RNZ - Phil Pennington

New police powers: No new money for vital technology

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 15:17:55 +1300

A rush to deliver police new powers has not been matched by promised government funding for the technology needed to carry out those powers.

Police need two new or improved tech systems - one to handle the photos of people and other data generated by enhanced intelligence gathering; and one to issue new infringements under a Bill before parliament.

Official papers say enhanced data management will be "essential to building and maintaining public trust and confidence" and to "establish appropriate constraints" around what data police collected and how they used it.

RNZ inquiries show police are paying for the new infringements system out of an "underspend" last year, and there is no funding for a new data management system.

Police Minister Mark Mitchell was told by police last year that "an important complement to the immediate statutory reform we are progressing, will be the need to consider opportunities to enhance police information management and data protection and security measures".

Another official paper, written six months ago, said: "This work is likely to be significant and will likely require a business case to be developed, for consideration in a future Budget cycle."

But Mitchell's office told RNZ this week: "To clarify, the aim is for police to find solutions through enhancing existing technologies. No additional funding has been sought at this stage."

Mitchell said he could not comment on any work underway on the development of a newly funded Digital Evidence Management System "as clearly an investment of this kind would require additional funding, likely through a Budget process".

Legislation and technology 'in parallel'

Official papers mentioned the significance and complexity of the proposed law changes, and how building better data systems to implement them was a matter of trust.

"Police will progress enhancements to data management controls and assurance processes in parallel with the development and progression of the bill and will continue

following commencement of the legislation," said one.

"These enhancements will be essential to building and maintaining public trust and confidence in police's information management practices and treatment of personal information and helping ensure compliance with relevant Privacy Act obligations and principles."

Police told Mitchell in a proactively-released briefing in May: "It is important that, as we establish lawful authority to record visual and other information, we have information systems that enable us to ensure effective storage, retention, searching and destruction of these images."

This was partly because it was poor data and evidence handling by police that led to a 2022 inquiry and a Supreme Court ruling last year that constrained their powers.

Police were criticised in 2022 for the haphazard storage and handling of tens of thousands of casually-taken photos of Māori youth and others. Attempts by police to put better technology in place missed a deadline set by the Privacy Commissioner.

Not looking - or looking?

Police told RNZ last week they were not looking at any data tech options.

"As this bill has only just begun going through the parliamentary process police has not yet commenced work to investigating supporting technologies that may be required in preparation for implementation," they said.

But this week they said they were "continuing" to work on the most effective means of managing data. "We are looking at our existing technology and at additional opportunities presented via things such as our Digital Notebook app."

The papers showed that police had been pushing since last May for "urgent" law change - the earliest date put forward to enact it was by December 2025.

Mitchell responded enthusiastically, but police had to ease up when early engagement with the Justice Ministry and Privacy Commissioner "highlighted the level of challenge likely to be encountered" while noting that "Police has not been well positioned to respond to those concerns to date."

Freeing up new intel-gathering tech

One driver of the Bill - and of the need to upgrade to a digital evidence management system - was so that new technologies such as body-worn cameras could be introduced more easily.

"The methods and channels by which police collects personal information have changed as a result of technological developments," said the regulatory impact statement.

"New technology capabilities are supporting policing practices here and internationally, and are creating new opportunities for more effective policing."

The papers listed other intelligence-gathering tech police might want to harness more: "Mobile phones, high-resolution cameras, drones, Police Eagle helicopter footage, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) camera networks in urban and rural locations, Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), retail camera convergence platforms (for example, Auror and SaferCities), online open-source search tools, waste-water testing, and geospatial and geolocation tools."

They also noted how "some of this personal information may have an unknown specific intelligence use at the time of collection" - so the Bill sought to give police the freedom to use it in future.

Critics have voiced concerns that this opens the gate too far, without setting up strong safeguards.

Enhanced information systems were seen as a safeguard. "Further information management investment will assist with strengthening these safeguard [sic], ensuring police is meeting its current requirements, and maintaining public trust and confidence," said the impact statement.

"Whether any investment required will be met through existing baseline, or through a Budget bid, would be addressed through any necessary assessment."

New infringement system this year

Lack of funding has also delayed replacement of the Police Infringement Processing System (PIPS) for at least eight years, despite it being overloaded and unable to process anything other than traffic offences.

It had to be replaced for the amendment Bill to be implemented this year.

The Bill would give police new powers to detain and fine people in areas they have declared temporarily off-limits, and the old PIPS could not handle this.

Mitchell told RNZ its replacement would be completed this year, but gave no firm date.

The government aims to enact the policing amendment Bill after the select committee reports back in July.

"Police is developing a phased programme of work to transition to the new system which will support enforcement of the new infringement offences as well as existing infringements," Mitchell said.

"No new funding has been allocated to this development. The system has been funded from Vote Police underspend from the 2024/5 financial year."

NZ doesn't join allies in call for responsible use of AI by the military

Thu, 02 Apr 2026 11:36:16 +1300

New Zealand has not joined in the latest international call for responsible use of AI by the military, but has been taking part in the UN talks about autonomous weapons.

AI has been used in unprecedented ways in the war in Iran, for instance in drawing up hit lists and targeting missiles, according to overseas media reports.

Forbes has called it "the first AI war".

Australia, Canada and the UK were among this country's Five Eyes group partners that endorsed the non-binding call issued by the third summit on "responsible artificial intelligence in the military domain".

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs said no one was sent to the summit in Spain in February, unlike the second summit in 2024 when the NZDF had someone there.

"Although we observe when resourcing allows, New Zealand is a not a member of REAIM," MFAT said.

The US endorsed an earlier call from the 2024 summit of REAIM, a European government initiative.

The summits have been trying to nut out a blueprint for armies using AI but there remains no international law or legally-binding treaty that bans the use of lethal autonomous weapons.

Their calls to action have been described as "modest".

The latest call said military AI "can and should" contribute to peace and security, for instance, by reducing exposure of military personnel and civilians to danger, and helping decisions to be faster and better.

But its risks had to be corralled within frameworks of international humanitarian and human rights law, it said.

In March, NZ permanent mission staff in Geneva took part in the UN talks on lethal autonomous weapons, MFAT said.

These revolved around work by a group of government experts on the conditions where autonomous weapons could be developed and used legally.

The March talks referred to a new report by a leading Swedish thinktank that said militaries must change their AI weapons buying practices to build into them political commitments to responsible use.

The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute said in the US the Pentagon had previously stressed that its flagship Replicator initiative - to build fleets of thousands of drones focused in the Indo-Pacific - was based on policies for ethical use of AI.

But it added, "the tension between acquisition speed and thorough legal, safety and ethical review remains unresolved in public documentation."

More recently, US Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has hit the accelerator on emerging tech development, while at the same time deriding "stupid rules of engagement" aimed at reducing mistakes and civilian casualties.

The Stockholm study said militaries seeking speed were turning to commercial AI solutions rather than the traditional approach of ordering what they need, custom-made. This was leading to the fielding of "minimum viable capabilities" often without a whole lot of pre-testing.

"States may even knowingly accept governance trade-offs under acute security or operational pressures," it said.

The commercial, minimum viable approach has been gathering pace at the New Zealand Defence Force in the last year.

The study said governments should invest in evaluation mechanisms for military AI, and strengthen that by clear thinking in the military about what they want the AI they buy to do, backed up with solid ways to assure commercial suppliers' tech was set to meet political obligations.

Electrical rule change deemed 'dangerous' is justified, independent review finds

Wed, 01 Apr 2026 16:35:57 +1300

An independent review says a decision to change electrical wiring rules condemned by some as deadly, is justified but leaves residual risks.

Worksafe said this confirmed it was on a sound footing but the Electrical Inspectors Association was not buying it.

The changes lifted a total ban on inserting a switch, circuit or fuse into mains power earthing systems, known as protective earth neutral conductor (PEN) switching.

Worksafe ordered the review when the inspectors and others in the industry called on the government to intervene, saying it raised the risk of electrocution for households and businesses and it was out of step internationally.

It said it made the changes to future proof power networks for new technology that better enables charging electric vehicles, battery storage and homes generating solar power.

"The report concludes that the decision is justified, but that there are residual risks," the 37-page review by a UK engineer said.

"Some of the residual risks are already mitigated by existing practices, standards and guidance, whilst others require additional industry guidance and/or standards to be implemented."

It outlined five risks - a key one was where the protective conductor was switched so that "hazardous touch voltages exist without faults being present".

Worksafe said the review confirmed its evidence-led approach to electrical safety regulation to future-proof the systems.

It advised against installing switches until it published extra advice.

But the inspectors association said the review should have been done by someone familiar with New Zealand's system, that differed from the UK's.

It pointed to the report itself stating, "It is not desirable to switch a PEN conductor under any circumstances. Not all countries enable switching of protective conductors in their national wiring codes. The UK is one country that does, but even in the UK, switching of PEN conductors is precluded."

The association added, "The independent advice did not undertake any risk assessment/scoring, discuss risk controls or event directly analyse WorkSafe's advice to MBIE."

Worksafe said this type of switching had been allowed in some circumstances for decades and the "risks are well understood and can be managed through existing controls and other guidance".

"Overall, the review confirms the advice supports innovation, energy resilience, and safety, consistent with Energy Safety's role as the electricity and gas regulator."

Hospital builds: Health NZ 'significantly underspending its capital expenditure' - report

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 18:55:06 +1300

Health New Zealand (HNZ) is struggling to build new hospital projects, partly because staffing cuts have slowed down procurement activities, according to a newly-released report.

HNZ is headed into another Budget with long-standing infrastructure delivery challenges caused partly by job cuts, according to the Treasury report released under the Official Information Act.

The report showed that when the finance and infrastructure ministers met Health Minister Simeon Brown in December for a "please explain" meeting, "health capital underspends" were a focus.

"Health NZ is significantly underspending its capital expenditure compared to forecasted intentions," was a key message.

A second was that "individual projects are also frequently running over time and over budget".

The Infrastructure and Investment Ministers Group has been pushing chief executives and ministers of capital-intensive agencies with "the highest levels of Crown capital underspend" like HNZ to make their forecasts much more accurate.

Health NZ had a $315m discrepancy - including $190m on buildings and plant - between forecast and actual capital spending for the first quarter of 2025-26.

The Treasury papers tracking this are only released publicly months after they were given to ministers.

RNZ requested additional documents from Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop and was provided one from December 2025, written just ahead of Brown's meeting with Finance Minister Nicola Willis and Bishop.

That three-page report said that fixing the underspend and under-delivery of hospitals faced big hurdles.

"Health NZ has long-standing infrastructure delivery challenges stemming from two key factors: Health NZ's organisational capability and market capacity," Treasury told Bishop and Willis.

The construction sector has 2.1 percent fewer jobs now, compared to a year ago.

"These challenges are further exacerbated by difficulties in recruiting and retaining experienced project directors for major projects, reductions in staff numbers which have slowed procurement activities [and a third factor that was blanked out]," Treasury said.

"Efforts to address these challenges are ongoing (via improving project sequencing and bundling, and staff capacity building) but progress is slow."

It did not help that health's project teams tended to be optimistic in forecasting capital expenditure and "often do not accurately update forecasts to reflect experience and trends in expenditure".

Despite myriad costly efforts to improve this since HNZ was set up in 2022 - in part to fix the fragmented hospital building-and-management regime under 20 health boards - the weaknesses have persisted between governments.

HNZ was promising in 2023 to "make health infrastructure delivery quicker and more efficient by standardising Te Whatu Ora infrastructure planning, design, decision making and construction".

That year Health NZ set up a new national infrastructure team, but the whole agency has since undergone financial upheaval and a reset, and had now embarked on decentralisation which Brown this month said was the government's most significant structural move on health.

In April 2025, the government put out a multi-billion-dollar, 10-year plan for rebuilding hospitals and promised building would become more efficient, partly by doing things in phases. At the time health projects with ministerial approval worth $7.44 billion were underway.

One of the first projects to go the bite-size route has been Nelson Hospital, which HNZ recently said was on track but that Treasury last year said faced an 18-month delay on its inpatient block.

At the time the government launched the 10-year plan, HNZ papers show it foresaw significant risk it would not invest in the right place or "meet government expectations around providing a prioritised pipeline of capital investments".

Early this year, a study to assess the agency as the rapid decentralisation ordered by Brown got underway found it had workforce gaps in its infrastructure and investment group particularly in the northern and central North Island regions.

The January 2026 internal report said the delays in delivering projects had a favourable short-term effect on HNZ's cash balance.

But it added that "delays are likely to lead to increased project costs such as increased labour, equipment and material costs in the long term".

Related extra depreciation costs had taken $85m off the bottom line in 2025-26 - when HNZ aims to report a $200m deficit - and that would jump by another $160m next financial year, even as it tried to get to break-even.

One of the causes of the delays was lack of capacity - Treasury in December had said: "Common issues across infrastructure investments include challenges with HNZ capability, sector capacity and internal prioritisation", - but a second one carried a ring of hope: That more effort was being put in to get better decisions round investments, the January report said.

In December, ahead of the 'please explain' meeting for Willis and Bishop, Treasury listed some questions "you may wish to ask Minister Brown..." but Bishop's office blanked them out.

Disaster warning overhaul at risk, documents show

Tue, 31 Mar 2026 15:11:57 +1300

As Northland recovers from another storm, officials in Wellington are trying to fix the disaster warning and communications systems that have failed repeatedly for two decades.

The systems came up short in Cyclone Gabrielle when people did not get alerts in time and rescuers often had to guess what was going on.

They have got further than ever before on what they are calling "a once in a generation opportunity to significantly uplift the supporting systems".

Several business cases are ready to build the technology - such as a national warning system - and a review found the phased approach was sound.

The National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) told RNZ it was "moving to the delivery phase" of the five-year programme.

But warning signs have also been flashing.

The latest review released under the Official Information Act (OIA), from six months ago, said the project was "feasible, but significant issues already exist" that demanded "constant and high-level attention" so that risks did not "materialise into major issues threatening delivery".

At that stage, last September, the business cases appeared to have "substantially underestimated" how much technical, operational and cultural capability had to be built.

"The review team heard that critical questions remain unanswered regarding the fundamental information architecture: what data will be stored, how it will be gathered systematically, and crucially, how it will be transformed into actionable intelligence rather than merely aggregated information."

Having rated the project amber - on a red-amber-green scale - the 'Gateway' review listed six "do now" urgent tasks to resolve them, including a risk assessment.

