Radio New Zealand – Page 84

The Ministry of Transport currently factors elements such as road closures, emergency service response, and the social costs for the life lost into the total cost of a road fatality. RNZ

A transport consultancy firm says analysis of traffic data reveals the total cost of a crash is up to 70 percent higher that previously calculated.

The Ministry of Transport currently calculates the social cost of a road fatality at more than $15 million, which includes elements such as the road closure, emergency service response, and the social costs for the life lost.

But Abley Principal Transportation Planner Chris Blackmore told Nine to Noon data analysis shows that the impact of a crash on the overall road network is not factored into that calculation.

“There’s a lot of big immediate costs that we see when you look at the impacts of road trauma – be that FENZ, hospital admission, recovery costs.

“We do occasionally take into account any easily visible impacts of closing a road … but at the moment that’s only really included at a high level, and it ignores a lot of the secondary and following impacts.”

Councils and the Transport Agency had traditionally relied on physical equipment such as pneumatic road tubes to measure traffic data.

“That’s really what has prevented, up until now, having a more holistic view of the impacts of what we call network disruption.”

But a system called TomTom Area Speed enabled the analysis of more information, and more sophisticated data about the wider impacts crashes had, Blackmore said.

TomTom takes information from sources such as Apple, data from the cars themselves, and other apps motorists might be using to show exactly how widespread the congestion is, for how long, and what activities might be affected.

Blackmore provided the example of a crash between a bus and a car on Auckland’s Tamaki Drive, which closed the significant connection between the eastern bays and the city centre for more than 24 hours.

“What we could see with TomTom was that as that link closed, people had to find their way around.

“Say five O’clock, six O’clock in the morning, that’s all right … but what happens when you get into the peak hour … we see all of the other connections from the eastern bays massively overloaded.

The TomTom data showed exactly how people reacted to road closures, he said.

“Some people do u-turns, some people turn of earlier and try and get through some back roads, some people try to tough it out in the queue.”

When the data was added up, it revealed the overall impact the crash had on travel times, and the total disruption to the road network.

Crashes on rural roads also could carry a heavy unseen cost, Blackmore said, using the example of a crash on State Highway 6 near Kington in Otago.

“What we saw there was that travel time increases weren’t as significant because there’s not a heap of congestion. People could figure out that there’s a crash before they started driving down State Highway 6 and make their choices.

“But we did see hundreds of thousands of extra kilometres that people had to travel, and that has impacts on people’s lives and their routines as well.”

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

March 19, 2026

Inflating cost of running a farm now structural – report

Source: Radio New Zealand

AFP / William West

The cost of running a farm in New Zealand is more than a quarter higher than it was before the Covid pandemic.

ANZ’s latest Agri Insights report, which analysed financial performance across more than 4000 dairy, red meat, kiwifruit, arable and pipfruit customers over five years, found farm operating costs across the board were 27 percent higher than before Covid.

This was driven largely by increased labour and input costs like fertiliser, and on-farm cost inflation becoming structural.

The gap between average farms and the top performers continued to widen, pointing to significant untapped productivity potential, with leading operators consistently generating materially higher earnings per hectare through system optimisation rather than expansion.

The report’s co-author and ANZ’s head of strategy and execution – business and agri Marcus Bousefield said it showed farms must lift productivity just to stand still.

“Really everything is up on that pre-Covid area in terms of costs. We’ve seen it as a structural shift as opposed to just being inflationary and moving with the inflation cycle.”

Despite having the largest cost increases – which was reflective of their labour-intensive nature and impacts of wage pressures during and after the pandemic – the report found both dairy and kiwifruit had some of the strong returns.

Total kiwifruit farm income rose 59 percent driven by the maturing of post-PSA plantings and higher orchard productivity, while dairy also saw higher earnings per hectare achieved through improved milk production per cow and better herd performance, rather than expansion.

Red meat farms had modest income growth, with a wide gap between top-performing operators who earned about 80 percent more per hectare than poorer-performing counterparts.

Pipfruit faced the most challenges, including labour shortages and multiple weather events.

Bousefield said the report showed the strongest performances were linked to reinvestment and commitment to improving productivity.

“You can look to the singular price in commodity prices being a key leader of performance but that is always outside of farmers’ control.

“It’s really the sum of the parts of all the other components that drive the topline revenue piece that has a bigger bearer on what we saw as performance of the top 25 percent.”

Bousefield said this included factors like the execution of buying and selling, crop management and animal efficiency, particularly in the dairy sector.

He said farming was multi-generational industry where decisions made today would pay off in later years. He said it was at a junction point where stronger markets, coupled with agritech advances provided opportunity to improve efficiencies on farm.

Bousefield cautioned that conflict in the Middle East would continue to create global uncertainty in the shorter term.

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

March 19, 2026

New figures show slow growth in job market

Source: Radio New Zealand

The latest SEEK employment report shows job ads rose 0.9 percent in February. 123rf

A slow warming in the job market appears to be broadening out into a more meaningful market shift.

