes a badge of pride to wear your I'm an anti-mining activist badge next to your pounamu without doing any kind of rational thought about it. Again, it's that kind of you're either in my tribe or you're not.  I support mining in Waihi for the reasons as outlined. Do I support it everywhere? No, but then they're not asking to mine everywhere.  Do I want conservation parks kept pristine? Yes, I do.  Do I want all of New Zealand kept like that? No.  So, I would really love to hear from those people who live on the West Coast, who live in Waihi, who live in areas where there are mines. You can actually grow up in and around the mines and there is still beautiful, lush, green land, there are still native birds, but there's also a thriving industry that provides well-paid jobs to men and women who would otherwise have to go to Australia to get them. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s been a tough run for the economy this year, but the Finance Minister is celebrating the progress that was made.  Nicola Willis told Kerre Woodham the economy is growing, which means that when they look back on 2025, they’ll be able to say it ended a lot better than it started.  She says that looking into next year, it’s set to grow much faster, with many more jobs being created.  “People can look forward to their incomes rising faster than inflation and ongoing low interest rates – that's a positive way to start the next year.”  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Trains will be offline across the Auckland rail network from December 27 to January 28.  KiwiRail says the closure is needed to allow for urgent repairs and maintenance which is needed for the upcoming City Rail Link, set to open in the second half of 2026.  Public Transport Users Association National Coordinator Jon Reeves told Kerre Woodham that shutting down the trains over the summer for maintenance purposes is the classic cliché that's been going on for about 25 years.   He says it's become a bit of a joke, and a different way to make these upgrades needs to be found.   LISTEN ABOVE  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

New Zealand's economy grew more than expected between July and September.  But between April and June, it shrank more than previously thought.  GDP rose 1.1% in the September quarter, surpassing all expectation but Stats NZ has revised the numbers for the June quarter, finding GDP actually fell 1%, not the previously-reported 0.9%.  That means the economy shrank 0.5% in the year to September.  NZ Herald Business Editor Liam Dann told Kerre Woodham the data is showing there’s some momentum in the economy, especially within manufacturing and business services.  He says consumers take a bit longer to feel upbeat, but the business core of the economy is picking up.   LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

For those who have been here over summer, Auckland is a lovely place to be.  A lot of residents push off, and it feels like the city is yours to explore, and visitors are very welcome and make a welcome addition to the city, new people with new energy and seeing things that you don't see, seeing the city through new eyes.  But it's going to be a little bit tricky to get around, unless you fancy a bus on a sweltering day or you bring your car, because Auckland trains have announced that they're delivering the last big push on the rail network rebuild and other critical city rail link preparations.  There'll be more than 1,300 people involved in repairing tracks, building new platforms, pedestrian bridges, removing level crossings, and testing the timetable. So, thank you very much to those 1,300 who will be working in the heat over summer to get the CRL up and running, but it does mean the closure of the Auckland rail network from the 27th of December to the 28th of January.  It'll be fully closed for most of the time, with the exception of some southern eastern and Ōnehunga line services returning between the 19th and the 26th of January. Auckland Trains say balancing delivery with minimising disruption to passengers and freight is tricky to get right. So, using holiday periods when demand is lower means we impact fewer people, they say. For those staying in Auckland or working right through, we understand this is frustrating – and it will be. If you're one of those essential workers working right through, it will be frustrating to know that an efficient public transport option is closed to you, quite literally.  And for those who are looking to be the first people in the world to welcome in the new year in Auckland City Central, I mean, it's a hell of a spectacle. You've got SkyCity with the fireworks display and Vector with their lights, great music and it is a happy fun time, but imagine having good times and energy and well factor and then hopping on a bus crammed to the gunnels, chugging back out to Pukekohe. Is that really how you want to begin your new year? It's hardly the hoots wahay you're looking for, is it?  A bus is not a train. Showing that I understand mechanics and engineering, a bus is not a train. Several buses are not one train.  I do get it. I really do. There has to be some short-term disruption for long-term gain. And I do want to be able to travel hither and yon on public transport if I can do so safely and efficiently, as I do in other cities, I love jumping on the subway or the metro and even the buses. But Auckland's so far behind the eight ball. London opened its first deep-level tube line with electric trains in 1890. The New York subway opened in 1904 and Paris's metro a few years earlier in 1900. So, it's taken us a hot minute to get with the program, even allowing for economies of scale.  