That assessment, released under the OIA, showed a "high" and ongoing risk of major impact if a national disaster hit while the new systems were still being built over the next five years.

The system 'will not cope'

The system gaps have proven fatal before when people have not been warned in time, or rescued from their roofs in time, by emergency responders flying partly blind by lack of proper real-time shared data systems, epitomised in Cyclone Gabrielle and the failed response in the Esk Valley.

It goes way back. In 2004, a review said the existing national crisis management centre information system "will not cope with a national emergency of a magnitude, scale or duration greater than the recent February 2004 floods".

Two decades on, last July NEMA told companies at a 'town hall' to learn what the tech options were: "Over the past 20 years, there's been numerous reports highlighting the need for improved technology. Our technology is not fit for the fit for purpose for the sector.

"NEMA does not have a suitable modern platform for delivering its core functions before, during, and after a response.

"NEMA currently relies on a mix of disparate basic collaboration tools which are highly manual, prone to error, and can create risk during an emergency."

Basically, it faced disasters with little situational awareness, it told MPs in 2024, a year after Gabrielle.

'Anchor' programme

RNZ asked for the most substantive and up-to-date documents. The agency withheld four business cases on confidentiality and commercial grounds. Asked for advice and briefings to ministers since last October, NEMA advised there were none within the specified timeframe.

It told the companies: "There is real enthusiasm within the sector to finally be able to go and improve our information and management systems, to support the sector, to keep New Zealanders safe and improve community resilience before, during and after an event."

It was "very interested" in the cost and told the businesses to provide rough figures that nevertheless would not need much tweaking.

The Emergency Management Sector Operational Systems Programme runs from 2026 for five years. Described as the "anchor" project of the government's work to strengthen emergency management, it is still subject to policy work, legislation and funding.

It includes setting up:

a foundational data platform that is a a consolidated "single source of the truth" across local, regional and national emergency management agencies;
a standardised national visualisation tool called a common operating picture, or COP;
a national warning system;
operational systems for NEMA to nationally coordinate response and recovery.

In September, the agency found a preferred solution for all this but details were scarce as the business cases were withheld.

'More intractable'

However, as big as the tech build appeared - and that work demonstrated "considerable sophistication" - the even more crucial work was "more intractable" and in fact beyond NEMA as things stood, the review last September said.

"The organisational foundations necessary for successful delivery remain underdeveloped," it said.

"The contrast between technical readiness and institutional capacity presents the programme's most significant strategic challenge."

The long patchy history of disaster response had led to the 16 Civil Defence Emergency Management Groups nationwide sometimes doing their own thing and implementing "part solutions" that did not fit with others.

For instance, in 2011 when central Civil Defence introduced new disaster tech, it struggled to "convince the nationwide CDEM (Civil Defence Emergency Management) sector to fully uptake the tool". By 2013 the groups were failing to turn up at meetings, official reports showed.

Fifteen years on, and "fundamental cultural transformation across the entire emergency management system" was essential, the September review said.

"The proposed shift from fragmented, agency-centric operational models toward integrated, sector-wide coordination represents not merely a technical upgrade but a comprehensive reimagining of institutional relationships and working practices that have evolved over decades.

"This cultural transformation challenge may prove more intractable than the technical implementation aspects."

It warned Wellington not to lose support of the groups that had begun to buy in on the current overhaul.

"The phrase 'don't go dark on us and then expect us to reheat the meal' resonated with the Review Team."

Timeline

2004, 2017, 2020 - Inquiries into flood responses find big disaster system gaps. Various patchy tech systems are set up over the years.
2023 - Gabrielle and the North Island storms spark 26 separate inquiries.
2024 - NEMA develops a business case for implementing recommendations of those inquiries.
2025 - NEMA asks tech companies for advice, develops business cases - and a Gateway review delivers warnings.
2026 - The five-year Emergency Management Sector Operational Systems Programme official begins.

Workplace safety law changes out of step with global good practice, select committee told

Mon, 30 Mar 2026 16:16:52 +1300

Workplace safety law changes risk bringing in a two-tier system - one for small businesses, the other for large - according to a business leaders' forum.

A parliamentary select committee is hearing submissions on the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill, which is being championed by Minister for Workplace Relations and Safety Brooke van Velden.

It would be the biggest reform of workplace safety rules in a decade.

Paul Goodeve is on the Business Leaders' Health and Safety Forum and heads Clarus, which subcontracts to smaller firms.

He told MPs on Monday that the Bill would make it harder for him to ensure the small operators met his big-operator standards, set under the new bill.

"Everyone wants people to go home unhurt and that requires the entire system to work in alignment.

"Different cars driving on the road, some having to stop at the traffic lights but others not, it just creates problems with the whole health and safety system."

Under the Bill, small businesses must manage only risks defined as "critical", while all others must manage all risks and prioritise critical risks.

The Bill adds a new definition of 'critical risk', covering hazards which could lead to death, serious injury, notifiable incidents or occupational disease - but does not create an offence for failure to prioritise critical risks.

Its proponents say it will cut compliance costs and reduce uncertainties, while reducing deaths, injuries and illness at work.

But Goodeve's colleague and forum chair Sheridan Broadbent told the committee the carve-out covered small businesses, even though they had a 24 percent higher injury rate than the others.

It was out of step with global good practice, and by their assessment would increase ACC costs and lower productivity, said Sheridan, an independent director of companies.

"In checking in with our colleagues at the UK regulator, they are really scratching their heads to understand why we would go down this path."

But another lobby group BusinessNZ told the committee the Bill "right -sizes" health and safety duties for small businesses.

Chief executive Katherine Rich said the current law was too complex, creating uncertainty and "real fear" of getting it wrong.

Small business owners had told them this led to overcompliance, the use of consultants and lots of paperwork, she said.

They backed the Bill and had seen no evidence that the duties of the small would conflict with the large, as in practice, such as an architect adhering to a big construction site's health and safety duties when they went on the site, Rich said.

Critics have voiced worries that bullying and other psychosocial risks would be managed far less under the bill.

Young Workers Resource Centre director Matariki Roche told the committee that young workers were over-represented in small businesses, and were worried about psychosocial issues taking a real back seat.

But Rich said all good employers worked hard to manage such risks.

The current law was passed in 2015 in response to the fatal Pike River mine disaster five years earlier.

Many submitters to the select committee have said they liked the Bill's stress on using 'codes' more to show industries "what good looks like".

Van Velden has led the push for more reliance on the Approved Codes of Practice.

However, some submitters warned the codes can take a long time for industries to agree on, and the process had to be well resourced.

Police yet to investigate what technology is needed gather intelligence as part of new bill

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 15:41:21 +1300

Police say they have not yet started investigating what technologies they might need to implement intelligence-gathering powers contained in a new bill that would give police new powers to move and detain.

They also said public consultation on the policing amendment bill would happen at the Justice select committee where it was sent after its first reading this week.

The bill delivered new powers to police to move or detain someone, but just how far it went would now be decided in select committee.

There was no public consultation on it until now, with a regulatory impact statement saying the time pressure had been to enact the changes as soon as possible after a Supreme Court ruling almost a year ago, "given the impact on daily policing activity".

Two official inquiries and a Supreme Court ruling almost a year ago, challenged police's understanding of how they could collect general intelligence and, the bill said, narrowed the law.

This came after police photographing people indiscriminately was ruled unlawful, and police storage of tens of thousands of images was exposed for the first time as so haphazard they still had not been able to locate them all.

Police missed a mid-2025 deadline to find a way to identify and delete all the photos.

Their updates to the Privacy Commissioner over several years showed that while they stopped the practice, and taking youths fingerprints unlawfully too, they failed to find or afford technology to destroy the pictures, or to flag them if they cropped up in a current investigation.

The tech gap was raised in the debate over the bill's first reading this week by Labour's police spokesperson Ginny Andersen.

A digital evidence management system had been presented as a solution, she said.

"We have a right to know how long those photographs or video recordings or sound recordings are being held for and where they are being stored," Andersen said.

"It's important to know that there is a system in place within police for this to be done responsibly, and it's also important for us to know if this is funded, because we know... there's been inadequate funding for the development and implementation of a digital evidence management system.

"Had they had that, police would have stored and identified photos and linked them to specific cases, which would have also meant [that] staff would have documented the lawful purpose for taking the photo."

In mid-2024 a project to build such a system was put on hold for lack of money.

RNZ would seek an update from police.

Tim Anderson, Assistant police commissioner for iwi community and partnership said on Friday, "as this bill has only just begun going through the parliamentary process, police has not yet commenced work to [sic] investigating supporting technologies that may be required in preparation for implementation."

Police began a push for a law change around general intelligence powers in 2022 soon after being taken to task in inquiries by the Privacy Commissioner and Independent Police Conduct Authority.

The government said the new bill sought to correct that and restore their powers but critics say it expands their powers without adequate safeguards.

The lack of consultation before the bill was introduced extended to Māori.

Police said on Friday they would continue to consider and give effect to their obligations to Māori and the Treaty "including ways in which any disproportionate impacts to Māori can be appropriately mitigated".

Bill to give police new powers to move and detain introduced to Parliament

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 07:22:51 +1300

A new bill would give police new powers but just how far it goes will now be fought over in select committee.
The Privacy Commissioner says it sets the bar too low, but a Justice Ministry push for more safeguards was rejected.
A criminal procedure expert warns it leaves so much up to police discretion it will likely land them in lots of court challenges.
A hurry around the bill led to limited consultation with the public, Māori and over impacts on children.

A big step towards mass surveillance or restoring common sense powers to police to collect evidence and fight crime?

A bill just introduced to Parliament delivers new powers to police to move or detain someone, but just how far it goes depends who you listen to.

Alarm and reassurance were both in play when Mark Mitchell tabled the Policing Amendment Bill at its first reading before a nearly empty Parliament on Tuesday evening.

"I want to be very clear that this bill will not provide additional powers to police that could be construed as enabling mechanisms for mass surveillance of the New Zealand public," the Police Minister told the House.

Labour's Camilla Belich retorted that it was too vague to be sure.

"We don't want a situation where we have an Orwellian society of mass surveillance, where there is unreasonable collection of personal data, which is then in some instances used to charge people with offences and ... there isn't enough detail in this bill to date that ... should assure the House that situation will not arise," she said.

The bill allowed for police to record short live videos in public if they judged that was justified.

Law professor Gehan Gunasekara bridled at Mitchell's repeated statements that the bill "restored" police powers.

"It doesn't restore the status quo. It changes the status quo," he said.

'Safeguards'

The bill in a preamble said two events "have together narrowed the law" so that police now had less power to photograph or record people in public than a regular person.

One was official inquiries sparked by RNZ in 2020 exposing how officers for years had casually snapped tens of thousands of people, mostly Māori teenagers.

Ruled illegal, the practices were curtailed - albeit reluctantly and soon after police won bipartisan political support to change the law amid a rise in ramraids on shops.

That change had taken till now, but not before a Supreme Court ruling last year further narrowed what officers could do, according to the bill.

ACT's Todd Stephenson gave qualified backing to reverse that.

"This bill does clarify and expands the police's power to collect, record and use information, including images, sounds, for lawful policing purposes," he said in the debate.

But with a kicker.

"Our support is conditional on ensuring that there is strong privacy protections and safeguards against mass surveillance powers."

'Low bar'

The Privacy Commissioner was not convinced about the safeguards, saying the bill set a "low bar".

"It permits collection of people's information for 'an intelligence purpose' which is not defined and establishes a low bar for police to meet (the police employee collecting the information only has to 'consider that the information will or may support the Police in performing a function')," said Michael Webster in a statement.

The Justice Ministry meantime had recommended tailormade safeguards.

But that was "deemed unnecessary" because the bill was not displacing any privacy principles or the Commissioner's powers, said the bill disclosure statement.

However, the ministry largely supported the bill and said it did not breach the Bill of Rights Act.

Webster's office in 2021 made one of two investigations of police taking so many photos so casually.

The Privacy Act did not permit "baseless or indiscriminate collection", he said, but now the bill sought to set up a broad authorising framework.

"Overly broad or insufficiently clear intelligence gathering powers will impact on the privacy rights of everyday New Zealand[ers] and has the potential for chilling effect on people's civil and political rights."

Green MP Tamatha Paul said at the first reading that maybe Mitchell was right when he said the bill would not impact everyday New Zealanders: "Maybe he's right, because this bill is going to impact Maori.

"Rather than tightening up the practice and protecting children, they're changing the law to make it legal," she said.

Police did make changes over several years as ordered by the Privacy Commissioner but failed to find a technology solution to identify and delete all the unlawfully taken photos.

Council of Civil Liberties' Thomas Beagle saw not power restored to police but a power grab.

"It is trying to give the police whatever they want at the price of the people of New Zealand," he said.

"It's expanding surveillance powers for police drastically by allowing them to use any form of recording [of] visual or audio data that they can capture from public or private places without any oversight."

'Time pressures'

"Time pressures" meant there had been little or no consultation with the public or Māori or consideration of Te Tiriti, said the disclosure statement, and a regulatory impact statement (RIS).

Police consulted Te Puni Kokiri, which raised these concerns.

For the same reason, impacts on children and teenagers had not been delved into - even though the bill arose in part from officers photographing and fingerprinting them.

"This proposal is not seeking to legislate any additional protections for the collection, use, and retention of personal information on children and young people," said the RIS.

Existing protections combined with police seeking "to ensure operational policy and guidance is aligned with our legislative obligations" was enough, it added.

Police would deal with any disproportionate impacts, the disclosure statement said.

Children's Commissioner Dr Claire Achmad said she had real concerns especially for mokopuna and rangatahi Māori, "given the previous breaches of their rights by the exercise of police power in photographing them".

A police policy team talked to her office and invited more feedback "but due to very short time-frame provided by police, this was not possible".

'We're striking the balance'

The Police Association's Steve Watt said it was not over-reach.

"Look, it is important to consult a wider group when these types of bills come out. However, I'm sufficiently satisfied that there's safeguards in place that minority groups won't be targeted as a result," Watt said.

"Ultimately ... what this does is it gives our officers certainty around the information that they can collect and store as part of their day-to-day duties.

"We're striking the balance between what was occurring in the past but allowing the freedom and ability for police to be able to perform their duties and functions appropriately."

He echoed Mitchell in stating that internal and external controls were adequate - Mitchell noted the establishment of the Inspector-General of Police role sparked by the McSkimming scandal - and how any information gathered could be tested in the courts.

But criminal procedure expert professor Scott Optican of Auckland University said that was the problem.

