“What if things turn sour?” people often asked when Bennett and Gray mentioned they were investing in a house with a former flatmate.
But people don’t ask that question when romantic partners buy a home together, Bennett points out on RNZ’s Thrift podcast, and those relationships often don’t work out.
After flatting together in Tauranga and Christchurch, the friends thought they might live one day together again or even buy a place together, but that seemed like a “wild pipe dream”.
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The government has announced a mega ministry which will take on the work of housing, transport, and local government functions.
The new Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport (MCERT) will bring together the ministries of environment, transport, housing and urban development and the local government functions of Internal Affairs.
Housing, Transport, RMA Reform and Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop said currently much of the government’s reform work spanned multiple agencies.
“For example, solving our housing crisis is impossible without fundamental planning reform, which is currently the responsibility of the Ministry for the Environment (which looks after city, district and regional plans).
“It is also impossible without reforms to infrastructure funding and financing (currently split across HUD, DIA and Transport).”
Bishop said the current system was too fragmented and uncoordinated.
“New Zealand is very well served by outstanding public servants in all of these agencies doing their best to serve ministers and the public in difficult circumstances.
“My experience is that they are often as frustrated as ministers are by the duplication, overlapping responsibilities and lack of coordination.”
Public Services Minister Judith Collins said the new ministry would deliver the best results for taxpayers.
“We are investing to ensure its success and while it is not intended as a cost-cutting exercise, we do expect to see efficiencies in the medium to long term.”
A chief executive will be appointed in the first half of 2026, with the MCERT fully operational by July next year.
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The Royal Auckland & Grange Golf Club.www.photosport.nz
A world class professional golf tournament will return to Auckland for the first time in more than 20 years with the launch of the Japan-Australasia Championship.
The tournament, which is co-sanctioned by the Challenger PGA Tour of Australia and the Japan Golf Tour Organisation, will be played at Royal Auckland and Grange Golf Club from 5-8 March, 2026.
The $1.4 million event will showcase leading players from Australasia and Japan alongside rising stars from across the region.
The tournament will become the third leg of a three-week New Zealand swing and will follow the New Zealand PGA Championship at Paraparaumu Beach on 19-22 February and the New Zealand Open at Millbrook Resort, which starts on 26 February.
PGA of Australia chief executive Gavin Kirkman hailed the new event as a significant milestone for golf in the region.
“This tournament represents an exciting new chapter for golf in our part of the world,” Kirkman said.
“Partnering with the Japan Golf Tour for the first time is a tremendous opportunity to strengthen ties between our Tours and provide our players with a truly international stage.”
Royal Auckland and Grange Golf Club recently completed a major redevelopment and club captain Ian Blair said being approached to host the event was recognition of their world-class course and facilities.
“This is Auckland’s first major men’s professional tournament in 20 years, and we’re honoured to showcase our course to international audiences while engaging with our wider community and inspiring the next generation of golfers. It’s a historic moment that reflects both our proud heritage and our exciting future.”
The New Zealand Open was last held in Auckland at the Grange in 2004.
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Firefighters expect they will be battling the fire for days.Pretoria Gordon / RNZ
A fire in South Taranaki has grown overnight to an estimated 100 hectares, with firefighters expected to be battling the blaze for several days.
The fire, located between Waitōtara township and Waiinu Beach settlement, started on Monday afternoon and is yet to be contained.
Fire and Emergency (FENZ) says two firefighting crews, two helicopters, and heavy machinery are working to extinguish the blaze, with additional help on the way.
There have been no evacuations, but residents have been told to prepare to leave.
FENZ says the smoke is currently blowing out to sea but are advising local residents to limit their exposure by remaining inside with windows and doors shut.
Waiinu Beach Road is closed from Silver Fern Farms Waitōtara to the turn-off to the Waiinu Beach settlement.
A separate forestry fire southeast in Parikino has seen reinforcements from the New Zealand Defence Force and the Department of Conservation called in.
The blaze in Lismore Forest near Parikino – near Whanganui – has scorched more than 100 hectares, after being first reported at 5.15pm on Sunday.
FENZ Incident Controller, Assistant Commander Renee Potae says the fire, which is still not contained, is burning through slash piles, cutover pine forest and underneath standing pine trees on the forest floor in several locations, across difficult terrain.
“There will be multiple crews on the ground today with support from heavy machinery and five helicopters.”