People will use public transport if it's efficient and it's safe and it's going. They're not going to use it when it's shut. We're seeing increasing numbers of people choosing other modes of transport other than the car, according to the latest AA survey.  Now, you'd expect people who belong to AA, you know, to love their cars, and they do. 97% of the 7,000 members who responded drove in the four weeks before taking the survey, but 60% also walked where they needed to go, 15% had cycled, 15% had bussed, and 6% had hopped on a train. Imagine how many more there would be if we did have an effective public transport system that was actually running. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Mark Mitchell is acknowledging the wins he had in 2025.  It’s been a busy year, the Minister dealing with a range of emergencies across the country, plus the hefty police portfolio.  He told Kerre Woodham that although there’s a lot of negative headlines throughout the year, we should be extremely proud of ourselves as a country.  Mitchell says there’s a lot more going on than there is bad.   LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Treasury's Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update shows more delay to getting the books back to black.   The deficit's expected to deepen to a depth of $16.9 billion and not narrow to $60 million dollars until 2029-30.  Economic growth is expected to be just 1.7% next year.  NZ Herald Business Editor Liam Dann told Kerre Woodham that the problem isn’t in how much we borrow, but the efficiency of government spending.   He says there's a big lack of trust in the government, as people would be able to cope with higher borrowing if it was going towards amazing infrastructure projects, but we haven’t seen that over the last decade.   LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

We're going to start this morning with the Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update, which was actually the Three-quarter Year Economic and Fiscal Update. It delivered news we all expected, and that is that we're getting there as a country. It's just taking longer than we thought.  Treasury's half-year update, published on Tuesday, predicted a return to surplus in 2029/30, a year later than it forecasted in May. Finance Minister Nicola Willis said she'd continue to aim for 2028/29 and said we're on target to return the books to surplus faster than they will in Australia, the UK, Canada, and many other advanced economies, while maintaining a prudent debt position.  She's doubled down on what she calls her disciplined plan for returning the books to surplus, and says she's not willing to implement more brutal spending cuts, as the Taxpayers' Union have been advocating for, warning that their prescription would deliver human misery and hurt frontline public services and depress already weak demand in a recovering economy. She points out that the Taxpayer Union proposed, among other things, scrapping all Working for Families tax credits, reducing the average weekly income of the recipients by about $180. She said beneficiaries and low-income families would be at the brunt of any change like that, delivering a level of human misery she was not prepared to tolerate. She said of Labour's criticism, that their approach to spending is reckless and would further delay a return to surplus.  She said that the Government had delivered about $11 billion a year in savings during its term. Without this disciplined approach, she says the year's deficit would be $25 billion, and debt would be on track to blow out to 59% of GDP. So, according to Finance Minister Willis, she and her government are on track, and that being castigated by the Taxpayers' Union for being too soft, too wimpy, and being criticized by Labour for being too harsh, means she's charting the right course.  It is a fine balance she has to strike. You, me, everybody can see where she can make cuts. The winter energy payment, making it a needs-based payment, making a number of allowances needs-based, the fees free, that sort of thing. There's a lot of low-hanging fruit you could pluck off and save a few cents here and a few cents there. What a lot of households have done over the past few years. But she is bound by her agreements with coalition partners. There are some things she cannot touch. She's working in an MMP environment. There are plenty of things I'm sure she'd love to do, things that Ruth Richardson could do, but even allowing for the human misery factor, there are coalition partners she has to placate, and the Government wants to get re-elected.   It is utterly pointless steering the right course, but only for three years. It is utterly pointless saving a few billion here, only for it to be squandered next time round. So what do you suggest she does? I'm sure she gets plenty of reckons from all sorts of people – the most recent and the most high profile was former Finance Minister Ruth Richardson, who really should pipe down. I'm glad that debate's off. That was just farcical. But Ruth Richardson needs to pipe down because she could do things, and did do things, that simply aren't possible for this Finance Minister to do under MMP.  And also, it's a lot harder to get elected under MMP and to have a big say in the direction of the government unless you've got a big platform. So anything Nicola Willis does has to be with an eye to being the biggest party to form a government.  So, I tend to think she's right, that if you've got the Taxpayers' Union going, you're too soft, you're too wet, you're too pathetic, you've got Labour going, you're too cruel, you're too harsh, you're too brutal, then she's pretty much on the right track. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I remember back when I first started talkback, a million years ago at nighttime, it must have been the semicentennial of the waterfront workers strike of '51, or the lockout, depending on which side you're on. It was the biggest industrial confrontation in New Zealand's history for those who don't know of it. It was 151 days from February to July, and at its peak, 22,000 waterside workers, or wharfies, and associated unions were off the job, out of a population of just under 2 million.  It took place at a time of Cold War tensions, so name calling was rife. The opposing sides denounced each other as Nazis or commies, traitors and terrorists. Not all unions were on board with the Waterside Workers Union. Some of them thought they were way too militant, way too stroppy, so the unions weren't completely aligned. There was even the difference between the strike, which is what the employers and government called it. For the unionists, it was a lockout.  Things got so bad that a railway bridge near Huntly was dynamited at the time of the tensions. An act of terrorism, basically – that's certainly what the Prime Minister at the time Sid Holland called it. No one was hurt, but coal supplies were severely disrupted. So, we've got bridges being blown up, we've got people on strike, we've got families who would have starved were it not for supporters feeding them. But if you were found out that you were supporting a wharfie's family, you could be ostracised, even if you were a working-class family, it hit you. Your union had to be aligned with the waterfront workers. So it was incredibly divisive.  On the 1st of June, police dispersed up to 1,000 marchers in Queen Street, using truncheons and heavy-handed, fairly heavy-handed tactics. There was a lot of argy-bargy. There were fractured skulls and lacerations and concussions. The Government broke the strike really by bringing in new unions, and new unions of workers. They were denounced by the unionists as scabs, and the wharfies' position was becoming increasingly hopeless. Eventually, after five months, they conceded defeat on the 15th of July. So after 151 days.  But the ugliness and the bitterness remained, because we were talking about the strike, and a man rang me from Huntly, and he said there was a scab living in his town, and he wouldn't be in the same shop, he wouldn't be in the same pub, and he would cross the street. 50 years later, that bitterness and that anger remained.  Then we had in '81, probably the only comparable thing in recent times, was the Springbok tour, and the protests over that. That was the largest civil disturbance seen since '51. More than 150,000 people took part in more than 200 demonstrations. 1,500 were charged with offences that resulted from the protests. It was a clash between baby boomers and war veterans, between city and country, between young versus old. It's the Britain of the South versus an independent Pacific nation. There were real tensions and families were divided within themselves.  And then along came Covid, more recently.  I guess what I'm wondering about is how do we heal ourselves? Because we're at a time in history and at a time globally where tensions are running really, really high. Can we learn any lessons from our past? Our own past. We can't look at the world and try and fix that, but we can certainly try and heal ourselves here. We can look at the civil, not civil wars here, but civil division, civil fractures.  I mean, if you look back and you and your family were divided over the Springbok tour, not expecting anyone still to be around from 1951, but if you look at the division you might have had with your parents during the Springbok tour, you can't cut ties forever with your parents, can you? You can't cut off your kids because they went on a protest march. So surely on a micro level, if you can heal your differences and still come together at Christmas and birthdays and things, despite the pain and the anger and the absolute incomprehension of each other's stances, then surely we can do it on a national level, can't we?  And the same with Covid. There probably wasn't as much violence, physical violence, but certainly the violent rhetoric online was painful and awful. And it was probably more, I don't know, those who did not get vaccinated feel they were very much othered by the whole of society, that they were outcasts and punished unfairly and unnecessarily. But that was more an anti-authority, in my mind anyway, when it comes to Covid. You didn't agree with all the decisions being made, or you did. And anybody who dissented was a traitor and wanted to kill old people.  We're at a really tricky time, but we have been at tricky times before. We have thought how on earth are we going to get over this before, many times in our history.  I guess I'm looking at stories from a micro level. If there were real differences within your family, how did you get past them? How did you get past the pain and the hurt and come together as a community again? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The NZ Blood Service is encouraging people to donate, saying the demand doesn’t stop.  Although the amount of hospital activity and the number of surgeries slow down over the holiday period, CEO Sam Cliffe says things like accidents, births, and long-term conditions are still prevalent.   She told Kerre Woodham that they try to over-collect in the two weeks up to Christmas and for a little bit after, as their stocks tend to get a little bit spikey in January.  Additional mobile donation stations have been set up across the country, so even if you’re not at home, there are options available.  LISTEN ABOVE  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.