Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

WARNING: This story includes content that may be disturbing to some readers.

One Rotorua women’s refuge says it has been shocked at the increase in those needing to escape abusive homes over the past 18 months.

But the rise in those affected by family violence isn’t just a Rotorua problem – one Auckland provider told RNZ the economic situation in New Zealand over the last year and a half has compounded the problem.

Jonathon Hagger is on the board of Waiariki Women’s Refuge in Rotorua.

He said they had a feeling more women and their families were needing help, but it was still a shock to see their numbers from the last financial year.

“Our crisis line, which is where they will reach out and ring to say they need help, had a 30 percent increase in volume during the last financial year,” Hagger said.

That ended in June.

“What we are seeing is a trend upwards again, of even greater number of requests for assistance and help for women and families who are experiencing violence or unsafe living circumstances.”

Chief executive of the refuge Sarah Small said it knew the numbers would only increase as the year came to an end.

“And if we are experiencing those numbers I hate to think what other organisations are experiencing as well,” she said.

However, she said she felt lucky that in Rotorua, community services worked together to help people in need.

Further north in Auckland, specialist family violence service provider Shine said it saw a 58 percent increase in women needing to use its refuges over the last financial year.

The general manager of social services at Presbyterian support northern (of which Shine is a part), Grenville Hendricks, said these women had no other safe option and it was difficult to find space and money to support all those in need.

“We rely a lot on our sponsors and our donors to supplement money that we get from government,” he said.

Shine’s refuge manager Sophie Maclaren said food and housing insecurity, job loss, increased meth use and addiction had all contributed to the rise.

She said it was seeing families where violence had not been a problem before.

“Which tells us that all of these stresses are actually adding to [the country’s] problem of family violence,” she said.

Both organisations said more funding and easier access to government support would help as they struggle with the increased demand.

“There’s no extra funding and there’s no recognition for those extra costs so our refuge is at the point where we are considering where do we go from here and what choices do we make,” Hagger said.

Hendricks said bureaucracy could get in the way of quickly supporting families leaving violence.

“To get emergency accommodation for women that need that for safety reasons, often that’s a huge challenge and there’s a lot of bureaucracy we need to go through to try and get that emergency accommodation for them,” he said.

The Ministry of Social Development’s group general manager of enablement, Karen Hocking, said emergency housing continued to be available as a last resort.

“We are concerned to hear a women’s refuge is having difficulties helping vulnerable whānau to access accommodation,” she said.

Hocking said when someone approached the ministry with an urgent housing need, it considered all options to avoid homelessness including financial assistance to start a new tenancy or a referral to transitional housing provider.

“Where possible we refer people escaping violence to transitional housing providers because it offers more stability and tailored support.”

Anti-family violence white ribbon day is on 25 November.

Where to get help

• Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason.
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357.
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO. This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.
• Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202.
• Samaritans: 0800 726 666.
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz.
• What’s Up: 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787. This is free counselling for 5 to 19-year-olds.
• Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 or text 832. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and English.
• Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254.
• Healthline: 0800 611 116.
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155.
• OUTLine: 0800 688 5463.

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.

Sexual Violence

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

The deputy prime minister says several hundred schools and childhood centres have contacted the Ministry of Education after the discovery of asbestos in a range of coloured play sand.

Rainbow sand from Educational Colours and coloured sand from Creatistics has been recalled because Tremolite (a naturally occurring asbestos in quartz) has been found in samples during lab testing.

David Seymour said as of Monday night, about 16 early childhood centres had closed.

“There’s been enormous amounts of phoning and emailing, several hundred early childhood centres have been in touch with the Ministry of Education on suspicion they might have this sand and many more primary schools.

He told First Up instructions had been sent out, advising that the sand should be isolated if possible and to isolate the area if the sand had already been spread around.

There were about 200 asbestos removal specialists staff throughout New Zealand that they could seek guidance from and that list had been provided to schools and early childhood centres, he said.