She says the weather forecast could hamper firefighting efforts.
“The wind has picked up significantly and some rain is forecast which could make the ground muddy and make access more difficult for ground crews.”
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Worldline NZ expects Christmas Eve to be the peak day for total core retail transactions.123RF
Consumer spending patterns have been tracking slightly below expectations for the first half of the month, but are expected to pick-up as Christmas approaches.
Worldline NZ’s latest data indicates spending at core retail merchants fell 0.3 percent to just over $2 billion ($2.049b) in the first 14 days of December on last year, with mixed patterns across sectors and regions.
Spending was highest in West Coast (+3.9 percent), Whanganui (+3.3 percent) and Otago (+2.9 percent), with the biggest declines recorded in Wellington (-4.0 percent) and Bay of Plenty (-2.4 percent).
Worldline NZ chief sales officer Bruce Proffit said Christmas Eve was expected to be the peak day for total core retail transactions.
“But we’ll see if that holds up in the ongoing challenging economic environment,” he said.
Hospitality spending was also expected to rise further this week with the peak expected Saturday 20 December.
“Food and liquor stores saw more transactions and slightly higher average transaction value across almost all regions in New Zealand, apart from Marlborough, but this is expected to increase even further in the coming days as shoppers prepare for Christmas Day festivities,” Proffit said.
Hospitality sector spending was mixed with spending generally more positive outside the major centres.
Spending on non-food goods fell 5.7 percent on the year earlier to just over half a billion dollars ($549m).
“Notably, some merchant sectors surpassed their Black Friday weekend spending peak last Saturday, including gift stores, toy and games retailers, bookshops, marine stores, florists and jewellery stores,” Proffit said.
“However, almost all merchants within this group are anticipated to reach new highs for the year, in the remaining days before Christmas, although spending at clothing stores generally peaks on 26 December amidst the usual Boxing Day sales.”
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Austen’s six novels – including Emma and Pride and Prejudice – were groundbreaking in the early 1800s.
As a pioneer of free indirect style and the marriage plot, her mastery has inspired many homages and imitations — both on the page and the screen — over the last two centuries.
On the 250th anniversary of her birthday, we look back at Austen’s life and legacy.
A portrait of Jane Austen based on a drawing by her sister Cassandra.
Jane Austen Wrecked My Lifeis a French film about a fan of the great novelist, who goes to England as part of an Austen residency and soon her life starts to echo an Austen romance. But which one?
Who was Jane Austen?
Austen was born on December 16, 1775, in the village of Steventon in rural Hampshire, where her father, the Reverend George Austen, was a clergyman.
Her mother, Cassandra, was “known for her poems and her wit”, Devoney Looser, who is a professor of English at Arizona State University, tells ABC Radio National’s The Book Show.
“She had two very interesting parents, but they were not by any means a family of great wealth.”
Jane Austen fans pose at at Winchester Cathedral with a Bank of England £10 note featuring the author’s portrait.
AFP
The Austens were what’s often described as lower gentry: people of ‘good birth’ who weren’t landowners themselves.
The Austen home was an “intellectual environment” but one in which money was tight.
To supplement the family’s income, George Austen took in a series of male students, to the ultimate benefit of his daughter’s education.
“There were, one scholar has estimated, 19 different boys who spent some years of their lives in this clergyman Reverend George Austen’s home,” Looser says.
“In effect, Jane Austen didn’t just grow up as a clergyman’s daughter; she grew up in a boys’ school.”
Early signs of genius
Austen is believed to have started writing when she was 11. She made copies of some of these early works, written between 1787 and 1798, later published as her juvenilia.
Looser says that while many critics initially dismissed this early writing as lightweight, it is now viewed more favourably.
“You can see her brilliance, her genius in these works from 11, 12, 13 years old. It’s quite incredible.”
Her early work often played on sending up the literary conventions of the day to comic effect.
“The juvenilia is filled with drunkenness, adultery, murder – not the things you necessarily associate with the mature Jane Austen, the Jane Austen of the six major novels,” Looser says.
Devoney Looser is a professor of English at Arizona State University and the author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane.
Supplied
The collected works of Jane Austen
Aspiring authors, take heart: Austen’s first attempts to have her work published were unsuccessful.
One of Austen’s novels (no one is sure which) that her father submitted to a publisher in the 1790s was rejected sight unseen.
