Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: New Zealand Government

Minister for the Prevention of Family and Sexual Violence Karen Chhour is advocating for increased protections for family pets in family violence incidents. 
“I want to talk about some hidden victims of domestic abuse – our pets,” says Mrs Chhour.
“New Zealand unfortunately has unacceptably high rates of family violence in the developed world, and at the same time one of the highest rates of pet ownership.
“Pets are part of the family. They are our companions, our comfort, often a source of unconditional love. Tragically, this means that when family violence happens, our animals are often caught in the crossfire. 
“Abusers know how much their victims love their pets, and they use that love as a weapon. 
“Many people are shocked to learn how deeply linked pet abuse is with domestic violence.
According to the latest research from Women’s Refuge: 
•         53% of women in abusive relationships delayed leaving their violent partner out of fear for their pet’s safety.  Over half of victims hesitate to escape because they cannot ensure their pet will be safe without them.
•         About 24% of women (nearly 1 in 4) had a pet killed by their abuser.  This horrifying statistic shows that for a significant number of survivors, their worst fears were realised – their beloved companion was brutally taken from them.
•         Frontline agencies are reporting a rise in sadistic violence toward animals in domestic abuse cases. These are not isolated incidents; they are part of a pattern of extreme cruelty designed to instil terror.
“These numbers and examples are shocking and painful to hear, but sadly they reflect the reality for families across the country and in every community. 
“Talking about this issue is important, but taking action is even more important. 
“Today, I’m both asking for your help and making a commitment as Minister. 
“Please spread the word that if you or someone you know is experiencing family violence, remember that you can include pets on Protection Orders. 
“Under New Zealand’s Family Violence Act, when you apply for a Protection Order, you can ask the Family Court to add a special condition to protect your animals. This means the abuser can be legally forbidden from hurting or taking the pets.
“Too few people know about this so I would encourage everyone to tell your friends, family, and colleagues. 
“My commitment is to strengthen these protections. 
“I will be advocating to colleagues that we urgently need to update the Protection Order application and affidavit forms. We need these forms to explicitly cover pets and animal safety. 
“I am also pushing for improved training and guidance so that lawyers, judges, and support workers routinely consider pets in every family violence case. 
“Our courts and our system must recognise that pets are family, and that protecting them is part of protecting victims. 
“This will be a team effort by all of us, we all have a role to play in stopping this cycle of abuse. 
“It can be as simple as checking in on a friend if you suspect they’re afraid to leave an abusive home because of a pet. 
“It can be educating our children that kindness to animals and people is non-negotiable.
“No one should have to live in fear, and no animal should suffer as a pawn in domestic violence. 
“Together, we can shine a light on this issue and bring about change. Let’s make sure no family member – two-legged or four-legged – is left behind in the journey to safety,” says Mrs Chhour. 

Source: ACT Party

The Haps

An ACT MP becoming Deputy Prime Minister has seemed impossible for most of the Party’s history. Now it is real. David Seymour’s first speech since becoming Deputy PM has been described by Mike Hosking as ‘uplifting’ We agree. He thanks supporters who helped the party ‘through the wicked old days, when we went it alone’ and you can read it or watch it here. Seymour will also be debating at Oxford Union at 7:30am Friday morning NZT streamed on YouTube here. Seymour will be opposing the moot ‘nobody can be illegal on stolen land.’

Meanwhile ACT MP Laura McClure’s campaign against deepfake pornography has gone ‘global,’ with her video covered in the UK press and videos of her speech to Parliament attracting tens of millions of views. The Party’s Deputy is rolling out reforms to WorkSafe this week. After months of travelling and listening to the people affected by regulations, Brooke van Velden is reforming WorkSafe to help people be safe instead of scaring them into paying consultants an arm and a leg. Road cones are the visible example of this problem. Without clear guidance, the simple way to show your commitment to safety is to pay for another cone.

ACT is Changing the Media

ACT’s ‘David vs the Media’ series is a simple idea. When David (or other ACT MPs) interview journalists, the Party independently films the whole exchange and posts it online. This has made journalists very upset. They have even tried to have it stopped, which is odd for people who are supposed to be in the truth business.

They may be upset because it is rating better than many of their own efforts. A good David vs Media is watched 60,000 times, better than some TV and radio shows. This is most obvious when the journalists put their own content on YouTube, on a level playing field they struggle to compete.

We know they’re upset by the comments. People see inanity of them trying to catch politicians out by asking the same question ten different ways, and they pile on in the comments. The journos seem genuinely upset to receive a fraction of the abuse heaped on politicians, often because of the image media have created of them.

However we believe there’s a much deeper reason David vs Media is upsetting them, it manifests something that’s been happening for a long time, but is becoming unignorable. Moore’s Law means the fall of the media monopoly, and monopolists hate competition.

Moore’s Law says that the number of transistor gates on an integrated circuit will double every eighteen months. It’s usually expressed more simply as ‘available computer power will double every 18 months.’ Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted the law in the 1970s and it has been amazingly durable.

In practice it means the cost of capturing, storing, transmitting, and displaying text, photos, and video has fallen through the floor. Now anybody can do for a few hundred dollars what used to cost millions.

Once upon a time you needed to a TV studio with cameras and lights, and massive rooms filled with film or tape. You needed cables going up hills to transmission towers, projecting the one or two available channels down on to people’s roofs. Now anyone can compete with their mobile phone.

Journalists are losing the power to decide what people see. For one example, A TV journalist recently interviewed three people in Newmarket who didn’t like David Seymour. This was presented on the news as the view of the electorate. Epsom has elected Seymour four times with up to 50 per cent of the vote, so one of three things has happened. Either there’s been a major change of views, the journalist is incompetent, or the journalist is abusing their power to give viewers a false impression.

The tide is going out on such incompetence and treachery. Fewer and fewer people, and almost nobody under 40, is watching the 6 o’clock news. If rumours are to be believed, we may be back to one channel by the end of the year.

Meanwhile, journalists are forced to put up more ‘raw’ content themselves. Guyon Espiner’s show 30’ is what it sounds like, a 30-minute uncut interview. At one level it’s extraordinary to see someone who commanded an audience of half a million with monopoly power barely eke out the views of David vs the Media on his best days.

At another level, we are seeing the seeds of journalists trying to actually inform their audiences and make up their own minds. Espiner’s highest rating videos are the ones where he genuinely tries to help his audience understand what the interviewee has to say.

Another example is John Campbell, who was apoplectic when David Seymour showed up to an interview with his own microphone and camera. The full 42 minutes is gold: “You’re a real star on ACT’s YouTube channel!” “Marvellous!” “That’s not a good thing, John.”

Campbell ended up putting the whole interview on TVNZ’s website himself, not something you’d normally see. The shorter, edited version was edited surprisingly well, would this have happened if it was not for the knowledge that the whole video might get more views than his edit anyway?

Campbell has written a long, too long, meditation on whether Seymour is too combative to win people over. What he’s missed is that he’s having to change himself because of the transparency ACT is bringing.

The problems with our media won’t be solved by subsidies, taxes, or any other approach. What will change is technology, competition and innovation. Who would have thought the ACT Party would be helping save the media?

Source: New Zealand Police

Police Commissioner Richard Chambers has welcomed an Office of the Privacy Commissioner report into the trial of facial recognition technology by a major supermarket chain, saying such technology is a valuable tool for fighting crime.

“I welcome the OPC’s comments about the potential benefits of facial recognition technology and the finding that, in the case of the Foodstuffs trial, it was effective at reducing incidences of serious repeat offending.”

“The value of technology such as facial recognition is that it is fair and accurate. It has an important role to play in policing.

Facial recognition technology is valuable for deterring, detecting and resolving crime. While there are many benefits to using technology it is crucial to have appropriate guidance in place.”

“I welcome the clear guidelines from the OPC on how retailers can use it effectively and the safeguards that are required. It offers useful guidance on whether its use is appropriate, what the privacy risks are and how those can be minimised.”

Commissioner Chambers said the use of facial recognition technology as a crime prevention tool was a decision for retailers to make for themselves and their businesses.

“Police is supportive of retailers using tools like this to enhance safety for their staff and communities, as long as it is done lawfully and ethically.

I am very enthusiastic about the opportunity to better use technology to help achieve positive outcomes.  

One of the biggest opportunities we have as a country is to embrace technology when it comes to fighting crime.”

ENDS

Issued by Police Media Centre. 

Source: New Zealand Government

The Government is welcoming a report which shows facial recognition technology is an effective way of combatting retail crime, Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith says.

“The Privacy Commission today announced it has found the live facial recognition technology model trialled by Foodstuffs North Island, is compliant with the Privacy Act.

“It found the technology is effective at reducing harmful behaviour towards retailers, especially serious violent incidents.

“This is great news for businesses that are considering using the technology as a means to protect their livelihoods.

“The report notes that privacy concerns must be carefully safeguarded. 

“I expect our Ministerial Advisory Group will continue to look at this technology as an option to be used more widely and engage with the sector on it.

“I’ll be encouraging the MAG to take this report into serious consideration.”

Source: New Zealand Police

A man has died this morning, following a crash on No 3 Road, Te Puke last night.

Police were called to an address in Te Puke this morning after a man was located deceased. It was later discovered that he was involved in a crash last night.

Enquiries into the circumstances of the crash and the death are ongoing.

ENDS

Issued by Police Media Centre

Source: New Zealand Police

The Pardoa Boulevard on-ramp to the northbound lanes of the Waikato Expressway is currently closed following an earlier crash.

The two-vehicle crash, involving a truck, was reported at around 3:30am, nobody was injured.

The on-ramp will remain closed while recovery crews work to move the truck and clean paint that has spilled from the truck onto the road.

Motorists are advised to take alternate routes, such as the Resolution Drive on-ramp, and expect delays.

The on-ramp is not expected to re-open before midday.

ENDS

Issued by Police Media Centre

Source: Privacy Commissioner

4 Jun 2025, 07:00

Privacy Commissioner Michael Webster has found that the live facial recognition technology model trialled by Foodstuffs North Island is compliant with the Privacy Act. 

However, his Inquiry report released today, shows that any business considering or using FRT needs to make sure it sets things up right to stay within the law. 

“While the use of FRT during the trial was effective at reducing harmful behaviour (especially reducing serious violent incidents) it has also shown that there are many things that need to be taken into account.

“FRT systems have potential safety benefits, but they do raise significant privacy concerns, including the unnecessary or unfair collection of people’s information, misidentification, technical bias which can reinforce existing inequities and human bias, or the ability to be used for surveillance”.  

“These issues become particularly critical when people need to access essential services such as supermarkets. FRT will only be acceptable if the use is necessary and the privacy risks are successfully managed”.

The purpose of the Privacy Commissioner’s Inquiry into Foodstuffs North Island’s trial use of live FRT was to understand its privacy impacts, its compliance with the Privacy Act, and to evaluate if it was an effective tool in reducing serious retail crime compared with other less privacy intrusive options.

The Inquiry found while the level of privacy intrusion was high because every visitor’s face is collected, the privacy safeguards used in the trial reduced it to an acceptable level. 

“Foodstuffs North Island designed the privacy safeguards used in the trial with feedback from my Office. This has provided some useful lessons for other businesses which may be considering using FRT.” 

The main privacy safeguards in place during the trial were:

• Images that did not result in a positive match were deleted immediately, as recommended by OPC – this meant there was very little privacy impact on most people who entered the trial stores.
• The system was set up to only identify people who had engaged in seriously harmful behaviour, particularly violent offending.
• Staff were not permitted to add images of children or young people under 18, or people thought to be vulnerable, to the watchlist.
• There was no sharing of watchlist information between stores.
• During the trial, the operational threshold that triggered an FRT alert was raised from 90% to 92.5% likelihood of the images matching, reducing the chances that people would be misidentified while managing down the “computer says yes” risk.
• Match alerts were verified by two trained staff, ensuring that human decision making was a key part of the process.
• Access to the FRT system and information was restricted to trained authorised staff only.
• Images collected were not permitted to be used for training data purposes.
• Systems were reviewed and improved during the trial where misidentifications or errors occurred.

“There is still some work to do to increase the safety and effectiveness of FRT software use in the New Zealand context, as FRT technology has been developed overseas and has not been trained on the New Zealand population. 

“As a result, we can’t be completely confident it has fully addressed technical bias issues, including the potential negative impact on Māori and Pacific people. This means the technology must only be used with the right processes in place, including human checks that an alert is accurate before acting on it.”

“Some improvements will also need to be made by FSNI before the use of FRT is made permanent or expanded to more stores. These focus on ensuring the documented processes and system settings are updated to match what happens in practice, including ongoing review of the use of FRT to make sure its use is justified as an effective tool for reducing serious harm offending. 

“I also expect that Foodstuffs North Island will put in place monitoring and review to allow it to evaluate the impact of skin tone on identification accuracy and store response, and to provide confidence to the regulator and customers that key privacy safeguards remain in place. 

“The trial findings will help other businesses to ask the right questions about whether FRT is necessary and appropriate for them and to understand what they would need to do to set FRT up and run it in a privacy protective way.” 

The report sets out my expectations for the use of FRT across nine key areas, says the Privacy Commissioner. 