“We’ll continue to assist, you know for a lot of parents this is deeply distressing but what does need to be said is we understand the problem, we’ve put in place a procedure for dealing with it where there’s a suspicion of it.”

Seymour said the goal was to clean it up if necessary and to get centres re-opened as soon as possible.

“It’s a massive disturbance to people in their daily life when you have a sudden unexpected closure of a daycare centre.”

There were millions of products brought into New Zealand and purchased every year, he said.

“We could put in a regime that nothing could be sold unless it had been tested in some way but I think people know deep down that that would not be realistic and chances are we’d miss something totally unexpected.”

Sand recall shows lack of due diligence from businesses, Eco Choice Aotearoa says

But a New Zealand product certification organisation said the discovery of asbestos in brands of play sand showed a lack of due diligence from businesses.

Laura Gemmell from Eco Choice Aotearoa told Morning Report there was a high trust model for product safety in New Zealand.

“My own son’s school was affected by this so I was surprised to get an email saying his class would be closed today, his whole school will be closed today.”

But she said from a professional stand point she was not surprised it had happened.

“We see so many everyday products that New Zealanders buy that have really gnarly ingredients in them and they’re none the wiser.”

In Australia and New Zealand the importer really had the primary responsibility to ensure their products were safe, she said.

“But it’s almost sort of like an honesty system, importers are sort of trusted to verify safety but they’re not actually required to prove it.

“So I think this is a really good example of why something like mandatory due diligence for high risk products, like those that are used by children, could potentially be a partial solution.”

Although even that would not catch everything, she said.

“I’m a parent and I see people, you know other parents buy things from other retailers, online retailers, and bring things in and you know having no visibility of what’s in them.”

People did not realise what a big problem that was and it really paid to check, she said.

There were standards that people could look for in terms of toys and art products, she said.

“There’s the European toy safety standard which is represented by an EN71 on the side of products, that’s a really good one to look at, and secondly they have something called Reach and that sort of excludes chemicals of concern, ingredients of concern.”

Gemmell said she would encourage people to work out which standards and certifications they trusted and look for them for products for children or that were used routinely in the home.

In the coloured sand case there was no indication that the asbestos had been intentionally added, she said.

“Asbestos occurs naturally so it could be in a quarry where they got this sand, through equipment or storage containers that were also contaminated.”

Businesses really needed to understand their product, “they need to know what’s in that product otherwise they shouldn’t be selling it”, she said.

Several large Australian retailers were selling the sand, but so far Kmart was the only one identified as selling it in New Zealand, she said.

“But these are companies that should know their supply chain, they should know their source, they should be requiring independent testing, they should be auditing their supply chain and they should have things like supplier agreements in place with really clear expectations around health and safety and things like 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

Vocational Education Minister Penny Simmonds says she is seeking extra funding so new industry bodies can investigate low apprenticeship completion rates.

Speaking at the Vocational Education and Training Research Forum in Wellington, Simmonds said she was concerned that less than 50 percent of trainees completed their apprenticeships.

“It’s a problem because it’s a waste for those individuals that start and don’t complete. But it’s also a waste for the government in terms of investment so it’s really important that we do get more employers taking apprentices on, but also that we get more completions,” she told RNZ.

Simmonds said the government could help through policy settings and funding but the nature of the problem was likely to vary between industries.

She said she would put the issue to the Industry Skills Boards the government was setting up next year to replace Workforce Development Councils as standards-setting bodies for vocational education and training.

“I want the industry skills boards next year to be doing some research into this. It’s probably different by industry, it’s not a blanket across all. Some industries have high numbers of apprentices going into employment and some have better completion rates so I want it to be done by industry, by the industry skills boards,” she said.

Research for the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation, BCITO, presented at the conference indicated personal circumstances, redundancy, and poor support from training advisors were the most commonly-cited reasons that stopping an apprenticeship.

BCITO director Greg Durkin said it commissioned the research because its completion rate had been about 65 percent but withdrawal rates had risen.

He said it found the rate of withdrawal from its apprenticeships increased about 50 percent after the Covid-19 pandemic began and pay was a factor for some of those who left.

