/on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/rss 九一星空无限 Fri, 20 Jun 2025 14:43:56 Z en /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-scrapping-the-census-was-long-overdue/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-scrapping-the-census-was-long-overdue/ You know what I’m not going to miss? The census. If there anything that showed how bad Governments can be at embracing technology, it was the census. At a time when Governments collect huge amounts of electronic data about us, it seemed ridiculous that they were also asking us to fill out a paper form and send it in. They already know what we’re earning, the IRD has that. They already know how many babies are being born and how many of us are dying and how many of us getting hitched - Births, Deaths and Marriages has that. They already know how many of us are leaving the country and coming into the country, that’s collected too. They know how many one, two or three bedroom houses there are, that’s all collected already.  And yet - they were asking us to tell them that all again on the census form. Which made the exercise a giant waste of money. The last one cost $325 million and the next one was going to cost $400 million. Now I accept that there is information we will lose. Because as far as I know, no Government department collects information on how many languages you speak or what your sexuality is or what your first language is or how many people live in your house. So yes, by scrapping the census, we will end up with an incomplete set of data. But we already have an incomplete set of data because of the huge numbers of us that didn’t fill it in. In 2018, we didn’t count one in six Kiwis. That's not complete at all. So either way, we won't know anything. Except one way was going to cost us $400 million. Scrapping the census was way overdue. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 18 Jun 2025 05:01:21 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-dont-agree-with-acts-new-employment-bill/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-dont-agree-with-acts-new-employment-bill/ I'll tell you what I'm gonna be watching with some interest in the next few weeks -  that employment bill that ACT has just introduced to Parliament that would make it a lot easier for employers to fire staff who earn more than $180,000 because those high earning staff would not be able to take personal grievance cases for justified dismissal. Now, I say high earning with air quotes, because while yes, these people do earn a lot more than the average wage, I don't think that they earn so much that they can be considered, I don't know, rich pricks and treated so callously as to simply fire them without them having any recourse. Many of these people, I think, will probably be raising families - because you don't earn $180,000 plus if you're in your early 20s, do you? These are people who are in management, maybe even in upper management, and I'd imagine that they've got families to feed and families to look after, so I imagine these people would be amongst the most stressed if they could just lose their jobs all of a sudden. I think ACT is taking something of a political gamble here, because I would have thought that this is a case of ACT screwing over some of its own voters. Because remember, ACT does well in well-heeled places like Epsom, which is where people earning more than $180,000 a year live. Now, I'm not sure what's made ACT feel like they have to do this, because it's not as if there has been this huge public debate about how people on $180,000 plus have been terrible employees who need to have their employment rights stripped. And if anything, this is just going to provide work for lawyers because people on this kind of money will have the means, and if they have families to feed, the motivation as well, to litigate, and I suspect that they will. So I'm very keen to see if ACT actually goes through with this part of its plan, because from where I'm sitting, this just looks like a really weird idea with more downsides than upsides. LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 17 Jun 2025 07:11:02 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-this-governments-all-talk-bugger-all-action/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-this-governments-all-talk-bugger-all-action/ This morning, the Prime Minister was asked about the 2000 public servants that had lost their jobs. 2000 are out but 64,000 remain. Chris Luxon saw nothing wrong with that.   That right there is part of the reason why this Government is polling so poorly, because it's all talk, isn't it, bugger all action. Now I'm sorry. I realize this is a lot to start the week with - we're starting strident. I don't mean to continue like that - but were you as surprised as I was to hear that we've only cut 2000 public servants? And were you even more surprised that the Prime Minister's explanation is no more than a verbal shrug? This, I think, will be profoundly disappointing to a lot of people who expected this Government to get public spending under control. And cutting public servants is part of getting that spending under control. There is no reason why we have as many public servants as we have today. 63,000 - there is no reason why we have more than double the 30,000 public servants that we had in 2001. Our population hasn't doubled since 2001. It's gone up about 37 percent. If you adjust accordingly, then we should have 41,000 public servants, not 63,000 public servants. Now, I would have expected that the Prime Minister would have a better explanation than simply saying - at least it's not as bad as Labour. Well, maybe so, but I hoped for better. I hoped for a Government that was gonna actually turn this around. Certainly more than a Government that just feels like it's actually Labour dressed in blue clothing. And isn't this just the latest example of talk from this Government that is not being matched by action? They promised to cut spending every year, and they spend more than Grant Robertson. They promise to get on top of debt every year, and they add more to the debt. They promise to stop the race-based policies - and we just keep finding them. They keep waving them through unless we bust them at it. I think this, in part, answers the question that we were asking last week, which is why is it that 3 polls in a row were so tight that it wasn't actually clear if this Government would win an election if an election was held today. This is why they're not brave enough. They should be braver. In fact, if they were braver, they might be more popular. It's worth remembering that for all the hard decisions that were taken by the 4th Labour Government, which is definitely the most transformational that we can think of, right? For all those tough decisions taken in the first 3 years, they actually came back with a bigger majority in 1987. So maybe, you get rewarded for doing what you say you'll do, tough as it may be, rather than just talking tough and then doing very little. LISTEN ABOVE Mon, 16 Jun 2025 07:25:11 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-speed-is-of-the-essence-for-the-air-india-crash-investigators/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-speed-is-of-the-essence-for-the-air-india-crash-investigators/ Let me tell you about my colleague Kylie's reaction to that Air India plane crash last night.  She was in bed. She was playing on her phone as you do, and the news came in at about 9 o'clock.  Immediately, she looked, she suspected it, looked up what kind of plane it was, exactly as she thought: a Boeing.  Then she immediately looked up what plane her 12-year-old daughter is on to Samoa this Sunday —exactly as she expected, a Boeing— and she freaked out.  Now fortunately for her, she's got a partner with common sense, and actually, she herself is reasonably rational, so she's not going to be pulling her daughter off that flight. But she is still feeling incredibly uncomfortable about it.  And look, I don't blame her for that. I would bet that she's not alone in reacting like this.  And just assuming this is a Boeing problem. Truth is, we don't actually know that this is a Boeing problem.  Yes, it was a Boeing plane, but there is a very, very good chance that this is actually a pilot problem because it looks like the pilot may not have extended the wing flaps.  But the trouble for Boeing is it does not have the same benefit of the doubt that a planemaker would normally have with a crash like this because of all of the problems that Boeing has already had in the last 10 years.  Never mind the fact that the problems have been with the 737 narrow-body planes, and this is a 787, which is completely different. Never mind that.   Boeing shares fell immediately, and they have stayed down.  Now, I would say that speed is of the essence here for the people who are doing the investigation with getting those answers out.  These investigators, I understand, have about 30 days under international expectations to issue the preliminary findings, but they should, all things going well, have answers out of that flight data, the flight data recorders within days, if not hours of the crash.  And then I think the sooner that the public are told what has happened, the better for Boeing's sake. And Boeing will be hoping like hell that the answers clear the plane and unfortunately blame the pilot. Fri, 13 Jun 2025 06:07:00 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-can-we-trust-another-word-out-of-neil-quigleys-mouth/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-can-we-trust-another-word-out-of-neil-quigleys-mouth/ I don't enjoy saying what I'm about to say because personally I quite like Neil Quigley, but I think that he needs to quit as the chair of the Reserve Bank - simply because I do not think that we can ever trust a single word that comes out of that man's mouth again as the chair. He has been busted telling not just one, but quite a lot of fibs about Adrian Orr's resignation. So for a start, on the day that Adrian Orr quit, you'll recall Neil Quigley was the one who held the press conference. At the time he said Adrian's resignation was a personal decision. That is clearly not true. Adrian, we now find out, packed a sad, and quit over funding.  