"The definitions are vague, the reasonable standards are vague, and I think it's going to invite continuing challenges in court," said Optican.

"I don't think it does the police any favours."

Giving police general intelligence-gathering powers was a laudable goal, but should be done after wide consultation to arrive at "proper standards, clear guidance that adequately balances the need for criminal investigation against the protection of personal privacy, [and] that creates standards of reasonableness that we all understand and live with", he said.

Part two

The bill is in two parts: The first is on intelligence gathering; the second would give police new powers to declare a wider range of public areas off limits earlier, before, say, boy racers kicked off or other public disorder, including the power to fine people $1000, get their details or if they refused, to fine or jail them for up to three months.

Part two would "deter antisocial driving behaviour", the bill said.

But it also would let a constable temporarily close off a place if they believed on "reasonable grounds" that "public disorder exists or is imminent at or near the place", or a danger to a member of the public.

It "expands the police's existing temporary closure powers to include circumstances that are broader than vehicle-related offending, as well as expanding the geographical size of areas that may be subject to temporary closure".

Beagle said that was unreasonable and open to abuse, for instance, to close off protests.

"This, combined with the police powers to move on homeless people, are reducing the right to be in public places," he said.

The bill has now gone to select committee to be reported back to Parliament on 27 July.

Briscoes Group trialling facial recognition tech

Thu, 26 Mar 2026 17:53:45 +1300

*Amendment: This story has been updated following a clarification from Briscoes

Facial recognition technology (FRT) trials are underway in 18 Briscoes and Rebel Sports stores across the North Island, the country's fourth big retailer to have announced a move to adopt or test it.

Foodstuffs' separate chains in the South Island and North Island have deployed it permanently in 28 supermarkets, and hardware giant Bunnings is about to test it.

Briscoes Group is already halfway through a year-long trial which began in September 2025, outlined on its website.

"A thorough process is in place to ensure we do not negatively impact customers," it told RNZ.

Retailers use FRT to create a biometric template of every shopper's face, then check it against a watchlist of known risky people. Images that do not match are deleted quickly, they say.

Proponents say retail violence is growing and the tech makes stores safer.

In the UK, the ongoing debate about FRT in stores has also been about its use to combat shoplifting: "So much theft is driven by addiction - cameras alone won't solve that," a police outreach worker told the BBC.

Asked by RNZ if Briscoes anticipated the tech would cut down on theft, it said removing violent people from stores "as a byproduct, may reduce the loss".

"However, this was not the reason for the FRT trial, this is about the safety of our team members and customers."

Six other big retailers not using it yet

Briscoes is using a system that Auckland company Auror launched in NZ last September.

Auror said in an email to the sector earlier this month: "In New Zealand, leading retailers are already operating ASR (Auror Subject Recognition), building practical experience with governance frameworks, community engagement, and day-to-day controls that maintain trust while protecting teams."

It declined to identify which retailers when RNZ asked.

Bunnings and Briscoes were among 11 big box retailers and supermarkets that signed a statement in June 2025 supporting facial recognition to "protect workers and customers" following the Privacy Commissioner giving a cautious tick of approval to the Foodstuffs trial.

Of the others who signed, The Warehouse Group, Farmers, Mitre 10, Woolworths, Spark, and One NZ said they were not currently using FRT. Michael Hill Jewellers did not respond to a request for comment.

'Violent, threatening or aggressive'

Bunnings is about to begin its own trial in two Hamilton stores, Te Rapa and Hamilton South, in April.

"The FRT system is calibrated to an accuracy level of 93 percent - meaning only matches with an accuracy rating of 93 percent will trigger an alert," it said online.

Foodstuffs North Island is using FRT in 15 Pak'nSave stores and 10 New Worlds.

Foodstuffs South Island has deployed it in three Christchurch stores, where a trial ended in January.

"Only people who have previously been violent, threatening or aggressive in our stores are entered into the FR watchlist," the South Island chain said on its website.

It told RNZ on Wednesday: "We're taking this step by step. The stores in the trial were picked for a reason - they've got solid reporting processes, experienced teams and they've been dealing with threatening and harmful behaviour, so they're well-placed to see if this makes a difference on the shop floor.

"We're still working through the results, and any call on adding new stores will come down to what's actually working, how it stacks up from a privacy point of view and whether stores have the right systems and know-how to use it properly."

The four big retail groups all said only trained staff used the system. They all said they had done privacy impact assessments and engaged with the privacy commissioner.

Bunnings recently had what observers considered a partial win against a challenge in Australia to its use of FRT.

Auror, perhaps not surprisingly, saw it that way: "In Australia, the recent Bunnings appeal decision has opened the door to exploring how FRT can be used in retail settings for the purpose of crime prevention and safety. This decision gives retailers greater confidence," said the company, which last September said it had only recently become comfortable that the tech was accurate enough in identifying people that it should begin offering it to retailers.

Bunnings on its website said in New Zealand it had engaged a Māori digital sovereignty expert to align with tikanga Māori and also got independent research to understand what New Zealanders think about FRT.

Tech not linked to police

Briscoes said it let customers know about the trial with signs on the store doors.

Only people who posed a risk to team members and customer safety were uploaded to its watchlist, it said in a statement. That comprised customers who offended against staff or were threatening physically or verbally aggressive, and any known to carry weapons.

The system was not linked to police. Instead, a manager would call police to remove someone, but not approach the person themselves for safety's sake.

Staffers were grateful for it, Briscoes said.

"We will consider any future deployment based on the reduction of harmful events across the full trial period."

Rule three of the recently finalised national biometric code said companies using FRT must tell people it is being collected and why, say how long data is retained for and make it clear how they can complain or access and correct any of their biometric data that is held.

Auror said its system allowed retailers to focus only on known high-harm offenders, and had multiple points where humans intervened, but with strict access controls.

"It does not allow retailers to retain data of regular shoppers, it reduces bias by prohibiting the collection of sensitive characteristics, and ensures data is not shared between organisations."

Auror also operated an automated number plate recognition system for stores that generated over 10,000 reports of potential theft or assault or similar crimes to police a month. But it did not provide police access to FRT information, it said.

'The last thing you want to do... is to violate consumer trust'

Following Bunnings' announcement, Massey University marketing professor Bodo Lang warned a botched rollout of facial recognition technology could be costly for retailers - and said a business should signal its intention well before implementation.

"Many, many companies spend tens of thousands, or sometimes tens of millions of dollars in advertising to build their brand and get people in the store.

"So the last thing you want to do as a business is to violate consumer trust and I think by front-footing the issue, providing transparent information, you can avoid any erosion of trust."

He believed most people would accept it in retail as a "necessary evil" but such support could be easily lost.

"I think the public opinion would swing hard against it if they had a sense, a perception, an inkling that this might also be used for other purposes."

Assurances it was for "one purpose, and one purpose only", was therefore key to public buy-in.

Security consultant Nicholas Dynon said New Zealand was a laggard on research into how people felt about the tech, with just some data from the Office of the Privacy Commissioner on public attitudes towards privacy, including FRT.

"So we do have some numbers - but they are very limited and they are general," said Dynon, who wrote 'Licence to Operate' for the National Security Journal about public buy-in of FRT.

"What we don't have is that sort of objective peer-reviewed understanding of how the public in New Zealand feels about FRT."

Research in other countries showed acceptance varied depending on the environment, and that it had low rates of social licence in retail, compared to, say, at airports, he said.

Dynon also called into question the justification often used for deploying facial recognition, that retail violence was on the up and up.

NZ has 'seized opportunities' to work closer with US on defence, space - MFAT briefing

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:27:55 +1300

New Zealand's attempts to get more cooperation with the Trump administration on defence, space and sensitive technology sectors has been paying off, according to an official briefing.

"New Zealand has seized opportunities in the first year of the current US Administration to register - at all levels - the importance of US-New Zealand cooperation across these sectors," said a Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade (MFAT) briefing, dated November and newly released under the Official Information Act.

"There is support in Washington for stronger partnership with us."

In the latest bilateral move, NZ Space Agency officials will meet their counterparts in Washington this week.

This second US-NZ space dialogue - two years after the first - aimed to "strengthen bilateral space cooperation" but details were confidential, the agency told RNZ.

It has coincided with the US Department of Defence finalising a study looking at options for its increasing number of rocket launches - including at sites in other countries.

With Cape Canaveral and its other launch sites under growing pressure, a Pentagon study - due back with US lawmakers next week - covers environmental, regulatory, cost, geographic and orbital factors that may make alternate locations "outside the continental United States... viable or advantageous".

RNZ has asked Congress's armed services committee for a copy.

Defence, space and emerging tech have been evolving in new ways, at a time of big change including from US President Donald Trump applying America First policies and national security interests to international alliances, domestic production and arms exports.

Two impacts have been to tie commercial and military tech and space contracts more closely together, and to increase efforts to expand the US military industrial base. US law considers New Zealand to be part of that base.

'Closer integration with key partners'

The November MFAT briefing said technology cooperation was increasingly significant to the relationship.

"Deeper cooperation with the United States in the defence, space and other sensitive technologies sectors has the potential to deliver significant economic and strategic benefits to New Zealand," it said.

Local firms were advancing the country's strategic interests by "facilitating closer partnerships and closer integration with key partners" but faced complex regulatory barriers and the growing 'buy-America-made' hurdle.

"Importantly, the Administration is open to investigating options for addressing regulatory challenges faced by New Zealand, particularly related to the US International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR) and US domestic sourcing requirements."

One option was to seek some sort of exemption from ITAR, it said.

The US has been lowering ITAR barriers for Australia and the UK because they are part of the nuclear-subs deal AUKUS.

The methods American firms could exploit that was the subject of a webinar this week from US trade officials - "Full Steam Ahead: AUKUS, ITAR, and the Keys to Australia's Naval Supply Chain".

Defence and Space Minister Judith Collins has been at the forefront of building the NZ-US relationship on these fronts, while also streamlining aerospace regulations and overseeing a defence capability plan rich in drone and emerging technology options.

But Collins steps down soon, and is not attending the Washington space dialogue or the US Space Force's main annual symposium in Colorado next month, where last year she was the only non-US politician invited to speak.

At the symposium in 2024, New Zealand updated its agreement to align local space regulations more with America's.

'Few impediments to the transfer of technology'

However, the NZ Space Agency told RNZ it was not involved in the current Pentagon study that covered foreign launch sites.

Asked if New Zealand might be in danger of missing out on US business, the agency said: "Through our regulatory cooperation with the Federal Aviation Administration and the Technology Safeguards Agreement (TSA) with the US, the New Zealand Space Agency has been actively facilitating Rocket Lab's provision of launch services from their private spaceport at Mahia since their inception. Customers of these services include US government agencies.

"If there was interest beyond Mahia, the New Zealand Space Agency would expect to become involved although not necessarily as the first point of contact."

The November briefing said MFAT was prioritising work to strengthen the country's export controls regime so it was more comparable "with our closest partners", and to secure other short-term gains for local businesses in the defence, space and sensitive tech sectors.

"We have welcomed messaging from the US, at all levels, that as a close and trusted partner there should be few impediments to the transfer of technology between us," it said.

In 2022, the US Congress said America should ensure that the Pentagon's capabilities for rapid space launches "align with initiatives by Five Eyes countries" and other allies. New Zealand is in Five Eyes.

The US should implement space missions with allies that demonstrated "rapid launch, reconstitution and satellite augmentation from locations in the Indo-Pacific, European, and other theaters of operations" and "leverage allied and partner spaceports to diversify and disaggregate launch sites across the world for a multitude of missions, including national security missions", it said.

After the first US-NZ space dialogue in 2024, the sides issued a statement focused on commercial space partnerships, and stating, "Participants acknowledged that New Zealand's geographic advantages has enabled frequent and responsive launch for US industry and government agencies, adding strategic resilience to launch capacity."

That year the NZ and US also launched a dialogue on critical and emerging tech, saying: "Both nations highlighted the necessity for increased interoperability with like-minded countries to address common challenges."

The race against time for people trapped in floodwaters

Wed, 25 Mar 2026 06:20:42 +1300

Fire and Emergency (FENZ) has been struggling to respond quickly to some rescue callouts when big storms hit - including one last month when a man died, well-placed sources say.

The specialist team in last month's case near Ōtorohanga took 50 minutes to get out the door after they got the call for help. The team has been asking themselves if they could have saved his life, if they had been put on alert much earlier.

"We knew that every minute goes by, it's not great for us. So there was a bit of angst in the appliance, you could feel it, the guys just want to get there and do what they're trained for," said a person with knowledge of what happened, who was not authorised to discuss the matter publicly.

RNZ knows of two other emergencies - one in January at Welcome Bay in Tauranga and another in Nelson in July - where sources believe FENZ did not get specialist teams to flood rescues quickly enough because the crews were not pre-deployed and ready to go, despite plenty of warning.

After the Nelson storm, FENZ was warned its systems had been slow.

But the agency has defended its response in all three cases.

It declined to be interviewed, but in a statement said water rescue teams were a national resource approved with national oversight to ensure they were deployed to areas of greatest need.

It pre-deployed swift water teams "when appropriate to do so" after local operational leaders had discussed it with police - who are in charge of co-ordinating water rescues - and Civil Defence.

Swift water rescues are not a core FENZ function. But they do come under "additional functions" in the legislation, which says it is allowed to help with them "to the extent that FENZ has the capability and capacity to do so" and as long as it retained its capacity to fight fires.

The swift water teams were in a fledgling form when Cyclone Gabrielle hit in early 2023, and some members have talked to RNZ about getting a "kick in the guts" from lacking the gear to do enough when the cyclone and the Auckland anniversary floods hit.

The problems with swift water predeployment and responding were not uniform, several sources said. Some districts were better than others at standing up teams or getting them out the door, and were improving. But they said headquarters was a problem.

It also did not help that not all local or volunteer brigades even knew that calling on them was an option, while there seemed to be no standard way for communications centres to let them know at the very start.

"In my opinion, they've struggled to be proactive to put teams into areas that potentially will need flood response," said one of the several sources.

Time was never on their side. As floodwaters rose, any swift water team became less able to get in at all.

"We weren't really going to be much use if we just turned up as it was kicking off."

Ōtorohanga

A man in his 70s died after his vehicle was submerged on State Highway 39 near Ōtorohanga on the evening of 13 February.

A severe thunderstorm red warning for south Waikato and Ōtorohanga had gone out from MetService at 4.40pm that Friday afternoon, and another red warning was valid from 7pm.

That did not trigger pre-deployment of the closest swift water teams at Rotorua fire station to south Waikato.