“We found that, simply put, where apprentices were moderately to well-paid in their apprenticeship role, they were less likely to withdraw from their apprenticeship than if they were poorly paid,” he said.

Durkin said it also found that apprentices were more likely to stay on if they felt their employer took a personal interest in them.

“Employers thought that some of the reasons for withdrawal might have been generational. That they weren’t understanding some of the needs and some of the things that would help them understand apprentices who were from a different generation from them,” he said.

Durkin said anecdotal reports suggested industries with high expectations for school-leavers’ NCEA qualifications seemed to be report better completion rates, and that link was worth more investigation.

MAST Academy chief executive Chris van der Hor said the marine technologies institute asked its apprentices several years ago the main reasons they stayed with an employer.

“What they told us, which we suspected but they confirmed, was that the culture of an organisation is critical to them staying,” he said.

“If they feel they belong and feel supported, part of the team, regardless of how big the organisation is, they’re more likely to be happy to turn up to work.”

Van der Hor said apprentices also said they wanted to learn, so their workplace trainers and mentors were critical, and they wanted work that matched their aspirations.

He said the institute had trained 100 workplace trainers so they understood what good training and mentoring looked like.

Global Apprenticeship Network executive director Kathryn Rowan said completion rates varied internationally but were higher than 80 percent in countries with a focus on work-based learning and apprenticeships.

“Strong alignment between educational institutions and the private sector is absolutely critical and making sure that what individuals are learning is applicable to the world of work so making sure that it stays up to date,” she said.

“Probably the most important thing I would say is the role that the coaches and the mentors play in advising young people. I think you can see that as well here in New Zealand that if there is a strong alignment and a connection between the coaches and the apprentices, the likelihood of them succeeding and completing their programme rises tremendously.”

Meanwhile, Penny Simmonds said the cost of standing-up independent polytechnics next year would be within the contingency the government had set aside several years ago.

She said 10 polytechnics would leave super-institute Te Pūkenga next year and become locally-run institutes next year, though two of those would belong to a federation designed to support weaker institutes.

Simmonds said the remaining four institutes would be considered early next year, but were expected to be part of the federation.

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

Police have been keeping guard overnight at the scene of a house fire in Manawatū on Saturday, where three children and their father died.

The deaths at Sanson are being treated as a murder-suicide, RNZ understands, although police are yet to confirm that.

Manawatū Area Commander Inspector Ross Grantham said the father was not burned – but his three children, aged 1, 5 and 7, were.

It is understood the father was Dean Field, and the children have been named in the Givealittle campaign for their mother as August, Hugo and Goldie.

Do you know more? Get in touch with sam.sherwood@rnz.co.nz

The bodies of two children were recovered on Sunday night and were blessed by the family with karakia. The body of the father was removed earlier.

The third child’s body was recovered on Monday morning, Grantham said, by investigators supported by a forensic pathologist.

The children’s family were present as the child was taken from the scene, he said.

Grantham said the next few days will be a “hard grind” for police examining the site, and talking to witnesses and whānau.

He said police will stay at the house as long as it takes to determine what happened.

Meanwhile, more than $250,000 has been raised for the mother of the children as she deals with the “unimaginable loss”.

“They were the light and love of her life, and her entire world has been shattered,” the Givealittle page said.

“In the midst of this unimaginable grief, she also lost her home and everything she owned. She is facing the hardest journey possible, stripped of her physical security, while navigating the deepest emotional pain.”

The creator of the Givealittle page posted a thank you to “what felt like the whole of Aotearoa” on Monday for the donations raised.

“No amount of money will ever be enough to heal the wounds left in her heart and soul, but to have this safety net to rebuild her life, knowing what feels like the whole of Aotearoa is with her, and how you have all contributed to this outpouring of love in so many ways is more than we could’ve ever hoped for.”

Speaking to media on Monday, Grantham said it was too early to tell if the fire was deliberately started.