In 1803, she sold a manuscript for £10 ($NZ30) to a publisher, who, for reasons unknown, refused to either publish the novel or return it to her.
(Her brother eventually acquired the novel back in 1816, and it was published as Northanger Abbey in 1817).
While Austen was a prolific writer, she had to wait until she was 35 to see her first novel in print.
Sense and Sensibility, published in 1811, was a reworking of her first full-length novel, Elinor and Marianne, written years earlier. No copies of the earlier manuscript survive.
Jennifer Ehle as Elizabeth Bennet and Colin Firth as Fitzwilliam Darcy in the 1995 drama series Pride and Prejudice.
BBC
In 1813, Austen published her next novel, Pride and Prejudice — also based on an early draft, known as First Impressions, that she began in 1797, when she was 21.
She published two more novels in her lifetime: Mansfield Park (1814) and Emma (1816).
Another two novels — Northanger Abbey and Persuasion — were published after her death in July 1817.
Austen published her novels anonymously and was relatively little-known during her lifetime, but news of her true identity soon began to spread thanks to the likes of the Prince Regent (later King George IV), who was “a notorious gossip”.
“Once the Prince Regent knows your identity, you can assume that the cat’s out of the bag,” Looser says.
The woman behind the books
To the great disappointment of Austen fans and biographers alike, most of her letters were destroyed after her death, some by her sister Cassandra and others by her niece Fanny. Only 160 of her missives remain.
The first published biography of the author, written by her brother Henry just months after her death, presented Austen as a saintly and, it must be said, dull figure.
“He says that her life was not a life of event. This is obviously not true,” Looser says.
“We can tell from her letters that she was not someone who was boring and nice and faultless. She had a rapier wit, and she wasn’t afraid to use it, especially in private.”
Camille Rutherford and Pablo Pauly in the 2024 French comedy Jane Austen Wrecked My Life.
supplied
Looser makes a case against Austen’s perceived mildness in her 2025 book Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane.
While Austen wasn’t an out-and-out radical, she broke with social convention in her efforts to become a published author.
“Certainly, she was not the wildest person of her day, but there were things that she was doing that were really outside of what was proper. They were outside of what was conventionally feminine,” Looser says.
“The ideal woman was supposed to be passive and quiet, and not unlike what Henry Austin describes in his biographical notice of her in 1818.
“This is clearly not who Jane Austen was.”
Looking for clues in her novels
Many have turned to her writing to learn more about who the elusive Austen really was.
“Clearly, she has a sense of what it means to be good, and her characters who do good and behave in ways that are good have better ends,” Looser says.
What differentiates Austen from her contemporaries is the way she dispenses justice in her novels.
“She goes a little light on her villains,” Looser says. “She’s responding to a very strong didactic moralising tradition in her era that kills off the villain or sends them away … They die a tragic death because they’re bad. She doesn’t do that.
“She lets her most flawed and villainous characters have a different kind of bad end. Often, they’re punished by being around other people who are really unpleasant … and I think that too is a kind of morality. But it’s not a punishment in the way that we generally think of it from fiction of this period.”
She introduced a new breed of sassy female protagonist in characters like Elizabeth Bennett and Emma Woodhouse.
“Her heroines are not pictures of perfection,” Looser says.
“Their flaws are part of what make them interesting and, arguably, even good.”
ALBERT LLOP
Irish author Colm Tóibín, an avowed Austen fan, has found other common themes running through her work.
“She loves a sailor,” he says, noting that Austen’s youngest brother Charles was a rear-admiral in the navy.
“In Jane Austen, anyone who’s in the navy is good, anyone who’s in the army is bad, and anyone who has inherited money is suspect.”
A real-life marriage plot
Austen never married, but her life wasn’t without romance. When she was 20, she formed a brief amorous attachment to Tom Lefroy, a neighbour who was, unfortunately, as impecunious as she, and the match went nowhere.
Then, in 1802, she accepted the proposal of one Harris Bigg-Wither, the brother of a friend, but changed her mind 24 hours later.
Looser says the one-day engagement shows that Austen was ambivalent about the institution of marriage.
Jane Austen’s bed at Jane Austen’s House Museum in England.
Eurasia Press / Photononstop via AFP
Bigg-Wither appears to have been a somewhat prickly character, but he stood to inherit extensive family estates that would have assured Austen’s economic future — no small thing in Regency England.
“It seems likely from what we know of her fiction that she wasn’t in love with him,” Looser says.
“It would have been a good match. She would have had economic comfort. She would have taken herself off the family balance sheet, so in that sense it would have been a gift to her father and brothers, but she put herself first by taking back her ‘yes’.”
It’s a decision that Looser believes mirrors the fictitious Elizabeth Bennett’s refusals of marriage – and one that paid off for Austen.
By the time of her death, the author had achieved a degree of economic independence, earning £700 ($NZ1,617) from her books, a significant sum for the time.
Life beyond death
In a tragic turn of fate, Austen died of an unknown illness when she was just 41.
In addition to her six novels, she left two unfinished fragments, Sanditon and The Watsons.
In the years since her death, her literary reputation has continued to grow to the point where she is now considered one of the giants of the English canon.
The title page from the first edition of the first volume of Pride and Prejudice, published in 1813.
Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
Her work has provided rich fodder for the screen, too. The first television adaptation of an Austen novel was a BBC production of Pride and Prejudice in 1938.
Many more have followed, including the 1995 six-part series starring Colin Firth in a famously damp shirt as Mr Darcy, and the 2005 film version, which starred a dishevelled Keira Knightley rambling through the muddy English countryside.
While many Austen adaptations are faithful to the period, others — like the inimitable Clueless, a reworking of Emma — have reimagined her work in a contemporary setting.
To Tòibìn — who has taught Austen’s novels, including Pride and Prejudice and Mansfield Park, in his creative writing classes at Columbia University — this longevity is no surprise.
“The more you study them and disentangle them, deconstruct them, the more perfect they seem,” he says.
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Once niche imports, Japanese and Korean sunscreens are now lining shelves at retailers, including major places like Farmers, and slipping into the routines of New Zealanders tired of the heavy, chalky formulas they grew up with.
Auckland hairstylist and makeup artist Naeema Bhikoo has watched the shift firsthand. After years of putting up with “sticky and heavy” Western sunscreens that left a white cast, she says she began exploring Asian formulas during trips to Japan and South Korea.
“I used to hate wearing sunscreens. The only time I’d wear a sunscreen would be if I knew I was going to the beach,” she says. “Asian sunscreens in general, they’re very lightweight, just feel like a regular moisturiser, some of them have gel textures … it just feels like it soaks right in, no white cast.”
Auckland hairstylist and makeup artist Naeema Bhikoo.
Supplied / Mala Patel
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Economists say the Reserve Bank governor is sending a clear message to financial markets they have gone too far in raising fixed mortgage rates over the past week.
Anna Breman, barely two weeks into the role, took the unusual step of issuing a statement about current financial conditions which had gone “beyond” the RBNZ’s recent projection for interest rates.
“Financial market conditions have tightened since the November decision, beyond what is implied by our central projection for the OCR.”
She repeated that the forward path for the official cash rate (OCR) published in the November Monetary Policy Statement (MPS) indicated a possibility of another rate cut in the near term.
“However, if economic conditions evolve as expected the OCR is likely to remain at its [ https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/business/580066/official-cash-rate-cut-to-2-point-25-percent
current level of 2.25 percent] for some time.”
“As always, we are closely monitoring wholesale market interest rates and their effect on households and businesses.”
Breman said the RBNZ would look at incoming data, financial conditions, and global developments, as it worked towards its next interest rate decision in February.
Independent economist Cameron Bagrie said banks were also looking at the numbers and were coming to the view that rates would rise next year.
“There’s a little bit of calm your farm, cool your jets.”
“Financial markets don’t tend to align themselves with what the Reserve Bank is saying 100 percent of the time, financial markets tend to push a little bit further in either direction.”
“They were a little bit south of the Reserve Bank when interest rates were going down now they’ve decided to go a little bit north of the Reserve Bank in regard that the next move looks like it’s going to be up.”
Bagrie said the same trend of second guessing and moving ahead of central banks was apparent in other economies around the world, including Canada and Australia.
He said it was a little bit of jawboning, but markets were anticipating a rate rise next year to counter any inflation pressures arising from a recovering economy.
BNZ senior strategist Jason Wong said wholesale interest rates had moved lower after Breman’s comments.
“The market took the view that Breman was sending a clear message of some discomfort with the post November MPS market reaction, which had seen rates sharply higher.”
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