The call logs showed that when it was called to go to the scene that night, it took 50 minutes to get on the road.

Twenty-two minutes of that was spent securing approval through a chain involving national commanders, and the rest spent getting ready for the job.

The first alert from the flooded highway was raised at 8.36pm by the Pirongia volunteer brigade, which FENZ said was "out supporting their community when they became aware of this developing incident".

The call log suggested initially the volunteers knew they had "a couple of people trapped in flood water" and also that "a patient is currently trapped in flood water on top of a tractor".

Three times in the next half hour the brigade asked for a helicopter or lines rescue team from Hamilton.

FENZ in a statement said: "It wasn't initially clear that the person trapped on the tractor required medical rescue.

"A lines rescue team is not trained to undertake rescues in water. The condition of the person trapped in a ute in floodwaters was not known at 20.52."

At 9.13pm, Pirongia was asked if the rescue was only for those on the tractor, and responded that the patient and firefighter on top of the tractor "tried to rescue some one else in a ute but lost sight of it".

A few minutes later, the two people on the tractor were reported safe.

At 8.56pm, the log showed FENZ people in Waikato were "in conference" and requested the swift water team from Rotorua.

But the swift water team did not leave Rotorua till 50 minutes later at 9.46pm, and they never made it.

It took 22 minutes for the request to deploy them to work its way to the National Commanders Group for approval at 9.07pm, then to be passed on to Rotorua at 9.18pm.

It took another 28 minutes for the swift water team to get ready - some had to come in from home outside Rotorua - and out the door.

"For some reason our team just takes ages to get approved from like the bigwigs," said an informed source.

They faced a 120km trip to the trapped man. They had been on the road for a few minutes when the call came in just before 10pm that he had died.

They were then diverted to Ōtorohanga, where they rescued at least 18 people in the dark from a house.

By contrast, fire callouts typically trigger much faster responses and times are tightly tracked against targets, which are reported back to Parliament.

FENZ told RNZ that pre-deploying a water rescue team was not raised by the Pirongia volunteer brigade.

The storm was "particularly severe" and it had received 800 calls on 111 about the storm on Friday and Saturday.

But it was focused on the risk of landslides, it said.

Weather modelling indicated the main risk was land instability and FENZ consulted Civil Defence, which was the lead on landslides.

"One request was received for support from a specialists water rescue team in Tairāwhiti, which was agreed to.

"There were no other requests."

It predeployed Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) crew who deal with slips to the East Coast, Bay of Plenty and Wairarapa.

Welcome Bay - rescuing the rescuers

The month before Ōtorohanga, the Rotorua swift water team took hours to get to a rescue near Papamoa, on the night before the fatal landslide at Mt Maunganui campground on 22 January.

A red severe rain warning for Bay of Plenty had gone out at 9am the previous day - a Wednesday - and a local state of emergency was declared.

But most of the swift water team was not pre-deployed, either at Rotorua or closer to Tauranga, according to a FENZ message log and the police record.

When a call came from police about 12.30am overnight Wednesday-Thursday to rescue a "person trapped in flood water in car" near Papamoa, the Rotorua team was approved to go a half hour later.

But they were not actually assembled and sent.

"We are still in bed asleep at home when it is all going down," said one of the sources.

Instead, a NZ Defence Force unimog with some police and firefighters on board went, and ended up rescuing four elderly people.

It was only when the unimog got stuck in a culvert about 4am, that the swift water team was sent from Rotorua station.

It was 5.45am before they reported in the log: "Swift water rescue just entering the water now."

They eventually got to the unimog about 6am. The rescued people who had been on it for several hours had "mild hypothermia".

Police told RNZ: "They were wet and cold but otherwise uninjured."

Earlier, at just after midnight, police had called the unimog for help, but were told the vehicle was a transport - not a rescue asset - and that police should call swift water rescue instead.

"FENZ were contacted to deploy a swift water rescue team," police told RNZ.

The swift water team at Rotorua was approved to go at 1.08am.

A fourth informed source said the unimog was under the assumption they were on their way - but they were not.

Police told RNZ that instead they discussed with FENZ the difficulty of getting in past rising waters, so went back to the unimog.

This time the unimog did set off, with some swift water rescue-trained FENZ staff and two police officers on board.

They rescued people on Waitao Road in Welcome Bay, but events then overwhelmed resources.

Driving back to dry land, the unimog hit slip debris hidden underwater and went into the culvert.

"We need water rescue," came their call at 3.49am.

"Can we get swift water rescue activated as the Unimog is stuck with people in it... trapped and semi submerged... 12 POB [people on board]."

The water was 1.5m deep. Police told RNZ: "The unimog driver advised police that the occupants of the vehicle were in no immediate danger."

The Rotorua swift water team was called for a second time.

A source familiar with this said: "Bear in mind as we were not pre-deployed, the team was at home, had to drive to station and uplift equipment and transportation."

They then drove 70km to Welcome Bay. They unloaded their raft as close as they could get to the unimog and, joined by surf lifesavers, went in.

Meantime, a car had come down the hill "and hit the flooded water - no movement or headlights have been seen since".

"Can you make swift water rescue aware and if further information is need[ed] they can speak to the stranded police officers on the unimog," said the log.

At 6.20am the swift water team was coming back with the rescued people from the unimog in a raft to a chopper on a dry bit of road to fly people out, while another team was "heading further up to a car that is under water".

"There wasn't concern" by then, said another source. "Water levels were receding, it was shin deep."

At 7.39am the FENZ call log said: "All crews back to dry ground inc life savers ... all patients rescued."

Nelson - 'The public's not probably getting the best bang for buck'

After last year's Nelson storm, FENZ headquarters was warned its systems were too slow. National commanders took hours to approve swift water teams to pre-deploy from Christchurch and Wellington.

Instead of getting there in daylight, they arrived about 3am the next morning, almost 24 hours after the first members had been called in down in Canterbury.

It is understood the warning triggered an operational review, which RNZ has asked to see. FENZ said the review was ongoing.

"We can't be turning up and being exhausted," said an informed source.

"The decisions not to pre-deploy or [use] us could have catastrophic outcomes for the public, but it's also for our people, too."

The frustration about when they got pre-deployed by national commanders - or were approved to actually go to a rescue - appeared strongest at the front line.

"We're at home having dinner while they [flood victims] are there getting stuck," said a third informed source.

Several sources suggested the policy should be that if a known flood-risk area, or one recently flooded, got a red weather alert, that should trigger swift water predeployment.

The swift water rescue teams based at Christchurch - two teams of four usually go out in utes and trailers - were called in four times to Nelson-Marlborough in the floods of June and July 2025.

Three times they made it, and a source said that pre-deployment had worked pretty well.

But the fourth time on 29 July was the worst flooding - and the slowest response.

After waiting all day for a green light, crews set off themselves, even though night was falling. Nelson had already been drenched - it should have been a quick, easy decision to pre-deploy, they felt.

As it was, they made their first rescue around the same time they would have been just arriving in Nelson had they delayed and left the next morning.

"The public's not probably getting the best bang for buck.

"It's also our volunteers and our firefighters that may not have that resource and will have to make a harder call than they would have needed to if we'd already been there."

"If the event had carried on any longer ... our own personal safety would have been [at] higher risk because we were just so tired because we had to drive through the night."

Road rage of a different kind: How cranes and trucks are feeling jammed up

Tue, 24 Mar 2026 08:38:36 +1300

Angry truckers have banded together with bus, crane and even combine harvester operators to hit out over rules they say make it too hard to get bigger, more efficient vehicles on the road and easily move them round.

They want far-reaching change to the 23-year-old 'Rule' around the size, weight and permitting system for heavy vehicles.

They said in a hardhitting letter to the Transport Agency (NZTA) that the old Rule was blocking safer, more efficient vehicles from easily being imported, envisaging a near future when the maximum 58 tonne diesel trucks were scaled up to 62 tonne electric (which allowed for the battery).

"The level of anger from our members and the risk of more pronounced public responses during an election year should not be underestimated if tangible progress is not made," said a letter from 11 heavy vehicle associations to the Transport Agency's chair late last month.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop promised last June the government would be "taking the handbrake off productivity through transport rule reform" - and on Monday said he heard operators "loud and clear when they tell us there are more changes they'd like to see".

The operators had earlier talked of feeling fobbed off, though the Transport Agency late last week offered them another meeting, for Tuesday this week.

"While responsibility is often framed as sitting with the Ministry, NZTA has long led sector engagement and provided all technical advice to the Ministry and ministers. Recent ministerial correspondence shows the full extent of the lack of progress is not well understood," their letter said.

"We seem to get pushed from pillar to post," said signatory Dom Kalasih, head of Transporting NZ that represented 1100 firms, mostly truckers.

Crane operators, who also signed, said the old rules were holding everyone up.

"Getting a crane out for a job, the ... permit and exemption process, goodness, for a large crane operation, we're talking hours, hours a day ," said Sarah Toase of the Crane Association.

Their next stop would be to seek a meeting with the minister, the associations told RNZ.

Bishop said the rules would be modernised.

"Important research and policy work is underway to carefully consider those ideas," he said in a statement. "This is a complicated area and not everything can be done all at the same time."

The question of how fast remained open though the first changes under reform were due this coming July.

'Complex safety, infrastructure and cost considerations'

The Transport Ministry pushed back on the industry group criticism.

"Many of the changes sought by industry - particularly those enabling significantly larger or heavier vehicles - raise complex safety, infrastructure and cost considerations," it told RNZ.

Research had to be done on the impacts on roads and what additional infrastructure investment may be required, it added.

However, the industry said "frustration ... is now acute".

The agency was unnecessarily outsourcing analysis to consultants, even though the reform's ambition had been scaled back.

It talked of batteries and extra safety tech being blocked by the old rules.

"In some cases, safety features are being compromised to manage weight."

Bishop had got their hopes up last year.

"Instead, the work programme was underwhelming in scope and subsequently reduced, leaving industry with no confidence that meaningful change is being prioritised."

The reform is of what is called 'the Rule', the main VDAM or Vehicle Dimensions and Mass rule.

One core change being proposed was to remove the permits on trucks between 44 and 50 tonnes.

These big trucks would still have to fit the weight and design limits of what is called the '50MAX' class - and would still have to stick to certain roads and bridges - but they would not have to get an actual permit, as they have done since 2013 when the High Productivity Motor Vehicle (HPMV) regime was introduced. HPMV's advent was the biggest change in the Rule.

Electronic monitoring of trucks was now widespread and would help keep them to approved routes that were strong enough, a source said.

Another proposal in the reforms would make it cheaper to comply for the likes of electric buses now tipping the scales at over a seven tonne threshold because of their batteries.

Cranes caught in the Rule

Toase told RNZ it was not enough.

Cranes were "always being dealt with in retrospect" and were routinely having to seek exemptions from narrow rules designed for regular trucks just to operate, she said.

They had tried to build change, for instance, through a trial that succeeded in cutting by a fifth how far overweight mobile cranes had to travel, reducing congestion and emissions.

"We've sent all the information through to NZTA and it's just sitting there."

Another example she gave was that many mobile cranes were now often failing brake tests under an electronic inspection regime.

"It doesn't produce accurate results for cranes because they are engineered differently. So cranes are failing those tests, which means they are then deemed not roadworthy.

"They've failed compliance and they can't be used."

Operators then had to revert to manual testing in order to pass, which all took time.

Federated Farmers and Rural Contractors NZ also signed the letter.

Combine harvesters, for instance, faced very restrictive limits on what bridges they could cross which should be managed in a much less complex way, said another source.

"We're not just talking about road freight, we're talking about harvesting of food."

At the trucking coalface, the old Rule meant heavily specced new vehicles could not be easily imported as-is but needed bespoke modifications, in a market that was already isolated due to being minority righthand drive, the letter said.

The industry ideal for keeping up internationally, allowing for the state of NZ's roads, was to lift the 58-tonne HPMV limit to 62 tonnes, Kalasih said.

At 62 tonnes they would not be much bigger to overtake, and the distribution of weight between the axles would spread the impact on the road, he said.

The AA did not want to comment on that from a car driver's point of view.

'Totally at odds'

Consultation has opened on phase two of the reform following on from phase one that began last October.

But the meetings with officials earlier this year were a final straw for the industry associations.

"The scope of that work is frankly incredibly underwhelming and lacks ambition," said Kalasih.

"It seems to us totally at odds with what Minister Bishop has asked for."

They felt the time was up on more reviews, research and meetings, and they were tired of being passed from NZTA to the MOT and back, he said.

But MOT said the latest research was a "necessary step to ensure that any larger changes are safe, durable, and deliver real benefits to industry and the wider transport system".

Other changes are going on into bridge designs, which determine what weight of trucks can pass, although NZTA has played down how that work would alter old or new bridges.

NZTA said it understood the impact of the Rule's settings on the industry.

"This is why we are engaging with industry representatives to understand the specific challenges they are facing, and the opportunities which they see for improvement," it said in a statement.

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi chair Simon Bridges, in a letter responding to the associations, acknowledged their concerns, telling them the minister made the rules and offering another meeting on Tuesday this week.

