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Source: Radio New Zealand

A Breaker Bay local with a long history of fighting for clean water in Wellington explains why the sewage dump is so catastrophic, for health, history, and the environment.

Ray Ahipene-Mercer keeps a jar of 24-year-old water in his refrigerator, labelled ‘Moa Point Final Effluent’.

“It looks like a glass of water, hasn’t got a single bug in it, no discolouration, nothing,” he says.

It is a memento of the new sewage plant which he battled over for years as the co-leader of the Wellington Clean Water Campaign.

But nearly 30 years after that successful campaign to stop the dumping of raw sewage in the sea, it is happening again.

Since last Wednesday, more than 600 million litres of untreated sewage have poured into the water off the south coast after a catastrophic failure of Moa Point, the city’s main treatment plant.

On a sparkling summer day Ahipene-Mercer looks out from his Breaker Bay home just around the corner from the plant and the bays are empty.

“I’m looking at the water about 50 metres away, it’s beautiful and yet underneath it there is this darkness. There is not a person walking the dog, having a walk, swimming, surfing, nothing,” he tells The Detail.

The former city councillor is angry, not just about the health risks to humans, but the damage to the environment and risks to the kororā, and to historic Māori sites.

“Toilet water is now brushing up against historic sites at Tarakina Bay. One of the reasons this campaign in the 80s was so successful, we married Māori concerns and Pākehā concerns together and that’s why we won that campaign,” Ahipene-Mercer says.

“I’m very angry, because of all this work we did. It’s not in vain however because Wellingtonians have responded magnificently.”

The plant failed early last Wednesday morning during a bout of heavy rain. With the threat of more bad weather this weekend, there are fears the situation could get worse.

‘It’s going to get smellier’

The Post journalist Tom Hunt has been writing about Wellington’s wastewater woes for years and is experiencing first-hand the effects of days of raw sewage flowing into the sea.

“It gets worse the longer it’s there and it’s apparently going to get smellier as well,” he tells The Detail.

“I live not far from the tip and it was a still night last night and I could pick up a faint smell,” he says. “They’ve got these tanker trucks that Wellington’s quite familiar with because in covid time there was another pipe failure and they’d take the wastewater to the tip and they were called ‘turd taxis’. They’re just back and forth ferrying all the stuff out of the olympic-sized swimming pool room and just clearing that out and taking it to the tip.”

Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dougherty broke the news last Wednesday that a room in the plant was three metres deep in sewage, blowing the electrics and badly damaging or destroying equipment.

In the immediate aftermath raw sewage was flowing through a short outfall to five metres off the coast but it is now going through a longer 1.8 kilometre pipe.

“But it is still untreated sewage … and for the foreseeable future we will have effectively raw sewage being pumped off the south coast very near a marine sanctuary not far from a nesting area,” Hunt says.

It could be months before the sea on the south coast is safe for walking, swimming and collecting kaimoana.

It brings back memories for Hunt, who grew up around the south coast of the polluted waters in the 1980s.

“That was a different time when the south coast was not a desirable place to be.”

He says now they’re “back in that for a mystery reason, we still don’t know what caused it.”

Hunt explains the numerous reports of warnings and abatement notices issued to the operator, French-owned Veolia which is paid roughly $17 million a year by Wellington Water to run the plant.

He says it is too soon to say who is at fault and a full inquiry will impel people to give evidence.

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Source: Radio New Zealand

Former Reserve Bank Governor Don Brash is supportive of the government’s decision to review the Bank’s decisions during the Covid-19 pandemic, but concerns from the opposition over the review’s timing so close to the election are a “fair question”, he says.

On Wednesday, finance minister Nicola Willis announced she was launching an independent review into monetary policy decisions during the pandemic, including cuts to the Official Cash Rate, and the Large Scale Asset Purchase programme.

Willis is touting the exercise as a fact-finding, lessons-learned mission.

“This is simply about New Zealand learning the lessons of history. The Reserve Bank, during the response to Covid-19, did a huge amount of money printing,” she said.

“The result, in part due to those decisions, in part due to Labour’s decisions to spend and borrow a huge amount of money, was very high inflation, house prices going up 30 percent in a year, and more than $10 billion of losses after the printing of that money. So it is appropriate for the government to look at, did we get it all right, what could we do better in the future?”

