Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

The harm social media is causing young people is being explored in ‘Under the Influence’, a new series from the NZ Herald.  The second episode, ‘Manosphere v Boy’, explores the network of online influencers pushing extreme, and often misogynistic, ideas about masculinity to boys and young men.  The messaging sets unrealistic expectations around success, wealth, relationships, and dominance, often preying on insecurity and loneliness – offering simple messages and “self-improvement” tips that draw them deeper.   Director and producer Nadia Maxwell told Kerre Woodham that one thing that isn’t paid enough attention to in this conversation is the cumulative effects.   She says you might see a video you know has bad messaging, but young people are consuming hours' worth of content daily, and it doesn’t matter how smart you are or what your pre-existing beliefs are, all it takes is repetition.  A key element of the manosphere playbook is the concept of what’s fair, or to be exact, what isn’t.  Maxwell told Woodham that they’re essentially saying a certain group of people are to blame for the world being unfair, and then they sell them a solution – reclaiming tradition, power, and masculinity.   LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

National is accusing Labour of having a “hidden bill”, worth $18 billion, in its spending plans.  Finance Minister Nicola Willis says they promised to outline how it would fund its election commitments after the Budget, but no credible plan has been provided.  But Labour disputes this, promising everything will become clear in the party’s fiscal plan, which will be released later this year.  The big focus is Labour’s Future Fund, which would take ownership of some Crown stakes and shareholdings, using the dividend revenue to fund other policies. However, this would leave a $2.7 billion hole in public finances.  NZ Herald Political Editor Thomas Coughlan told Kerre Woodham that Labour is refusing to say what will be redirected into the Fund until after the election – which they’ve rightly copped flak for.  But he believes that after the election they might quietly try to kill it by making it a very small fund —around 10–15% of what was promised— which could help the numbers stack up.  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Do you know what's real and what's not when you're scrolling through your news feeds? When you're scrolling through your social media? AI generated “news” pages and political deepfake ads are swamping social media feeds. They've been around for a while, but there's more and more and more of them and they're becoming harder to detect as the technology gets more sophisticated, as people understand how to use the tools they're discovering.  When it comes to the ads, think of Mike Hosking's cryptocurrency investment scheme scam and Toni Street's weight loss drugs scam – all AI generated, all false. But if it looks like them, it sounds like them, how do you know it's not them? It's the same as true with news stories. How do you differentiate between what is real news and what is fake news? And it's getting even harder now that some news is becoming fakeish.  The Herald reports this morning in their story that many posts are on pages with more than 100,000 followers, so you'd think, well, that would be legit. The phonies take existing stories, news stories that begin as real, then run them through AI to rewrite them and then republish them with fake images, again in many cases using the original image and then oomphing it up. The Herald used an example of the attack on Christopher Luxon's electorate office. They showed the real photo, which was of a pretty much undamaged facade of the building with two police officers standing outside. Next to it, somebody had vamped up the image by showing it completely gutted with fire appliances and many fire officers standing around with the two original police officers. So you take the original, then oomph it up.  Particularly spurious is the spate of fake social media articles that have been targeting New Zealand athletes and their families. Recent posts have featured former and current All Blacks, and Warriors coach Andrew Webster and his family were targeted with a post claiming his wife had died when in reality she is very much alive. Why would anyone be so stupid and so cruel? TVNZ spoke to Massey University marketing professor Bodo Lang, and he said the people posting these fake articles were likely seeking clicks and followers. They're people who make their living out of posts on social media. There are many of them who do that. Some are just eking out some kind of existence – they would far rather be an influencer, or run a YouTube channel, or run a page and make their money that way. That's what they think. It's actually a hell of a lot of hard work from what I understand from people who do in fact make a sizeable income out of their social media. It's a lot of effort and I don't think these people understand nearly how much it is.  And as many of the young influencers, the young YouTubers who start off life with followers because they're doing something they love doing, when they monetize it and have to put the work in, they end up crashed on the shores of their own fame, shipwrecked. They give it up by the time they're 22/23 if they don't come to a worse end. But initially, these young people think, well, this has got to be better than a real job. They'll take anything they can and use it to get the clicks in an attempt to monetize it.  