澳新发表国防政策联合声明，2035年完成跨塔斯曼防务一体化

Mon, 23 Mar 2026 07:31:27 +1300

中国日前发出警告，称国际间军事同盟可能会加剧、而非缓和紧张局势，并且会造成"扩大、而非限制冲突"。

这一警告由中国驻新西兰大使在本周四（3月19日）发出。当天，王小龙在惠灵顿发表了一场措辞强硬的地缘政治演讲。

近期新西兰在防务领域正与澳大利亚走得更近，而澳大利亚也正与美国靠得更近。

该演讲前不久，中国曾指责跨塔斯曼盟友在军事演习争议中表现出"傲慢"。而这一争议言论恰逢澳新两国近期发布的最新防务联合声明"Operationalising the Australia-New Zealand Alliance: Anzac 2035 - Closer Defence Relations Statement"（澳新联盟实践化：ANZAC 2035--更紧密的防务关系声明）。

该声明旨在 "到2035年打造一支更加一体化、更具作战能力、能够无缝协同运作的澳新联军"。

与此同时，堪培拉方面在另一项联盟框架下承诺，将与美国"通过加速和扩大联合防务举措、共同投资新能力以及整合工业基础来深化合作"。

这一切都发生在美国总统特朗普宣布其政府的军售方式发生重大转变之后的几周内。

此前所谓的"盟友优先军售方式"（partner-first arms sales approach）已被抛弃，取而代之的是"美国优先"（America First）的武器出口战略。在这一新战略下，美国将鼓励其盟友购买美制武器作为一种明确而有力的外交政策工具，并优先考虑那些"在自身国防领域有投入、并在执行国家安全战略中具有关键作用或关键地理位置"的盟友。

"新西兰从未被落下"

这种新的、以"美国优先"为基础的盟友优先名单会影响到新西兰吗？

新西兰在澳新联军（ANZAC）体系、澳新美安全条约（ANZUS）体系、五眼联盟（Five Eyes）体系中均有其自身位置，但并非是澳英美三边安全伙伴关系（AUKUS）的一员。

RNZ 向军工企业L3 Harris提出该问题，该公司是美国十大国防承包商之一，近期刚达成了一项超过10亿美元的合作，为美国"自由武库"（arsenal of freedom）战略提供导弹发动机；上月与沙特签署了防务合作协议；并为新西兰海军和陆军提供先进通信设备。

"在我的职业生涯中，我还从未见过新西兰因为没有完全与（美国）政府政策一致而被排除在外。"L3 Harris澳新业务副总裁Alan Clements说，"无论是在我当兵时还是退役后，我从没听说过新西兰有哪次被排除在外的。"

"是的，确实会有些政策……但也有例外条款，是有豁免的。"

"从我们公司的角度来说，这些政策设定中的任何内容都没有阻止我们与新西兰合作，并向其提供产品。"

Clements表示，虽然新西兰没有加入AUKUS第二支柱项目（澳大利亚、英国和美国之间的一项军事科技共享协议），但也并未因此失去机会。

"新西兰不会被排除，因为新西兰是五眼联盟情报体系的一部分，有资格获取相关信息和资源。"

共享与合作

澳大利亚的军事媒体曾报道称，特朗普在军售领域的美国优先政策将带来"重大影响"。

这种做法要求五角大楼用"MAGA视角"审视对外军售项目，而新西兰的装备采购正是通过该渠道进行。海鹰直升机交易表明，澳、新、美三国军方走得越近，其合作也就会越紧密。

去年在提交给内阁的一份备忘录中称，"海鹰直升机在澳大利亚和美国都是首选的现役直升机" 。

"借助美国和澳大利亚的供应链以及全寿命周期的后勤保障……让这款直升机成为最具性价比、最耐用的直升机。这意味着军方无需为关键军事装备和系统的集成和认证提供资金"--并且机组人员也可以互换。

Clements说，澳新两国的国防工业需要协同，通过避免重复投资来控制成本。

"我们现在看到双方合作越来越紧密，尤其是在能力对齐方面。"

L3 Harris在新西兰有7名工作人员，不过在澳大利亚的团队则超过500人。

"但我们与其他新西兰公司合作，由它们作为分包商，有时甚至作为主承包商来完成工作，我们希望在新西兰本地建立能力，而不是依赖进口。"

军事联盟弊大于利？

在更高层次、更复杂的地缘政治联盟中，谁在掌控局势？

中国驻新西兰大使王小龙本周四警告称，军事联盟是一种"错综复杂的关系"，最终会让所有人变得更不安全。

"另一条行不通的路是军事同盟。中国认为，军事同盟非但不能维护世界稳定，反而会成为动荡的根源。"

"从其定义和设计初衷来看，军事同盟旨在赢得战争而非维系和平。"王小龙当天在Wellington Club发言时称。

国防部长Judith Collins在本周四被问及"考虑到澳新两国在对核能和伊朗战争等方面的立场差异，与澳大利亚加深一体化的界限在哪里"时对RNZ表示，这些属于外交政策差异，而非防务问题。

"这对我们的独立性没有威胁。"Collins说。

她表示，与澳大利亚现有的"巨大"防务一体化是双向的。

"我们独立性的最大风险恰恰在于不与澳大利亚紧密合作。"她说。

这份"2035联合声明"中共6次提到"主权"。

2035澳新防务一体化

声明还明确指出，澳新两国将越来越多地使用相同的武器；到2035年，双方将"部署日益一体化且可互换的部队"。

澳大利亚和美国也是如此。堪培拉最近签署协议，将投入超过200亿资金与五角大楼和洛克希德·马丁公司共同生产制导武器--美国政治媒体Politico 将其称为"火箭外交"。

此外，人机协同的发展路径也日益清晰。美国陆军计划在2027年前部署首批"人机一体化作战编队"（HMIF），而新西兰国防军在其最新的长期展望报告中也将"人机协同"列为四大主题之一。

这不仅是共享尖端武器的问题，还包括其背后的数据处理人工智能系统。军方上周对国会议员们表示，这些系统将成为最重要的武力放大器。

人工智能使战场上的指挥与控制实现前所未有的整合。新西兰国防军正在由美国主导的多国演习中进行相关试验。

Clements说，新西兰的立场和防务能力规划意味着，新西兰可能会朝着与盟友（尤其是澳大利亚）在指挥与控制系统方面实现对齐的方向发展。

"这种在指挥和控制层面的对齐对两国来说都很重要。"

"澳大利亚已经走在一条特定路径上，其体现在一定程度上与美国保持一致。"

"目前使用的这些系统其实并不是 L3 Harris 的系统，但如果未来有机会开展新项目，那么（我们）当然可以参与。"

他表示，在较低层级，比如无人机操控--可以通过编程"预设其执行任务的限制、观察范围以及信息流向"。

"所以你完全可以对其进行限制。"Clements说，而一旦数据上升到更高层级，则由不同系统处理。

比如L3 Harris 一款名为"Amorphous"的产品可以同时控制陆、海、空无人机集群，其前线控制与后端更高层级的目标决策系统是分开的。

军方目标：提高作战能力

Collins的一项变化是要求军方提高作战能力。

新西兰军方已经与承包商开展"早期阶段"的研讨会，探讨无人机等技术。

新西兰国防军现在是否在寻求战斗力更强和自主性的武器？

"现阶段我并不认为他们直接向我们提出来这样的要求。"Clements说，"不过是的，作为一家军工企业，我们会利用现有的一切工具来开发能力，以满足军方对战斗力的要求。"

"不过我们通常不会去主动上门推销说，'你需要买这个或那个'。"

"我们会先了解他们的整体架构，然后再讨论：'你认为这对你们的工作是否有帮助？'"

尽管Clements强调"自主性、人工智能感知和无人系统"正在改变军事能力，他也表示，实现精确打击并不一定需要完全自主，人类仍可以在关键环节中发挥作用--"在开始时按下那个按钮"。

Government data being held by 'unvetted third parties' - Treasury report

Sun, 22 Mar 2026 08:40:09 +1300

The Government Communications Security Bureau (GCSB) spy agency has taken six times longer than it should have to address questions about lax cyber security identified in a Treasury report.

The report last year mentioned that government data was "being managed or held by unvetted third parties".

It gave no details, so RNZ sought them.

Director-general Andrew Clark apologised for taking 120 working days to respond, instead of the statutory 20 under the Official Information Act (OIA).

He then refused to answer virtually all of the dozen questions.

Clark said they had to keep incidents and vulnerabilities confidential or people would not share with them, and they needed that information to counter threats.

The Treasury report said government agencies had continued to raise concerns about the security of third-party vendors' products and services, including poor security controls and unpatched software.

"Some agencies reported that vendors had offshored some services without their prior approval, meaning government data was being managed or held by unvetted third parties," said the quarterly investment report for the three months to December 2024. Such reports are released publicly many months after they are done.

New Zealand's small size as a market was biting it, the report suggested.

"Agencies assess that poor service delivery is likely driven by lower competition and less resourcing for comparably smaller contracts in New Zealand versus larger markets," it said, under the title 'Other emerging ... issues'.

"Low competition, coupled with poor service delivery from some vendors, has also led to high reliance by many Government agencies on the same few vendors, which creates risk to service delivery across the public sector should those vendors suffer a cyber security incident or event."

Many government agencies had become increasingly reliant on cloud-computing services from US Big Tech companies.

RNZ asked the GCSB, National Cyber Security Centre and Internal Affairs who the problem vendors were. Clark in his response would not name them or say anything about them.

"Providing this information would likely have commercial implications for these vendors" so that was refused on the grounds of unreasonably prejudicing someone's position.

What about the government agencies that had raised the alarm?

"I am refusing those parts of your request where you have asked for information that has been provided to the GCSB in confidence by agencies," was the reply, otherwise it might prejudice the supply of such info in future.

The unvetted third parties were not disclosed, and neither were the risks to service delivery that Treasury had told ministers were in play.

The risks information was refused on the grounds the GCSB "does not hold this information in the manner or format you have requested".

Work was underway on digital investment and procurement, Clark said.

Asked what measures were taken, he said the National Cyber Security Centre provided a range of advice, and they had recently developed "minimum cyber security standards" to focus on the basics and encourage good practices.

The subsequent three quarterly reports after this one did not mention the threat again.

But other weaknesses did come up in them, and in one case Treasury was called out for them, in the latest quarterly report, to September 2025.

It said many data and digital projects did not include information relating to cyber security management or improvement.

It went on to fault the Treasury's investment management system because it did not recognise the ongoing cost of cyber security, "making it difficult" to upgrade old systems and move away from on-site hardware to 'as-a-service' tech "which we know deliver better security results".

"The current financing rules and settings around capital and operating expenditure are preventing agencies from modernising and improving their cyber security."

Agencies' approach to procuring IT systems or services was called "outdated and fragmented" by the government chief digital officer in the September quarterly report, six years after Treasury told the public sector to take an all-of-government approach to try to cut the IT upgrade bill of multi-billions of dollars.

The long wait for the response to the OIA request was put down by the GCSB to consultation and the "volume of information requested" by RNZ.

Most of Clark's three-page response was taken up outlining the grounds for refusing the information.

RNZ asked for any report that focused on the threat, but did not get one.

Clark apologised for the wait.

"Our response ... did not meet the statutory deadline and I do apologise for that. Thank you for your patience while we completed our response."

Military alliances: is NZ getting a tangled web or a ticket to get in?

Fri, 20 Mar 2026 06:54:45 +1300

China is warning that alliances will likely escalate rather than de-escalate tensions and "spread rather than limit the conflicts".

The warning delivered by its ambassador in a hardhitting speech on geopolitics in Wellington on Thursday came as New Zealand was getting closer to Australia and Australia was getting closer to the United States on defence.

The speech closely followed China accusing the trans-Tasman allies of "arrogance" in a clash over military manouevres.

That in turn came on the heels of the allies releasing a new 'Operationalising our Alliance' joint statement aimed at "being able to operate seamlessly as an increasingly integrated, combat capable Anzac force by 2035".

Canberra for its part under a separate alliance was "committed to deepening cooperation through accelerating and expanding joint defence initiatives, shared investments in new capabilities and industrial base integration" with the US.

This all came a few weeks after US President Donald Trump announced a big shift in how his administration would sell weapons.

Gone was what his directive called the "partner-first arms sales approach", newly arriving was an "America First" arms export strategy, where allies would be encouraged to buy US-made weapons as an explicit powerful foreign policy tool that prioritised partners "that have invested in their own self-defense and have a critical role or geography for executing the National Security Strategy".

'I haven't seen New Zealand miss out'

Would the new 'America First' priority partner list impact New Zealand? It had favoured status in Anzac, ANZUS and Five Eyes, but is not part of AUKUS.

RNZ put that question to L3 Harris, a top 10 US defence contractor that just did a billion-plus-dollar partnership to add missile rocket motors to the US "arsenal of freedom"; signed a defence collaboration deal with Saudi Arabia last month; and supplied advanced comms gear to the NZ navy and army.

"In my career, I haven't seen New Zealand miss out because they weren't perfectly aligned with the way that the administrations have played," said Alan Clements, L3 Harris vice president for Australia and New Zealand.

"Never once have I heard, either when I was in the military or outside the military, that New Zealand was to be excluded from anything.

"Yes, there's policies ... but there are also carve-outs for that, there are waivers.

"From our company perspective, nothing that's been said inside those policy settings has stopped us being able to work with New Zealand and deliver capability with New Zealand."

The country was not part of AUKUS Pillar Two - a military tech sharing arrangement for Australia, the US and UK - but was not missing out, Clements said. "New Zealand wouldn't miss out because New Zealand being part of the Five Eyes [intelligence grouping] would be able to get access to that as we go."

Share and share alike

In Australia, defence media reports had foreseen "major implications" from Trump's America First arms move.

It beholdened the Pentagon to put a MAGA lens over the Foreign Military Sales (FMS) programme, which was the place where New Zealand went arms shopping. The government began talks under the FMS last August to buy $2 billion of naval Seahawk helicopters.

The Seahawk deal showed how the closer the three militaries got, the closer they were likely to get. "The Seahawk helicopter, operated by Australia and the United States, is the preferred helicopter," an aide memoire to Cabinet last year.

"The ability to leverage American and Australian supply chains and through-life support arrangements ... makes this the most cost-effective and durable helicopter. It means Defence does not need to fund the integration and certification of essential military equipment and systems" - plus aircrew would be interchangeable.

Clements said the defence industries on either side of the Tasman had to align to rein in costs by preventing double up.

"We are now seeing more and more that we're working closer together, particularly when it comes to capability alignment."

L3 Harris had seven people working in New Zealand, compared with over 500 across the Tasman.

"But we work with other New Zealand companies and they do the work either as a subcontractor or sometimes as a prime for us where we try to build that capacity and capability within New Zealand itself, rather than import."

'Entanglements'

In the higher, weightier world of geopolitical alliances, who was in control?

China's ambassador Wang Xiaolong warned on Thursday that alliances were "entanglements" where everyone would end up less secure.

"The next non-solution I want to debunk is military alliances, which we believe is, often a de-stabiliser rather than a stabiliser for the world.

"These alliances, by definition and by design, are meant to win wars rather than to keep the peace," he told the Wellington Club.

Defence Minister Judith Collins, asked by RNZ on Thursday where the line was within increased integration, given Australia's different positions, say, on nukes or the Iran war, said those were foreign policy differences, not defence.

"There's no risk to our independence," said Collins.

The existing "enormous" defence integration with Australia went both ways.

"The biggest risk to our independence is to not be closely connected to Australia," she said.

The 2035 joint statement mentioned "sovereignty" six times.

'Rocket diplomacy'

The statement also made clear the Anzacs would be using the same weapons more and more; by 2035 the two would "deploy increasingly integrated and interchangeable units".

Australia and the US would be, too. Canberra recently signed on to spend over $20 billion with the Pentagon and contractor Lockheed to co-produce guided weapons - what Politico called "rocket diplomacy".