Brash, also a former National leader, said the effects of monetary policy were “substantial” during the pandemic, and given the costs to the taxpayer an ex-post review “almost certainly” made sense.

“The Reserve Bank did two main things: they cut the Official Cash Rate to a very low level, 0.25 [percent], and would probably have cut it below that level had they felt the banks were able to handle that,” he said.

“In the end, they didn’t cut it below 0.25, but instead, of course, they bought many billions of dollars of government bonds at low interest rates in an attempt to stimulate the economy, but at a cost to the taxpayer, which was very substantial. So I think it’s worth having a having a good look at that.”

The current governor Anna Breman said she welcomed the review, but pointedly referenced a mandatory review undertaken by the Bank of the 2017-22 time period, which found the “large scale asset purchase programme was successful in correcting financial market dysfunction and reducing long-term interest rates”.

The review also found that “in hindsight, earlier, or stronger monetary tightening could have curbed the subsequent hike in inflation,” Breman said.

Willis was not impressed by that previous review.

“The Reserve Bank went through a window-dressing exercise of doing their own review of what they’d done, and gave themselves essentially full marks at the time,” she said.

“In opposition, I was frank. I said they’ve marked their own homework, that’s not good enough. If I was the finance minister, I would commission an independent review, and today that’s what I’ve done.”

The opposition has questioned why, if Willis had wanted a review all along, she had waited until now to commission it – especially as it is set to be made public in September, just a few weeks before the election.

Labour leader – and former Covid-19 response minister – Chris Hipkins said it was “an exercise in cynical, political manipulation,” pointing to other occasions the government could have done a review, including when it expanded the terms of reference for the Covid-19 Royal Commission of Inquiry.

“The timing of it is very transparent. This is a very clear political exercise in the middle of an election campaign. It’s not designed to provide some impartial view of the Reserve Bank’s actions, bearing in mind that the Reserve Bank took all of these actions independently of the government of the day,” he said.

“I think the whole world has learned a lot of lessons around monetary policy in a global crisis like a global pandemic. New Zealand’s Reserve Bank, the actions they took weren’t out of line with the actions being taken by central banks around the world. And there have certainly been lessons, I think, the whole economic system have learned from that.”

Hipkins described the review as an “attack” on the Bank’s independence.

Green Party co-leader Chlöe Swarbrick has also questioned the timing, noting she had called for a Select Committee inquiry into the economic response in 2022.

“The timing of this is so sus. Nicola Willis has been talking about these concerns since I was on the Finance and Expenditure Select Committee with her back in 2020. And it also obviously was an election issue throughout 2023. So if the minister’s intent, if the government’s intent, is pure, they would have got this out of the way with the broader Covid inquiry.”

Swarbrick said she had held former Finance Minister Grant Robertson’s “feet to the fire” on the effects of monetary policy on inequality, and did not believe Willis had any intention of addressing inequality with the new review.

“The Greens have actually been concerned since the outset of Covid-19 with unconventional monetary policy’s deployment. Because, as reflected in advice from RBNZ and Treasury at the time, that to do the Large Scale Asset Purchases and associated unconventional monetary policy without intervening or mitigating fiscal policy, we would see massive house price inflation and growing inequality,” she said.

“Of course, that’s exactly what happened.”

Willis has denied the review is timed for the election, and said she had not received advice on its timing.

“I don’t need to have that raised with me. It turns out that it’s quite top of mind that there’s an election in November. I don’t need officials to give me advice on it,” she said.

“The more political question you should all be asking is why are there politicians who are afraid of an independent review of the decisions of the independent Reserve Bank? Riddle me that.”

Brash noted that when he was Governor, the incoming Labour government in 1999 commissioned a “complete review” of the Bank’s framework.

That review, published in 2001 by Swedish economist Lars Svensson, recommended the formal establishment of a Monetary Policy Committee, something then-Finance Minister Sir Michael Cullen rejected.

The Committee was later established in 2019, following a further review of the Reserve Bank Act in 2017.

Svensson found the Bank had tightened its policy too late in 1992/93, and eased it too late in 1997/98.

He also recommended the Bank change how it reported and discussed alternative measures of inflation expectations for the medium and long term, but generally found its communication of monetary policy decisions to be “exemplary”.

Brash described that review as a “fair cop,” and a reasonable thing for a government to do.

He said it was a “fair question” of why Willis had waited until an election year to commission a review of her own.

