Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

A record surge of first-home buyers are in the market as prices come down.  CoreLogic data shows people looking to buy their first home accounted for 27% of all purchases in the past three months.  Despite stretched affordability, high interest rates, and cost of living pressures, first-home buyers still want a 'foot on the ladder'.  CoreLogic Chief Property Economist Kelvin Davidson told Kerre Woodham that while their market share is at a record high, the number of deals overall is not.  He said that it equates to four and a half thousand deals in the third quarter, which is still a good number even if it’s not a record high.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

It’s being billed as the best thing to happen to NZ’s pothole-margeddon problem since the infamous Pothole Penis Painter.  For the first time in New Zealand, an all-in-one pothole repairing machine has arrived that is revolutionising pothole repairs worldwide. There is nothing else like it.  The Pothole Pro repairs potholes in a fraction of the time and cost of current manual labour methods. It also means fewer orange road cones and fewer frustrated motorists.  JCB Construction Sales Manager, Tony Hennessy, told Kerre Woodham that generally it can take workers quite a while to rip up the road and crop the pothole for repair properly.  He said that the Pothole Pro can cut the crop and clean it up in about eight minutes, roughly a quarter of the time needed without it.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Air New Zealand has announced Kiwi designer Emilia Wickstead will design the airline's next uniforms.  She was chosen from a shortlist of three, after having received hundreds of other pitches.It is one part of a re-design by the national carrier that will also include airplane interiors.The new uniforms will replace the current Dame Trelise Cooper designed uniforms by 2024.  Chief Customer and Sales Officer Leanne Geraghty spoke with Kerre Woodham about the new designs and why Wickstead was chosen.   LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I wasn't expecting to come home to a fully formed functional government.  After all, the results of the specials were only announced on Friday and there are still a couple of electorates where it is absolutely worth going through and counting the votes again.    As expected, National lost two seats after the count of special votes, while Te Pāti Māori gained two, and the Green Party has gained another.    The margins in some electorates are in the single digits:  - Te Pāti Māori candidate Takutai Tarsh Kemp won the Tāmaki Makaurau electorate by just 4 votes over Labour's Peeni Henare.  - Labour's Helen White beat National's Melissa Lee in Mt Albert by just 20 votes   - And Labour candidate Rachel Boyack won Nelson with a majority of 29 votes over the National candidate Blair Cameron.  Melissa Lee and Blair Cameron have indicated they may request a recount and really, why wouldn't you if you were them?    But nonetheless whatever the results, Christopher Luxon and David Seymour and Winston Peters are joined together in an uncomfortable throuple and they're just going to have to deal with one another.    Not the result Christopher Luxon wanted, but then it's not up to him to dictate the makeup of Parliament.  It's up to the voters, and this presumably is what they wanted.    Winston Peters has been around.  This is not his first rodeo.    So he'll be looking to parlay his 8 seats from 6.08 per cent of the votes into a shiny baubles and pretty trinkets - mainly for himself but no doubt he'll be looking for a few pieces of costume jewellery for his MPs.    LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I thought that one thing we’ve done over the past few days is put the Rugby World Cup Final disappointment behind us.   We've dealt with the result, we've welcomed the team home, we’ve said farewell to a bunch of players —quite nice scenes at the airport I thought, with people warmly welcoming the All Blacks and Ian Foster home— and I thought that’s it. We can move on now.    So, I admit it was with some shock that I clicked on to the New Zealand Herald website this morning to see the news that Wayne Barnes —who oversaw the World Cup Final between South Africa and the All Blacks— has retired from refereeing, stating that online abuse and threats have become too regular for everyone involved in rugby.    So, one of the top, if not the top ref in rugby, is gone from the game in —let’s be honest— his prime, at the relatively young age of 44, having overseen 111 test matches.    What a career and what a disgrace.    You don’t need to go online to see the sort of abuse that he put up with, you can just witness just from the crowd reaction that he experienced at the Rugby World Cup Final.   Which was something his wife and his children also had to witness, and frankly, I’m disgusted.    I think this is a tragic result for him and for rugby.    There might be some who goes oh who cares, good riddance, but while you're at it, ask yourself how many people who might be considering having a crack with the whistle, will be thinking maybe not.    It’s worth saying and I think it would be unreasonable not to acknowledge that many, maybe the majority of New Zealand rugby supporters, do have a level of nuance and maturity when it comes to dealing with disappointment. You know, we get passionate at the time, but we get over it.   But I think it would also be naive to suggest that it’s just a fringe element ruining it for everyone.    You just need to look at a home Test match with the booing and jeering that goes on while the opposition is taking a kick to realize we have a problem with bad sportsmanship.    