The FRT trial started on 8 February and ended on 7 September 2024 and ran in 25 supermarkets. During the trial, 225,972,004 faces were scanned (includes multiple scans of the same person), with 99.999% of these deleted within one minute, and there were 1742 alerts of which 1208 were confirmed matches. See our infographic of FRT by the numbers.

OPC is currently developing a Biometric Processing Privacy Code, which applies to biometric information, including a photo of someone’s face used in a Facial Recognition System. The new Code is expected to be published in mid-2025. The Biometrics Code is designed to provide guardrails for the safe use of biometrics generally, including FRT, in New Zealand.

Source: New Zealand Police

Please attribute to Taupo Area Investigations Manager, Detective Senior Sergeant Ryan Yardley:

Police have launched a homicide investigation, and a man has been charged with murder, after a man seriously injured in Tokoroa last week has now died.

Officers were called to an Abercorn Place address about 4:15am on Tuesday 27 May, to reports that a man had been injured by a male known to him outside his house.

The man was rushed to Waikato Hospital in critical condition, but has since passed away.

A 21-year-old man has been arrested and charged with murder. He is next due to appear in the High Court at Rotorua on 27 June.

Police are still working to establish the full sequence of events that led to the man’s death, and we’d like to hear from anyone who witnessed anything, or has any information that might help our investigation.

We’d also like to see any dashcam or CCTV footage anyone may have from around the time in question.

If you can help, please use our 105 service, quoting reference number 250527/7868.

You can also give information anonymously through Crime Stoppers on 0800 555 111.

ENDS

Issued by Police Media Centre

Source: Auckland Council

Smart changes proposed for Mount Smart Road will mean less time stuck in traffic at the end of a long day.

As Royal Oak continues to grow, so does the need for smarter, more efficient ways to get around. That’s why Auckland Transport (AT) is seeking feedback on a plan to help keep Mount Smart Road moving from Victoria Street to the busy Royal Oak roundabout.

Mount Smart Road connects Penrose with Onehunga and Royal Oak, carrying around 18,000 vehicles daily. In the evening, trips through this area can take more than twice as long as off-peak, with average speeds dropping to as low as 15km/h.

To help ease congestion, a new T3 transit lane heading towards the roundabout, has been proposed. This will operate from 4-7pm on weekdays and be reserved for buses, motorcycles, cyclists, and vehicles with three or more people.

Maungakiekie-Tāmaki Local Board chair Maria Meredith said a quick-fix, low-cost solution will enable more efficient traffic movements in the early evenings. 

“Mount Smart Road is often gridlocked in the evenings, but widening it isn’t an option without affecting nearby homes. Adding a transit lane is a smart, low-cost way to keep people moving,” she said. 

“This initiative targets one of our community’s busiest roads, which currently sees evening travel times more than double compared to off-peak hours. We want to see congestion eased, so people can spend less time in traffic.” 

Broken yellow lines will also need to be added at four bus stops along Mount Smart Road to ensure that buses can enter and exit the stops safely.

AT is seeking feedback from the community on this proposal, with a second community drop-in session planned for Oranga Community Centre, 1 – 3pm on Saturday 07 June 2025.

Have your say on the Auckland Transport website by 15 June 2025.

Source: New Zealand Government

New data showing international visitor spending increased by almost ten per cent on the previous year is welcome news, Tourism and Hospitality Minister Louise Upston says.

“Tourism is our second highest export earner and today’s results show just how important the sector is to unleashing economic growth in New Zealand,” Louise Upston says. 

International Visitor Survey results show for the year ending March 2025, international tourism contributed $12.2 billion to New Zealand’s economy, up 9.2 per cent compared to the previous year.

This reflects an increase of 4.3 per cent in international visitor arrivals, with 3.32 million visitors coming to New Zealand, up from 3.18 million in 2024.

“In real terms, that means more bookings in our restaurants, more reservations at local accommodation and visitor experience providers, more people visiting our regions and attractions, more jobs being created across the country, and an overall stronger economy.”

When adjusted for inflation, this equates international spending to $9.7 billion or 86 per cent of pre-pandemic levels. 

“The growth in visitor numbers and spending is very encouraging but there is still more work to do to ensure tourism and hospitality can really thrive,” Louise Upston says.

“Amongst other initiatives, the Government announced a $20.4 million Tourism Boost package this year to help drive visitor numbers.

“New Zealand is open for business, and we look forward to welcoming more visitors to our beautiful country.” 

Full details of the survey findings are available on the MBIE website: International Visitor Survey (Quarterly) – Tourism Evidence and Insights Centre