Neil Quigley also said that there was nothing that the Government had said in the days before that that caused Adrian to quit. Not true. Adrian and Nicola, and actually Neil himself, had a meeting about the funding 9 days before the resignation. Neil Quigley was also asked whether there were any policy conduct or performance issues which are at the centre of this resignation. He said there are no issues of that type that are behind this resignation. Once again, not true. He was asked what happened because: "Reserve Bank governors don't just up and resign" and he said: "There is a time when you think having achieved what you wanted to achieve, that's enough". Once again, not true. That's not why Adrian quit. Adrian quit because he packed a tantrum because he didn't get enough money. Now, I do not know why Neil Quigley decided that he needed to tell porkies in order to defend Adrian Orr. I mean, I get the feeling that he has spent a great deal of his time, unfortunately for him, trying to manage the tantrums of our former toddler governor, and perhaps he just got into a little bit of a pattern of butt covering for the guy. He has suggested that he was constrained in what he could say by Orr's exit agreement. But in that case, you simply say, look, I can't say much because it's an employment agreement. And I think we all will understand that because we're all employees or employers, and we're all constrained by the same law, so we get it. But he didn't choose to do that, did he? He chose to stand there and fib to us, and that means that next time he's up answering some tough questions, I don't know if we're going to trust him, are we? Already, unfortunately for Neil, he's got quite a big black mark against him. He was part of the money printing team with Adrian Orr that stuffed up the economy, and some already think that that is enough reason to call for him to quit. Never mind the fact that he has now been busted telling straight out porkies in public. So if I was Neil Quigley, he's got two options. He can hang in there and see how it goes, or he can quit while he's still ahead - and I would do the latter. LISTEN ABOVE Thu, 12 Jun 2025 07:01:43 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-groundswell-will-eventually-be-proven-right-about-the-paris-agreement/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-groundswell-will-eventually-be-proven-right-about-the-paris-agreement/ I think in the end, Groundswell is gonna be proven right - but I don't think they're gonna get what they want right now and I don't think they should get what they want right now. Because what they want is for New Zealand to pull out of the Paris Agreement. Now, we cannot pull out of the Paris Agreement. At least, we can't pull out right now, right? We cannot be one of the first to pull out, because the first lot of countries that pull out of the Paris Agreement are going to be the ones who are blamed for destroying the agreement, and they will pay for it reputationally. And frankly, here in New Zealand, we rely way too much on our good guy reputation for tourism and trading and so on to risk being seen to not care about climate change. But I think that eventually we will pull out - or more likely, the agreement will fall apart by itself because it's not working. I mean, just look at the numbers. We are supposed to hit our first significant target - the 2030 target - in five years' time. We're not going to hit it. I can tell you that now, we are not going to hit it in 5 years' time. Neither are a whole bunch of other countries - Argentina, South Korea, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Turkey, Canada, just go through the list of countries to find how many of them are actually going to hit it. Now when we don't hit it, which is inevitable, we are supposed to fix it up by planting a huge number of trees, and we're only going to be able to do that by paying probably a developing country to plant those trees for us. And the estimated bill for that, as it stands right now, is $23 billion. Now, do you think we're gonna send $23 billion overseas in 2030? No, of course we're not going to. We know that because the climate minister has basically gone around saying that. And even Chlöe Swarbrick knows that this thing is falling apart, because we had her on the show just a few weeks ago and I asked her if the Paris Agreement was going to hold - and she wouldn't say yes, which tells you she already knows. So if Chlöe can see that the thing is gonna fail and Simon Watts is predicting that it's gonna fail, then perhaps we all need to see that it is going to fail at some point and Groundswell will eventually be proven right. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 11 Jun 2025 07:34:11 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-spare-a-thought-for-aucklanders-today/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-spare-a-thought-for-aucklanders-today/ It is as expected - if our office is anything to go by, Auckland is a miserable town today because the house valuations are out, and they're bad. Just about everyone has jumped on the computer to have a look by now, I'd say, and just about everyone's house has gone backwards. So my house - it's gone down in value by 8 percent. One of the bosses, not too bad, only gone back by 4 percent. I don't think anyone's house has gone up in the office. Someone's house has dropped by $250,000. One colleague, and this colleague is suffering more than anybody else - her house has gone down by 21 percent. That's $1.15 million down to $900,000. That's another $250,000 shaved right off right there. Someone's feeling agitated. I called a real estate agent today to see if it's wider than just our office. They told me, yep - and people are not happy. Another real estate agent reckons he's already fielding calls from buyers who are mid-negotiation, who are now saying they're not gonna lift their offer anymore. They're just gonna leave it right where it is, because look at the valuation that's out today.  Auckland Council says they normally have about 500 people on their website at any one time. When we called, they said they were watching 12,000 people on their website at any one time. As I said yesterday, spare a thought for Auckland. If you have an Aucklander in your life, spare a thought for them because it's a tough day for Auckland today. Because, I mean, we take the mickey out of Auckland, but there is good reason why Auckland feels like this.  Houses in Auckland mean a lot, don't they? I feel like probably more than anywhere else in the country apart from maybe Queenstown and the surrounding area, because houses are expensive in Auckland. Young Aucklanders obsess about it. They scrimp and they save, and they try so bloody hard to get into their first house. It's totally understandable that absolutely no one in this town wants to watch their house then go down in value. But of course, bear in mind, it is slightly irrational. If you are one of these Aucklanders doing this, you are being irrational, you realize that, because you're not suddenly poorer today than you were yesterday, are you? I mean, the value of the thing has not changed overnight. It's simply just been written down. In fact, it was written down a year ago, it's just taken them a year to put it out there. And if you're buying and selling in the same market, it really doesn't matter at all. It's only if you're cashing up to move out of town or to get rid of an investment property or something like that, that this actually matters. Now, I say that knowing that none of that is gonna sink in - we're gonna continue to be irrational because it is all in our heads, isn't it? We feel wealthier when the house is worth more, and that ain't what happened today. LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 10 Jun 2025 07:38:01 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-was-anyone-shocked-by-mark-robinsons-new-zealand-rugby-resignation/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-was-anyone-shocked-by-mark-robinsons-new-zealand-rugby-resignation/ Anyone who thinks that Mark Robinson resigning from New Zealand Rugby today is a shock clearly doesn't follow rugby's dramas with their brain fully turned on. This was not a shock at all. Anyone could see this coming. This was coming the minute that David Kirk took over as the chair. Now, I don't want to be seen to be saying that David Kirk forced him out. It is, in fact, quite possible that Mark Robinson just read the room and left of his own accord first - but it was always going to happen, wasn't it? Because David Kirk is the new broom, and the new broom generally gets rid of things that aren't working. And unfortunately for Mark Robinson, that wasn't working. Now, I've got no hard feelings towards the guy. He seemed like a really easy bloke, but he has not had the most glorious 10 years, has he? When he brought in the Silver Lake deal, which has yet to bear any fruit despite all of the drama it caused - and boy, did it cause drama. He totally stuffed up the Fozzy situation when he tried to fire Fozzy and then didn't fire Fozzy, and then eventually did manage to get rid of Fozzy - but by then, we all felt really bad for Fozzy. And he persisted with the Super Rugby competition that isn't working. All he's really managed to do with it is tinker, and it still isn't really working. The finances are terrible. The game has maybe managed to arrest the decline, but nothing much else - and the rugby community is bruised after that Silver Lake altercation. If there is a lesson here, I reckon it may be that New Zealand rugby might want to replace Mark Robinson with someone who isn't a rugby man, or a rugby woman, whatever. Someone who isn't sentimental about the game, who can look at all of this business with fresh eyes and say: why is that happening? That shouldn't necessarily be happening - and have the courage to change it, because they don't actually care about rugby that much. Someone who can drive the change that rugby needs, because if there's one thing we all agree on, it's that rugby needs change. LISTEN ABOVE Mon, 09 Jun 2025 07:13:16 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-why-is-it-so-hard-to-do-the-obvious-thing/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-why-is-it-so-hard-to-do-the-obvious-thing/ I've been thinking overnight about the news yesterday that a second Christchurch school has decided to put the walls back up in their classrooms and abandon those modern learning barn style spaces that we were doing in favour of going back to the traditional single class.  