For a stark contrast, look at the test matches that are played in Ireland where the ground crowd goes completely silent and respect of the kicker.    Personally, I like Wayne Barnes.    Look, back in the day with that forward pass I probably hated him like everyone else, but then I grew up. I like the clarity with which he communicates with the players on the pitch.    He knows all the players by name, he’s respectful, he’s polite, and thoroughly professional in the way he goes about his business.   And I guess I can’t help but wonder if the All Blacks had won that match, would we be seeing Wayne Barnes retiring from the game? I think there’s a good chance we might not.   Here’s the tragedy:   Had we won, he might still be reffing. But instead, and because of the poor sportsmanship of a large number of the rugby community who struggle to keep a sane perspective on a sporting loss, rugby has lost its top ref.   And we just have to hope that more don’t follow.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I don’t mind telling you that I sort of avoided talking about this topic a couple of days ago because it’s simply grim. But the revelations are continuing following the death of baby Ru, with the latest including that the uncle of the slain toddler has criticized Oranga Tamariki saying that he asked the agency back in December to remove the child from the family home. And so, the Groundhog Day style naval gazing examination begins with the inevitable accusations that Oranga Tamariki is not up to the job. There probably haven’t been too many of us who haven’t thought that simply the fact that the baby was named “Ruthless-Empire” should have been a red flag from the start. I mean seriously, who names a beautiful little baby “Ruthless Empire”? But perhaps that’s a bit of a distraction when the inevitable questions about who is to blame begin, and whether Oranga Tamariki is fit for purpose. It’s not helped by the revelation that more than fifty children have died since the establishment of the agency. But isn't the fact simply that they have an impossible job and it’s just lazy and easy to make them the culprit, when in fact the picture, the failure of these children, ultimately must go back to the communities and the families in which they reside. That’s not to place blame too widely either, because members of the wider family, it seems, were very concerned. As we can see from the uncle who had complained about the safety of this child. I think it’s also important to acknowledge that if you’re working for Oranga Tamariki, surely you are there to make a difference and the very last thing you want to see is a catastrophic failure that results in a child's death. I can’t help but think of other agencies that are often under fire —such as Pharmac for not providing all the medicines we need— when it’s an impossible task when there is a limited resource trying to cope with an inexhaustible supply of problems. Just look at the stats: Around 70,000 complaints received a year. 38,000 had investigations completed, around 51,000 individual children. That’s 1% of our population.  57 child homicides since Oranga Tamariki came into being seven years ago. There will be questions, people who will want to see Oranga Tamariki disestablished, and a new agency set up but what would that achieve? Who’s it going to be staffed by? Probably the same people who work for the existing agency, who struggle with the scale of the problem that they have to deal with. Are we going to require that every child is uplifted when there is a question raised about their safety? Well, there will be those who say that’s the right answer, but then we’ll see stories of communities objecting to being children being removed and destroying the family and those communities in which they live. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. But one thing that’s certain is that as soon as we are relying on a government agency to provide all the answers, we’ve demonstrated that we’re failing as a society and as communities. When that government agency surely can only be as effective as the willingness within communities it serves to help them do their jobs. Personally, I think the problems go a lot deeper. The ongoing narrative that people's problems are always someone else's fault – the lack of demanding personal responsibility, entrenched reliance on the welfare state, the list goes on. And let’s be honest, we're only another few news cycles away from another tragedy just like this. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

An expected quarterly rise in our unemployment rate.  Stats NZ data shows it's at 3.9% for the three months to September, up from 3.6% last quarter, and 3.2% a year ago.  NZ Herald Business Editor, Liam Dann, told Tim Beveridge that while unemployment going up isn’t generally considered a good thing, a bit of “slack” in the labour market is needed to help combat inflation.  He said that 3.9% is still, historically, very low.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I’ve gotta be honest with you that I’m feeling a little punch drunk digesting the latest stories and statistics about our health system under pressure.    So, bear with me while I throw a few stats at you, just to package it all up.   Hospital admissions for babies and pre-schoolers is up 35%, and those are the admissions that could have been prevented with better primary care. Up 35% in the year ending June. It’s even worse in Auckland, the stat is 66%.   The number of patients waiting more than four months to see a specialist has jumped 46% in the last year.   And you might even recall the recent story that half of the number of Kiwis needing heart surgery waited longer than the maximum time frame which is considered appropriate by their specialists. Half of them.    