NZ Engine

Source: Radio New Zealand

MetService is warning you may need to keep your raincoats handy as the warm weather the North Island is experiencing may take a turn this weekend.

A low-pressure system is lining up a soggy weekend, bringing warm, humid air and the risk of heavy rain, especially for parts of the North Island still recovering after January’s floods.

MetService meteorologist, Mmathapelo Makgabutlane told Morning Report the next few days will be warm and humid for the North Island.

Muggy overnight temperatures on the way for the second half of the week as a warm-moist airmass pushes over us

Parts of the upper North Island will have overnight low temperatures around 20°C.

Meanwhile, Southland could have maximum temperatures in the high 20s on Thursday. pic.twitter.com/GexGcCsgyY

— MetService NZ (@MetService) February 10, 2026

Makgabutlane said there are a couple of weather systems on the way this weekend.

On Friday, a front is expected to move across the South Island, bringing a period of heavy rain and strong winds.

However, it’s the weather system moving onto the North Island on Saturday that Makgabutlane said was the one of interest.

A trough over the northern Tasman Sea is likely to move onto the North Island, bringing very humid conditions with scattered showers and possible thunderstorms on Saturday through to Monday.

“The two main things to look out for with the system is that intensification. How deep that low-pressure system is will be one thing that tells us how strong or how much rain we will see,” Makgabutlane said.

“The other thing is the location of that weather system. So, if it forms a couple of hundred kilometres to to the east of us, [it’s] probably going to be a lovely weekend for most of us, but even if it forms just a little bit closer to us, then we could be in for quite a wet weekend.”

As things stand, it does look like it will be a wet couple of days ahead, she said.

At this point, the areas that look the most likely to bear the brunt of the weather are most of the North Island on Saturday, and the lower and eastern parts of the North Island on Sunday and into Monday.

“Over the next coming days, I would say certainly keep an eye out for those [weather] watches because they do look likely,” Makgabutlane said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Teaching Council’s penalties for dodgy teachers may be too light, an independent review says.

It also warned that incompetent teachers might be going under the radar.

The review commissioned by the council’s governing board and provided to media this week called for a major overhaul of the organisation with a greater focus on child safety and quality teaching.

The council registers teachers and also receives complaints about their conduct, many of which end up before a disciplinary tribunal.

The report highlighted multiple short-comings in the disciplinary process and called for improvements, including enforceable financial penalties.

The review was highly critical of the practice of asking teachers to agree not to teach if there were risks associated with continuing in their job or they might come into contact with complainants.

It said asking for a voluntary undertaking to stop teaching was troubling.

“Either the matter is such on its face that the teacher warrants formal suspension or not, pending the investigation. Once such an undertaking or suspension is in place, one would also think that these high risk cases would be fast tracked. It is not clear to me that this is consistently the case,” the report said.

It also questioned whether the penalties imposed by the Disciplinary Tribunal were too light.

“…some interviewees were not certain that the penalties being applied in some cases were proportionate to the risks or harm entailed. Some wondered if the rehabilitative view that guides competency decisions leaked into the conduct work,” the report said.

It warned that serious child predators were “manipulative, skilled at going under the radar and almost never rehabilitated” and suggested an audit of recent cases to check its decisions aligned with those made in courts.

“Such an audit should encompass both conduct and competence, and should also test all stages of the Council’s processes for compliance with relevant legislation and with child safeguarding principles.”

The report said interviewees spoken to during the review criticised the high cost to the council of the disciplinary process and its slow progress.

They also said support for victims and complainants seemed to be ad hoc and vary by investigator.

The review said not all of the council’s investigators were formally trained and the proportion of police-trained investigators had dropped.

It said that was not appropriate, especially in situations involving vulnerable victims.

“I would instead see formal training and external experience as mandatory, giving the sensitivity of the matters under investigation and the risk of traumatisation to vulnerable children or witnesses,” the report said.

It said the Disciplinary Tribunal’s penalties appeared to be unenforceable and appeared in the council’s accounts as doubtful debtors at a rate of 80 percent.

“In summary, there are significant opportunities to improve the targeting to risk, urgency, efficiency and timeliness of the conduct process. Justice delayed is very often justice denied.”

Incompetent teachers

The review recommended the council investigate whether schools are failing to report incompetent teachers.

It said the council received an average of 30 competence complaints a year, which seemed too few given the size of the teaching workforce.

“This appears to be an area of significant under reporting, in that principals and leaders may performance manage these cases out, or teachers may resign when competence is called into question,” the review said.

“Anecdotally, respondents suggested that such is the current teacher shortage, some of these teachers can dodge accountability by shifting between schools. ‘Some schools are just desperate’ one said, ‘…and they can’t afford to look too closely at performance’.”

The report said if schools were under-reporting, it would be of considerable concern.

