Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: Radio New Zealand

A woman was so worried about rising floodwaters she decided to sleep in her shop after flash floods ravaged Wellington.

The capital and surrounding areas are under a rare red rain warning after days of wet conditions.

Those who weren’t hit in the first deluge did what they could to ensure it doesn’t happen again with more rain battering the region.

Around the capital, bleary-eyed people stand in their shop doorways, covered in grime, donning gumboots and wet weather gear.

Too stunned to speak, they say no comment. Their homes, shops and livelihoods ruined. Sweeping, shovelling, pumping whatever they can.

Asha Patel from Skin and Body Care in Newtown narrowly avoided catastrophe.

Next door in Lychgate mall, a metre high wall of water pushed through the building, blowing out windows and destroying the property as vehicles floated in the car park.

“I’m lucky I’ve got concrete floors in Lino, so that was easy to clean up.

“But I do feel sorry for a lot of people in Newtown, especially the cafes across the road.”

However she was not out of the woods with more warnings and rain to come.

“I’m worried. I’m thinking of staying overnight.

“Just because I’ve got very expensive machines, you know, machines can cost anything up to $150, $200,000.”

She said this would make her anxious every time it rained now.

“It will make me worry … stay up at night. I might want to come back to Newtown in the middle of the night to check on my clinic.

“It’s hard work, you know, it’s your sweat and your heart. You work so hard to make something, you know. And it gets washed away so quickly.”

Nicole in Owhiro Bay sandbagged and then left her place after seeing the torrent from the night before.

“If I had to make a call to leave to go to my neighbours across the road up the driveway, I’d have to evacuate quite quickly before water maybe got into my house because Happy Valley Road was so flooded that crossing the road would have been really unsafe.”

She said seeing the weather get worse and worse was terrifying.

“My oldest has just started intermediate school and he’s now missed two days of school, one for wind and one for flooding just in 2026, so pretty bad.”

A few houses away from Nicole a family evacuated in the middle of the night in waist deep water – the house is now filled with mud.

Too overwhelmed to speak, the owner told RNZ they are just getting ready for it to flood again.

A message other residents fear but are working to avoid.

Glen Christie spent Monday working on the gutters – doing his best to ensure the worst doesn’t happen again.

“It’s scary seeing the neighbours getting flooded and walking around and seeing a few other people flooded and a few cars smashed up by the little slips and things like that.”

Many residents will be anxious to open their curtains at first light this morning, to see what new damage awaits them.

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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 Wellington region and Wairarapa have spent the night under a red heavy rain warning, with downpours expected to continue through to late Tuesday.

Wellington was hit by widespread, damaging floods and landslides overnight on Sunday following a weekend of storms.

Authorities are urging lower North Island residents to stay off the roads and evacuate if they feel unsafe as the rain continues.

MetService said with continued rain over several days there was a possible threat to life from dangerous river conditions, significant flooding and slips.

Follow the latest with RNZ’s liveblog above.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Tenants using artificial intelligence to help them make applications to the Tenancy Tribunal are creating extra work and backlog, one property manager says.

Property Brokers general manager of property management David Faulkner said there had been a noticeable shift towards AI-written applications that tended to be longer, more complex and sometimes claiming excessive amounts of money.

He said his firm received a notice of hearing for a tenancy dispute just before Christmas. A tenant had claimed that she and her child had their safety compromised when they were renting a rural property with unsafe drinking water.

“There were other issues as well – a claim of retaliatory notice, breaches of quiet enjoyment, and a dryer breaking down, which took a total of four weeks to repair. Her claim was for $40,000.

“What we received was a total of 215 pages, made up of the application, evidence, photographs, and a 101 page written report outlining the claim and breaking down the costs that should be awarded to her. The basis of the claim was that the pH level of the water was at a level that made it dangerous to drink. There were two hearings, one remote and one in person.

“On 2 April, the adjudicator published the Tribunal order. The tenant was awarded a grand total of $80 for the inconvenience of the dryer.”

He said excessively long, seemingly AI-generated claims like this put pressure on staff as well as the owners of the property.

“[That] was probably the first one, and we’re thinking this looks very, very complex. Then you start to see two or three more come through asking for really big amounts, $40,000, $50,00, $60,000 and they’re all set out in the same format. It just becomes quite clear that it’s AI-generated.

“A tenant may have a grievance, they put it together, and, you know, in good old days they’d probably go to somebody like a tenancy union or a tenant advocate, and at least could have a conversation with them, but AI in some cases is just giving them information which is just not being verified. And they’re probably getting very excited about what they think they can get, and they submit it in. And it’s started to cause a few problems.”