“You can debate whether the timing should have been a few months earlier or a few months later, but that there should be a review seems to me to make good sense.”

Brash said he could “see some logic” in having it now, rather than earlier, as Willis would have wanted to wait until a new Governor came in.

He said he was not familiar with one of the reviewers, Athanasios Orphanides, but was familiar with David Archer from when he was the Reserve Bank’s assistant governor.

Brash said he was “pleased” at Archer’s involvement, and he had a “high regard” for him.

“Not only at the Reserve Bank of course, but he was also at the Bank for International Settlements in Basel for a number of years. So he’s had very wide international experience.”

Willis said the two reviewers were “objectively credible” and had significant experience.

“They are not political figures in any way. And I actually went to great pains to work through with the Treasury who, in a domestic context, would be able to do the review, who wasn’t conflicted by previous statements, and who would be able to give this credibility and weight, so I stand by the decision.”

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

One of two schools that illegally gave scholarships to foreign students who played in their top sports teams says it only happened because a sponsorship deal fell through.

The other has not responded to RNZ’s questions.

School sport leaders say they do not believe the cases are symptomatic of a wider problem, but an auditor told RNZ he doubts many of his peers know to keep a lookout for scholarships to foreign students when they review schools’ finances.

The Office of the Auditor General brought the https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/541873/schools-spending-money-on-gyms-family-travel-for-principals-auditors-say breaches to light in reports published in February and December last year, covering audits of school annual reports for 2023 and 2024.

“We highlighted that two schools breached legislation by meeting the costs of an international student through a scholarship. Legislation requires schools to charge fees for international students that at least cover the estimated costs of providing tuition and capital facilities,” the most recent report said.

The Office of the Auditor-General told RNZ the schools were Westlake Boys’ High School and Howick College and RNZ understands in both cases the students represented the Auckland schools in top-level sport.

The Howick College annual report for 2023 showed the breach related to two foreign students.

“Without modifying our opinion, we draw the reader’s attention to a breach of legislation. The School enrolled and met the costs of two international students, including homestay and other school fees in the year ended 31 December 2023 through scholarships,” the auditors wrote.

“This is a breach of section 521(1) of the Education and Training Act 2020 which requires state schools to charge fees for international students that are not less than the estimated costs of providing tuition to a student in the relevant subject, course, or programme, including the provision of capital facilities, plus any other fees prescribed for international students.”

The Westlake annual report for 2024 had a similar comment but for one international student.

RNZ understands a third party alerted the firm that audited both schools’ accounts that it was illegal for state schools to subsidise the education of foreign students.

The firm did not respond to an RNZ request for comment.

Former Deloitte auditor Priyesh Ramesh told RNZ he doubted many auditors knew scholarships for foreign students were forbidden and it was unlikely they would check whether a scholarship in a school’s accounts was for a domestic or foreign student.

However, principals told RNZ the rules prohibiting schools from waiving or otherwise covering foreign students’ tuition costs were clear and the cases did not represent part of a wider problem.

The Education Ministry’s handbook of financial information for schools said scholarships must be open to every student at a school unless the giver of the scholarship has created a special trust.

Its website said international students not on a ministry-approved exchange programme must be charged fees that cover the cost of tuition and access to facilities.

Westlake headmaster Paul Fordham said the situation preceded his tenure as principal but it appeared the school helped a student after a sponsorship arrangement fell through.

“It certainly wasn’t a scholarship situation,” he said.

“It was a situation where a sponsorship had fallen through and the school essentially stepped in to meet the costs.”

Fordham said the school worked with auditors and the ministry to understand the breach and resolve it.

He said in the second year, 2024, the school found sponsorship that would cover what it believed were the student’s tuition and capital costs.

“We’ve tried to meet the rules but it’s a tricky situation when you’re dealing with a person.”

He would not confirm details about the student or the sport they played.

Fordham said he had not previously heard of third parties providing scholarships or sponsorships for foreign school students.

“It does seem unusual and I don’t know if it’s a generally-used practice. It’s certainly a one-off from what I could establish at Westlake,” he said.

Asked if schools were aware that they could not waive international students’ fees, Fordham said common sense suggested they should not do that.

“Money that’s given to schools for operational needs and facilities etcetera certainly isn’t given for the purposes of subsidising international students’ costs,” he said

Fordham said Westlake had 200 foreign students and some represented the school in sport.

He did not believe foreign students’ participation in school sport was creating problems.