The latest SEEK employment report shows job ads rose 0.9 percent in February, the ninth consecutive monthly increase. It took annual ad growth to 12.2 percent, the strongest annual rise since 2022.

SEEK country manager Rob Clark said the growth was led by industries like construction, engineering and farming.

“If you track the last 18 months, we had a significant decline in job advertising, then it was pretty flat and now we’re seeing growth,” Clark said.

“What that says is that people are a bit more optimistic, they’re seeing some more growth opportunities, and typically that translates to hiring more people, and because we’re seeing it across most industries and most geographies, that implies that it’s a genuine market movement.”

The report shows there is less competition for the jobs being advertised, with applications per ad falling 2.4 percent from the month prior, off the peak seen in August last year.

Only a few sectors are in decline and they include retail and consumer products, as well as banking and financial services. All of the largest sectors saw improvement, according to SEEK’s report.

“The longer-term picture is roles in engineering, farming, construction, trades, healthcare are all growing at about 20 percent year-on-year,” Clark said.

“So they’re the key drivers of activity at the moment.”

Whether the momentum is likely to continue in the same direction is unclear, said Clark, although confidence could take a hit as a result of the Middle East conflict.

South Island regions still the engine driving jobs growth

The South Island showed some of the strongest growth year-on-year with Otago up 23 percent, Southland up 21.3 percent and West Coast up 20.9 percent and Canterbury up 20 percent.

“What we’re seeing is the South Island growing well ahead of everywhere else, and obviously they have a strong agricultural base,” Clark said.

“We’re seeing growth there driven by both a strong ag sector and population movement with a lot of internal migration from other parts of New Zealand to the South Island, because there are more opportunities there.”

Urban centres like Auckland and Wellington are showing little momentum, according to the SEEK report.

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

March 19, 2026

Conan O’Brien funded Sona’s IVF, so she made him Godfather of twins

Source: Radio New Zealand

Sona Movsesian and Conan O’Brien are co-workers but also “just two people who really care about each other”.

Making the 62-year-old comedian a Godfather to her two sons was also a way to present them with someone who has a great work ethic and character to try and emulate, Movsesian tells RNZ’s Afternoons.

“Plus Conan loves the Godfather movie, I know it’s his favourite movie. When we asked him, my husband quietly put on the Godfather theme, and we said, ‘we want to ask you a question…'”

This video is hosted on Youtube.

.28488372093″>

Movsesian has worked with O’Brien for 16 years – first as a personal assistant on The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien when she was at first starstruck by her “comedy icon”.

After they each tested the waters with each other, she says the pair’s “pretty classic sibling dynamic” developed quickly.

“Once we realised both of us were responding the way we wanted each other to respond, we just kind of went all in on it.

“I’m not his day-to-day assistant, but I still do worry about him. He’s like an older brother to me.”

Several years ago, when Sona and her husband Tak Boroyan discovered they needed IVF treatments to start a family but couldn’t afford them, Conan and his wife Liza “very generously” lent them the money, she says.

In 2021, when twin boys Mikey and Charlie were born, Conan and Liza became part of the family, too.

After discovering she was “very frazzled” and “kind of all over the place” as a mother, Movsesian says it felt like a natural progression to write about her struggles through fertility treatment and early motherhood in The World’s Worst Mom– a follow-up to her 2022 bestsellerThe World’s Worst Assistant.

The World’s Worst Mom is for the many mothers “who feel kind of lost sometimes”, she says.

“Sometimes it’s more heartening and more relatable to be reading a book by someone who has found that as tough as you found it.

“You say, ‘something’s wrong with me. I’m terrible at this’. If someone reads my book and feels better about how, underwater they feel, that’s really just what I want to do. I want people to not feel like they’re as lost as they might feel sometimes [and] sort of create this sisterhood with a lot of other mums who have no idea what they’re doing.”

With no previous desire for an on-camera career, having a public persona linked entirely to O’Brien makes it easier to act natural as a cohost of Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend, Movsesian says.

As a cohost of Conan Needs A Friend, Sona Movsesian says her job is to laugh.

Tiffany Roohani Photography

Talking like no-one is watching is easier said than done for most people, the 43-year-old Californian is well aware. But while she doesn’t know any other way to be, she also has to remind herself not to overthink.

“If you hear, ‘Sona Movsesian’s great because her laugh is great or she’s great because she always fills a silence with something profound’ or anything like that, you start thinking, ‘Oh gosh, I should do a bit more of that’. You stop getting the kind of magic that got you there in the first place.”

On Conan Needs A Friend, Movsesian says her job is to laugh, which often means sharing stories about her husband and sons. She does try to avoid saying anything they’d be horrified to hear in the future, though.

“I talk about my kids with some modicum of respect, but with my husband, it’s just open season.”

Movessian says she wrote The World’s Worst Mom to help create a sisterhood for mothers “who have no idea what they’re doing.”

Penguin Random House

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

March 19, 2026

Crashes cost up to 70% more than expected, Transport Ministry finds