So how do you spot the difference between what's real and what is not? In the story this morning in the Herald, there's a photo or an image that the Herald's used showing me in the big studio where Mike normally broadcasts and where we tend to film the interviews with leaders of political parties. It's got me in the big studio with Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins. Now, there's a number of things immediately wrong with that AI image. If I was moderating a debate, no matter what you think about my Tokyo Rose tendencies and my snuggling up to the National Party, I would not be sitting so close to the PM. A moderator always sits smack bang in the middle. And even though I'm looking at him with a kind of outraged expression as he lunges across the table pointing his finger at AI Chris Hipkins, I would not be sitting that close to him.  Chris Hipkins looks like Clutch Cargo – he's got this big manly jaw. Looks nothing, well, I mean, I'm sure he's got a very nice jaw, but it looks nothing like him really. Christopher Luxon's about right, although he looks to be towering over the rest of us when in real life, he wouldn't be. At first glance, if you were looking at that, you'd think, oh yes, when was the leaders' debate on? I must have missed it. If you weren't looking at it closely.  My mum got taken in when Pope Leo was anointed Pope. Did you see that lovely video about him with the alcoholic friend that he found in the Vatican City? Had him come and stay with him the first week. She showed me, and that wasn't even using particularly sophisticated AI, this was just a series of images of random people and the Pope. I'm like, Mum, no. No, that's simply not true. He did not take in his alcoholic friend from America and put him up in the papal chambers and get him sorted and reunite him with his family within the first week of his papacy. Well, how would you know? She said. Well, have a look at the papal calendar. And she's not a stupid woman; she just wants to believe nice stories.  So how do you know what is real and what is not? Have you been caught out before? I mean, if it's there for entertainment, if you know it's there for entertainment, you can enjoy it and jog on. But it does get damaging, it does get harmful when you believe that Mike Hosking is offering cryptocurrency investment advice. People have been taken in by politicians who are deepfakes, media personalities who are deepfakes. When you lose your money, when you are the victim of it, when you wake up one morning to find out that you're supposed to be dead, I mean, disconcerting to say the very, very least, and then having to tell people, no, I'm very much alive. And as we head into an election, how do you know what is real and what is not? When you look at all the information you're consuming across all the different media, how do you know what's true? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Now I mentioned Thomas Coughlan's excellent piece in the Herald yesterday. He looked at the costings for Labour's policies so far. He got the Treasury costings for them, got Nicola Willis, the Finance Minister's accusations about lack of detail, crunched it right down to give us the best possible chance of getting a real world look at the numbers and whether Labour will be able to afford the policies. It is well worth a read if you haven't already. We'll talk to Thomas tomorrow about the importance of costing all of the parties' different promises. It's not just Labour's, it's just that they've released probably the most policy thus far, shockingly, given how late they were to the party.  But all the mainstream media seem to be producing excellent analyses of the different parties' pledges and promises, and we have to read them as we go up to the election. It is so important that we know what we're voting for, what the implications will be if our party of choice is elected. And it doesn't really matter whether you're voting out of self-interest, what's in it for me, whether you're voting for tomorrow's New Zealanders, you have to understand what you're voting for, how it will be paid for, how far in the future the payments are going to be if it's a very expensive promise and pledge, what the bottom lines are. We have to know what we're voting for.  Radio New Zealand's looked at the different new taxes being proposed by different parties. Basically, they've looked at the capital gains tax from Labour with comment from economists. They've looked at the land value tax from the Opportunity Party and the Green Party's capital acquisition tax, which is essentially an inheritance tax. And oops on the accounting error from the Greens. What's $800 million here and there, really? Not a great start, but there we go.   Newsroom has an opinion piece from Sir Geoffrey Palmer and Andrew Butler claiming that the current Government has enacted laws far too quickly with inadequate consultation or analysis before they're enacted. And they have exhorted people to ask the different parties before the election what the party's attitude is towards the taking of urgency on legislation. The present coalition government has taken record amounts, they say, of urgency and has also avoided select committee scrutiny altogether on some important bills. That's where you get to ask questions of it and test the bill, really. And it's true that the coalition National government has passed more than 90 unique bills using parliamentary urgency since coming to office, nearly half of all the bills passed.  