The track to human-machine integation was also becoming well beaten. The US Army planned to deploy its first Human Machine Integrated Formation (HMIF) platoons by 2027, while the NZDF in its new long-term insights briefing made "human-machine teaming" one of four themes.

It was not just about sharing weapons at the pointy end either, but also the data-crunching AI systems behind them that the NZDF told MPs last week would become the number one force multiplier.

AI allowed command-and-control to be integated like never before on the battlefield. The NZDF was experimenting with this in US-led multinational exercises.

Clements said New Zealand's stance and defence capability plan meant the country would probably want to head down the path of aligning command and control with their allies and partners, in particular Australia.

"That alignment with command and control is important for both countries.

"Australia has gone down a particular path with its command and control, and it aligns and the services have aligned slightly with the way the US do things.

"Those systems that are actually currently being used are not L3 Harris systems at the moment. But if there was an opportunity where they were looking at doing something new, then absolutely."

Lower level control of, say, a drone could be programmed to "put constraints around what it goes to do, where it looks, [where] the information goes.

"So you can absolutely put constraints around that," said Clements. Once the data went up to a higher level, that would be a different system.

So, L3 Harris's product Amorphous that controlled swams of land, sea and air drones all at once, could be controlled at the frontline, and a separate system sit behind it where the bigger targeting decisions were made.

Lethality on order?

One shift by Collins had been to order Defence to become more lethal.

Defence has been holding 'early-days' workshops with contractors to get ideas about drones and the like.

Was the NZDF asking for more lethal and autonomous weapons now?

"I'm not aware of them asking for that from us directly at the moment," said Clements.

"But yes, as a defence organisation, we will develop capability using all the tools that we currently have to meet the requirements of the lethality requirements of the Defence Force.

"But often we're not in there trying to beat a door down and say, 'You need to buy this piece of kit'.

"It's looking at what they're doing from a full structure and then having a conversation about, 'Do you think this would help you in what you do?'"

While Clements has stressed how "autonomy, AI-enabled sensing and unmanned systems" were transforming military capabilities, he told RNZ that autonomy was not a prerequisite for the huge gains in precision and humans could be first in the loop - "at the beginning to hit the button".

Health NZ warned financial control 'one of the thorniest' aspects of decentralisation

Thu, 19 Mar 2026 07:03:37 +1300

Health New Zealand (HNZ) has been warned that keeping financial control is "one of the thorniest" aspects of the government's rapid push to devolution.

The government blamed loss of financial control when it sacked the central agency's board two years ago.

Health Minister Simeon Brown on Tuesday promised regions and districts would get more say over budgets and hiring from 1 July so that decisions on medical care were made closer to the patient.

Late last year he ordered HNZ to decentralise rapidly, and this week he said, "This is the most significant structural change our government is making to improve how the health system operates."

But the latest HNZ internal report on devolution said "people capability is an extreme risk" in the finance and operations area, with centralisation diverting resources.

"Many local teams are under-resourced in financial management," said the report done in January for a new devolution committee.

Brown on Wednesday said there was a "huge" amount of work underway to build back the local leadership disempowered by over-centralisation.

"We are making sure we've got the capability around operations, around finance, human resources, all of those things are being looked at."

The January report by consultants Deloitte laid that out, he said.

The report has not been publicly released though RNZ has seen parts of it.

'Clearly underpowered'

Former HNZ Te Whatu Ora board chair Rob Campbell expressed serious misgivings.

"They quickly need to get some financial resources into those regions and districts which are clearly underpowered in this respect," Campbell said on Wednesday. "That's the first thing they have to do."

The devolution plan puts executive regional directors in charge of rebuilding the capability but at a time when money was exceedingly tight said the report.

"The financial challenges are going to increase in 2026/27, meaning there will be even more pressure on financial controls to reduce the deficit .... from $200m to breakeven.

"Currently there will be little to no capacity remaining within the baseline next year without significant productivity improvements and prioritisation decisions," it said.

Campbell said it was an unenviable task.

"They're being told they're getting more autonomy. The truth is they're really not, and they don't have the money to do that anyway."

'Fully coming into effect' on 1 July

The devolution report contains self-assessments by Health NZ's various business units showing some progress, and a lot of risks, around devolving key clinical and service decisions back to the four health regions and 20 districts.

One section on "reduced financial visibility" said, "One of the thorniest aspects of devolution is financial control - 'who holds the purse strings' and how to prevent overspending or inequities."

Financial visibility was fragmented across 20 health boards before 2022's centralisation, then smeared after it by "confusion ... and weak controls" at Health NZ Te Whatu Ora. It then began its nosedive towards a forecast billion-dollar-plus deficit.

The centralisation also pulled experience and skills into the centre in Wellington, the report said.

This was compounded by hundreds of cuts to support jobs since 2024 in a savings drive.

The January report outlined "critical" current gaps and "staff churn" in the workforce, such as in data and digital, analysis and finance, that supports the frontline doctors and nurses.

Under a heading 'Options to accelerate devolution' it said, "There is a risk of not understanding cost structures or nuances between districts, further compounding the risk that pushing the funding allocation and management of each region and district to the lower levels quickly may result in loss of financial visibility across the sector again."

It said some fixes might take 18 months to three years.

However, Brown said on Tuesday the changes underway would "ensure a nationally planned, locally and regionally delivered health system, will come into effect on 1 July".

Hospitals would be able to recruit and deploy staff without central sign-off but with delegated budgets and responsibility to meet targets in the district or region.

On Wednesday Brown reiterated the 1 July delivery date.

The Deloitte report talked about the many initiatives being done by HNZ "to make sure that districts and regions are ready for 1 July when the devolved operating model ... is fully coming into effect", he said.

"Of course there's risks in changing an operating model but at the same time the last government ... left local clinicians not able to make some of the key decisions."

Globally, health ran better when a devolved operating model split decision-making between national, regional and local levels, Brown said.

New policy on who decides what

The devolution plan depended on four executive regional directors at the top being "best placed to manage performance and build capability, which can vary significantly between districts".

Already, a new policy on who gets to decide on hiring and firing, and on spending, was being rolled out.

Papers RNZ has seen showed the policy was approved by the board in December.

They showed there must be consultation with the regional or national head of human resources for all hires, or for creating new positions within budget; and to create any new positions outside budget needed "consultation/approval" from either of these heads or from the executive leadership team.

Campbell said, "You start off looking like they've got a lot of power, and then when you really read through it, they don't.

"Even on items that are within budget and full-time equivalent allocations, there is a need for ... consultation, and in a hierarchical organisation like this consultation means getting approval."

The biggest difference was a bigger regional element compared to what HNZ was building at the time he was sacked in 2023 for a political attack on National's water infrastructure policy.

Yet it was "still very tightly controlled" and regional and district managers were "in a no-win situation", Campbell said.

'Divergent approaches'

In addition to lack of finance staff, the January report added "fragmentation" to the hurdles for devolution.

"Without strong governance structures and clear national guardrails, regions and districts risk adopting divergent approaches, weakening system-wide alignment and equity in service delivery," it said.

Those governance structures were still being set up.

Campbell said good governance meant having a business model everyone grasped. "People throughout the organisation still find it very hard to understand what the responsibility for particular issues is."

The report said Health NZ had had to build national financial guardrails after its lurch towards a big deficit.

"If HNZ devolves too quickly or carelessly, they risk losing the opportunity to use its current ... structure and scale" to address system problems, it said.

On the plus side, devolution could help districts take more responsibility for day-to-day spending and not expect topdown bailouts, citing how Australian state hospitals used to have a "rollercoaster of budget blowouts and rescues".

Brown's plan retained the Wellington-based bureaucracy for strategy, planning, policies, standards and system integration.

However, the report said many of the national plans existed in name but "have not yet been developed or published, and the decision-making framework to support accountability is still developing".

Building districts' financial capability an ongoing focus - HNZ

Late on Wednesday Health New Zealand told RNZ that according to the Deloitte report the agency's budgeting, planning, reporting, and performance management disciplines had been strengthened since a review of financial management at the end of 2024.

"These improvements have 'reduced the risk of a loss of financial control levers'," it quoted.

Building financial capability of districts and regions was an ongoing focus, said executive national director of strategy performance improvement, Jess Smaling.

"Regions and districts will have clear budgets, and delegated authority to make decisions based on the unique local needs," she said in a statement.

"Budgets will be based on expected activity to meet those local needs, within the resources available to Health New Zealand."

A national funding board and human resources oversight committee had been replaced by four regional investment committees and "people and culture committees", along with a national version of that to consider human resource policies so there was national consistency.

A new national investment committee would make funding decisions above the authority of the four executive regional directors.

"Hiring decisions will be made in the regions and districts, within available budgets," said Smaling.

Those within existing FTE and budget would only require the approval of the hiring manager's immediate manager.

Decision-makers using delegated authority had to stay within approved budgets and limits, and comply with Health NZ policies and legislation, she added.

Papers show 'extreme risk' around Health NZ decentralisation

Tue, 17 Mar 2026 10:17:08 +1300

Papers show that Health New Zealand faces the "extreme risk" of not having enough of the workers it needs to push through the government's order to decentralise rapidly.

Health Minister Simeon Brown last November ordered the agency to "rapidly devolve decision-making to its four regions and 20 districts" to improve healthcare.

On Tuesday, Brown announced that from July decision-making within Health NZ will sit closer to patients, communities, and hospitals.

He said it was not a return to the DHB model, but decisions about workforce, budgets, and service delivery will be made by each region or district., Health NZ will retain responsibility for strategy, standards, and system-wide planning. Hospitals will be able to recruit and deploy staff without central sign-off, reducing response times when demand rises.

A new devolution committee has been set up and last month was presented a report assessing the "current state" across the board.

RNZ has seen papers from the report.

"People capability is an extreme risk," it said.

"Workforce has the lowest capability rating identified across regions and their districts with critical resourcing gaps."

The "most common" gaps were around staff to handle infrastructure, procurement, health and safety, planning, finance and analysis.

Brown had pushed for speed, but the assessment said there was "a feeling that basics need to be in place first".

"The transition back to a devolved model too quickly may remove the current controls and undermine the effective oversights that have been put in place."

That included around finances, it said.

Health NZ told RNZ on Monday it was working to address the workforce gaps and capability issues identified.

The papers showed gaps in devolution resources in areas where the centralised agency in the last two years cut jobs and accepted hundreds of voluntary redundancies.

"The highly centralised organisation structure has led to a loss of experience" in making organisational, operational and strategic decisions in districts, the assessment said.

Even at national senior leadership level there were big gaps - "all interim apart from one role".

'As quickly as possible'

The government two years ago castigated Health NZ for loose financial controls, sacked its board and under a reset the new commissioner Lester Levy embarked on a $2 billion savings plan.

The government then embarked on rolling back large parts of the centralisation reforms of 2022.

"We want a nationally and regionally planned system, but one that has strong clinical input and buy-in at the hospital level," said Brown last November.

He gave Health NZ a New Year's Eve deadline to come up with a devolution policy in his letter of expectations.

"This reinforces my expectation that regional accountability, production planning, and local decision-making is embedded as quickly as possible," his letter said.

"Local districts and regions should be empowered to manage within their allocated budgets, including hiring decisions."

On Monday a spokesperson for Brown said the government had had to stabilise and turn around a system Labour had restructured during a pandemic "without a plan".

It "cannot simply be switched off" and must still deliver more care to more patients, faster, and a key to that was moving health decisions closer to communities, they said in a statement.

The report - the second one done on devolution by consultants Deloitte - offered a glimpse of how devolution had been going.

The senior doctors' union, the ASMS, in principle supported devolution but warned against districts having to take on more responsibility without the resources.

"The chatter that we're picking up from around our regular set of meetings with the districts is a massive concern that this is just pushing responsibility onto districts without any realistic means of achieving what needs to be done in terms of providing health care," said executive director Sarah Dalton.

'Carefully managing the transition'

The assessment said some areas like in strategy and finance showed progress.

But it varied a lot. What it called 'People and Culture' would be hugely impacted by devolution and was rated the worst, with 'low' assessments across all six measures; it was especially weak in the South Island and central North Island from Taranaki to Bay of Plenty.

"Regional and district finance and operational capacity remain concentrated at national level and many local teams are under-resourced in financial management," it said.

The solution? "Build capability across the organisation." The districts had lost key roles, now they needed them back.

A chart showed 12 categories - such as budgeting, analysis and auditing - and rated nine of them as less than fully effective. Three were only partially effective - the second-to-lowest rating - including Health NZ's savings programme and its internal audit programme.

Among the other gaps was technology. Key devolution changes were predicated on AI that was not yet in place, and so manual "workarounds" persisted.

Health NZ executive national director of strategy performance improvement Jess Smaling said the current state assessment report was to support "carefully managing the transition back to frontline decision making".

It came only after HNZ had addressed the first priority of fixing the financial crisis and improved performance, she said in a statement.

"We are committed to ensuring our districts are ready, able and most of all supported, to have more autonomy over their clinical decisions and operational budgets."

'Not driven by ... cost savings'

Health system commentator Ian Powell had long called for devolution but said that required the right capabilities.

"And we've lost that through short-sighted restructuring."

He did not see signs in the assessment that the topdown command culture was being overhauled. "That's the missing bit.

"Overwhelmingly on the management side of Te Whatu Ora, both regionally and nationally, there's a high level of job insecurity, and that is a terrible environment to actually to have to work in, and it guarantees a destabilised organisation."

Health NZ Te Whatu Ora subsumed all 20 of the old district health boards - DHBs - almost four years ago. Its establishment cost tens of millions of dollars including large sums in consultant fees.

Brown in his letter of expectations to the board chair late last year said it was "clear to me that Health NZ is too centralised".

"Too many decisions are made by people who are removed from the problems that frontline clinicians are trying to solve.

"While the final devolved structure may result in a smaller national office than in recent years,

this change is not driven by restructuring or cost savings."

The driver instead was to embed local clinicians in budgeting and planning services, and set up straight lines of accountability everywhere, Brown said.

But the papers the committee looked at last month indicated that districts might struggle with budgeting.

"Staff churn and the absence of robust costing systems and processes has created knowledge gaps, making it difficult to form an accurate bottom-up budget based on cost of services delivered, particularly in H&SS [Hospital and Specialist Services]."

It talked about reducing some of the risks by adopting a devolution "timeframe" that allowed regions and districts to get critical activities in place to take on more autonomy.

'Trade-offs and risks'

It sounded other notes of caution, too.

