Clearer boundaries around Kāinga Ora tenant behaviour could explain a 600% surge in formal warnings.

In the past 10 months, 63 tenancies were terminated because of abusive, threatening, or persistently disruptive behaviour.

Nearly 1,500 warnings have been issued in the financial year to date.

Chief executive Matt Crockett told Kerre Woodham behaviour isn't worse, rather the previous framework wasn't as sharp.

He says clearer boundaries and more follow through now have more people's behaviour changing for the better.

The fate of multiple vacant Kāinga Ora sections sitting empty will be confirmed in the next month.

Multiple projects are on pause as the state housing agency re-focuses on the Government turnaround plan.

This includes selling 900 older homes a year and a new build programme.

Crockett told Woodham Kāinga Ora's been reviewing which areas are cost effective and serve populations.

He says about 20% of its current land holdings will be sold back to the market.

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Kiwi business leaders fear the impact of Donald Trump's tariffs will be more severe than the impact of the Global Financial Crisis and the Covid pandemic.

ASB and Talbot Mills have been surveying more than 300 business leaders, including CEOs and founders.

Two-thirds of businesses are concerned about the impacts, including almost 80% of exporters.

Meat, dairy and wine are expected to be hit harder, while the wool and seafood sectors are expected to fare better.

ASB's General Manager of Commercial Banking, Ben Speedy, told Kerre Woodham that the results highlight that businesses are really struggling with the uncertainty that’s playing out in the environment at the moment.

He says businesses not only need to navigate tariffs, but also the difficult business and economic environment in New Zealand.

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How is it that two recent polls had such starkly different outcomes?

The latest RNZ Reid Research poll —out this morning— has the right bloc on 46.4, behind the left bloc on 50.3.

But the latest 1 News Verian poll —released last night— has the right bloc on 50-percent, well ahead of the left bloc on 45.

Curia Market Research Owner David Farrar told Kerre Woodham that when you poll 1000 people, they say there’s a 3% margin of error – so if a party is sitting at 50%, in reality they’re somewhere between 47% and 53%.

His advice for conflicting polls is to average them out, as that will generally give you a pretty good idea.

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On average, there are 73 work-related deaths in New Zealand every single year. Relative to the number of people in employment, the New Zealand workplace fatality rate is double that of Australia, and it hasn't shifted in many, many years. More road cones have not made a difference. The New Zealand rate is similar to the rate the UK experienced back in the 1980s. The gap between New Zealand and Australia is consistent across most industries and occupations. It's not like we've got one that is more dangerous than any other, which is why it's throwing these figures out. It's consistent across industries and occupations.

Looking at the construction industry, the New Zealand fatality rate is 4.41 workers every 100,000 compared to 2.93 workers in every 100,000. The workplace injury rates tell a similar story. New Zealand injury rates, as reported by ACC have improved over time, however the Australian rate is 25% lower, the UK 45% lower. Why? Why are we so much worse than other countries we should be able to compare ourselves with? Brooke van Velden, the Minister for Workplace Safety, says we're overregulated. That there are too many rules and the fear of prosecution is making workplaces less safe.

“We're changing the focus of worker health and safety to focusing on the critical risks, those things that can cause deaths and serious injury, and at the same time, I'm changing the focus of WorkSafe to care about deaths and serious injury as well and not sweating the small stuff because we've had a culture of too much over compliance, ticking all the boxes, trying to get all of the paperwork done, rather than focusing on, do I actually do anything in my workplace that could cause death or serious injury? And are we doing that correctly?

“So I'm saying to everybody out there, let's not sweat the small stuff. Let's focus on those deaths and serious injury activities and let's have WorkSafe going on site providing more upfront guidance so that they're here to help rather than having too much of the stick.”

Who was it that said there are no more chilling words than “hi, we're from the government. We're here to help”? It was an American, I'm sure. Is there going to be able to be a change of emphasis? If all of a sudden, Workplace Safety says, ‘hey, we're here to help. We're here to help you, as the employer, make the workplace safer’. Are we able to pivot away from thinking ‘if Health and Safety come in here, they're going to find all sorts of nitpicky things and make my life misery’, to ‘might ring Workplace Health and Safety and see how they can help me’. It's going to take a big mind shift.