Palmer and Butler have a point that it is not good for democracy when the normal protocols are bypassed. But Sir Geoffrey has either forgotten or learned from his mistakes – he was a senior member of the fourth Labour Government, which accorded urgency to a total of 152 bills. Of that total, 107 passed through all the stages under urgency during their term. The paper that the bills were written on was coming off and before the ink was even dry, people were voting on them. Sir Geoffrey is no stranger to urgency and perhaps he's learned that it's wiser to take time before you pass laws.  There's a lot that we can do to keep ourselves informed. There's a lot that we can do to understand the implications of what we're voting for. There's a lot that we can do to make politicians more accountable. But what the politicians are relying on is that this stuff is really hard, and it is. And they're making it even harder. Both Labour and the Coalition Government have been very slow to respond to requests for official information. Some of it is vexatious, some of the requests are vexatious and just designed to really annoy and take up the time of the people in charge, but a lot of it is not. It is hard to find the information, to get the information, to compare the information with other information from different agencies and then be able to form a conclusion from it. It's really difficult.  But our media's trying to do that on our behalf, and I think thus far they are doing a pretty good job. The politicians and the public service are relying on people to be as complacent as possible. Too busy, too busy working hard, too busy working hard with the kids. You do the thinking for me, you make the decisions for me, and then we moan when we don't like them. I mean, you look at Sir Keir Starmer – gone. Six Prime Ministers in Britain since Brexit because people don't like the news that they're getting. They want somebody to tell them it's going to be all right, and it's not. The world is in a parlous state, and we either have to cut our spending dramatically, and this is the Western world over, or increase taxes or some other way of revenue, getting revenue. It's really difficult. And so we have to know what we're voting for. The onus is on us starting from this election onwards to be informed as we possibly can. Democracy, from the Greek, rule by the people. Let us put the 'demos', the people, back into democracy. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Very shortly public voting will be underway for the Spark Retail NZ's People's Choice award. The People’s Choice Award recognises a retailer that has made a genuine, positive impact on its customers. Retail NZ Chief Executive Carolyn Young said it's important to allow Kiwis to have a say in who they think deserves the award. Voting is open from Friday the 26th, and the awards ceremony will be on the 3rd of September. LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Work ethics – where do we stand on those? Is it a generational thing? Do you continue to soldier on despite Covid changing the way we see coming to work while sick? Do you still soldier on? Do you pause and take a break if you can feel a sniffle coming on because you want to A) ensure you don't infect your colleagues and B) ensure that you've got the best possible chance of getting better by staying home? Is it a generational thing or just an individual thing?   Gerry Brownlee, the Speaker of the House, is cracking the whip. At scrutiny week yesterday, he proposed changing Parliament's sitting hours and expressed a strong view that Parliament did not sit long enough. During the 30 weeks that Parliament meets for business, it generally sits from 2pm until 10pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays with a dinner break —and this is harking back to 1953— with a dinner break from 6pm to 7.30pm. None of this snatching a thing of pre-packaged sushi and scoffing it at your desk for ten minutes. No, no, no. When the House sits, there's a dinner break from 6pm to 7.30pm, and then the House sits again. On Thursdays it sits from 2pm until 6pm.   Governments can move motions to extend sitting hours to the following morning or they can put the House into urgency, but that doesn't happen very often. Gerry Brownlee has proposed extending Parliament's sitting hours, but he wouldn't tell the media the specifics of the proposal saying it would be unreasonable to do so while all the parties were considering it. Of course, many MPs do much more work than just sitting in the House debating proposed legislation. If they're good MPs, they'll work every day of the week. I mean our electorate MP, I see him at every community thing, every community clean up, every school fair, and that's with two small children – a new baby and a toddler. When you're doing it properly, it's a job that's tough on people and on relationships.   And while we might like the idea of them all working longer hours and getting our money out of them, working longer hours and more days is all very well and good, but if MPs are just rehashing the same old ideas and arguing amongst themselves and point scoring and whatever, we wouldn't be getting value for money out of them, we'd just be getting more of the same. Working longer doesn't necessarily mean working better, does it? If you're the sort of jobsworths that sit there and work their hours, don't add anything, don't come up with any innovation, do something that way because it's always been done that way and we don't deviate from doing that way because that's the way it's always been done. I don't really think that you're getting value for money there.  