Author: MIL OSI Publisher

Source: Radio New Zealand

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/finn-brothers-get-the-band-back-together-for-electric-avenue/

Source: Radio New Zealand

A woman who complained to the Teaching Council about being sexually abused by a former teacher says its investigation was badly handled and traumatic.

The woman RNZ agreed to call Ellen said she lodged a complaint in 2023 about abuse that happened 30 years ago at a secondary school and is backing recent calls for an overhaul of the organisation’s treatment of victims.

Ellen said her interaction with the council’s investigators was badly handled and traumatic.

She contacted RNZ after a critical review of the council highlighted gaps in its treatment of victims, including lack of specific training for working with the victims of abuse.

Ellen said the secondary school teacher she complained about was no longer registered as a teacher but she wanted to ensure he never worked with children again.

She said the council’s Complaints Assessment Committee – which makes an initial investigation of complaints about teachers – decided her case should proceed to a full Disciplinary Tribunal hearing.

But on the day that was the deadline to confirm if she wanted to go ahead with a hearing, Ellen told RNZ her experience with the council made her reluctant to go further.

“I went into this process to try and protect other kids. And I feel like I failed them. I feel like I failed the kids in my community by not seeing this through. But at the same time, I don’t know how much more I’ve got to give,” she said.

Ellen said she decided to proceed to a hearing but the investigation of her complaint was poorly handled.

“To be honest, the whole process has been really traumatic right from that first contact,” she said.

“I submitted my complaint online and I was phoned at work asking for his address and details to complete their form. Now I’ve moved cities to get away from all of this and I don’t want to know anything about him and I was really shocked that was the first sort of interaction that I had.

“Another example is I was randomly emailed photos to confirm where the abuse occurred. Imagine when you’re just going about your day and this pops up in your email, seeing the photos of where the worst things in your life have happened. I think anybody would understand that it’s very traumatising.”

Praise for police

Ellen said the behaviour of the council’s investigator was in sharp contrast to police, who investigated but decided not to lay charges, and the Accident Compensation Corporation which agreed she had been abused and qualified for support.

She said police were sympathetic and supportive and made it clear what would happen with her evidence, where it would be stored, and who would have access to it.

She said none of that was true of the Teaching Council.

Ellen said in the past four years she had been interviewed 10 times by three different agencies about the abuse she suffered.

She said they needed to find a way of sharing evidence so victims were not re-traumatised by repeated interviews about their abuse.

“You can’t move on with your life when you’re constantly reliving the worst thing that happened,” she said.

Ellen said she understood that if she agreed to continue to a tribunal hearing it would hear the evidence she gave police so she would not have to repeat that.

However, the former teacher’s lawyer would be allowed to cross-examine her.

“Given the interactions that I’ve had with the Teaching Council today, I don’t feel safe that my interests will be looked after in that setting,” she said.

She said the council needed to improve because its role investigating complaints was particularly critical in cases where there was no conviction or prosecution.

“When you’re talking about very serious crimes against children with potentially long-term jail sentences, the threshold for conviction is really high and subsequently, the threshold at which police can prosecute, where they’re confident that they can go ahead and secure a conviction, is very high,” she said.

“For historical cases like mine, where there’s no digital record or physical evidence, that can be really difficult.

“Then this leaves the teaching council as the only quasi-legal body who can prevent predators from being allowed to work with children again. That’s why I made my complaint to them.”

She said the Teaching Council’s approach felt weighted in favour of teachers.

“All of my interactions corresponding to the Teaching Council focused heavily on principles of natural justice and fair treatment of the teacher when their focus should absolutely be on how can we eliminate abuse from our profession,” she said.

Ellen said the council’s investigations should be faster, it should be absolutely clear about what happened with sensitive evidence, and it should be able to use evidence provided to other agencies so victims were protected from repeating their testimony.

“Ultimately, we need that coordinated approach. How can we stop victims and survivors from having to give evidence multiple times to different government agencies,” she said.

Ellen said she was gutted when she saw reports about the independent review of the council, but also relieved because it proved she was not imagining her experience.

“It’s too late to change what happened to me, but I’m trying to make it less hard for… the people to come after [me].”

Council responds

The council told RNZ it acknowledged the courage it took for survivors to come forward, particularly where allegations were historical.

It said its investigators were assigned to cases based on the complexity of the file.

“Investigators assigned to complex cases have experience in trauma-related practice. Where possible our investigators do seek to rely on information and documentation already provided by other agencies,” it said.

The council said it had a dedicated contact pathway for historic allegations, including a specific phone line (0800 002 458) and support information for people affected by sexual harm.

“We recognise concerns raised publicly about timeliness, and complainant experience. We are prioritising strengthening our complainant engagement and communications,” it said.