He said Tenancy Tribunal adjudicators were having to go through all the pages of evidence and it slowed the process.

Faulkner said some claims did not have merit and others were exorbitant.

Landlords submit the bulk of Tenancy Tribunal applications, commonly for rent arrears. Faulkner said these cases often did not need to be dealt with via a hearing and the tribunal could speed up the rate at which it heard cases by dealing with hem remotely.

Sarina Gibbon, director at Tenancy Advisory, said it was true that cases were being lodged that were more complex and sometimes meritless.

But she said it was probably another stage in the evolution of technology.

“If you look at the overall system in terms of the common challenges we have now which is to make the tribunal pipeline flow more effectively and minimise wait time so genuine applications are not having to wait months and months and months to get a hearing, in that sense having a very primitive grasp of AI is not helping.

“But if you take a step back and consider the overall intent of a tenancy-specific tribunal, which is really set up to promote cheap and expedited justice or dispute resolution … if AI enables more applicants to put forward applications, is that helpful? Yeah, I think it’s helpful. It’s serving justice and giving access to justice to more people.

“I don’t see a problem with AI as such, I think this is a reflection of simply that the technology is just so new and we’re still such naive and primitive users that we’re grasping with what this technology means. So right now what is happening is a lot of people are engaging with AI with very little knowledge of the RTA themselves. So they’re buying into AI hallucination, they’re buying into this tremendous amount of bloat that AI produces.

“I’m a lover of technology, over time I’m confident that AI is going to get us to a point where it’s going to be, it’s going to be a help rather than a hindrance.”

It comes after the Insurance and Financial Services Ombudsman warned last week that people should fact-check the information AI was giving them when they made complaints.

In one example seen by the IFSO Scheme, a Google AI summary suggested that insurance claim decisions are “frequently overturned” when consumers complained, and that “up to 80 or 90 percent of cases can result in success if people persist”.

But Insurance and Financial Services Ombudsman Karen Stevens said that was misleading.

She said complaints that escalated were often complex and stressful, and not always able to be resolved in the consumer’s favour.

She said AI responses could make the process more frustrating for people when reality did not match their expectations.

“While AI can be very useful for general information, it can sometimes oversimplify complex policy wording, miss key exclusions, and rely on overseas information that doesn’t apply in New Zealand. We’ve also seen instances of AI hallucinating previous cases and using them as examples. This can result in it giving incorrect advice,” she said.

“We’ve seen complaints which are 300 pages long. But more words aren’t necessarily better. Clear information about what has gone wrong for someone is much more useful than multiple pages referencing legislation and case law.”

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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 Wellington region and Wairarapa have spent the night under a red heavy rain warning, with downpours expected to continue through to late Tuesday.

Wellington was hit by widespread, damaging floods and landslides overnight on Sunday following a weekend of storms.

Authorities are urging lower North Island residents to stay off the roads and evacuate if they feel unsafe as the rain continues.

MetService said with continued rain over several days there was a possible threat to life from dangerous river conditions, significant flooding and slips.

Follow the latest with RNZ’s liveblog above.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Cryptocurrency and blockchain experts, investors, financial advisors appear unfazed by immediate threats to the Bitcoin blockchain posed by quantum technology.

Google has issued a white paper urging the Bitcoin community to take urgent action to upgrade blockchain security as advances in quantum technology increase the risk of fraudulent transactions and theft.

New Zealand Blockchain Forum executive director Trevor Topfer said quantum computing posed a greater risk to global financial systems than to Bitcoin.

Topfer said the blockchain community was working at pace to secure blockchains against the quantum threat, and Bitcoin was no exception.

“It’s easy to point the finger at Bitcoin, but I think that there’s a lot of other things that are a much bigger fish to fry than Bitcoin.

“Less than 5 percent of the world’s population owns Bitcoin.

“It’s a small threat to a small group of people when the entire world trades on SWIFT rails (Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), which would be much easier for quantum computing to undermine at a global scale than Bitcoin.”

Topfer said quantum can break anything it goes after, with the threat probably coming much faster than current estimates.

“There’s no way we can let quantum loose on the financial system, because it will disrupt the entire financial system, whether it’s Bitcoin, whether it’s fiat currency, whether it’s Swift, whatever function within the financial system that Quantum goes after, it can hack and overcome and break. That’s the problem. That’s the quantum threat.”

However, he said anything quantum breaks would make it stronger.

