Author: MIL-OSI Publisher

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Government has long promised to be tough on crime, and legislation could see a major crackdown on retail crime – but within the retail industry, the proposed hard-line changes are controversial

The man behind the controversial moves to crack down hard on retail crime is one step closer to getting his way.

Sunny Kaushal has been on a 10-year mission to deal to retail criminals with harsher penalties and give retailers and the public more powerful tools to fight them.

The measures are now part of proposed changes to the Crimes Act 1961 and include the most disputed aspect, citizens arrests.

Submissions closed last week and they will now go to select committee.

If the amendment is passed into law it will be a victory for Kaushal, who has long fronted for dairy owners in the call for tougher laws. But it comes at a cost.

The government group headed by Kaushal, which was set up to give expert advice, has collapsed and three members quit before it was due to wind up, exposing deep differences within the retail industry.

Today The Detail talks to three journalists who have delved into the work of Kaushal and the Ministerial Advisory Group for Victims of Retail Crime (MAG).

The group was set up in July 2024 to tackle rising retail crime by providing independent, actionable, and evidence-based policy proposals. According to a government press release it was set up to advise on “changes to the Crimes Act 1961 to strengthen self-defence, anti-social behaviour policies, and security regulations”.

The Spinoff’s special correspondent, Madeleine Chapman, says she’d been thinking about Kaushal for years as he was often in the media speaking on behalf of small retail businesses, particularly dairy owners, around ram raids and other crimes.

After poring over pages of material about him, going back many years, Chapman says she was impressed by his consistent message.

“He has really been on the same beat for the whole 10 years.”

Kaushal has been calling for more police, longer sentences, and making it easier to charge people who commit the crimes, she says.

“Part of me goes: that seems kind of strange for someone who’s speaking and canvassing lots of opinions to have that same strong opinion the whole time.

“Another part of me was surprised that he has kept the energy and the momentum and I think that is why he has had such staying power,” Chapman says.

What emerged from her investigation was more than the story behind the group of retail leaders unravelling, it was about one man who continued to push through his campaign with a “little bit of tunnel vision” despite strong opposition from many parts of the retail industry.

“It is quite incredible that he has come against all these people, all of his colleagues saying all sorts of stuff. That has worked, they accepted the group’s recommendations and now it’s proposed legislation.”

Jimmy Ellingham, RNZ’s Checkpoint reporter, says when the government announced the Ministerial Advisory Group in 2024, it cited an 86 percent rise in retail crime over five years, while Kaushal pointed out that retail crime costs $2.7 billion a year.

“So this was set up in response to that and the objectives at the time were said to do the likes of empowering security guards at retail premises and give business owners of retailers more power to deal with shoplifting. There was also mention of facial recognition technology. This group was set up to look into those issues,” Ellingham says.

Ellingham and Checkpoint senior producer, Louisa Cleave, looked into ministerial advisory groups, compared their budgets and the time spent by the members.

“It’s not unusual that this was set up and the remit was a bit of a blank canvas. The minister Paul Goldsmith said on this show, ‘I want them to throw any and every idea at me’.'”

Goldsmith told Checkpoint he wanted them to push the barrow, though suggestions such as allowing people to use pepper spray to deter criminals was considered a step too far, says Cleave.

The group had a very good scope of experts but somewhere along the way, something went wrong, she says.

“There’s been one aspect that seems to be the most controversial and that’s the citizens arrest powers. We’ve heard from two quite strong groups, Retail NZ and the Police Association, since submissions closed last week that they have some serious concerns.”

Chapman says submissions show the concerns around arming security guards and making citizens arrests are shared by others in the industry, like petrol station owners.

“They were against any sort of citizens arrest or any sort of expectation that your regular retail worker should be trying to stop armed offenders. Currently what they do is say, ‘keep safe, make sure people are safe, the person will likely leave, call the police’.

“And then when you read the submissions some of them are quite strongly worded about how ridiculous this whole idea sounded.”

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Dual British citizens need UK passports to travel there from Wednesday – but can try their luck with an expired passport if they have to.

UK dual citizen Chris Betterton is among those outraged by the change to require British passports, describing it as a shambles, with “appalling communication”.

The move meant citizens of UK and Irish citizens needed a passport from one of those countries to enter Britain, and could be turned away at airport check-in if they did not have one.

However, the British High Commission confirmed on Tuesday additional temporary guidance had been given to airlines about travellers using expired (post-1989) passports. It said it was an operational decision for them whether to accept them.

“We recognise that this is a significant change for carriers and travellers, but we have been clear on requirements for dual British citizens to travel with a valid British passport or Certificate of Entitlement, in line with those for all British citizens,” said a spokesman. “At their own discretion, carriers may accept some expired British passport as alternative documentation.”

Emergency travel documents were available to some citizens if they urgently needed to enter the UK.

“In line with current practice, on arrival at the UK border, Border Force will still assess a person’s suitability to enter the UK and conduct additional checks if required.”

The House of Commons library guidance still said that operators were “unlikely to deviate from the guidance because they can be penalised for bringing inadequately documented passengers to the UK”.

The Board of Airline Representatives New Zealand declined to comment.

Betterton, who has a New Zealand mother but moved from the UK in 2017, said using an expired document was not a gamble worth taking. His parents were in their 80s and he may need to travel quickly if they became ill. He was also taking his family to visit next year.

The Wellingtonian wants a rethink, with an affordable and lifelong certificate of entitlement – which currently costs £589 (NZ$1330) – to make sure dual citizens did not have to bear ongoing costs.

Tremendous expense

“It’s been an absolute shambles, they haven’t given any explanation,” he said. “Like everything else, I don’t think they’ve thought through the consequences, I don’t think they’ve thought through the cost and expense, the fact they’re making it more expensive for British citizens to come to their own country than everybody else.

“I think their communication has been appalling. I did email the High Commission but they just ignored me. I’d like them to have announced it properly, like a good six months to a year ago. I’d also like there to be a grace period. And I’d like the certificate of enitlement to be much cheaper, and then that would be the obvious thing to do – now they’re not charging to transfer it between passports, you’ve got it for life.”

UK media was also now recognising the huge impact it was having on dual citizens including those who had to take up citizenship after Brexit, he said.

“We now need to go to the tremendous expense and waste of money of UK passports for the entire family rather than go on our New Zealand passports like our New Zealand friends can.”

Thousands of dual citizens from New Zealand had applied for passports since last month, many angry at what they believed was poor communication of a significant change.

UK MPs have called on the government to delay the enforcement of needing a UK passport or CEO.

NZ Post had been fielding complaints, too. Customer John Day said it took a month for his application to arrive in the UK, and at one point he and his wife were worried both had been lost – including the New Zealand passports they also sent – and his wife’s application has still not arrived.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

A study of river catchments in the Tasman District aims to make native restoration easier for landowners, while also working to protect communities during extreme weather events.

Back-to-back floods last winter caused extensive damage to farms and rural properties, with crops inundated with silt, fences washed away and land lost to swollen rivers. The repair bill for the Tasman District Council alone was estimated at $50 million, while the costs of insurance claims from the event were estimated at $37.4m.

The feasibility study was being led by Kotahitanga mō te Taiao, an alliance of 17 organisations in the top of the South Island including iwi, local councils and the Department of Conservation, and environmental not-for-profit The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa New Zealand.

It aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats across the lowlands of the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka rivers.

Small scale restoration work already underway

For Debbie Win and her family, a stand of mature forest in the middle of their Dovedale farm had always been precious.

She said they fenced the area several years ago and had undertaken dedicated work to trap pests and remove weeds like Old Man’s Beard. The work had transformed the forest floor, which was previously bare.

Now, tiny lancewoods, ferns and beech tree seedlings were scattered beneath the established trees.

Washouts were still visible after last winter’s floods last caused widespread damage across the district, including on the Win farm, cutting off access to stock, washing out a large culvert and scouring out the land.

“It was probably the biggest heartbreak I have ever felt, I got to the stage where I couldn’t walk out the door, our [place] was wrecked, I couldn’t even begin to process what had happened down the valley.”

Former orchardist Dave Easton had spent the past decade constructing a wetland in the place of what used to be an apple orchard, but was originally a wetland on his property near the Moutere Inlet.

He was reversing the work put in by his forebears, but thought they would be proud of what he had done. Easton had funded all the restoration work himself and did not want to think about how much he had spent.

“We’ve got 65 different native species that have been planted so we are trying to establish that biodiversity hub and if we protect it and do predator trapping then we get the birds, in my dreams I would love to have kereru nesting on the property.”

His son, Elliot Easton, who co-ordinates the Moutere Catchment Collective said much of the land in the catchment was heavily modified and had been used to grow apples, grapes, hops and graze stock, which had an impact on sedimentation in the nearby inlet.

He noticed many landowners were starting to think about their properties differently.

“A lot of the land, especially in the Moutere, is not actually that productive so you have a lot of stock that is sometimes there as maintenance, like glorified lawnmowers, so people are really keen to establish natives on marginal land and sometimes across their whole property.”

He said time and cost were the biggest barriers but since the group was formed five years ago, more than 500,000 native trees had been planted and 50 kilometres of riparian fencing installed.

“The inlet has had a particularly hard time with a lot of sediment getting in there so a co-ordinated approach to mitigating sediment and stabilising waterways by planting them up is really important.”

Sky Davies runs the Tasman Environmental Trust and owns a blueberry farm in the Graham Valley.

In the last few years, she and her husband had planted a couple of thousand natives on their property.

She said the planting was the easy part, it was the maintenance and keeping weeds at bay that was the hard part as it could be time consuming and costly.

“What we really need is some ways to make the finances of it stack up and having some practical ways of rewarding landowners for that work, that’s what will lead to more scale and landowners being able to do more of it.”

A restoration model that can be used nationwide

The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa interim director Erik van Eyndhoven said the study aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats and would also look at how to increase resilience during increasingly frequent storms.

“This catchment has just been hit by a couple of really big events this last winter and there is a view if you do native restoration in the right places and the right way, it can actually help with some of those storm surges and those flood peaks.”

He said the country needed to find innovative ways of funding restoration work.

“What other mechanisms can we leverage, things like carbon markets or emerging biodiversity markets … or finding people who are willing to pay for this work at scale, and making that accessible to landowners to help take some of the pain out of the equation for them.”

Kotahitanga mō te Taiao co-chair Hemi Sundgren said it was important to take a collective approach, because large scale restoration work could not happen alone, and iwi leadership, combined with community knowledge and technical science was critical when trying to address the challenges the environment was facing.

The organisation had a shared goal of restoring up to 15 percent of lowland forest cover in the top of the South Island.

“This rohe suffers, like any other, significantly from sedimentation so the restoration of the lowlands project and the catchments is really, really important. The approach that we take from the mountains to the sea, is a great values and principles-based approach.”

The study was expected to take a year with landowners and community groups across the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka river catchments being called on to share their experiences.

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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 Mountain Bike festival kicks off this Friday with three days of racing, shuttle runs, food, beer and entertainment in three different trail spots around the city.

Local riders said up to 265km of trails made the capital a world-class riding destination worth celebrating.

They said riders in the capital were spoilt for choice.

Publicly accessible trails wind through the hills just a short pedal from almost every part of the city.

Matt Farrar – co-founder of festival organisers, Trails Wellington – said organisers could have chosen nearly a dozen locations to hold the events.

“We tried to get the right mix for beginner riders through to the more technical riders. Wainuiomata was perfect for the technical stuff as well as the family stuff. Matairangi’s so amazing being right in the centre of the city – we had to go with that one – and then Mākara’s our original famous mountain bike park, so they’re the three that gravitated to the top,” Farrar said.

Mākara Peak mountain bike park ranger Mark Kent said the sport’s popularity had exploded in Wellington over the last 20 years.

He said about 72,000 people visited the park – in the suburb of Karori – every year, and there was room for plenty more.

“Every second car coming into Karori on a Saturday has a bike on the back. The spinoff of that, the economic benefits for the cafe’s and for the bars in the suburb’s been fantastic and that’s similar across the city. Biking is social and so is going for a beer or going for a good feed afterwards as well,” Kent said.

The Wellington Off Road Riding Department, or WORD, runs skills courses for kids from seven to 17 years old.

The charity even has its own race team – Fast ForWORD.

Chief executive Nic Johnson said the festival was a chance to showcase the huge range of riding that had grown from trail builders’ efforts all around the city.

“Rotorua is very much one place, one network and same with Queenstown, you’re on the hill up at Skyline. Whereas we’ve got separate trail areas and it’s all a bit of insider knowledge about where the best trails are. We just need to connect them in a way and I think this mountain bike festival will do that. We’ve got three different venues over three days and people will get to taste a bit of each of them,” Johnson said.

Sixteen-year-old Ruben Armstrong said he would been taking advantage of the shuttles running in Mākara on Friday and competing in the Mt Victoria In’Duro Race on Saturday.

He said he loved riding the city’s terrain but it was the people he met out on the trails that made the capital so special for him.

“It’s awesome, it’s so buzzy. There’s always a good crew of people out. The trails are awesome, the location is awesome. It’s not a big drive out from the city. It’s always fun riding with people, everyone’s so friendly,” Armstrong said.

Co-founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, Paul Ward, said volunteers’ work building trails had helped provide access to the city’s green spaces, and was supporting planting and pest trapping efforts.

The work – along side Zealandia and groups like Predator Free Wellington – had resulted in a massive resurgence in indigenous wildlife around the city over the last 25 years.

“I grew up in Johnsonville in the nineties and my backyard was blackbirds, sparrows and possums and rabbits at night. Now I can open my door in the morning and hear kaka parrots, tui, kererū, kārearea the falcon and on the edges of Karori and places like Waimapihi you’re probably going to hear kiwi calling at night too,” Ward said.

The Wellington Mountain bike festival begins with a WORD-hosted youth ride, music, food and free shuttles trips about Mākara Peak Mountain Bike Park this Friday.

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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 number of rough sleepers known to outreach teams has dropped in Auckland, but those on the front line are treating the figure with caution.