And on the same day that Gerry was reported as calling for MPs to work longer and harder, there was an interview on Stuff with journalist and men's health campaigner Jehan Casinader talking about Gen Z getting it right when it comes to prioritising work-life balance. He said in the interview, “We hear Gen Z described or Gen Zed described as the snowflake generation, but I think they're actually just showing the rest of us how to prioritise what's important in our lives. They have better boundaries, they're more emotionally open, they're better at articulating their needs and they're focused on how do I get my work to support my life rather than the other way around." Jehan said, “I think that's challenging for a lot of older people because they grew up with the opposite story: sacrifice your health, sacrifice your wellbeing, do whatever you need to do to provide for your family, keep your employer happy." But I do think he says that we're seeing a cultural change.  And I have to say I am probably in that generation that turns up for work. I don't think there's anything wrong than doing whatever you need to do to provide for your family and keeping your employer happy. But then I've always had good employers, so you want to work when you've got good employers. I haven't had a crappy one. And my work's interesting, so I guess that's a bit different. Who's right, who's wrong?  I'm all for MPs sitting longer, but it's really difficult because when you are an electorate MP particularly, although I'm sure there are some good list MPs as well who work every hour God sends, but it's a bit harder to quantify what they do. Sitting longer in the House isn't necessarily going to ensure better legislation, more innovative legislation, great ideas, bright ideas.  I think there should definitely be penalties if you don't turn up for the bare minimum. Looking at you, Te Pāti Māori.  I don't know. Who's got it right, who's got it wrong? Is it a generational thing or is it an individual thing? And should our MPs be sitting longer and more often? See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

I'm going to start with good news today. Now, I know we don't normally, but it is such good news I have to comment, and it's also a topic dear to all our respective talkback hearts. And that is that almost all of Parliament is backing the 30 year infrastructure plan. You'll have heard it in our news, the Coalition Government comprising National, ACT, and New Zealand First, as well as Labour and the Greens, have committed to the Infrastructure Commission's blueprint for major works in this country, and bloody well done to them, I say. To get this sort of rare across the house support, the Commission must have done an excellent job of prioritising works, justifying the order of works, outlining what needs to happen for these works to be done. Chief Executive of the Infrastructure Commission, Geoff Cooper, is absolutely delighted, as he should be.  “I think this is a great step forward. It is a significant opportunity for New Zealand to get to get better outcomes for infrastructure, and it's not every day that you've got the government and the opposition parties saying, “Yep, we can see a plan forward here."”  There are 16 recommendations, 10 priorities for the next decade, and this had to happen. We don't have to imagine the cost of a stop-start approach to vital infrastructure; the numbers have already been crunched. A report out earlier this month showed that pausing, cancelling, and delaying infrastructure projects has cost New Zealand an estimated $11.8 billion in the last 25 years. Auckland Light Rail, Transmission Gully, the Interislander Ferry replacements, just in recent times have all been paused, delayed, or scrapped. Both main parties have been guilty of prioritising ideology over the country's wellbeing, but now, hopefully, the next generation won't have to see money literally disappearing down drains.   Kieran McAnulty, in his foreword to the Infrastructure Commission's plan —the Government, Chris Bishop, Kieran McAnulty, and Julie Anne Genter from the Greens all wrote a foreword to the plan— put it very well. He said both Labour and National-led governments had announced projects without funding them, watched costs balloon, and then scrapped what the other side started. He said every time the plan changes, we lose time, we lose money, and we lose the skilled people who build these things —too many of them— to Australia. That's the problem this plan sets out to fix. He said the plan offered a long-term, evidence-based path that did not belong to any one government, a prize bigger than any single policy. That is very well stated.   Green Party infrastructure spokesperson Julie Anne Genter said the party supported all 16 recommendations in the plan and said the Party overall welcomed the Government's intention and urges that this commitment to long-term planning and evidence-informed decision-making continues to drive investment in long-lived assets. Now, Labour and the Greens have some reservations, but not enough to put a spoke in the wheel, not enough to hold up this fantastic blueprint for the future. Ultimately, they have come together to support a long-term vision for the country that will benefit all future voters, whatever party they support. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