“If you turn a quantum computer at blockchain to crack it, you can also turn a quantum computer at blockchain to build it right?”

Blockchain seen as reshaping global infrastructure

Blockchain was invented to facilitate Bitcoin transactions, and had expanded to serve as a secure layer of the internet.

“Tthere’s an entire blue ocean of opportunity, because a blockchain is a better technology than what we have,” Topfer said, adding it had already completely rewired the global financial system.

“We’ve got a lot of different opportunities coming down the pipe. We’ve got identity, we’ve got personal data ownership, health records, there’s supply chain benefits.

“There’s already companies in New Zealand working in primary industry to use smart contracts and various other mechanisms that blockchain offers to find efficiencies and streamline those services.

“There will always be an underlying layer of blockchain when we need security, validation and automation. Blockchain exists for that.”

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

In 2010 the kiwifruit vine killing bacterial disease Psa-v was found in a Bay of Plenty orchard.

What followed was job, livelihood and monetary losses for many North Island kiwifruit growers as a variety of gold kiwifruit, Hort-16A, proved to be particularly susceptible to the disease.

Unfortunately, the disease spread to other kiwifruit growing regions in the North Island, including Northland, the Coromandel and the Waikato. But this aggressive version of the plant bacteria never made it to the South Island.

And so, a team of kiwifruit breeders and scientists devised a system to keep it that way.

North Island tissue culture

“The way we are doing it in New Zealand is more stringent than what we’re doing if we’re exporting material,” says the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s Dr Ed Morgan.

Based in Palmerston North, Ed leads a team of scientists responsible for doing a lot of plant tissue culture and moving plants around the world, and around New Zealand.

Following the Psa-v outbreak, the Bioeconomy Science Institute was approached by kiwifruit company Zespri about developing a plan to enable plants to safely move from the North to South Islands, without any risk of bringing the disease south.

This would allow South Island growers to purchase cultivars bred in the North Island and allow the Kiwifruit Breeding Centre (KBC – which is 50:50 Zespri and Bioeconomy Science Institute owned) to continue its work testing kiwifruit vines in different environments and different climates at its nursery in Motueka.

North Island cultivars to be moved are sprouted from budwood, and then four or five weeks later sent to the Palmerston North lab. From there, plant tissue cultures are established.

In this contained environment, the new plant tissue cultures go through several cycles of disease-checking in the lab, culminating in a PCR test by an external, independent lab which specifically looks for a piece of the Psa-v genome.

Only if they’ve been cleared through three or four checks, and the PCR test, will they be considered for sending south.

But that’s just the beginning.

South Island post entry quarantine

After they cross the Cook Strait, the tiny tissue culture plantlets, just 2-5 centimetres in size, with a few leaves and their first roots, will arrive in the Bioeconomy Science Institute in Lincoln, just Southwest of Christchurch.

Here they spend six months in a glasshouse where they are checked weekly for the tiny brown dots with yellow halos that are the tell-tale sign of Psa infection.

After that they are tested again by PCR. If they clear that stage, they then spend a further eight months across a new spring and summer growing season in pots in an enclosed outside area, again with weekly checks and a final PCR test.

Even then, there is one last step to go. If the plants are cleared, they will spend another year either at the onsite farm in Lincoln or in a nursery site outside of the South Island growing regions as an extra precaution.

While Zespri and the KBC are the customers, and the Bioeconomy Science Institute is providing this scientific service, it’s Kiwivine Health (KVH) who is the overseer of this pathway.

KVH was established in 2010 when the Psa outbreak occurred, with the mandate of managing the spread and impact to kiwifruit growers within the industry. The movement of kiwifruit plants falls under their pathway plan, a regulatory plan under the Biosecurity Act, and each year they audit the steps in the pathway.

While today growers use kiwifruit vine varieties that are less susceptible to Psa-v, it still has an impact on plants every year says KVH chief executive Leanne Stewart. “There needs to be active prevention programs in place every season, to make sure that it doesn’t become an issue and infections don’t run rampant on orchards.”

Currently the pathway can accommodate about 120 plants each year and so far they’ve not had any sign of Psa-v in any of the plants that have arrived in Lincoln. And Leanne is keen to keep it that way.

“In the South Island, we grow Heyward and Sun Gold and Ruby Red kiwifruit. If it was to get into the South Island, those varieties are susceptible to Psa. Not the same as Hort-16A, but there still needs to be active management of the bacteria. Because it’s a colder environment down there we could see a high level of infection, which we want to avoid.”