“It’s pretty risky with the part of the structure still there and the the dust that’s generated from the fire, so it will take us some time just to go through and establish what’s happened.”

Grantham said police were not seeking information from the public at this stage, but if anyone knew anything, they could “reach out”.

He said it was “unusual” for a house fire to begin in the afternoon.

Police would remain at the property for “as long as it takes”, Grantham said.

Where to get help:

• Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason.
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357.
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO. This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.
• Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 or text 4202.
• Samaritans: 0800 726 666.
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 or text 234 or email talk@youthline.co.nz.
• What’s Up: 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787. This is free counselling for 5 to 19-year-olds.
• Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 or text 832. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi, and English.
• Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254.
• Healthline: 0800 611 116.
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155.
• OUTLine: 0800 688 5463.

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.

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

A unique trove of information for measuring the impact of government services on millions of New Zealanders is sitting on “old and increasingly unstable” technology. It is hard to use and badly in need of an upgrade – but the Integrated Data Infrastructure system – run by Stats NZ – is also crucial to the government’s overarching social investment approach because it gives answers that cannot be found anywhere else – as long as you can coax them out of it.

The message read like the sort of warning that is sent when e-mail storage runs low: “We currently have 1% capacity, and this is impacting all users.”

The e-mail – sent by Stats NZ last Wednesday – was talking about its main “sandpit” – or testbed for researchers – inside a system so valuable anybody who wants to use it has to sign up to a lifetime secrecy pledge.

Stats NZ told the researchers to dump their old data tables in the Integrated Data Infrastructure system (IDI), adding it was going on a “clean-up” of old accounts because its budget stretched to 550 researchers, not the 1000 who have signed on.

Statistics Minister Shane Reti has called the national system “dated and constrained”, and the situation is especially fraught when the government is relying on evidence-driven changes to social programmes.

“The IDI was developed in 2011 and is still in prototype form,” Stats NZ told Treasury late last year.

“Its capacity has been exceeded and it is not future-proofed to handle the increase in demand for person-level data and analytics.”

Another briefing to Reti in July 2025, newly released to RNZ, said: “While the IDI is a critical tool to help accelerate social investment, its ageing infrastructure and complex user experience need to be upgraded before it is ready to support the Social Investment Fund.”

It was “clunky and slow”, with high technical barriers, the minister was told.

‘Incredibly difficult for them to actually find useful information’

Stats NZ has also told ministers it had made some effort to improve the vital system over the years.

But this was clearly not enough and a lot more was needed, according to the Reti briefings.

He has told his officials to move “at pace” on an overhaul, he told RNZ.

The officials had got as far as a preliminary business case going before Cabinet a few weeks ago.

Meantime, immediate work was continuing to make sure the system was usable and secure, Reti said.

The task is daunting – while Stats NZ is already working on a new tech platform for the IDI, there are 15 billion rows of data, which can not be found anywhere else.

Finding it at all within the datasets could be inordinately difficult, according to Gisborne researcher Malcolm Mersham.

“It is pretty clunky and very challenging to find the data,” Mersham said.

Mersham is research and insights leader at Trust Tairāwhiti in Gisborne, which wanted to mine loads of data – including health, economic and household stats – to set a baseline measure of the happiness of the locals.

“The reason we went to the IDI is because publicly that information wasn’t available for us in Tai Rāwhiti,” with data typically lumped in with Hawke’s Bay.

However, they struggled to get into the IDI at all.

“There’s only really a few that can sort of navigate the research project piece.”

They needed expert help to apply, then more expertise from someone familiar with the labyrinth – and who knew some coding to unlock its secrets.

“For any person from the streets or average Joe, it would be incredibly difficult for them to actually find useful information about their communities,” Mersham said.

Ultimately they did not find what they wanted.

“We’re poor, we’re Māori, we’ve got a lot of deficit kind of data … So, this is like if you get a traffic fine, it’ll pop up.

“The [government administrative] admin data is really sort of output of activity that government does to you, if that makes sense.”

They instead needed measures of whether people were happy and connected.