The school is Shirley Boys High.  And then last year, Rangiora High School did the same thing.  Something that Rangiora High School's principal said struck me.  He said, the results have been a huge shift in engagement, in attendance, in achievement.  It is not what I was expecting. I was expecting a small shift, but it has gone through the roof. It's made a massive difference in everything in the school.  And that reminded me a lot of what the principals and the teachers said after we banned the phones in schools.  Remember that we banned the phones, and suddenly they were saying, well, the difference is huge.  But all we've done in both cases is the obvious thing, isn't it?  I mean, obviously, if you take the phones away from kids, they're gonna be less distracted.  They're gonna learn better, they're gonna talk to each other more, they're gonna play outside more.  And obviously, if you put 30 kids in a room by themselves, there will be less noise than if you have 120 kids in a big space together.  Why is it so hard for us to do the obvious thing?  Why was the Ministry of Education so hellbent on doing the wrong thing?  Because if you listen to educators or everybody else who's involved in this, they will tell you it was virtually impossible to get a school upgrade unless you agreed to take all the walls down and buy in, and yet, obviously it was a really big mistake.  It feels a little bit like the Ministry of Education went through a weird experimental phase that has cost our kids, with everything from classroom styles to weird ways to teach English when they didn't have to do it.  And when common sense would tell you that it wasn't gonna work, why is it so hard when it comes to schooling for us to do the obvious thing?  Fri, 06 Jun 2025 07:08:00 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-polls-revealed-how-people-felt-about-the-pay-equity-saga/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-polls-revealed-how-people-felt-about-the-pay-equity-saga/ We've had a case of conflicting polls over the last twenty-four hours, with two completely different Governments predicted. But if there's one thing you can take from these polls, which they both agree on, it's that the pay equity revamp hasn’t turned into the circuit breaker that the left clearly thought it was going to be. The polls are almost identical in the proportion of people who oppose the revamp. The One 九一星空无限 poll had 45 percent, the RNZ poll had 43 percent. That is not big. It is absolutely a plurality - in both polls, more people oppose it than support it. I’ve seen polls where 70 percent, 80 percent of people oppose something. Someone pointed out to me the polls that were done after Hekia Parata used Budget 2012 to announce class sizes would change - about 80 percent hated it. So 45 percent is nothing. It certainly isn’t the circuit breaker and make-people-hate-the-Government moment that Labour and the Greens and the unions were hoping it would be. Why? I don’t know. I thought it was a slam dunk for the opposition to run home but maybe people didn’t understand it enough to care. Maybe the Government managed to claw back the narrative when it started properly explaining what it was doing, maybe Labour completely ballsed it up, maybe Andrea Vance distracted everyone by calling female ministers the c-bomb. Or maybe people are just ideologically entrenched and not wanting to oppose anything the Government does because they voted for the Government - and so on. I don’t know. But what is clear is that it’s not the moment it could’ve been - or was expected to be. And the Government has not been damaged by this as badly as it could’ve been. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 04 Jun 2025 06:02:43 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-see-nothings-changed-in-camp-jacinda/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-see-nothings-changed-in-camp-jacinda/ Looks like nothing's changed in camp Jacinda, has it? You will get no admission that she and her Government got anything wrong during Covid, from what I can gather. Now, this is my disclaimer - I haven't actually read the entire memoir just yet. But from what I've skim read and from what I've read and heard in the reviews, and what I've read and heard with her interviews promoting the book, if you are looking for her to admit that she got anything wrong at all during Covid, you're not going to find it. The closest thing I found is on page 309, where she admits that she made 'imperfect decisions', but that's really underselling the massive balls-up that was our Covid response, wasn't it? What you get instead is multiple excuses, heaps of verbal fluff to avoid answering hard questions and, regularly, the defence that we saved 20,000 lives. Here's an example - she gave an interview to RNZ's Jessie Mulligan where he asked her about vaccine mandates, which we now know, of course, was a huge mistake that cost people their jobs simply because they wouldn't get the jab in which the Royal Commission of Inquiry into Covid said damaged 'social cohesion'. Would she agree with that, he asked. She said she wouldn't argue with their findings. He then asked her, did vaccine mandates save any lives? She said - she's not the one that can answer that question for you, although apparently she can tell you that she did save 20,000 lives, she just can't talk about this particular instance. And then she goes on to say that the Commission did also say that vaccine mandates were important in areas like healthcare and so on, and we're relatively limited, but again, I won't argue with their findings. So, not a yes, not a no - and definitely not an apology. Now, I don't actually know why I was expecting anything else from her. I mean, this was a feature of Jacinda during Covid.  She would never say she did anything wrong, which is why it got worse and worse as she barrelled full steam ahead in the wrong direction at times - because apparently going full steam ahead in the wrong direction was better than admitting she was headed in the wrong direction. And of course she got things wrong. I mean, anyone would have. She made thousands and thousands of decisions over multiple years. She would 100 percent have got at least one of those decisions wrong, do you not think? It would be nice just to hear her admit it, because I think it would help some of us - and I'm talking about me here - to forgive her. LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 03 Jun 2025 07:32:23 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-seymour-and-peters-are-the-right-men-for-the-job/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-seymour-and-peters-are-the-right-men-for-the-job/ This weekend marks the last day of Winnie and the first day of David Seymour as the Deputy Prime Minister. Now, mostly I don't actually care. I mean, I largely agree with Jim Bolger's assessment and, and obviously, happy 90th birthday to Jim for tomorrow. The role doesn't actually mean very much. It's symbolic. It doesn't carry any particular power other than really just letting you know who's second in command. But it feels like an appropriate time just to take a moment to acknowledge, because we don't do this very often, that it's actually very nice, isn't it, to have both of these two men in government right now, if only to give the Nats a little bit of a push along, you know, to actually do things from time to time. Winston strikes me right now as the right man for the right job for right now. Don't you think? With all this nutty stuff that's going on in the world, his huge previous experience as a foreign minister, I think, is reassuring. I feel like it's not going overboard to say that I trust his instincts in the job. When he gets angry with Israel, you know, it's not for politics, it's not for performance. It's because he's actually angry with Israel. Given his experience, that would be warranted. On David Seymour, if there's one thing that we can truly thank him for right now, it's shifting the Overton window so that we can, and now do debate things like the treaty principles. The Overton window is the available, is the, it covers the stuff that we feel comfortable talking about in the media and in society. He has shifted that, so principles are now firmly within the Overton window and we talk about it, and we should be able to debate it, because they should not be taboo. Things that have as much impact on our economy and our society and our lives as treaty principles, and as on our private property as well, should be up for discussion without critics of those things being labelled racist. And it is squarely because of ACT's policies that those discussion, those discussions are now out in the open. Now, I don't really expect very much to change after the weekend other than maybe we'll see more of both men, more of David Seymour because he'll be the deputy, and more of Winston because he'll not be the deputy, which means that he can act up a little bit, maybe. But either way, I think it's not a bad thing to have both of them in there at the moment, is it? Fri, 30 May 2025 07:00:12 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-theres-a-gloomy-note-in-the-reserve-bank-decision/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-theres-a-gloomy-note-in-the-reserve-bank-decision/ I don't really want to have to start on a bum note, but if there is a thing that we do on the show, it's honesty. So let's be honest about it. What the Reserve Bank decision told you today is how much trouble our economy is in. If you're in business, you already know this and you don't need me to tell you this. I was talking to a couple of CEOs yesterday. They were telling me they cannot see the green shoots - we've been waiting. We were told - survive til '25, we're halfway through and we're still stuffed. Well, let me tell you what we got today. We got a 25 basis point cut. We needed 50 percent because that OCR is still too high. It's now sitting at 3.25 percent.  