More than a million households could be overpaying for power this winter, as more Kiwis struggle to pay the bill at all. Around half of Kiwi households haven’t switched providers in five or more years, which is potentially costing them hundreds of extra dollars a year.  Consumer NZ says that sticking with the same provider can result in a “loyalty tax”, as better deals are often only offered to new customers.  Consumer Powerswitch Manager Paul Fuge told Kerre Woodham everyone grumbles about prices and their company, but they think it’s time something has to be done about prices.  He says it's causing harm to consumers and the economy, and it can’t keep going the way it is, so they've started a petition.  Fuge says that while some people have always struggled to pay their bills, the number of households struggling is increasing every year.  “Middle New Zealand is now struggling to pay their power bill, and that’s not acceptable.”  LISTEN ABOVE See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Life isn't fair. It's one of the first lessons you learn. And it's not fair when you find yourself, or more accurately your home, right smack in the middle of a vital piece of infrastructure. There's been so many cases around the country over a long period of time, but more recently you had the buyout of houses after the Canterbury quakes. Technically the buyouts of more than 8,000 properties were structured as voluntary offers. However, many residents felt forced to accept because the Government explicitly stated that essential infrastructure and council services would cease in those zones. They would be no more. They'd be living in a literal no man's land. You had the buyout of 160 odd homes for the Waterview Tunnel. We've had 50 odd homes in Ranui in West Auckland bought by the council to make way for new floodplains and to uncover a buried piped stream. So if your house happened to be right over the top of that stream, you were gone.  Now we have the buyout of homes in Grey Lynn in Auckland for the Northwest Busway project. Some of the residents in the suburb of Grey Lynn have lived in their homes for more than 50 years, but the bus needs to get through. The Northwest Busway project will give the growing population of West Auckland a valuable public transport option. When completed, it will be able to carry 9,000 passengers per hour either way. There's just the matter of the people living on the land that's needed for the expansion of the motorway. About 20 of the properties have already been purchased at a cost of $40 million, which seems about right for that part of Grey Lynn and should still buy you a house in this market in the area of similar quality and standard of renovation if that's where you want to live. Negotiations will take place over the coming years for the remainder of the busway project as it progresses. And it might be tough for the residents, but at least the Government's learned lessons from the past.  Remember Raglan Golf Club? You might not, but the Crown originally seized the 63-acre coastal site for a Second World War wartime military airfield. Turns out it wasn't needed. But instead of giving the land back when the war was over, instead of returning it to its Tainui owners, the Government leased it to the Raglan County Council, who turned the land into a golf course. Local Māori were evicted and expansion plans for the golf course encroached upon Māori sacred sites and burial grounds. When Māori objected and started to protest on the golf course, the council said, “Oh, all right then, well we'll sell it back to you." And Māori said, the Tainui said, “I don't think so. You didn't pay for it in the first place. You took it off us because you said it was absolutely needed for the defence of the country, and then you didn't give it back."   I mean, imagine if the Crown just said, “Right, well we need this for the busway, bugger off." You know, at least they've learned the error of their ways. Eventually the golf course was returned to Tainui, the rightful owners. So at least we're not living in those grim times. There seems to be an understanding that a home is more than land and a house. And the neighbourhood buyouts are always complicated by differences of opinion. We saw that in Canterbury, we saw that in Ranui, we're seeing it now in Grey Lynn.  There are pragmatists, some are even sanguine about it, seeing it as a new opportunity. You know, it has to happen, it's got to happen, well, you know. Others want to chain themselves to trees – “over my dead body," they're saying, will the NZTA take their home. And in that same area roughly, a supermarket was buying up land for its brand new supermarket. One holdout who wanted something absurd for his run down little home. I mean it's his castle, but he was wanting an absurd amount, so they just built round him. All right then, stuff you, we'll build round you.   But what options do you have if you have been there and done that? There'd be plenty of people who have had NZTA come knocking on their door, especially with the highways between Auckland and Cambridge, between Auckland and the Brynderwyns really, and there's still more looking to develop that. Residents of Canterbury, you know, what options do you have? Have you been treated fairly? I mean, just looking at the prices that they're paying for the Grey Lynn residents of that part of Grey Lynn, that's market rates, which is fair enough. You don't want, I suppose you do if you're the owner, but as the taxpayer, you don't want the former administration going in with an open chequebook saying, “No, name your figure. No, that's too low. Let's give you more." You would want to see market rates being paid, a fair market rate being paid, so if people want to stay in the area they can, if they want to move on elsewhere, they can do that too. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Men’s Health Week is underway, with a warning one in four Kiwi men won’t live long enough to get the pension. The campaign says raising the retirement age ignores big health gaps—especially for Māori and Pasifika men—and is urging guys to start making small changes to improve their health. Men's Health Week Director Mark Sainsbury joins Kerre Woodham to discuss the campaign.  LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.