"While there is a desire to accelerate the devolution process, Health NZ recognises that there are trade-offs and risks involved," said Deloitte's assessment.

This could lead to "lack of control, poor decision-making, duplication of effort, inconsistent reporting and accountability gaps".

The solution was good planning.

But this appeared a long way off.

"The desired end state has not yet been clearly defined, including the [transition] from a national to a regional structure," it said.

The "scope, sequence and pace" of devolution all needed defining.

Dalton said while 2022's centralisation had caused "chaos" by distancing clinicians from decisionmaking, devolution had to be resourced and the minister would be wise to taihoa.

"I mean, it really does smack of trying to come up with what looks like some quick wins in an election year, and that's no way to run a health system."

Oranga Tamariki reports it is 'off-track' dealing with critical reports of concern

Fri, 13 Mar 2026 16:38:13 +1300

Oranga Tamariki reports it's not meeting targets with critical and urgent reports of concern about children, and in fact, is a bit worse than before.

However, the Children's Minister Karen Chhour has focused on other figures out Friday which she said shows the agency "showing strong progress against key targets".

The minister highlighted - as did OT - that 97 percent of children were being visited by a social worker within a targeted time, caregivers were doing better, and there was a large drop in serious persistent offending.

This is from the latest report on performance against ministerial priorities for July to September last year.

But the report also said "OFF TRACK" in red capitals against the target for handling the most urgent cases in time, in its section on "ensuring the safety of children".

The time taken has dropped to 10 percent below target, when it was nine percent below in the previous quarter.

This was due to it getting so many reports - almost 28,000 - and having too few social workers, OT said.

The target was to respond to 95 percent of critical cases within a day and very urgent reports of concern within two days.

It hit just 85 percent, down from 86 percent previously.

"Meeting report of concern timeframes has become more challenging due to the high volume of Reports of Concern and workforce pressures," the report said.

These factors were very similar to last May; so too was the government's response last May when it said that the figures as whole showed OT making progress.

The quarter's 27,700 reports of concern almost matched the previous quarter but were 3000 above forecast.

The agency had pinned its hopes of hitting time targets on an upgrade of its obsolete tech system.

In Friday's report it said the tech upgrade had improved social workers' confidence and assessments. It added it had developed the first part of a strategic workforce tool to become more efficient.

The Independent Children's Monitor last month said children were no safer than when Malachi Subecz was murdered, stating, "there continues to be a high proportion of reports of concern from professionals that do not result in further action by Oranga Tamariki and where tamariki and rangatahi are not seen."

On Friday Chhour said young people were turning their lives around and being kept safer.

"We've recruited twice the number of social workers compared to the number of social workers who left Oranga Tamariki in the last financial year. We've also invested in greater professional supports and training.

"This is not mission accomplished, I also acknowledge there is still room for improvement," she said in a statement.

Other reports released under the OIA show the agency has struggled for years to recruit and properly train staff in its youth justice residences.

Another target Chhour noted was a 14 percent reduction in children in state care residences being harmed.

Harm in state care as a whole in its various forms was down eight percent. In family placements it was at its lowest level in seven years, but jumped 23 percent in the category known as return/remain home placements when children return to the care of their parent.

AI in warfare being tested in Iran, needs 'much more' careful thinking by NZ - Defence

Thu, 12 Mar 2026 06:31:00 +1300

New AI-supercharged weapon systems will need to be "very, very carefully designed" to comply with international and domestic laws, MPs have been told.

And it would be the software behind the systems that would dictate like never before just how effective any new missiles, guns or electromagnetic jammers were, a defence official told a select committee.

Defence ministry deputy secretary Anton Youngman said it was time for some serious thinking by New Zealand.

"One of the key points that we talk about here is that with these new capabilities ... they need to be very, very carefully designed to comply with international and domestic laws," he said.

The briefing coincided with the first week of the Iran war.

Experts said the war was testing out for real the questions of what artificial intelligence should be used in warfare and who controlled it.

Fox News has reported that the advance in AI "is changing the nature of the battlefield by speeding up targeting and analysing intelligence all while raising new concerns over the role of human judgment and oversight in modern warfare".

The Guardian reported, "The use of AI tools to enable attacks on Iran heralds a new era of bombing quicker than 'the speed of thought' experts have said, amid fears human-decision-makers could be sidelined."

AI targeting has been developing rapidly in the last several years.

Youngman, for his long-term insights briefing of the select committee, drew on a less militaristic example. He described a future where NZ kept an eye on nearby oceans by using satellites, drones flying high and on and under the sea, surveillance aircraft and land-based radars - " all of these working in sync together".

The software did that syncing.

Such technology was typically 'dual-use' with civilian and military applications.

Youngman went on: "The ability of defence forces to collect and analyse data at speed will increasingly be the key determinant of military advantage."

Defence Minister Judith Collins in her speech to a geopolitics conference on Tuesday said New Zealanders understood the world had changed, and "the highly skilled personnel" in defence needed to be ready to do what the govenment "and people ask of it".

"That's why we are focusing on more than doubling our defence spend and investing in a defence force that is combat capable with enhanced lethality and deterrence; a force multiplier with Australia and increasingly interoperable with partners," her speech notes said.

What does this have to do with NZ?

NZ has already put development of these syncing technologies on a faster track under last year's $12 billion defence capability plan (though officials had been tightlipped about the aim to get a sovereign satellite).

Its latest move was to start testing 14 drones for the sea and air, with potential strike capability, from local firm Syos.

It was also working internationally through its defence science technology section with its counterpart in Australia, and with the US and other countries. NZ has not waited to join AUKUS Pillar Two - which focuses on emerging military tech - to make these moves.

AI-targeting experiments were part of that. The NZDF has been taking part in the US-led Project Convergence exercise to test joint AI systems alongside multinational forces.

Last year's exercise in California had a "digital backbone" provided by data-mining firm Palantir.

The Washington Post has reported that Palantir tech was being used by the Pentagon in Iran. The Post said its targeting system called Maven was using an AI tool, Claude.

"Anthropic's AI tool Claude central to US campaign in Iran, amid a bitter feud," ran the paper's headline.

Palantir, co-founded by Peter Thiel, a NZ citizen, has said the software used at Project Convergence "provided a unified data infrastructure for advanced battlespace management that empowered users across all levels to plan, execute, and assess operations effectively and enable commanders to rapidly make informed decisions".

Another such Convergence exercise was scheduled for the coming US summer. The NZDF did not respond when asked how many people it was sending.

RNZ has previously reported how this work fits under a Pentagon top-priority project with allies and partners called CJADC2 or Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control.

'Needs to be thought through much more carefully now than it ever previously did'

Youngman offered MPs another insight, that the ascendancy of software would change soldiering itself.

"Under the human-machine team ... it's a different role for defence personnel in this long-term future," he said in response to National MP Tim Costley suggesting that NZ might be too small to properly deploy AI weapons and be better off adding to its soldiers, sailors and bullets.

Youngman said the role was moving potentially "from less kind of in the field work and more into that kind of tuning and training systems, interpreting the outputs, making decisions and ensuring adherence with ... law and doctrine".

Whose law and doctrine? That second question, of who controllrd the AI, also came up at the committee.

Green MP Teanau Tuiono asked, "You were saying earlier around making sure that the system design adheres to domestic international law. How are you going to do that?"

Youngman said the challenge was new, now that machines could now take action themselves, for the first time in warfare.

"It's going to continue to be a growing challenge and something that through the design of the capabilities, needs to be thought through much more carefully now than it ever previously did," he said.

Labour MP and former Defence Minister Peeni Henare asked, "Do we have the foundational legislation to make sure that we're able to govern effectively in the spaces of war?"

Youngman replied that was beyond the scope of the long-term briefing but added, "This is exactly the type of questions that this research is pointing to and saying we need to have this conversation.

"We are looking at a longer term horizon here, 2035, and the reason for doing this type of long-term research now is to say these are the types of conversations that we need to have."

What about NZ being able to afford its own cloud-based AI military systems in future, Henare asked.

"Really good quesiton," said Youngman. "I think the importance of remaining interoperable with partners is going to be key. It is today and it will continue to be.

"However ... [the briefing] does talk about needing to continually balance that cost with sovereignty, with legality and social licence."

'A grey ship is a grey ship'

Everyone agreed that explaining all this to the public was much harder than talking about buying a new frigate.

"A grey ship is a grey ship," said Henare.

"People will read this and go, this is preparing us for AUKUS," he added.

Youngman replied that defence would "need to be more proactive" in communicating around the new capabilities.

The briefing itself said this was one of "three major shifts" defence had to get its head around.

"Public trust in defence forces is earned, not assumed. Ensuring Defence maintains public trust will remain essential, and possibly more challenging, in an environment defined by increased contestation and technological change," it said.

When RNZ asked NZDF to lay out the nature of its technology and data-sharing with the US and other Five Eyes partners, Defence responded by turning it into an Official Information Act (OIA) request that would take at least five weeks to answer; similarly, a question about whether defence was taking a role in testing or developing systems from Palantir.

"Your request is noted, but the NZDF still needs to manage information requests in the way it deems appropriate," Defence said.

The nature of NZ's national security work within Five Eyes had come up earlier at a select committee. In that case, the SIS and GCSB replied they had tight controls around intellligence sharing and could withhold intel if legal, policy and human rights settings were not met.

An OIA in December showed that defence currently used nine AI-enabled tools in a restricted cacpacity for research in data and sensor processing and modelling. Sensors could be used in targeting.

The nine were: ChatGPT, Dalle-2, Github Copilot, Azure Machine Learning, Azure OpenAI services, Microsoft Copilot, Microsoft Teams, AiZynthFinder and Meta Llama 2.

National MP Dana Kirkpatrick thanked Youngman for the insights briefing: "There's no time like the present in the current geopolitical challenges to be talking about future capability and interoperability in defence."

新西兰疫情应对有哪些教训应该吸取？第二阶段皇家调查公布

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 16:25:45 +1300

本周二（3月10日）下午，新西兰新冠疫情调查皇家委员会（NZ Royal Commission COVID-19 Lessons Learned）发布了其第二份总结报告。

此前，由于公众认为委员会的首份报告浮于表面，因此启动第二次调查工作。

这份长达500余页的报告研究了委员会所称的一些"围绕疫苗和强制措施最困难、最具争议的应对措施"。

其中一项内容是"用于评估和监测疫苗安全性的程序是否充分"。

报告认为，上任政府在这方面勉强合格，但有一个相当重要的"但是"： 2021年和2022年疫情时期，政府发起的名为 "team of 5 million" （500万新西兰人守望相助）的全社会动员从早期相当有效的"清零策略"转向了"严控和最少化策略"。

"很多向我们作证的人表达了他们对疫情期间应对措施所带来影响的痛苦和愤怒。这些影响在今天依然存在于人们的生活中。"报告称，"但话虽如此，当时各部长和有关官员面对的，是在一个瞬息万变的环境中对一系列复杂且高风险的决策做出尽可能明智的判断。结果证明，新西兰的疫情应对在全球范围内都属于第一梯队。"

"相当坎坷的过程"

但尽管如此，也并不意味着新西兰应对疫情是"一帆风顺"的。工党方面在当天回顾疫情应对时，形容那段时期"相当坎坷"。

不过，Jacinda Ardern和Grant Robertson这两位时任高层仍然对当时的应对予以肯定："我们做对了很多事情，比大多数国家都多。"

国家党则立即利用第二阶段报告对工党展开批评。

正如工党本身提到的，疫情是一场前所未有的全球性危机，而当被问及前任政府的应对是否只是出于谨慎时，现任卫生部长Simeon Brown对记者说："我认为他们当时在内阁讨论的一些方案并没有卫生部门建议的背书。但其实，Chris Hipkins每天站在媒体前对新西兰人说，他所做的决定都是基于卫生部门的建议……而事实上，在有些时候并不是这样。"

Brown还补充提到，工党政府无视了国库部关于疫情支出可能推高通胀的警告，而这些支出有一半时间实际上被用于与疫情无关的事情。

"那些遗留问题的后果在今天开始显现了。"Brown说。

在长达半小时的发言中，Brown先后13次使用"ultimately"（最终）一词。

"关于某些决定，最终，你必须得问问当时拍板的部长，问他们为什么要这么做。"

Hipkins对当时的应对则给出完全相反的评价："是经过深思熟虑的、适当的，并且以当时能够获取的最佳证据为依据"。

他称，政府当时的做法挽救了无数生命，尽管一些决定造成了困难。

据世卫组织统计，新西兰截至目前共有4500人因新冠疫情死亡。这一数字按人口比例计算略低于澳大利亚，远低于加拿大，而与美国、英国相比则低了约4倍。

对"下一次"有哪些经验教训？

尽管各方对调查所揭示的"事后诸葛亮"式的结论存在分歧，但所有人都同意一点：必须为下一次"黑天鹅事件"做更好的准备。

那么，第二阶段报告为未来可能出现的"疫情2.0"提供了哪些教训？

四个字：未雨绸缪。

报告强调："风险相当巨大。每一个决定都关乎于国民生命和生存质量，但尽管如此，决策者没有拖延的借口，必须做出艰难的决定。"

不过报告指出，对于PCR检测等问题，"对未来替代方案缺乏规划"这一问题在其他领域也同样存在。

第二阶段报告提出了24项建议，其中包括在下一次疫情到来前，提前准备更完善的对于疫情及其影响的研判、更好的决策咨询机制，以及一些基础性的疫情相关立法。

另外四个字：痛定思痛。

报告称："决策者告诉我们，他们发现，给公众一个'盼头'至关重要，或者至少要传递一个'光明就在不远处'的信号。"

如果没有这样的信心引导，公众就会对官方的各类措施感到抵触。

报告还指出，在下一次疫情到来之前，新西兰必须更好地应对社会层面的影响，包括探索建立信任和社会凝聚力的方法，并向公众展示"艰难决策"背后的科学依据。

除了报告主体外，还有额外300页内容记录了向皇家委员会提交意见的人们所表达的观点。

报告称："很多人和我们反映，强制疫苗政策在社会中造成了分裂，这种分裂至今仍然存在。"

情况在某些方面失去了平衡。在第一阶段报告之后，有人将其称为"摇摆（wobbles）"。

消除"摇摆"

从第二阶段报告可以得出的一个结论是：事情本可以不发展到那么严重。

比如，无论是哪里决定封城，无论是Gore还是Papakura，封城决定必须要在公众健康和经济损失之前进行平衡。

决策者将不仅要考虑公共卫生目标和社会干扰，还必须考虑更多因素--既要考虑当下，也要兼顾未来；既要权衡不同群体利益，也要避免公信力被不断侵蚀。

主报告中给出这样的评价："基于我们得到的证据，他们（时任政府）确实有过这方面努力。"

然而，随着民众越来越倾向于怀疑专家的公众，预测和分析被扰乱，预测和分析中的漏洞被利用，痛苦的、未经检验的举措带来压力、或助长错误和虚假信息的滋生。

比如在报告地270页提到的：负责制定政策的官员缺乏足够的分析来评估封城对教育的影响。

简而言之：当时的决策缺乏足够的证据支撑。

"理想情况下，决策者应该在公共健康影响领域获得更清晰、更具体的决策依据。"

缺乏证据也减少了决策层可选择的选项。

"更全面、更有力的应对策略本应更早准备好。"

换句话说，面向未来的痛定思痛，其前提就是要有未雨绸缪的准备。

第一阶段报告共716页，其中一些经验教训早在两年前就于Science Media Centre上进行过讨论。

据悉，对疫情的复盘不会再有第三阶段报告，委员会收到的来自组织和个人的各类反馈总数超4.1万份，同时还调取了各政府机构8000份各类档案。

"委员会确信已经掌握了足够的信息。"

Government seeks information from police on rescue helicopter deployment after complaints

Wed, 11 Mar 2026 06:39:10 +1300

The government is seeking advice from police about how rescue helicopters are being deployed.