Mike said this morning he thought there were too many rules and there probably are for people who are educated, who have choices about what they do, who have choices about where they work. For people who don't have the luxury of telling a boss to stick it if they're asked to do something they think is really dangerous, or to do something with equipment they think is dangerous, rules are required. But they need to be clear, they need to be effective and if they're not working, do away with them. And I think most importantly, employees need to be on board with them. The number of times I've had employers ring in and tell me that as required by law, they bring in the safety gear, they instruct the workers to wear it, they do spot cheques to ensure the workers are wearing it, and the workers are not wearing it. They say that the goggles mist up. That the harnesses mean that they can't rely on their own wits to go about the building, and they'd rather risk death than rely on their own sense of balance. The employees don't seem to value their lives in some cases. You've got to get employees on board as well.

There has to be a culture of safety, that workers have to value themselves and employers have to value their workers. And you can't regulate for that. You can't red cone that. I tend to agree that too many rules just mean the important ones get lost in the noise. Too many road cones and you don't know when it's dangerous and when it's not. But our work-related deaths are appalling. And they've been appalling for a very, very long time. How do we fix it? It's only those workers in dangerous occupations, mainly men, and the bosses in those dangerous occupations that can tell us.

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The rise of generative AI could be putting children at risk.

Gloria Masters, founder of 'Handing The Shame Back', believes the current digital environment has enabled “much more sexualised content” of children to be available to predators.

AI tools allow people to remove clothing from people in photos, such as children, creating fake nude images they can then trade.

She told Kerre Woodham that share your photos with trusted friends and family members by all means, but the days of posting them on Facebook, Instagram, and other such platforms are gone.

According to Masters, research shows that 85% of online offenders become contact offenders, going on to abuse real children.

She says it’s important to stop giving predators a free pass and remove content so they can’t access it.

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You might have heard ACT leader David Seymour on the Breakfast show this morning. He says there will almost certainly be prosecutions against parents of absent students this year as the Government intensifies its crackdown on school truancy. And it's not even truancy, in my mind truancy are kids doing a bunk, wagging, taking a day off. What this is, is parental neglect. Parents who are failing to ensure that their kids get to school and get to school on time. According to Ministry of Education figures, around 11.3% of students were chronically absent from school and term 4 last year, equating to around 93,000 young people. Chronically absent means a student attends 70% of school or less. The Associate Minister for Education spelled out what's going to happen next to parents who will not send their kids to school.

“Basically, a school will go to the Ministry of Education, say look, we've got someone who they're not a can’t, they’re a won't. We've tried. We've gone out. We've engaged with them. They're basically giving us the middle finger and saying education is not important and you've got no right to demand that my kid enrols and attends a school. And in that case I've been told by the youth aid, police, by the attendance officers, by the deputy principal, we need another sanction, another step we can take. At that point they will go to the Ministry of Education and say, look, this is a potential prosecution case. Ministry of Education will weigh it up and if it stacks up, they'll take the prosecution, ultimately go before the courts. Now you can be fined $30 bucks a day up to $300 initially. For repeat offending the fine on parents can be $3000.”

Which of course many parents won't be able to pay in that category. They're not going to be able to pay it, but the message is clear from the Government. They are quite happy to be the bad guy in getting your kids to school. And principals have said they've already noticed a difference. The expectation is that young people will attend school. Schools have to deliver statistics on the numbers of children who are turning up and they have to deliver those to the Ministry of Education – if their figures are slipping, or if there's no improvement, then action is taken by branches and agencies of the ministry to encourage children to attend school.

So is it going to help the parents who've rung in and told me they cannot get their children to school? These are the older students who cannot and will not get out of bed. That makes it a bit tricky. We have had, on the face of it, perfectly “normal parents” who are trying to do the right thing by their children and by the community who want their kids to get ahead in life, who want their kids to go to school, tell us that they cannot get their teenagers out of bed and into the classroom.

If you can say, well, if I have to pay that fine, then that's going to come out of the money for your wardrobe or the money for your school trip, or the money for your phone plan, will that help? I mean, 11% of kids who are chronically absent, that's quite a lot of children, 93,000 young people, as a lot of young Kiwis who are missing out. And they're not just missing out on learning they're missing out on the structure and the discipline of getting up and going to work.

And what if the parents and grandparents like me, who take the kids out of school for a jolly? I guess there are exceptions to every rule, but should we be fined as well? If you're willingly, wilfully disobeying the edict from the government to get your kids to school should parents and grandparents like me be fined for basically sticking the middle finger, as David Seymour said, to the attendance expectations?

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