It's probably actively still dampening our economic growth because I think the consensus is that 3 is neutral, and we're not there yet. But they could not give us a bigger cut today. And even they must realize how much damage they're doing, because they themselves have admitted that the economy is even more stuffed than they thought it was as recently as February, when they last met. Back in February, they predicted that in the first quarter of this year, we would have seen growth of 0.6 percent. They have revised that down to 0.4. This quarter that we're in right now, they forecast that we would be growing at 0.6 percent. They just halved that to 0.3 percent.  Next quarter, they thought would be 0.5 percent. They've taken that down to 0.2 percent. That's not good. That's bad. And now, why couldn't they give us a bigger cut to help us along? Because they might set off inflation again if they do. We just saw a rise in inflation the other day, and there is potential for it to keep on creeping up. We've got dairy prices going up, we've got electricity prices going up, we've got rates going up - I could go on and on and on. The Budget that we just had last week is not super deflationary, is it? And their job at the Reserve Bank, remember, is not to help the economy grow. That is not their job. Their job is to contain inflation, and it's kind of borderline, and they can't take any chances there. Could we have a touch of the old stagflation back? No growth, prices going up? Feels a bit like that's a risk at the moment, isn't it? Now, I hope not, but 'I hope' is not a strategy. And yet, what else have we got left when even the Reserve Bank can't get out of the economy's way? LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 28 May 2025 07:23:15 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-winstons-rejection-of-chippy-is-more-significant-than-we-realise/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-winstons-rejection-of-chippy-is-more-significant-than-we-realise/ I think Winston Peters ruling out ever going into coalition with Chippy after the next election is actually more significant than many people will realize. Because Winnie was actually Chippy's only credible path back to being prime minister again. Without Winnie, Chippy is completely stuffed, because the alternatives are not real options. The alternatives are: One - being in a coalition with a couple of loony parties, which centre voters are absolutely not going to go for. So you can forget about that. The other is that Labour is returned as a majority Government again, which is, after what happened last time, not going to happen for a very long time again. So basically, there is no way back for Chippy. He will not be Prime Minister after 2026, if ever. Now a lot of people would say to me at this juncture - well of course not, National were always going to win the next election anyway, so this is just a completely spurious argument. But I would say to you is - Labour's chances are actually a little bit better than you might think, because what we have right now is hardly a wildly popular Government. These guys were elected, remember, telling us they were going to turn this economy around. 18 months later, they have not turned this economy around. 18 months later, we are still in the economic doldrums. We are yet to see a vision, economically, from the coalition Government, the right track, wrong track indicator that comes out in multiple polls now is heavily negative for this Government. Thousands of people are voting with their feet and leaving the country altogether.  People vote with their hip pocket, right? Forget about everything else. If you just look at the economy, that is your greatest determiner of what happens at the election. People vote with their hip pocket - and right now, the hip pocket is suffering, it is not looking good for the economy. But also, there should be a target right now on Chippy's back in Labour, because Winnie's problem is not with Labour. Winnie's problem is with Chris Hipkins, which means a different leader and Winston Peters is back in the game as a possibility for Labour. Now that requires Labour to roll Chris Hipkins and then their chances are good again. However, that requires Labour actually realizing that they need Winston Peters to form a coalition Government after 2026 - and that requires them also realizing there is no way they can coalesce with the Māori Party because most voters are allergic to the shenanigans that that party get up to. But I don't think Labour is smart enough to realize that yet, do you? LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 27 May 2025 07:22:50 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-needs-to-get-out-of-the-retailers-way/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-needs-to-get-out-of-the-retailers-way/ I totally understand that retailers want an urgent meeting with the Police Minister. This is over the revelation that police aren't bothering to investigate shoplifting below $500 bucks anymore. They're clearly worried, because what's happened is there's been a revelation from a memo that was sent to police staff a couple of months ago, saying that from now on, across all districts, cops will no longer investigate theft and fraud below a certain value. General theft - anything below $200, not investigating. Petrol drive-offs - anything below $150, not investigating. Shoplifting - anything below $500, not investigating.  Fraud - as in paywave fraud, online fraud, scams, anything below $1000 and then all other fraud - anything below $500, cops aren't turning up. And that is, by the way, regardless of whether you have lines of inquiry. So even if you know who nicked the stuff, even if you can tell them where the stuff is, they're not going to investigate. Now, it's totally understandable for retailers to want an urgent meeting on this, because this has probably come as something of a shock. But also, this is the reality, isn't it? There are not enough police to deal with all the crime in the country. We know that. It's not really even a total surprise when you think about how many stories you've heard about people who go to the police, tell the police exactly where the bike is, where the police can go and find it because it's been nicked, and the police won't go and get it. But, this is gonna be a problem, isn't it? When the thieves start finding out about this stuff - cause they may be criminals, but they're not always stupid - they know what they can get away with scot-free. And that is why so many of them just ended up brazenly pushing those loaded trolleys out of the supermarkets for a while there, cause they knew nothing was gonna happen to them. I suspect the same thing is gonna happen once they figure out what the thresholds are here. And if this is the reality that we now live in, then I think the only solution to this is for the Government to get out of the way of retailers helping themselves.  They need to let the supermarkets use that facial recognition technology they want to use, so they can stop people from coming in and committing the crime. They need to pass the citizen's arrests law to allow the retailers and the security guards themselves to stop the criminals getting away with this stuff. Because frankly, if the cops can't help - and clearly there aren't enough of them to help - then the retailers need the tools to be able to help themselves. Mon, 26 May 2025 06:00:31 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-dont-touch-my-pension/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-dont-touch-my-pension/ Let's talk about this business with the pension age. Chris Luxon has said today twice that he wants the pension age to go up to 67. He said it once on Kerre’s show this morning, and then at a post-budget lunch speaking to business leaders, he repeated it and he told them that this is basically going to be election policy for National next year. Now, regardless of how you may feel about this, I mean, you'd have to be coming around to the realisation, wouldn't you, that we are inching closer and closer to this thing actually happening. Especially after the changes that the government made to our KiwiSaver retirement funds yesterday. It's not long now. I think that the government will have completely wound down its government support of KiwiSaver, and then it's gonna come after the pension next, isn't it? This is where I think it gets tricky, because this is not just about money for people. This is emotional. Let me lay out the emotional argument for you as it plays out in my head, OK? It goes like this: Don't touch my pension. You can touch anything else. Do not touch my pension. I don't care if they take away every other piece of welfare that is available to me and other people. In fact, I would actually welcome it, because I think there is way too much welfare in this country for the middle class who don't actually need it. You get a best start payment for having a newborn. You're having a baby. They give you money. You get the winter energy payment. You get Working for Families, which I think is a crime. You get the subsidised childcare for sending your kid to kindy. You get free tertiary education for the 3rd year, God only knows why. Free government money for your KiwiSaver. Now, as far as I'm concerned, there's way too much of that stuff going on. They can take all of that away. If they don't want to take it away, they can means test it so that actually the most, and only the most needy in this country get it. But I will do everything I can to stop them touching my pension. Because I have earned that money. This is not a question about whether I need that money, it is that I have earned that money. I, like you, have contributed huge amounts of tax to this country, and actually I have not claimed very much back for myself. It's certainly not anywhere near how much I have put in. The only thing that stops me from being very sour about how much money they take out of my pay packet every year and the wasting of that money and the bludging by some on that money is the knowledge that when I hit 65 and want to retire, I will get a little bit back. Call it a goodwill gesture from the government, if you like, a government who I have helped prop up just like you have for donkeys' years, by the time that money comes into my bank account. So, good luck to Chris Luxon getting this one across the line. I think it's going to be one of the hardest fights to win because of the emotional argument that I have just laid out for you. I think they might find it easier to take away a lot of other welfare first. And unless they take away a lot of other welfare first, I am not budging on the pension. Fri, 23 May 2025 07:19:00 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-this-years-budget-doesnt-go-far-enough/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-this-years-budget-doesnt-go-far-enough/ I don’t want to start on a bum note, but if you share my view that this country is in a hot mess financially, then this Budget is underwhelming, disappointing - you pick your epithet. It’s called the growth Budget, but there's no growth in it. The only growth is a result of a tax incentive scheme which is a good idea - but doesn’t go far enough. It lifts GDP by, get this, 1 percent over 20 years. What is that? Is that growth or a rounding error?  In fact, the Budget is full of this kind of thing - good ideas that are only half baked. Cutting 18 and 19 year olds off the dole and making the parents taking responsibility is a great idea - but it's so full of loopholes, so you can see exactly how those kids are going to get around the rules and stay on the dole. Cutting the Government KiwiSaver contribution to rich people is exactly what should happen - but it should be cut to everyone. The gas exploration money is exactly what needs to happen - but it's tiny, a couple of hundred million dollars in an industry that talks in billions. Five billion dollars of savings and cuts - which is small. That's the same amount we rack up in interest payments on our debt in just 7 months. So if you were hoping for something to turn this ship around, something that supercharges growth or slashes spending or really gets us out of the financial trouble we’re in - this is not it. This is a budget of good ideas that don’t go far enough. LISTEN ABOVE Thu, 22 May 2025 04:44:03 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-tonkin-plus-taylor-saga-shows-free-speech-cuts-both-ways/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-tonkin-plus-taylor-saga-shows-free-speech-cuts-both-ways/ Was Tonkin + Taylor right to apologise to Winston Peters for the employee heckling him? Of course they were! They don't want to be associated with this kind of behaviour. The guy was wearing their work lanyard, it clearly identified him as a staffer and I had his name and photo land in my inbox at 4:41 yesterday afternoon. Which is to say - people had already figured out who he is and who he works for. And if Tonkin + Taylor said nothing, rightly or wrongly, - there would be people who would assume they were fine with his behaviour or shared his views. So it was a reputational risk for them to remain quiet. And they were right to publicly distance themselves from him - and an apology to Winston Peters seems like a perfectly reasonable way of doing it. Also, it’s perfectly reasonable for them to call Mr Bollocks into the office and remind him not to embarrass them while he’s wearing a work lanyard. I think that seems fair. But I think that’s where it has to end. The Free Speech Union raises some decent points - he should not be punished or fired for it, he's entitled to his views and he’s entitled to make a dick of himself in his own time if he wants to, which he clearly does. His free speech should be defended, but so should the free speech of his chief executive, who didn’t like what she saw and wanted to say she was sorry on behalf of her company. Free speech cuts both ways. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 21 May 2025 05:22:29 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-isnt-trying-to-silence-the-m%C4%81ori-party/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-isnt-trying-to-silence-the-m%C4%81ori-party/ Well, that ended up being a fizzer, didn't it? I mean, wow, here we were. We were expecting this big debate over the Māori Party punishments to drag on for days, if not weeks, and overshadow the Budget - and the blinking thing didn't even last an hour. It got postponed to next month. What happened was, in retrospect, very simple and very obvious, just a move from the Government. It came to the Government's turn to talk about it - and up pops Chris Bishop, Leader of the House. He says - hey, I move it gets postponed, and guess what, it gets postponed because the Government has the majority in the House, so they simply voted for that, and there we go, clear air for the Budget. Most relieved, I would say, would be the Government, because it means that they do get clear air for the Budget on Thursday. Most bummed out, I would imagine, would be the Māori Party - who'd even gone to the effort of organizing a protest on the full court of Parliament. So basically, what's happened is we put this thing to bed for a few weeks because of a checkmate move from Chris Bishop. But while we've got this pause, can I just make an observation? It's quite remarkable how quickly this has gone from being a thing about the deliberate flouting of rules consistently by a party doing it as part of a PR strategy to being a thing about the National-led Government using parliamentary process to banish MPs they don't like, thereby turning us into a "banana republic". This is the kind of reportage that I'm reading at the moment. Suspending the Māori Party MPs threatens democracy. It is a drastic step that looks, on the face of it, undemocratic. Those are two different articles, by the way - it seems to be a theme that's emerging. But hang on a minute here, because it's going to take a lot to convince me that this is the case of a heavy-handed Government silencing innocent dissent - because I haven't forgotten how we got here. I haven't forgotten that the Māori Party planned to disrupt Parliament that day. They planned to disrupt it - and then they carried out that plan. I haven't forgotten that Debbie Ngarewa-Packer pointed her fingers in the shape of a gun at another MP and that the Māori Party refused to turn up to the Privileges Committee when they were asked to - and when they were supposed to. I haven't forgotten that that the Māori Party refused to apologize and accept they've done anything wrong and that the Māori Party then leaked the recommendations of the Privileges Committee, which is against the rules, and that the Māori Party co-leaders have said that they will do this again - most likely with the Regulatory Standards bill. I haven't forgotten any of that stuff. And it's remarkable to me how quickly people want to turn this into a bad Government story instead of a bad opposition story. And it's also remarkable to me how quickly people have forgotten what this party did to end up here today. LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 20 May 2025 07:40:39 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-grownups-dont-need-to-use-social-media/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-grownups-dont-need-to-use-social-media/ I've got a life tip for you - Grownups should not post their opinions on social media. Case in point, Gary Lineker. Now, Gary is about to announce that he's leaving his job at the BBC because of a social media post. This, in the UK, is very big news. Gary's a very popular host. He's the highest earner at the BBC because of how popular he is. He gets a salary of about $3 million New Zealand dollars, he's a former professional football player - I wager that if you ask anyone in the UK who Gary Lineker is, they'll be able to tell you. That's how well known he is. But he just torpedoed his own career by reposting a pro-Palestine video on social media that criticized Zionism and included an illustration of a rat. Now know your history on this - a rat is an image that was used in Nazi Germany to characterize Jews as vermin. You don't get away with that, you've got to know what you're doing there. And the thing about it is this wasn't even Gary's first mistake. Like with the first mistake - you could cut the guy a bit of slack. Then he posted about migrant policy, got in trouble, posted about the Tories, got in trouble, posted about politics in general, got in trouble, and he'd be given many chances to learn that having a rant on on social media gets you in trouble - but he just couldn't stop himself. When it came to posting that video and the little image of the rat, now he's gone. It is mind-blowing to me that in 2025, after 20 years of social media and of people getting in trouble, we still have people doing this. I mean, we just had 'Bussy Galore', we had Damian O'Connor last year saying Hamas was justified in what they did on October 7th to women and children, we had Penny Henare posting a picture of David Seymour with poo coming out of his eyes and a bumhole for a mouth. I mean, these are grown adults. It's like kindergarten stuff, isn't it? You'd think people would think, would learn that it's not worth it, but I guess the dopamine hit you get from people loving what you say and the narcissism - those things are strong motivators, it would transpire. Here's the thing - some people need social media for work. Influencers, for example, or the Māori Party, who appear to do all their politics on there or politicians who need it for publicity. And maybe, for them, the rules are a bit different. Maybe they just need to stick to the subject at hand, like footballers post about football and nothing else, and the  Māori Party post about politics and nothing else. And maybe don't tweet after you've been drinking. But for the rest of us, get off it. Adults do not need social media. LISTEN ABOVE Mon, 19 May 2025 07:40:26 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-in-defence-of-instant-coffee/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-in-defence-of-instant-coffee/ I just want to be clear, I don't want to start a disagreement between shows here on 九一星空无限talk ZB, but I did listen to Mike Hosking this morning talking some smack, and listening to it, I felt, no, I'm gonna have to say something about this just to restore a bit of balance to this debate. In defence of instant coffee, the stuff is great. I love it. I drink it nearly every day, little flat white in the morning, little old school instant in the afternoon. I am, I would like to point out, squarely in the demographic that should be snobby about coffee, right? It should be like fresh beans from Rwanda every day. I grew up on the cafe culture, live in Ponsonby, have some of the best cafes in the country around the corner, but I still write by instinct. Now I don't want to be super unfair on Mike, because obviously he's a legend, but he does some girl math when he wants to. Instant coffee is not more expensive than your ground beans. I mean, if you look at it on the face of what you're paying at the supermarket, yep, sure, your classic Makona at $12 for 100 g does appear to be more expensive than your Havana 5 Star coffee beans at $10.50 for 200 g, cause obviously getting 200 g of the beans as opposed, as opposed to 100 g of the instant. So, you know, you're paying for twice as many beans for roughly the same price. But you and I know that's not how it works. You and I know that you're getting more cups of coffee out of that little Macona jar, cause you're only using one teaspoon at a time. You're using the beans, you're gonna have to fill up that whole double shot filter basket, and so you're gonna whip through that 200 g a whole lot faster. But the thing about it is, obviously, you know, I live in Ponsonby, OK? It's not just about price. I can afford to go and buy myself a nice little flat white. It's about the fact that it tastes good. Instant coffee tastes good in its own special watery mud way. Do you know what I mean? It's got its place in life. I don't think we need to discount it. It's kind of like you can enjoy yourself a craft beer, but then you can also want a dirty old Corona from time to time. Or you can make a virtue out of eating your Vogels and getting all that fiber going through your gut. But then sometimes you just want a nice white slice with your snag. You know what I mean? Sometimes you just want to get down in the gutter with that little instant coffee. Not everyone wants to drink an espresso at 3 in the afternoon and be pinging at 11 at night. Still, that's the place of the instant coffee. You have that at 3, it's got a little light little buzz until 7.Sleep like a baby after that. And finally, just the final point on this is. It turns out more of us actually drink the instant than the espresso. This may shock you, because we're the land of the flat white, but we are also the land that invented the instant coffee in Southland. And the last survey I saw said 44% of us drink the instant, and only 34% of us drink the espresso. And as Mike likes to say, numbers don't lie. Fri, 16 May 2025 06:46:24 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-will-we-ever-get-order-back-into-parliament/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-will-we-ever-get-order-back-into-parliament/ It sounds like Gerry Brownlee thinks that the Māori Party punishment is too harsh. He started Parliament today with the Speaker's ruling and he dropped some pretty strong hints that he thinks that 21 days without pay for Debbie and Rawiri over that haka is too much. He called the punishment very 'severe' and unprecedented because up til now, the harshest punishment has been 3 days, not 21 days. He pointed out that the punishment was only carried by a narrow majority on the Privileges Committee - and that going through with the punishment as it stands will deprive the Māori Party of their ability to vote in the House for several sitting days, and that Parliament does not have to go through with it. He told them that - he said, you don't have to go through with it, Parliament can change the punishment. Now, I can't say I agree with them on this for one simple reason, and that is deterrence. Whatever the punishment is going to end up being, it has to be harsh enough to stop the Māori Party doing this again - or at least try to stop them doing this again - because this is a strategy from them. We need to see this stuff for what it is. This isn't like Julie Anne Genter losing her rag in Parliament in the heat of the moment, apologizing, and then ending up with just a censure and perhaps never doing it again. The Māori Party break the rules deliberately. This is their strategy, so you can assume that they will keep on doing it. And the reason they keep on doing it is because it gets them attention. Attention for wearing sneakers in the house, attention for wearing a cowboy hat in the house, attention for doing a haka in the house, attention for not turning up to the Privileges Committee, attention for leaking the recommendations of the Privileges Committee - the list just goes on. They say this is about tikanga - but it's not about tikanga. Sneakers are not tikanga. This is about breaking rules for attention - it's a PR strategy. 3 days without pay is not going to deter them. To be honest, I don't even know that 21 days without pay will deter them, but it surely has a better chance of doing it. And for the record, a 21-day suspension is not that wild in the UK, where our Parliament derives from. Just in the last two years, three MPs in the UK have copped suspensions of 30 days or more. In 2019, one guy was suspended for six months. Now I don't know that we will ever get order back into Parliament the way things have gone in the last few months, but if we don't try, we definitely won't. So in that context, 21 days doesn't seem overly harsh. LISTEN ABOVE Fri, 16 May 2025 00:09:59 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-what-does-labour-really-think-of-the-greens-alternative-budget/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-what-does-labour-really-think-of-the-greens-alternative-budget/ I'd love to know what Labour are saying behind closed doors about the Green Party's alternative Budget released today. I mean, they're playing nice in public - but behind closed doors, they must be tearing their hair out because this is next level crazy. I mean, none of it is a surprise. It is full of exactly the kind of utopian, money grows on trees, when-I-grow-up-I-want-to-be-a-unicorn kind of stuff that we expect from the Greens. There is a wealth tax, there is an increased tax for companies, there are two new personal tax rates, there's a private jet tax, an inheritance tax, there's doubling the bright-line test to bring in more capital gains tax, and a doubling of the minerals tax. They're also gonna save some money by cutting planned prisoner beds, but they haven't quite explained how they're going to stop these bad guys actually committing the crimes that land them in prison in the first place. They're gonna spend the money on light rail in Auckland, an overnight train from Wellington to Auckland, trains from Auckland to Tauranga, trains from Christchurch and Dunedin, trains from Auckland to Hamilton,  There's free GPs, free nursing services, free annual dental check-ups, free basic dental care, free prescriptions, and free childcare from age 6 months. There's also free income in the form of a UBI for students and beneficiaries - as I say, just the usual crazy stuff which 90 percent of us voters seem to agree makes them completely unfit to run the country's books. My reaction, obviously, has just been to laugh - because, you know, I was 5 years old too once and I also had these kinds of dreams. Labour's reaction must be to cry, because this kind of loony nonsense that's paraded as serious policy just makes it so much harder for them to get back into Government. I mean, Labour will need the Greens much more than they have in the past, right? We are no longer dealing with the Greens sitting at 5 percent where their nutty ideas can be ignored because they will not get as much out of coalition negotiations, we are now dealing with the Green Party consistently sitting at 10 percent and above. A Labour-Greens government will be 3 quarters Labour and one quarter the Greens - and that's not even counting the other dollop of crazy that's going to come from the Māori Party. Jet tax, death tax, wealth tax, crims out on the street - Labour must be weeping today. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 14 May 2025 07:23:02 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-we-need-to-get-serious-about-ensuring-people-pay-back-their-student-loans/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-we-need-to-get-serious-about-ensuring-people-pay-back-their-student-loans/ Why has it taken us so long to get serious about forcing people to pay back their student loans? Last month, IRD had someone arrested at the border. They have now paid back their loan. Isn't that amazing? They had been chased and chased and chased and chased - and you know that they had, because the IRD only arrest you at the border as an absolute last resort, but suddenly they were arrested at the border and despite presumably years of not paying back their loan - they pay it back. Isn't it incredible what a little bit of pressure can do? We've got more on this, by the way. The IRD has got in contact with more than 12,000 people who are living overseas who owe money on their student loans. 960 of them have paid back everything that was overdue, 1300 of them have started repayment plans, and 89 people have been warned they will also be arrested at the border if they don't start paying up. 11 of them, as a result of that warning, have started dealing with their debt - either by paying it back or by applying for hardship provisions. Now, why I'm telling you this is because it's nearly a year since the Government threw extra money at the IRD to chase down these bludgers. And the IRD has put out a press release with the latest figures to show that actually, yeah, putting that extra money in for the enforcement is bearing fruit. The only question we now have is - why didn't we do this earlier? I mean, it is not like this is a new problem, is it? We have complained about this for years, about these people freeloading on the ever-generous New Zealand taxpayer and then getting a free education over here, going off overseas to live their best lives, paying taxes somewhere else, helping out some other country, and then leaving us holding the baby in their debt. Now, I suspect our lack of action in the past - but I probably can't answer the question on this - comes down to a general attitude towards taxpayers, which is a lack of respect for our money. It's been treated like it's never-ending for too long. We've simply handed out to all without actually really requiring them to pay it back. We say you've got to pay it back, but we don't actually mean it. And this is not a historic problem - it's a current problem. A recent case in point is the small business COVID loans that were handed out by Grant Robertson in 2020. Unsecured, right? They are now due to be repaid. At least $800 million is outstanding and a lot of that will never be repaid. We have to get used to that idea. We handed it out and we're not gonna get it back. It is probably too much to wish for - but wouldn't it be great if we could carry on getting money back like the IRD are with student loans at the moment? LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 13 May 2025 07:26:47 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-theres-a-lot-of-remarkable-things-about-yesterdays-c-word-column/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-theres-a-lot-of-remarkable-things-about-yesterdays-c-word-column/ There are a lot of remarkable things about that C-word column yesterday, and one of them is that it is still up online, and apparently no one is sorry for this. If you haven't seen this column, let me get you up to speed on this: Yesterday, Sunday Star Times columnist Andrea Vance did something that I would venture no other mainstream columnist has ever done in this country - she called a minister of the Crown a c-word in the newspaper.  She didn't write the c-word out, she wrote it as c....The subject of it was the gender pay equity revamp, the minister was Nicola Willis and Andrea wrote - "turns out you can have it all, so long as you're prepared to be a C...." Now, I don't even know how to start explaining to you how wild it is that that happened yesterday, that Andrea dropped the C-bomb in the Sunday Star Times. That word is the 2nd most banned word on radio. We are not allowed to say it - and if we do, go to town on us and complain because somebody is going to get in a huge amount of trouble, and we will be saying sorry. But at least on the radio, to some extent, I think we have the defence of being able to say - Hey, look, it was the heat of the moment and the words slipped out of my mouth. That is not what happens in newspapers. Words don't just slip out onto the paper, you write it down, you consider it, you rewrite it, you reread it. You make sure that every single word is exactly what you mean to say. Nothing about that is in the heat of the moment. And then you send it to your editors, and your editors read it, and they look at it and they go - yep, that's okay, they can go in the newspaper. And that it what happened. Now, I'm not a prude. I am not offended by swearing, I swear myself, and I have also done exactly what Andrea has done. I have said things about ministers that I shouldn't have said, and I've regretted and I've apologized for it. But this is out of hand, what has happened here. There has to be some decorum. I mean, we can hardly complain about anonymous trolls on social media attacking our female politicians when our very own columnists do it in print with their names attached to it. And reverse this, by the way, if you're not offended by it: Imagine it was Jacinda. Imagine that a columnist had written this about Jacinda, how much outrage that would have caused, how cancelled that person would have been. There were other c-words we weren't allowed to say about Jacinda. Cindy was one of them, communist was another. And if you said either of them, people would flip out. Well, imagine how people would have flipped out if we'd said the c-word. It is very hard to respect an argument about how Nicola Willis isn't a real feminist in a column that attacks her in the most un-feminist way, right? It uses the most gendered putdown that you can think of. It uses terms like girl math to basically suggest that she can't balance the country's books because she's a woman. Now for the record, I think Andrea Vance is a fantastic journalist and an incredibly incisive opinion writer, and I think that her editor Tracy Watkins is the best at what she does, but this was a mistake and it lets everyone down when we drag the tone down that badly. LISTEN ABOVE Mon, 12 May 2025 08:02:15 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-nzrs-financial-problems-are-its-own-fault/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/heather-du-plessis-allan-nzrs-financial-problems-are-its-own-fault/ If you are at all interested in understanding what's going wrong at rugby headquarters in Wellington, can I recommend that you read Gregor Paul's piece in the Herald today? It's an excellent summation.   The question that we had yesterday when we were looking at the financials was how on Earth is it that New Zealand Rugby pulls in more money than it ever has in a financial year and still manages to not make a profit? How do you do that? The answer is it seems going by Gregor's piece, it's just wasteful spending and spending in the wrong places.   For example, New Zealand rugby spent more than seven and a half million dollars last year on paying board members and executives. That is more than the seven million it spent on Heartland rugby teams last year and it is more than five and a half million it spent on its five Super Rugby clubs. No organisation should spend more on the people running the thing then on the thing itself, that's nuts.   New Zealand Rugby flew two board members, Dame Patsy Reddy and Bailey Mackey, to the UK last year when they were leaving the organisation the following month.   What's the point of that?  If you know that people are leaving, stop flying them places. They're now redundant, aren’t they?   When the All Blacks played in Tokyo, they took players and coaches and management. Fair enough.   But then they also took administrative staff and executive staff.   That was 75 people for a rugby game. Honestly, that's way too much.   Do you know how much they were paying at the hotel they were staying at? $900 a night.   That is an organisation spending like it's in the gold mining game, not like it's an organisation making more annual losses than profits in recent memory.   Gregor Paul suggests some people are going to lose their jobs and I think that's probably fair.   To be fair to NZR, we all understand what's going on here and not all of it is their fault.  The biggest problem they've got is that rugby is boring. That's because the rules suck and NZR has only got so much control over the rules. It's really a World Rugby problem. But for NZR, it has been obvious for ages that the problems that they face with participation and viewership, attendance, and money are not going to get solved anytime soon.   Now, if you know things are tough and they're not improving, do you not put the credit card away? Do you not cut the spending?   You and I might, but not NZR, apparently, and that's their fault. Fri, 09 May 2025 06:27:12 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-we-knew-the-lundy-pictures-would-be-out-sooner-or-later/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-we-knew-the-lundy-pictures-would-be-out-sooner-or-later/ Mark Lundy has divided our workplace out there. Some of my colleagues think that it's really gross that the Herald, who we work with, have taken photos of Mark Lundy today after he got out of jail yesterday. Now, the photos aren't anything particularly special - he's sitting in the passenger seat of a car, all you can really see is his face, that funny little beard he's got, some sunglasses and his latte coloured hoodie. It tells you nothing and it shows you almost nothing. And I suspect the reason it shows you almost nothing is because there are very heavy suppression orders about where he lives at the moment. So anything that identifies the town outside of the car, I would imagine, cannot be published. So they're a little bit limited in what they can show you. But even though there's almost nothing to see in these photos, boy, are we clicking on this particular story. It was, when I last checked, the most read and most viewed story on the Herald - so people are interested. And shouldn't the media be reporting and taking photos of things that we're interested in? I would say yes. Now, I can understand why people are grossed out by this. I suspect a lot of that comes down to the fact that there is significant doubt amongst some people as to Lundy's guilt - just as there was doubt with David Bain, just as there was doubt with Scott Watson. And so the feeling is, if you think he hasn't done it, then you feel gross about the fact that he keeps on being harassed after serving his time. But remember, until he proves otherwise, he is a man who was convicted of murdering his wife and daughter, and his trial and his behaviour around that gripped the nation and frankly turned him into one of the most famous - or infamous - people in the country. So he is a legitimate news story And it's not really a question of whether the Herald should have taken those photos, it's actually just a question of where you were going to see that photo first. Because you were going to see it somewhere. If it wasn't on the Herald, it would be on some other news outlet, or just someone popping down to the local coffee shop, seeing Mark Lundy there, taking a photo of him, and putting it on social media. Cause we all know what he looks like, and clearly we're all interested in him - and it was going to happen sooner or later, wasn't it? LISTEN ABOVE Thu, 08 May 2025 07:56:33 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-will-pay-for-the-pay-equity-drama-in-a-big-way/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-the-government-will-pay-for-the-pay-equity-drama-in-a-big-way/ Let me make a prediction for you on this pay equity drama that's been playing out for the last 24 hours - the Government is going to pay for this in a big way. I reckon that this could become one of the defining moments of this Government when we look back on it in years to come. Kind of like the 'Mother of All Budgets' came to define Ruth Richardson and Bolger's Government and the way the cup of tea came to define David Lange's Government - I think this is a moment for this Government. Not because it's the wrong thing for this Government to do, but because of the underhanded and sneaky and cowardly way that they have done it. Now, I personally think that the pay equity system did need an overhaul. I mean, I think it is ridiculous to have librarians, as I said yesterday, compare themselves to engineers to justify similar pay. You can see those jobs are not even the same, right? But I do not think that it should have been rushed through with the shock and awe that it has been. ACT, in particular, has spent so much time in the past criticizing the previous Labour government for using parliamentary urgency to get around normal processes and keep people out of deliberations. And yet, here they are doing exactly the same thing because it suits them. And this is significant. It should have been flagged with people because it affects so many people - and yet, there was no indication whatsoever until yesterday that this was going to happen.  Where was it on the list of the Prime Minister's action plans for the first quarter, or even the 2nd quarter or any quarter? It's just popped up absolutely out of nowhere and it's taken everybody by surprise. And what's more, they need to stop pretending in Government that this isn't being done in a hurry to have an impact on the Budget. This is being done in a hurry to save money for the Budget. We know that - because David Seymour said so yesterday. So everyone, and especially the National Party, needs to pretend that this is being done for some sort of principle, when actually what it's being done for is to save billions and billions and billions of dollars. The primary problem here, I think, is cowardice. It feels like these guys are rushing this through as quickly as possible with as little notice as possible, so they do not have to own their own decision. They should own it. It's not a bad decision, but they're making it feel like a bad decision.  And I'll tell you what, oppositions can sense weakness - and they know that these guys are weak on this and they're going to strike on it, which is why I think this Government is itself making this a defining moment. LISTEN ABOVE Wed, 07 May 2025 07:10:28 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-will-the-pay-equity-claim-shake-up-save-us-money/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-will-the-pay-equity-claim-shake-up-save-us-money/ That decision today to stop all those pay equity claims is ballsy - I mean, you know, ballsy is good - and I think I lean towards thinking this is the right thing to do. Those pay equity claims have been a bit random. I don't know if you know how this works, but basically, if people can prove that they're underpaid because they work in women-dominated jobs, then they can get a pay rise. And how they prove this is by finding men who are doing a similar job and then showing that there is a difference in pay. But the problem is, it really isn't. It isn't comparing apples with apples, it's often apples with oranges. For example, librarians. Librarians are currently trying to get a pay rise by comparing themselves to traffic engineers. Now, no disrespect whatsoever to librarians, but the Dewey Decimal System is not that hard. I'm pretty sure that most of us could learn to do it and become librarians in about 20 minutes flat. I think it takes a little bit longer to train up as an engineer who specializes in designing and planning and constructing and operating and maintaining a transport system. And the same goes with the admin health staff who are trying to compare themselves to mechanical engineers, and the same goes with the social workers who are trying to compare themselves to air traffic controllers. You can see the trouble here, right? Now, from what I understand, what Brooke van Velden has done today is going to save the country billions of dollars - in the Budget that we're getting in 2 weeks' time. Apparently, this is one of, if not the single biggest savings in the Budget. And apparently over 4 years, it counts for something higher than $10 billion. That is a significant amount of money. And as we know, the country is financially stuffed. However, someone will pay for this, and it's going to be the Government. They will be punished for this in political capital in the years to come, because this attack basically writes itself. Heartless Government takes money from underpaid working women - and that is why it is so ballsy, because the pay equity system is clearly, when you look at the detail, deeply flawed. I mean, it's a lovely idea, let's pay women more, but the system that we use to do that is deeply, deeply flawed and obviously needs this overhaul - but the politics of it is gonna be very, very rough. LISTEN ABOVE Tue, 06 May 2025 07:29:56 Z /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-dont-think-voters-are-rejecting-trumpism/ /on-air/heather-du-plessis-allan-drive/opinion/perspective-with-heather-du-plessis-allan-i-dont-think-voters-are-rejecting-trumpism/ After Albo’s massive win across the ditch on Saturday, I can see a lot of commentators are tempted to blame it on Trumpism - in the same way they blamed the Canadian election upset on Trumpism. But I'm not convinced they’re right - at least not in the way they think they are.  What these commentators are saying is that Trump has given Canadians and Australians the ick so badly that they voting against anything that looks like him: Dutton in Australia, Poilievre in Canada or just right-wing-ism in general. I don't think that’s what happened here. Look at what’s happening in New Zealand at the moment  - the two parties in our parliamentary system that would probably share the greatest number of policy positions with Donald Trump are NZ First and ACT - and both are polling much higher than they historically have. But also, those commentators seem to be conveniently forgetting what just happened in the UK on Friday night - which is that the Reform Party absolutely swept the local elections in a shock result. Reform, led by Nigel Farage, is probably the closest thing to Trump in the English-speaking world. So as much as the left would like to believe what happened in Australia and Canada is a Trump ick factor that they can pin on the rest of the right - I don’t think it is. I think what’s happened is the same thing that happened with Covid: safe voting. I think Trump and his tariff talk - and the possibility of a massive global slowdown - has freaked out voters in a similar way to how Covid freaked out people. And when people freak out, it favours the incumbent, because it’s better the devil you know to protect you. That's why the Canadians returned their incumbent Government and that’s why the Australians returned their incumbent Government. The same doesn't apply to the UK, because that was a local body election which is about rubbish and roads - not central Government which is about tariffs and healthcare.  So I suspect we shouldn't over egg how much voters hate Trump as much as understand how much he might be frightening them. LISTEN ABOVE Mon, 05 May 2025 05:03:29 Z