It suggested the council engage with schools and agencies such as the Education Review Office to evaluate the size of the problem and possible treatments.

“The purpose of the competence process is to support teachers to build in an area they are not meeting. Unlike the discipline area, the competence process is designed primarily to be rehabilitative,” the report said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Usually, there are only calm currents at Auckland’s Western Springs Lake.

But this week, electrocurrents are being used to stun pest fish and turtles so they can be scooped up, brought to land and killed.

Associate Professor in Biodiversity and Ecology at the University of Waikato’s School of Science, Nicolas Ling, is one of the specialists scooping up hundreds of koi carp, including goldfish and brown bullhead catfish, on New Zealand’s only electrofishing boat.

He said no native species would be harmed by the electrofishing process.

“It puts a pulsed electric current into the water, and it temporarily stuns the fish, which means we can recover them. The native species, we can recover those, and we can put them back in the lake unharmed, and the pest species, we can humanely euthanise them.”

Ling said catfish were most likely released into the lake more than a hundred years ago. Koi were believed to have been introduced into New Zealand in the 1960s.

But he said most of the goldfish and turtles in the lake were people’s unwanted pets.

“People think they’re doing the right thing, you know, when they don’t want their pet anymore, they go and release it into the local lake. And it’s actually the worst thing you can do. If you want to take on a pet, then take it on for the course of its natural life.”

He said they were also removing red-eared slider turtles from the lake.

“Again, these are pets that people have released when they no longer want them. The problem with the turtle is, if you take that on as a pet, it’s a 50-year commitment. It’s a multi-generational pet. They get huge and it becomes very expensive to provide the habitat for an adult turtle. And so people just go and release them, which is a sad thing.”

All of the pests collected were brought back to shore to be killed and then taken off-site to be turned into compost or rendered down to produce natural gas.

While killing the pests was not a pretty sight, Ling said it was necessary.

“These particular species are known to cause negative impacts on water quality. The lake should be nice and clean, but it’s not, and the fish are definitely contributing to that. They stir up the bottom sediments, and that resuspends nutrients back into the water column, which can cause increases in algal growth and bacterial growth.

“The koi and the goldfish eat the plants in the lake, which also take out nutrients.

“Those challenges with water quality mean that it makes it potentially unsafe for recreation around the lake. You don’t want to be touching the water.

“There’s fantastic bird life around here. When the water quality is really poor, they can suffer from a disease called avian botulism.

“And of course, they’re competing with the native species as well. There are lots of eels in the lake, and that’s good to see. There are also īnanga, which are key whitebait species. There’s common smelt in the lake as well.”

The lake was home to three native eel species: the short-finned eel, the long-finned eel, and the Australian long-finned eel, and there are plans to declare the lake an eel sanctuary.

The Waikato University specialists would be at the lake for one week ending on Friday, 13 November, with the council saying there were plans for them to return in the near future to continue the pest removal operation.

Auckland Council Senior Freshwater Advisor, Matthew Bloxham, said the council had previously tried other techniques to remove pests from the lake, but this was the first time they had brought in an electrofishing boat.

He said so far it had been a success.

The team at Western Springs had caught Koi weighing up to 14kg. The largest Koi ever caught in New Zealand weighed 15kg.

“Not many people realise that they get so large,” Bloxham said.

We’ve found quite a few diseased goldfish in here recently. So, putting them in here doesn’t necessarily give them a better life. It’s actually passing on the problem to somebody else, in this case the environment.

“It’s far better to repurpose that goldfish or re-home it, reach out and see whether anybody’s prepared to take it on and there will be people out there, you know, people love goldfish, they are attractive things after all, but they’re a nuisance when they’re released into the wild.”

It was costing the council $20,000 to rent the electric fishing boat from Waikato University.

“The cost of this operation is not cheap. We’d prefer not to be spending the targeted rate on controlling pests. We’d rather spend it on direct biodiversity outcomes, such as planting trees, but it’s a necessary evil. We have to maintain these fish at really low numbers.”

“It only takes two fish, a male and a female, to breed up and to produce the sorts of volumes that we’re seeing here now. We’ve been fishing all week, and so far we’re just under 300 kilograms of fish. That’s hundreds of fish.”

Bloxham said eradication was the goal, but that wouldn’t happen if people kept putting their goldfish in the lake.

“If ever we do achieve eradication, and we’d really like to, that is our end goal, it’s so easily undone by somebody otherwise well-mannered person who thinks they’re doing their gold fish a favour and then just quietly, surreptitiously emptying them into the lake, and suddenly we’re back to square one.

“The big message that we’re trying to get out is that if you’re contemplating, you’ve reached the end of the year, and you’ve got a pet, you don’t know what to do with it, don’t release it into your waterway.”

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand