Category: Public Media

Source: Radio New Zealand

A worker at a special court that helps Auckland’s homeless who have committed low-level offences turn their lives around, says she is seeing increasing levels of poor mental health and distress over the past six to 12 months at the court, as the city continues to see a rise in the number of people without shelter.

On Tuesday, the release of the latest six-monthly survey of housing support providers under the National Homelessness Data Project (NHDP) showed that homelessness in Auckland has more than doubled from 426 to 940 people in the year to September.

The report, released by the Salvation Army and Community Housing Aotearoa, found that 14 of the 21 agencies interviewed reported an increase in homelessness.

It highlighted that the number of emergency housing applications that were declined increased from 4 percent in March 2024 to 36 percent by June 2025, while the assessment of whether people had “contributed to their own homelessness” remains a major reason for declining grants.

The report said there was little evidence to suggest that the Ministry for Social Development (MSD) had adjusted its “use of discretion” to be more accommodating when assessing emergency housing applications, despite directives from the government in September.

Carmel Claridge has worked for more than three years as a coordinator at Te Kōti o Timatanga Hou (the Court of New Beginnings) based at the Auckland District Court, which provides a therapeutic approach to offenders who are homeless in the Auckland CBD.

She said she had noticed people coming to the court recently were giving up on applying for emergency housing due to the cost of the housing, the dangerous environment, and past experiences of being declined.

“The last half dozen people that I have assessed for suitability to come into our court, of those people, not a single one of them was prepared to even apply for an emergency housing grant,” she said.

The latest Salvation Army report under the NHDP stated that emergency housing grants fell from 7068 in March 2024 to 1833 by December 2024. One agency reported that in one month, all 27 people they referred to the MSD for emergency housing were declined.

Claridge said the people she works with at the court are at “the bottom of the ladder” when it comes to getting housing assistance – often denied access due to addictions, mental health struggles and past convictions.

She said she was seeing more distress and emotional dysregulation of people coming to the court over the past six to 12 months.

“What I’m seeing is people presenting up at the Auckland District Court with very poor, often untreated or unmedicated mental health issues, combined with perhaps alcohol or drug addictions, and sometimes also with criminal history as well.

“Those people are very, very difficult to house at the best of times, but when they are completely shut out of a housing continuum by denial of a basic emergency housing grant, they’re effectively cut off from any support whatsoever,” Claridge said.

Claridge said this cohort was unable to get help for drug and alcohol issues without a fixed address, which puts them in a “vicious cycle” of being denied the support needed to sustain a stable tenancy.

There was a need for housing that provides a supportive environment where their mental health, drug and addiction issues can be addressed, she said.

The government and the council’s move on orders for the homeless in Auckland was not a humane solution to a very complex problem, she said.

Claridge said there could be wider social consequences if nothing was done to support people.

“If you have a group of people out there in the community who are very mentally unwell, who are not receiving the medical help they need, who are not properly medicated, who are not having their conditions monitored, or their prescribed medication controlled in some way.

“It is inevitable that you are going to get more incidents of random acts of violence on the wider members of society,” she said.

Salvation Army and Community Housing Aotearoa December report

The report acknowledged that the government’s $17 million in targeted funding in September, for 300 Housing First places and outreach support, has had some positive impacts – including more people helped into Kainga Ora housing in Hamilton, and more outreach workers for some providers in Auckland, Christchurch and Wellington.

However it raised concern that the funding ends in June 2026, as well as the lack of relief for smaller centres such as Whangārei, Rotorua, Taranaki, Nelson or Dunedin. It is calling for sustained funding beyond June 2026.

It also highlighted that government budgeted funding for homelessness support in the current year to June 2026 has reduced by $79m, compared to the year to June 2025.

The report calls for more tailored responses to women’s homelessness, including young women with children, older women, and Wāhine Māori – who make up more than a third of homeless women in New Zealand.

Older people facing homelessness was identified as a growing issue in the report, with service providers reporting a growing proportion of pensioners renting and vulnerable to unstable housing.

Youth outreach service providers also reported that youth homelessness is becoming more visible, with nearly 50 percent of those experiencing severe housing deprivation being under the age of 25.

Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka: government is addressing the issues

Associate Housing Minister Tama Potaka said in a statement the report findings reinforce what the government knows of homelessness as a complex issue, “shaped by long-standing Whānau and system breakdowns”.

“We know there are real issues, however, we are taking action to address these. We are working closely with community housing providers, Iwi, Māori organisations and frontline services, and we take their insights seriously,” he said in the statement.

Potaka said the figures cited in the report reflected “provider experience” in particular places, and were not a national headcount.

Ian Hutson, director of the social policy and parliamentary unit, said it was concerning that there was currently no government funded comprehensive data to capture the real extent of homelessness in the country.

The figures on Auckland’s homelessness came from the council and community providers who had counted the number of homeless people known to them, he said.

The real numbers would be much higher, Hutson said.

An earlier briefing released by the Salvation Army in July this year found through OIA requests and a range of sources that one in every 1000 people in New Zealand is without shelter, and 57,000 women are experiencing homelessness, often in unsafe or unstable living situations.

Potaka added that it was too early to judge the impact of the $17m committed by the government in September.

“We are investing over half a billion dollars a year in housing and support, backing Iwi- and community-led solutions, and fixing a system that was fragmented and ineffective.

“Support is delivered nationwide based on need, and funding shifts reflect a deliberate move away from crisis responses toward stable housing outcomes,” he said.

Meanwhile, Potaka said MSD had clear direction to apply discretion where people face genuine hardship.

“Based on feedback I have received there is a noticeable difference and providers are working effectively with MSD,” he said.

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

Multiple Fire and Emergency crews were sent to Rangipo Power Station, after reports of a fire on Monday night.

A spokesperson said crews were called to the site Kaimanawa Forest Park shortly before 9pm.

They said the report suggested it was the power station’s generator room that was on fire.

Fire and Emergency later confirmed the reported fire was a false alarm.

Crews from Tūrangi, Southern Lakes, Waiouru and National Park had been sent.

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

Depending on who you ask, Canterbury is either in the grip of a nitrate emergency orcontrolled by environmental alarmists waging a war on dairy cows. Despite the disagreement, there is no dispute the region’s dairy boom has coincided with a decline in water quality. In the first of RNZ’s three-part series Water Fight, Tim Brown reports on the health concerns raised by worsening drinking water contamination.

Luis Arevalo is about to welcome a grandson into the world but he does not think the child will ever drink from his kitchen tap because of nitrate-tainted water.

His family only drinks bottled water because he is worried about nitrate exposure from the Oxford Rural 1 supply where he lives in Canterbury’s Waimakariri district.

Council testing shows nitrate-nitrogen levels between 4.3 to 5.17 milligrams per litre (mg/L) over the past two years, well below the drinking water standard of 11.3 mg/L, but Arevalo is concerned about emerging evidence detailing the potential health risks of nitrate at far lower levels.

“I’m old enough to remember when smoking was okay. I’m old enough to remember when seatbelts weren’t needed in cars. When scientists and politicians and organisations and corporations were saying there’s nothing to worry about, well, they’ve been proven wrong,” he said.

“If enough scientists are saying we’ve got a problem here, I dare say we have got a problem.”

Arevalo’s concern was now even more personal, with the baby on the way.

“Our grandson will probably never drink the water out of the tap,” he said.

“We know that what’s being dumped in now won’t come through for another 20 or 30 years, so we are going to have an increase.”

Arevalo was so alarmed that he formed the Waimakariri Residents Against Nitrates community group 18 months ago after getting his water tested by Greenpeace.

He said the group aims to raise awareness about nitrate levels and the potential risks to people’s health.

“Without the right information people aren’t going to stand up. What we are trying to do is get as much information as possible out to the public. Governments will not change until their voting base says ‘this is not ok’.

“They will be getting away with this for as long as they can.”

‘Huge number of bores’ in breach or close to breaching drinking water standards

Since 1990, Canterbury’s dairy herd has increased by about 1000 per cent, to well over a million cows.

Between 2002 and 2019, nitrogen fertiliser use in Canterbury increased 326 percent, while the area being irrigated increased by 99 percent over the same period.

An Earth Sciences New Zealand-led study published in November confirmed that Canterbury has the highest percentage of elevated groundwater nitrates in the country, following testing of 3800 rural drinking water samples from private wells between 2022 and 2024.

Researchers identified nitrate-rich cow urine as a primary cause of contaminated groundwater.

The Canterbury Regional Council’s (ECan) [https://www.ecan.govt.nz/get-involved/news-and-events/2025/annual-groundwater-survey-yet-to-show-improvements-in-water-quality

latest annual groundwater survey] shows nitrate increasing in 62 percent of the 300 test wells.

More than 10 percent of wells tested had nitrates above the drinking water limit, including 18 of the 36 wells in the Ashburton zone.

In September, regional councillors voted nine to seven in favour of declaring a nitrate emergency, although some branded the move a political stunt, virtue signalling and an attack on Canterbury farmers.

University of Canterbury public health associate professor Dr Tim Chambers supports the move.

“I think it’s a positive step to recognise how big an issue nitrate contamination is within ECan’s jurisdiction,” he said.

“There are a huge number of bores now that are either breaching or near breaching the drinking water standard.”

The maximum acceptable value (MAV) of nitrate-nitrogen in drinking water was set in the late 1950s by the World Health Organisation (WHO) to guard against blue baby syndrome, a rare but potentially fatal condition caused by nitrates starving the body of oxygen.

New Zealand’s drinking water standards set out the maximum amount of nitrate acceptable in drinking water, generally based on WHO guidelines.

A 2021 study co-authored by Chambers found up to 100 cases of bowel cancer and 40 deaths might be caused by nitrate-contaminated drinking water each year, with about 800,000 New Zealanders exposed to potentially hazardous levels.

Bowel cancer is the second highest cause of cancer death in New Zealand, with particularly high rates in South Canterbury.

A link to bowel cancer is in dispute, with Bowel Cancer New Zealand saying current evidence suggests nitrates in drinking water are highly unlikely to increase the risk in Aotearoa, while the Cancer Society notes nitrates can react with other substances when metabolised to form compounds widely shown to be carcinogenic.

Chambers argues the drinking water limit is too high and potentially puts people at risk of pre-term birth and bowel cancer.

“There is a lot of emerging evidence suggesting that level should be lower,” he said.

“There are international studies that are linking nitrate with pre-term birth risk and also with bowel cancer. The levels at which we are seeing that increased risk in those studies is much lower than the current MAV, but exactly where it should be set based on that evidence is not clear yet because it hasn’t gone through the regulatory assessment.”

Most New Zealanders drank from supplies with nitrate at less than 1 mg/L of water but hundreds of thousands of people on private and public rural supplies were being exposed to levels of concern, Chambers said.

On 5 December, the Waimate District Council reported the Lower Waihao and Waikakahi East rural water scheme had reached nitrate levels of 8.8 mg/L, where supplies were off limits for extended periods in 2022 and 2024 because of breaches of drinking water standards.

Chambers said intensive dairy farming in areas with shallow groundwater had resulted in rapid changes to nitrate levels.

“We’ve had that situation in Waimate where a local drinking water supply went from under one milligram per litre to breaching the drinking water standard in as short a time as six or seven years,” he said.

“We need to do better with our environmental management. We need to do better with our source water protection – this lands on the councils. If there is a problem we need to try to find alternate water supplies or apply appropriate treatment methods at the plant before it hits the tap.”

‘People can’t smell it, they can’t taste it’

While public drinking water was tested by local councils and the results published online, people on private supplies must do their own testing.

At a Greenpeace-run testing day in Darfield in November, more than 100 people turned up to get their samples checked for free.

Results showed the town supply was about half the acceptable limit but nine private bores were above the standard.

One local, who did not want to be named, told RNZ he was concerned about nitrate levels in his tap water.

“The problem is people can’t smell it, they can’t taste it, so they don’t even know they’re drinking it,” the man said.

The College of Midwives advised pregnant women and parents with bottle-fed babies to use bottled water if nitrates exceeded 5 mg/L, which was less than half of the MAV.

Midwifery advisor Claire MacDonald said a “precautionary approach” made sense.

“When we’re thinking about something as fundamental as drinking water we need to take a long-term vision and we need to recognise that what we do now will impact on generations to come,” she said.

“The babies that we as midwives welcome into the world, they’re going to live well beyond our lifetimes and into the 22nd century and then their grandchildren will live further on, so this is not just about the now. This is about the future.”

The regional council was the regulator responsible for protecting source water used for Canterbury drinking supplies and followed national health authorities’ lead on determining safe drinking water limits for contaminants.

New council chair Deon Swiggs voted against declaring a nitrate emergency but said he now saw it as a chance to raise awareness about drinking water contamination.

“Once we all have more of an understanding about what it is we can work with the industry to start addressing some of the problems where there are hotspots and where there are issues,” he said.

“No one is saying there aren’t issues. The last thing we want is people to not believe there’s an issue when there potentially is an issue. Get everybody on the same page so we can start addressing it because the industry’s the one that’s going to need to start addressing some of these challenges.”

‘People are losing faith in regional councils’

Some political leaders were explicitly against the emergency declaration, including new Selwyn mayor Lydia Gliddon who believed it overstated the district’s situation and did not reflect the progress already made.

“Nitrate levels in Canterbury are a long-term legacy issue, largely driven by land-use practices of 20-30 years ago. In Selwyn, farming systems have already changed significantly. Fertiliser use is down, irrigation is more efficient, nutrient limits are tighter and farm environment plans are mandatory,” she said.

“What our community needs is accurate information, long-term planning and steady, science-based work, not heightened rhetoric.”

Cabinet minister Chris Bishop told RNZ the declaration was “precisely why people are losing faith in regional councils”.

“It’s political grandstanding and empty symbolism that does nothing to improve the environment and pits rural against urban and town v country,” he said.

“The declaration does nothing to improve water quality and undermines decades of collaborative work by farmers, iwi, councils and communities and fuels division and panic rather than solutions. Farmers are reducing synthetic nitrogen fertiliser use and 84 percent of dairy farms now operate under a farm environment plan (compared to 32 percent in 2021).”

Health Minister Simeon Brown said the MAV for nitrates in New Zealand drinking water was consistent with international guidelines, including the WHO, European Union and Australia.

“Drinking water suppliers are responsible for providing safe and sufficient water to the communities they serve. That means taking action to identify hazards, including emerging hazards that relate to their supply and how any risks associated with these hazards will be managed,” he said.

Water regulator Taumata Arowai, the Ministry of Health and the Ministry for the Environment also pointed to New Zealand’s nitrate MAV as being in line with international guidelines.

In December, Denmark was investigating lowering its legal limit by 88 percent, which is equivalent to a nitrate-nitrogen MAV of 1.36mg/L in New Zealand, because of concerns about bowel cancer risks and nitrates in drinking water.

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

Fire crews are working to put out a house fire in Nelson.

They were called to the suburb of Toi Toi at about 3.40am on Tuesday.

Fire and Emergency (FENZ) said neighbouring homes were evacuated at one point.

It said there were early concerns somebody was still inside the home, but everyone was now accounted for.

Police and St John were also called – FENZ said it was not aware of any injuries.

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