I’m not sure which of the figures concerns me the most, but perhaps it is the one that I began with, that the hospitalizations of young children which could have been prevented had they simply been able to see a doctor in a timely fashion.   I have seen comments that there are problems that Te Whatu Ora, and that health care specialists feel that the ministry is disconnected from the pressure that they are under.    It’s difficult to see if there could be any other issue facing the incoming government that could be of a higher priority than getting on top of the challenges that our health system faces.    Seriously. Can you think of a higher priority issue than health?   But that’s not going to happen overnight, and it might sound a touch paranoid but as a parent I have found myself saying to my kids “don’t do that unless you want to go and spend a day sitting in A&E.”   I think the thing these stats do is place the focus back on us, and how we look after ourselves. I wonder how many of us are still keeping up with private health insurance, no matter the increase in the cost of it. How many of us are thinking: “I’d better hang onto that because I might need it.”   When it has to be obvious that the challenge to all of us is how we look after ourselves in the interim, how do we prevent ourselves from having to rely on the health system?    Because regardless of when or how you get your care it doesn’t seem like it’s likely to happen —if you rely on the public health system— in the time frame is going to enable you to get back to living your life as quickly as possible.   The new Government, they’re going to introduce targets which is all very well but how are they going to meet them?  I don’t mind saying that, in the back of my mind, I probably am taking slightly better care of myself simply because often a few simple choices can make the difference between keeping on a healthy track and going down the line of sitting in a queue for health care that isn’t coming too soon.   Because the only certain thing we have control over is the ability to look after ourselves. Thats surely the first port of call.    Thats where I am at.    Look the headlines are disturbing, if you group them all together you’d just be living in a state of worry all the time.   And I know there are a lot of people getting great care with our wonderful health workforce, and deep down I still hope that the care will be there when I need it, but I’m certainly not counting on any longer in the way that I used to.  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So, the new grocery commissioner says it's disappointing to see any potential supermarket competitor fail on the back of the news that Supie  —an online retailer that had hoped to challenge the supermarket duopoly— had failed.  It leaves us with the question as to what it is going to take to break open the supermarket duopoly.  I’ll have to be honest that beyond being vaguely familiar with its name, I knew very little about Supie.   To be really honest, I think “bugger all” might be more accurate because —as a consumer— it really just hadn't registered with me.  And maybe there’s something in that, in that any new player is going to have to begin as an instantly massive and substantial player with an already established reputation overseas.  But it does raise the question as to how much responsibility we bear for that. What would it take for us to change our habits? How much of this is on us?  Because while there are other options for online shopping, I think the fact that we are creatures of habit is going to be a very difficult factor for any new entrant into the market to compete with. For example, one of our guests on the Weekend Collective, on the Smart Money segment sent me a link to one of the smaller players in fresh fruit and veg which, on the face of it, offers huge savings. I have to confess, I can't recall if I’ve even told my wife about it. And look, that's on me —and I am making a note to follow up on it— but the thing I wonder is if we have some sort of reservation about any online supplier that doesn't also have a bricks and mortar operation.  So the question is: what is it going to take?  What is it going to take for a competitor to establish itself and break the supermarket duopoly?  We do our shopping online but we do our shopping online with one of the two existing duopoly monsters. Maybe the reason is that their presence is so, well, omnipresent.  They’re everywhere. They’re brick and mortar, we all know the names, and it just feels like a safe, easy option, not too much thinking goes into it.   So when it comes to weekly shopping they are foremost in our minds, and I think that’s the biggest challenge any new supermarket player would have.  But how much of it is on us, and what do you think it would take, and what does a new competitor need to bring to the market?   I would suggest it needs to be something where a brand is instantly recognizable from overseas, with built in credibility. It needs to instantly be something that can compete in the heavyweight division and not something that's going to rely on a mixture of investment and organic word of mouth growth.  It can’t be a start-up business hoping to establish a presence over time, it’s going to have to be something that is already massive overseas that decides it’s going to put us out of our baked in duopoly misery.  But perhaps when we whinge about the absence of competition —as creatures of habit— we really only have ourselves to blame. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Kerre Woodham is off in Paris, catching the last two All Blacks games in the Rugby World Cup. She called in to the show this morning to catch listeners up on the energy in the city ahead of this weekend's final, and what it's like to watch the games in person. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.