Auckland Council’s latest tally shows the number of homeless people social services know of across the region fell from 940 in September to 668 in January – a decrease of 272 that almost matches the number of extra homes funded in that time.

It comes as the government plans controversial move-on orders for those begging or rough sleeping in public.

Council’s head of community impact, Dicky Humphries, said it was too early to tell if the quarter’s drop was a trend or seasonal dip.

“They carry a bit of hope but we do need to do some analysis as to why that might be the case,” he said.

“One quarter drop is not necessarily a trend so we will be looking to the next quarter figure and the one after that to see if this quarter is an anomaly or the start of a trend downwards.”

Humphries said across the region, homelessness had been increasing for some time and numbers could fluctuate.

The count included those working with people experiencing the extreme end of homelessness to those rough sleeping or living in cars.

“Any figure that we have, counted that way, is a sub-set of a much larger figure that is unknown to everyone,” he said.

“There’s a lot of work that’s happening between the social services sector, council and government so it is a figure that we would like to see fall, ongoing.”

Heart of the South business association general manager, Audrey Williams, said it had noticed an increase in homeless people turning up in recent weeks.

“Since the government started talking about moving people out of Auckland, our numbers have increased. We’re still only at about 15 not huge levels but it has definitely increased and the mental health state of the newcomers is a lot more severe than we’ve ever noticed before.”

Williams said it had not seen a drop in rough sleepers in south Auckland.

Local community liaison officers talked to new arrivals living on the street and she said it appeared they had been told to leave the main city centre.

“They’ve been told that they’re not allowed to rough sleep in the central city, they are told that by the security guards, by the locals,” she said.

“People have taken that as factual ‘you can go somewhere else you’re not allowed to be here in Auckland city’.”

Williams said the business association worked with social agencies and in the last 18 months had helped 30 people get a roof over their head and wrap-around support.

The homeless count was in a Regional Homeless Activity Update, to council’s Community Committee, by council’s homelessness lead Ron Suyker.

The report pointed out that the 272 decrease in rough sleepers coincided with the provision of 207 extra housing places in the Housing First programme, which “has had a positive impact”.

But Suyker said several registered community housing providers that offered wrap-around support and housing for the homeless were exceeding the caps on their contracts.

“The demand is greater than the capacity they have been provisioned to manage,” he said in the report.

“Government target settings in relation to the reduction of reliance on emergency housing have seen an impact, reflected in this report’s numbers, on the ability for homeless tangata to access emergency housing.”

That change was made in October 2024, and between September that year and January 2025 homeless numbers in Auckland jumped 53 percent.

Suyker said the council had provided support to several business associations responding to increased street homelessness in their areas.

“Physical and mental health issues, along with addictions, are presenting in most cases of rough sleeping and individuals needs can be incredibly complex,” he said.

The government funded an extra 300 Housing First places in September last year in a bid to curb homelessness, and the housing ministry said almost 200 rough sleepers had been housed as a result.

The Housing First programme helped people who were chronically homeless into stable, long-term homes and its manager Rami Alrudaini said that showed there was a need for more housing – he did not believe the move-on orders would help.

“We are now seeing the impact of that investment with more than two thirds of those places already filled and now they’re introducing move on enforcement which undermines the very investment they have made, by making it harder for people who are already doing it tough to access the support and housing they need.”

At Wellington’s Downtown Community Ministry (DCM), chief executive Natalia Cleland said there were not enough homes to go around.

DCM was allocated 30 of the extra 300 places in the one-off government provision and had managed to house 10 rough sleepers in the last two months.

Cleland applauded the government for supporting the programme, and the private landlords who leased their homes to people in need, but said there were not enough homes.

“We still have a huge number of people under our service that are waiting for housing that have signed up to Housing First who have said, ‘I’m sleeping rough, please help me to get a home’,” she said.

“Ten is great, but there’s at least 52 people as of today that are rough sleeping under our Housing First service that don’t have access to or a clear pathway to housing.”

Cleland said many homeless people were waiting for housing.

“It’s not that someone’s rough sleeping and needs to be walked down to DCM for support. It’s that they’re rough sleeping and they’re waiting for a home to move into.”

Auckland Council’s Community Committee would discuss the regional update and impact of move on orders on rough sleepers this Thursday.

Its chair, councillor Julie Fairey, expected discussion to be robust.

“The increase in funding for Housing First places has helped. This is part of the frustration, we know what will work here, the sector has been very clear about what is needed which is more funding for services like Housing First.”

She said there was widespread recognition that anti-social behaviour was a problem that needed to be addressed but questioned whether move-on orders would be effective.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

A crash on State Highway 1 in Kaiapoi, Canterbury, brought early morning traffic to a near-standstill.

The Transport Agency said a crash shortly after 5am on the Kaiapoi River Bridge on Wednesday blocked the northbound lanes as well as one lane southbound.

It said motorists should expect delays.

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