While their IDI project did not get there, it pointed them in the right direction – creating their own regional well-being survey, which is now in its fourth year, Mersham said.

They have found high levels of happiness and great connectedness, even where incomes are low.

“We would love to be able to publish that into the IDI.

“I think the future of the IDI, particularly with these upgrades, is what I’d like to see is the ability… to absorb datasets outside of just the admin data from government.”

Capacity pressure outside sandpits

At Auckland University, social sciences professor Barry Milne received the Stats NZ ‘1 percent capacity’ email while he was using the IDI on a project that looked at the impact of acquired brain injury on mental health.

“Once you get used to it, I think it’s easy to use,” Milne told RNZ.

But he said it was “creaky … I get the sense it’s kind of just being patched up a little bit to keep up with the demand for it”.

Parts of the IDI got a $1.4m patch-up in the eight months to June 2025, somewhat improving access.

“My sense is it needs a kind of complete restructure,” Milne said.

Government agencies have used the IDI in simulations to research policy change and monitor outcomes, such as Treasury’s tax and welfare model; MSD’s social outcomes modelling; and Oranga Tamariki’s children’s well-being model. Other projects have assessed how women’s pay is impacted by taking time off to raise children and men’s pay if a prostate cancer diagnosis comes late.

“It’s still really, really good,” Milne said.

It was the envy of research colleagues overseas, who could not believe he paid just $500 for access, and who often had even clunkier data systems to deal with, he added.

Stats NZ said the $1.4m built a sandpit just for Social Investment Agency researchers, taking the pressure off other shared space.

In June it also set up two additional sandpits for high demand users.

The real capacity pressure was on the infrastructure and data processing, despite “significant improvements and efficiency gains” in recent years, it said.

“We are limited to updating the IDI three times a year, and we have a limited number of new datasets that can be added,” Stats NZ said.

“This is one of the many challenges we would seek to address with investment in infrastructure upgrades.”

Risks in the fix

But Stats NZ has a long way to go to fix what it called a “world-leading system” and the country’s “only source of high-quality, de-identified, integrated data”.

The briefings showed the data being put into it from other agencies was “poor quality, not in a standardised format and missing in critical areas”.

But Professor Tahu Kukutai of Te Ngira Institute for Population Research said fixing that could be hard, because these other agencies might not help enough.

She said another question was around how much public trust existed in the government’s recent move to rely more on ‘administrative data’ – which has put an end to Censuses as we know them – and records its interactions with individual citizens, for everything from school and GP enrolment to speeding tickets.

“Māori trust in Stats NZ isn’t great,” she said, after a “failure” to implement Māori data governance and other measures.

‘The IDI will remain secure’

Treasury told ministers in late 2024 the IDI was an example of “inflexible and difficult to use infrastructure which cause inefficiencies and security risk within their system”.

At the public face, the assessments can be rosier.

The Social Investment Agency (SIA) – set up last year with former police commissioner Andrew Coster at its head – said: “The IDI is a world-leading resource with a great breadth and depth of data. Researchers can use it to analyse populations and investigate the impact of services and programmes on people’s lives.”

More than most agencies, the SIS needs the IDI to exhibit reliability.

But Reti told RNZ the data system was old so its “processes for data integration and analysis are slow and require manual support”.

“Stats NZ have assured me that with the immediate work underway using time-limited funding, researchers and decision-makers will continue to access the data they need and the IDI will remain secure.

“However, significant work is required to deliver the infrastructure upgrades needed to ensure our data infrastructure can scale-up in the long term.

“This is a complex undertaking, but I have made my expectation clear to officials that this project is to continue at pace and a long-term solution must be in place to support the government’s programme of work,” Reti said.

Mersham was hoping the officials will ask him what the revamped system should look like.

For those based in Gisborne, one physical barrier was that researchers could only use the IDI in a Stats NZ-run data lab.

The barriers needed to drop, Mersham said, and official papers also mentioned this.

“But I also appreciate it is a big machine,” he said. “I can totally appreciate where they find themselves right now.”

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