School Sport New Zealand chief executive Mike Summerell said schools could have no more than two international students in any teams competing in School Sport championship events.

He said in the past some schools recruited top foreign athletes for short periods to bolster their teams and the rules were designed to prevent that from happening.

Summerell said School Sport redeveloped its eligibility rules extensively in 2025 and would review them, including those covering the inclusion on non-domestic students, this term.

Summerell said it was difficult to track how many foreign students were playing in top teams.

“There’s not necessarily an outcry by schools to say that international students are filling up these spaces, but I would hazard a guess that there are certainly international students taking opportunities at these championship events for a lot of schools and that’s not necessarily a problem.

“Whether that leads to success for those schools is really not something I have the data to comment on.”

Summerell said he did not know how well schools understood the ministry’s rules prohibiting the use of school funds to cover foreign students’ fees.

He said School Sport rules forbade offering sport scholarships.

“If there was evidence that schools were providing scholarships… that weren’t publicly-available, and by that I mean that’s on their website that there’s a scholarship for X and it’s contestable, then there’s provision under the School Sport New Zealand eligibility rules and our integrity framework to look at that and investigate whether that’s fair,” he said.

However, Summerell said it was extremely difficult to prove if a school had provided scholarships that broke the rules.

College Sport Auckland chair Tim O’Connor said many schools had foreign students in their sports teams and Education Ministry rules about their fees were clear, as were the School Sport New Zealand rules on participation.

O’Connor agreed that though schools were prohibited from waiving or subsidising foreign students’ fees, there was nothing to stop third parties providing scholarships or sponsorships and that should be monitored in case it became a problem.

He said sport was an extra-curricular activity and the primary purpose of schooling, including for international students, was to provide an education.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

Wellington Water staff are now able to enter the failed Moa Point treatment plant but they cannot provide details of the work being done or who is involved.

Nearly 80 percent of the equipment inside the plant was damaged when it was flooded by a backflow of raw sewage last week.

At the peak of the equipment failure, 3300 litres of untreated wastewater went into the sea every second.

Since then a stretch of the Capital’s south coast had been off limits for swimming and gathering sea food.

Wellington Water expected it could be months before the plant was returned to full operations.

It said cleaning work was continuing, with fresh water flushed through the biological treatment areas of the plant to reduce levels of hydrogen sulphide, which made the interior of the plant hazardous to enter.

On Wednesday the water entity said it had “begun a closely managed entry” to the plant.

But it could not confirm specifics regarding who was now able to access the site, the conditions inside, what was being done to ensure the people’s safety or what was being revealed now that access had been acheived.

Earlier this week, Wellington Water chief executive Pat Dogherty said, initially, a room at the bottom of plant, the size of an Olympic Swimming Pool, was 3 metres deep in wastewater.

RNZ’s requests for information regarding the access to the site were put to Wellington Water at the beginning of the week in response to interviews with Dogherty where he said Monday would be the first day staff could safely go into the building to assess the damage.

On Wednesday, a statement from Dogherty said Wellington Water would be stepping back from making public statements about “aspects of the Moa Point incident and response” following an announcement from Wellington Mayor Andrew Little that the government would look to establish an independent inquiry into the plant’s failure as soon as possible.

“Now the inquiry has been signalled, it is important we allow that process to run its course. This means that we are unable to provide any further public statements regarding aspects of the Moa Point incident and response that may be included in the inquiry,” Dogherty said.

At the begining of the week, Little said Wellington City Council and central government would work together to ensure an inquiry was independent and had the right powers to make sure a similar problem never happened again.

Little said a ministerial inquiry would meet his preferred criteria of having independence, the right expertise and the power to access information.

“A ministerial inquiry has all that. It is more formalistic and does take a longer period of time to get the appointments up, get the terms of reference sorted out and then get it going. For me it is about having those criteria met but doing something that is as quick as possible. Those are the things that we are talking through,” Little said.

A spokesperson for Wellington Water said it hoped to provide more details of the work being done in the plant on Thursday.

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

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

Source: Radio New Zealand

An endocrinologist says more than half the women she sees on testosterone for low libido are taking too high a dose, and she and her colleagues are calling on Pharmac to finally fund a female-specific product.

Pharmac is set to consider funding AndroFeme 1 on Thursday, which unfunded costs anywhere between $150 and $250 for a three-month supply, depending on the pharmacy.