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Authorities are urging lower North island residents to stay off the roads and evacuate if they feel unsafe, as torrential rain continues to pour.

A state of emergency was declared for the Wellington region earlier on Monday.

MetService has issued a red heavy rain warning for Wellington and Wairarapa until Tuesday night, saying the rain presents a threat to life from dangerous river conditions, significant flooding and slips.

An orange heavy rain warning is in place for the Tararua district, with heavy rain watches for Taihape, Whanganui and Manawatu.

Strong wind watches have been issued for Taranaki, the Kapiti Coast, Wellington, Marlborough Sounds, Buller, Grey and Westland.

More than a hundred households are without power after high winds brought down power lines.

Wairarapa

An emergency mobile alert was sent to phones in Wairarapa on Monday night, due to further rain expected overnight.

“If you see rising flood water evacuate immediately to higher ground. DO NOT WAIT for an official warning,” it said.

“If you need to evacuate, seek shelter with friends and family if you can. Take pets and essential items.

“Call 111 if your life or property is at risk. Emergency services could be delayed.”

Part of State Highway 2 is closed just south of Masterton, from East Taratahi Road to Cornwall Road, because of flooding.

Waka Kotahi is also warning that State Highway 53 at Waihenga Bridge, near Martinborough may need to close for safety reasons.

Emergency management teams said three rivers in Wairarapa are higher than usual – Ruamāhanga, Mangatārere and Tinui.

Carteron’s mayor is warning people in the area to be vigilant and take precautions.

Steve Cretney said the Mangatārere Stream has risen close to where it was when it flooded in 2004.

He said the stream has eased a little but is expected to peak around 1am, so people should still be very careful.

He said several local roads are closed.

South Wairarapa District Council said Ponatahi bridge over the Huangarua River is closed.

The council said river levels in the Ruamahanga and Mangatārere rivers were likely to increase significantly and advised people to leave low lying or flood prone areas.

The council said all three libraries in the district would be closed on Tuesday – as well as the council’s reception on Kitchner Street.

Hutt Valley

Emergency management teams have been door knocking some residents along the Waiwhetū Stream in Lower Hutt, to tell them to relocate for the night if they are worried their home will flood.

Wellington Region Emergency Management said the stream and the Hutt River are at higher levels than normal and more heavy rain is forecast overnight.

Hutt City Council said the rising Hutt River has forced the closure of two bridges linking the city to State Highway 2.

The Kennedy Good and Melling bridges closed about 8pm and would not reopen until they had been assessed by engineers on Tuesday.

The council said Ewan Bridge remained open for now and advised residents to keep an eye on council channels for notifications on the potential closure of Silverstream Road Bridge further north.

The Transport Agency said State Highway 58 between Pauatahanui and Haywards is closed because of flooding.

Rising water levels had earlier forced evacuations in the suburb of Wainuiomata.

People at the northern end of Konini Street, as well as Wetherby Street and Rata Street, were told to evacuate on Monday evening.

The council said people in affected streets should not to wait to be told to leave.

It said welfare centres in Kōraunui Stokes Valley Neighbourhood Hub, Wainuiomata Neighbourhood Hub, Walter Nash Centre (Taita), War Memorial Library (Central Hutt) and the Eastbourne Neighbourhood Hub will remain open during the night, but displaced people should seek shelter with friends and whanau if possible.

Wellington

Wellington fire crews attended nearly 200 weather related callouts between 2am and 4.30pm on Monday.

Te Upoko region manager Bruce Stubbs said up to 20 personnel – with enhanced rescue and water capabilities – had been stationed in Hutt Valley and Wairarapa.

“This is where we ask the public to be really safety conscious. Please, we ask people to stay out of the floodwaters – as there’s often hidden obstacles or holes that you can’t see – and, if flooding does enter your home, turn off any appliances,” Stubbs said.

Wellington City Council said a small number of houses are uninhabitable following Monday’s heavy rain.

A council spokesperson said it will likely take officials a few days to understand the full extent of damage caused by flooding and slips.

He said people living in about 10 houses in the suburbs of Berhampore, Mornington and South Karori chose to leave, after their properties became flooded and inaccessible.

Meanwhile, a search and rescue operation for a Karori man in his sixties has been put on hold because of unsafe conditions.

A family member called emergency services on Sunday after being unable to make contact with Phillip Sutton.

Police search and rescue teams spent hours at his Karori South Road residence clearing the property and nearby areas, after it was hit by stormwater and debris.

Wellington District Prevention Manager Inspector Fleur de Bes the search will resume as soon as conditions allow.

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