RNZ has reported on Fire and Emergency lines rescue teams who do cliff rescues, who are upset they must go through police to get a chopper and are sometimes being turned down.

"Confirming the minister has sought advice from police and expects to receive that soon," said Mark Mitchell's office.

RNZ has also heard of frustrations among lifeguards and helicopter crew themselves about police gatekeeping of choppers.

An agreement in 2022 in rescue circles reiterated police were the lead agency on most search-and-rescue callouts.

Health NZ and St John in the last two years had reminded FENZ that its teams were not allowed to call out an air ambulance chopper off their own bat but must go through police.

FENZ told RNZ recently there had been "some discussion amongst our people" about the impact of the 2022 change to chopper callout procedures.

"We sought to discuss and confirm [with HNZ] our understanding of the details of the change to procedure, namely that requests for contracted air ambulance helicopters to transport Fire and Emergency lines rescue teams to incidents must come from a search and rescue coordination agency which is either Police or the Rescue Coordination Centre," said national manager of response capability Ken Cooper.

The centre handles major rescues, while police handle most other rescues.

Cooper was part of an email chain among lines rescue personnel and managers alarmed after being turned down by police for a chopper to go to a cliff rescue in January 2025, and who said this type of thing was happening repeatedly.

Police admitted they made a wrong decision at the cliff rescue at Hahei.

"We have now clarified the procedures, and our people clearly understand them," Cooper told RNZ.

"Fire and Emergency personnel take their responsibility for serving and keeping their communities safe in a timely way very seriously."

Lessons from the Covid-19 response inquiry

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 18:58:34 +1300

The Royal Commission of Inquiry into the pandemic on Tuesday afternoon released its second report, sparked by public disquiet that its first report did not dig deep enough.

The 500-plus-page report looks at what it calls some of the "most difficult and divisive responses around vaccines and mandates".

"The adequacy of the processes used to assess and monitor the safety of vaccines" was one of those.

It eked out a pass mark, but with a very big but for the previous government's efforts to shift the "team of five million" from an early, pretty effective elimination strategy to suppression and minimisation in 2021 and 2022.

"Many of the people we heard from expressed pain and anger about the impacts of the pandemic and response. Some of these impacts on people's lives continue to this day," the report said.

"It is clear, however, that ministers and officials were facing a series of complex, high-stakes decisions in a rapidly changing environment and were doing the best they could at the time. Evidence shows New Zealand had among one of the best pandemic responses in the world."

'Very bumpy ride'

It was, however, "far from smooth".

A "very bumpy ride" was how Labour itself summed it up earlier in the day. Though its former top two, Dame Jacinda Ardern and Grant Robertson, also defended it: "We got a lot right. More than most."

National immediately used the phase two report to pound Labour.

Asked if his predecessors were just being cautious - it was an unprecedented global crisis, as Labour pointed out - Health Minister Simeon Brown told reporters:

"I think they were putting options to Cabinet, which were not backed up by advice," Brown said.

"And the reality is Chris Hipkins stood up every single day and he said to New Zealanders that he was making decisions based on advice by health officials... The reality is, in a number of these instances, he was not."

They did not heed warnings from Treasury about inflation-stoking Covid-19 spending that half the time went on non-Covid things, Brown added.

"We are feeling those consequences today," Brown said.

In a half-hour stand-up, Brown said "ultimately" 13 times.

"Ultimately, some of those decisions, you will have to put those questions to the ministers who made those decisions at the time as to why they made them," he said.

Hipkins put their approach at the time entirely opposite: "considered, appropriate and guided by the best evidence available at the time".

The decisions saved lives, though the responses caused hardship, he said.

NZ has so far reported 4500 deaths due to Covid-19 to the World Health Organisation. That is slightly fewer per capita than Australia, well below Canada's and about four times less than the US and UK.

What are the lessons for Next Time?

While everyone disagreed on what 20/20 hindsight has shown from the inquiry, everyone agrees on the need to do better now to prepare for next time.

So what are the lessons from phase two for Covid 2.0?

Two words: Be prepared.

"The stakes were immense. Each choice carried the weight and quality of lives in the balance. Yet policy-makers could not delay some hard choices," the report said.

But the "lack of planning for alternative future strategies" that applied to PCR testing was a common shortcoming elsewhere, too.

Going in next time armed already with better research on pandemics and impacts, better strategies for getting the best advice, and some basic pandemic legislation are among the 24 recommendations.

Two more words: Be smarter.

"Decision-makers told us they learned the importance of giving people an end date, or some indication of 'light at the end of the tunnel'," the report said.

Without that, people resisted more and more.

Now we know for next time. But the country had to get a better grip on social impacts ahead of next time, by finding ways to build trust and social cohesion, and ways to demonstrate to people the hard science behind "hard choices", the report said.

In addition to the main report, an extra 300 pages laid out what people who submitted to the inquiry said.

"People frequently told us that the vaccine mandates caused division in society that lingers to this day," said this last report.

Things got out of balance. "Wobbles" was how it was put after the first phase report.

Cutting the 'wobbles'

It needn't have got that bad is one conclusion that can be drawn from the second phase report.

Lockdown decisions, for one, required weighing up health versus bank balances, from Gore to Papakura.

Decision-makers had to weigh up many more factors than public health goals and social disruption, and think about tomorrow, not just today and impacts on this group, versus that group, and eroding.

"Based on the evidence we have heard, that is exactly what they tried to do," said the main report.

Trying came up short, though, when painful and untested initiatives created pressures, or helped birth mis-and-disinformation, that upset forecasts and analyses or exploited gaps in them, among a public increasingly prone to doubting the experts.

The officials doing the trying lacked enough analysis of lockdown's impacts on education, for instance (page 270).

They lacked enough evidence fullstop.

"Ideally, though, decision-makers would have been better supported with clearer, more specific evidence about the effects of public health measures."

That cut down the options to choose from.

"More comprehensive and robust response strategies should have been in preparation much earlier."

Being smart required being prepared.

The first phase report ran to 716 pages; some of its lessons were discussed two years ago at the Science Media Centre.

There will not be a part three. The commission received more than 31,000 submissions from individuals and organisations, and obtained 8000 documents from government agencies.

"We are satisfied that we were thoroughly well-informed."

NZTA picks cheaper but less effective option to fix SH2 through Waioweka Gorge

Tue, 10 Mar 2026 06:31:15 +1300

The Transport Agency (NZTA) has picked a cheaper but less effective option to fix the highway through Waioweka Gorge north of Gisborne that leaves a greater likelihood of closures than a costlier "full" fix.

A newly released business case shows the recommended option would cut closures by 53 percent while a full fix would cut them by 70 percent.

But it would still deliver 83 percent fewer days closed, a 7.5 percent cut in deaths and serious injuries, and halve the cost of freight detours.

State Highway 2 through the 48km-long gorge was still being repaired and only partially open weeks after 40 slips shut it during January's storms.

It was regularly out of action, costing the economy at least $8 million a day.

In the May 2024 business case - the latest there was - the NZTA board actually "endorsed" the full fix of 83 sites because that would make funding it a bit more certain.

But it instead recommended fixing 58 out of the 83 sites of rockfalls, slips and erosion on what it called a "lifeline route" - those 58 most likely to cut the road.

The other 25 less risky sites to fix would be "separately funded" and not start till 2029.

It suggested this was the quickest path.

"There is urgency to address as many sites as possible quickly and it is recommended that TREC [the project] deliver funding tranches 1 and 2 now," the report said, "with funding of lower consequence ... sites delivered through future operations and maintenance programmes or future capital works programmes."

The difference in cost was put at $36-43m in 2023 dollars. A much cheaper third option was discarded.

The agency told RNZ it was now reviewing all the sites to see if the report or the costs needed updating.

However, it also said last month that the 2024 business case was "complete and does not need any further work. So it can be utilitised without delay, subject to funding availability".

The gorge was the country's only stretch of highway to be rated in the worst at-risk category by a 2020 assessment.

The draft business case was begun in 2022 but storms delivering more damage kept on catching up on it.

"This 2022 business case was substantially complete, including engagement activities and inclusion of iwi in the business case process, but it was not yet submitted for approval at the time Cyclone Gabrielle hit."

Some locals, saying Tairāwhiti had been suffering too long and too often, had called for the government to look at alternative routes north to Ōpōtiki but it said the clean-up had to come first.

The highway was closed for over three weeks after January's storms and was on stop-go signals at times during the day and still shut at night as roadworks carry on.

The report said the board endorsed a full fix to ensure that if extra funding came available in future, it could be released for it.

The full fix was to "ensure a resilient level of service for this lifeline route".

The estimated total costs were put at between $130m and $153m for the recommended option; and between $166m and $196m for the full fix.

The business case cautioned about leaving any risky sites ultimately unfixed.

"If lower risk sites remain unfunded there is potential these sites will deteriorate further and reduce the long-term resilience outcomes of the ... investment.

"Without proactive interventions the demand for emergency funding and repairs on SH2 through Waioweka Gorge will continue."

Of the 25 "maybe" fixes, 13 were of level three risks and 12 of level one and two. Four and five are the worst.

"Confirming full tranche 1 funding and obtaining additional tranche 2&3 funding will remain a high priority for the TREC team."

The Transport Rebuild East Coast Alliance, or TREC, was set up to rebuild roads after Gabrielle in February 2023.

The business case had envisaged starting in 2024 on 32 projects in tranche one, then tranche two through to 2029, but was overtaken by events.

The full fix had a higher cost-benefit ratio of 1.3 versus 1.2 for what was recommended ($1.20 value back to the wider economy for each dollar spent).

Eight key risks were led off by three "high" ones: That costs would rise, the quake hazard from the Koranga Fault and how sensitive the area was to local iwi and hapu.

"Please note that future investment in the corridor is subject to funding approval," NZTA told RNZ.

TIMELINE

2020 - Waioweka Gorge is officially rated NZ's riskiest highway
2021 - Waka Kotahi preparing a business case for gorge highway
2022 - Business case mostly complete
2022-24 - Eight extreme weather events
2023 - In February, Cyclone Gabrielle damages road
Later that year Transport Rebuild East Coast (TREC) is set up to rebuild
2024 - Business case completed in May
2025 - June and September rain closes road
Five repair projects begin after September
2026 - 40 slips shut the highway in January
By March 2026 it is stop-go past roadworks during the day, closed at night
Business case is done but unfunded

IT project behind overhaul of firearms regulations put on hold

Sun, 08 Mar 2026 16:22:42 +1300

An IT project behind the overhaul of firearms regulations has been put on hold, due to uncertainty over what is needed.

A Treasury report from last September, released this week, rated the 'Arms Transformation' project as red.

It suggested the police minister intervene to "resolve major issues".

"Yes, it has been rated red, however nothing has gone wrong," police told RNZ on Friday.

Usually a red rating in a quarterly investment report meant real doubt a project could be delivered.

In this case a so-called 'Gateway' review was done and found "there was uncertainty about the ICT and system requirements that would be required should a new regulator be created".

Setting up a new regulator depended on a bill still before Parliament.

"The work has been paused, while the legislative process is ongoing," Firearms Safety Authority business transformation director Richard Wilson said.

He said the Arms Transformation Programme had gone well since it began and was previously rated green/amber.

A digital registry of firearms was built on budget in 2023 and this was being expanded. A review last year found the registry should achieve public safety objectives, once it was fully embedded.

The authority was working with Treasury and the Ministry of Justice on it, Wilson said.

Riverlink project affecting Hutt River water quality

Sat, 07 Mar 2026 19:26:07 +1300

Lower Hutt's roads may be blocked up by the Riverlink highway project, but the river itself has so far kept flowing pretty clear.

Bulldozers have been busy in the riverbed and on its banks, shifting masses of stones around.

Meanwhile, monitors in the water upstream and downstream from the epicentre at Melling Bridge have shown some changes in quality.

"Yes, there have been temporary changes in water quality linked to RiverLink construction activities in the river channel," Greater Wellington Regional Council told RNZ.

However, by mid-February, tight conditions on pollution had only been infringed once, the project copping fines of about $1000.

The changes in the river were allowed on condition the water quality returned to "ambient clarity" approximately one hour after any job was done, the regional council told RNZ.

It released a host of test results under the Local Government Official Information and Meetings Act.

The council listed a few minor problems for Te Awa Kairangi partnership - in early January, for instance, the water got clouded by work shifting the entire flow of the river from the east bank to the west under the bridge.

In November, fine sediment levels got too high, triggering the first - and as of mid-February - only "active management response" that concluded it was minor and not directly related to Riverlink.

Back in June 2025, "there was a discharge of sediment-laden water from the haul road and Rockline L3 construction works during a site inspection". That co-incided with heavy rain, so they quickly built some temporary soakage pits and used hay mulch to turn it around.

So far, the project has done four monitoring reports on the riverbed - three on trout, two on macroinvertebrates and two on indigenous fish.

The Hutt River was popular among trout anglers.

"The potential and actual impacts of the RiverLink Project were considered, assessed and appropriate mitigations applied through the Environment Court Consent process," the council's group manager environment Lian Butcher said in the released documents.