To avoid that cost, many women are prescribed a funded alternative, called Testogel, which is formulated for men.

Testosterone is usually thought of as a male hormone, but it is also found in women. It is prescribed to treat low libido, also know as Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder (HSDD), in women who are postmenopausal.

Women’s health advocate and director of Cala Clinic, Jenna Scullin, explained: “Similar to males, women’s testosterone levels decline gradually over their lifetime.

“By the time a woman is at a menopausal age, it has often halved.”

Men who needed a boost of the hormone had the choice of four funded products, whereas women had no funded options.

Pharmac has twice declined to fund AndroFeme 1, first in 2024, saying the eligibility criteria (“postmenopausal women with HSDD”) was not appropriate and posed significant barriers to equitable access for women – particularly for women who, for cultural reasons, did not wish to undergo aspects of an HSDD diagnosis.

It also considered there was an “uncertain health benefit” in using AndroFeme 1 over the unapproved, or off-label use of Testogel, saying that if equivalent doses were administered, there should not be a significant difference in their effect.

At that stage, the discussion document showed there were 2300 people dispensed Testogel between February and November, and approximately 46 percent of those identified as female.

In 2025, the decision was reassessed, and the result was “no formal recommendation” which meant the previous decision stood – but this time Pharmac noted there was a need to fund a product with an appropriate dose for women, to minimise potential harm.

Endochrinologist Dr Anna Fenton from Oxford Women’s Health explained there was no research on how testosterone was metabolised by the female body.

“Women are being prescribed this without the appropriate baseline testing without, often, follow-up blood testing to make sure the level is appropriate.”

And it could be difficult for women to work out the correct dose of Testogel when it came out of the pump bottle, she said.

“It’s very hard to titrate the dose of a blob of gel, which is what you get from the pump dispenser, into something that is a quarter or a fifth of that dose, which is possibly what’s appropriate for women.”

Fenton said more than half of the women she treated who had been prescribed Testogel were showing testosterone levels that were too high.

“I had a woman the other day who had 12 times the upper end of the female range, so it was well into the male range.”

Side effects included greasy skin, acne or extra body hair growth, but at the extreme end, it could lead to changes in voice or enlargement of the genitals – and those effects were permanent, Fenton said.

New Zealand had “the bare minimum” available when it came to hormone replacements, which included things like oestrogen patches, trailing behind the likes of Australia, the UK, US, and Canada.

She, along with fellow endocrinologists Dr Megan Ogilvie, Dr Sylvia Rosevear, Dr Susannah O’Sullivan and Dr Sasha Nair, have made a joint submission to Pharmac ahead of its meeting, endorsed by the Australasian Menopause Society, urging it to prioritise “evidence-based, female-specific therapies” and fund AndroFeme 1.

“We urge Pharmac to refrain from normalising the use of male-formulated testosterone products in women.”

The company behind Testogel, Pharmaco, has made no claims of its safety for women.

It supplied RNZ with a statement, saying: “Testogel is a prescription medicine specifically formulated and approved to be used by men with low testosterone levels. The relevant data sheets and Consumer Medicine Information clearly state that the medicine should not be used by women.”

Pharmac director for advice and assessment David Hughes confirmed AndroFeme’s application was on the agenda for the Pharmacology and Therapeutics Advisory Committee (PTAC) meeting on Thursday.

“PTAC gives Pharmac clinical advice to help us make decisions about how to use our funding,” he said in a statement. “The committee reviews the evidence behind funding applications and looks at how strong and reliable that evidence is.”

He said a recently-received a submission would be discussed at the meeting.

Pharmac would aim to publish the provisional recommendation online within 30 days of the meeting, although that could be subject to change.

Female testosterone deficiency ‘more than just a low libido’ – health advocate

Scullin said one in three women between the ages of 40 and 64 experienced the effects of reduced sexual desire.

“It’s more than just a low libido, we see that it affects women’s mental health, it affects their social functioning, their relationships, their confidence and their overall wellbeing.

“There’s this view sometimes that a woman’s sexual function is not essential,” she said. “But when a man comes forward with needing assistance, there’s one of four funded options accessible to him.”

She said while some GPs and specialists were comfortable prescribing Testogel to women despite the lack of safety data, a number were not, “so it’s not just that we’re asking for a female-formulated option, but in many cases we’re actually asking for an option for women”.

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