The council said if a teacher was convicted for child abuse, that would result in the teacher’s registration being immediately cancelled.

“If a disciplinary case was undertaken following a conviction, it would normally be presented on the basis of the evidence heard at the criminal court.”

“We encourage anyone with concerns about a teacher to come forward and contact us. Our priority is safeguarding children and young people and maintaining trust and confidence in the profession.”

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/woman-describes-sexual-abuse-complaint-process-with-teaching-council-as-traumatic/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Rule changes for putting a granny flat on your section cut very little red tape, but move questions of liability from councils to homeowners

No garage conversions, no house extensions, no old materials or relocated cottages, no DIY practitioners, no mezzanine floors and no accessible showers.

And no building consent needed.

The government’s new rules for building a granny flat, or ‘minor standalone dwelling’, on your own property cut through one layer of paperwork and will likely save plans from being clogged up at council level, but they’re still complex, full of restrictions and just as expensive as they always were.

The real change these rules bring, say experts, is that when things go wrong, they shift the burden of responsibility from the council to homeowners.

Karel Boakes is the president of the Building Officials Institute of New Zealand, an organisation with around 1200 members who deal with building surveying, controls and regulations in both the private sector and in councils.

From what she’s seen in the month or so since the law came in, there’s been no rush to build these standalone dwellings – she says licensed building practitioners appear to be wary of shouldering the burden of responsibility for any failures.

“They’re concerned,” she says.

“They’re concerned for the homeowners and potentially the risks that they might be taking on if they choose to follow this route.”

“Obviously they’re not against efficiencies where they can be made. That’s common sense and we’re all on board with that. But we’re also trying to weigh up the level of risk that people could be exposed to if buildings are built in a way that’s not compliant or in a way that [poses problems] financially with insurance or what have you.”

Boakes says officials want to make sure people go into these processes with their eyes wide open, understanding the risks.

“There’s definitely a shift of liability.”

Before the regulation changed there was a level of surety in council checks, but we saw from the leaky building crisis that meant that councils were often the “last man standing” – the only organisation still around answering questions of liability when builders and developers went bust. Now the responsibility for any issues down the line falls on the homeowner, and those licensed building practitioners who supervised the job.

The only council responsibility comes right at the start of an application for a standalone dwelling when it issues a PIM – a Project Information Memorandum – which details information about the land or the project that they need to take account of, such as unstable land or flood plains.

“The council won’t be taking any liability any more in terms of assessing, or checking, or inspecting,” says Boakes.

The Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment has put out comprehensive information about the processes involved.

It says the granny flats building consent exemption allows small standalone dwellings of up to 70 square metres to be built without a building consent, if it has a simple design and meets the building code; homeowners notify the council before they start building and when they’re finished; the work is carried out or supervised by licensed building professionals; and all the exemption conditions are met.

You can download the seven forms required from the site, read the three checklists, five step-by-step guides and five fact sheets, and there are links to 12 professional groups that might be involved.

So there’s no excuse for winging it.

Bill McKay, a senior lecturer at the School of Architecture and Planning, University of Auckland, tells The Detail that when the rules came out, he was taken aback by the level of requirements – “all the things that you do and have to worry about”.

“One of the questions I’m mostly commonly asked is, ‘can I build it myself?’

“Short answer – absolutely not,” he says.

He says not having to get a building consent will save time, with the council unable to put off its issuing of a PIM. But a building consent is one thing – “you’ll still need building advice from someone who can draw up plans for you and that sort of thing. We might still need a resource consent, and this is a pitfall for lots of people.

“You can’t build just anywhere you want in your back yard. We have certain rules about minimum permeable and impermeable area so that rainfall will soak away, which is all good. And we have distances that we have to keep from neighbours … all that sort of thing as well.

“The government will change that with a thing called the new National Environmental Standard, but work on that is still ongoing and that won’t kick in till who knows when.

“I think a lot of people will just sort of leap into it without doing their homework first and doing it properly, and that could get them in trouble from various angles.”

Then there’s the sting at the end – while it varies throughout the country, most councils will charge a development fee, and in some places that could be around $25,000. Your rates will go up too, having added another bathroom and more square metres to your estate.

Meanwhile McKay has picked out an aspect of the regulations he calls ‘ironic’ – even if your little house is for granny, you can’t have a recessed shower, where you could wheel in or get in without tripping over if you were unstable on your feet.

“The reason for that is, they haven’t developed a class of LBP who can do that.”

That means the supervisory aspect of the project couldn’t be met – so accessible showers are on the no-go list.

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/a-home-for-granny-a-headache-for-the-homeowner/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Voting for Fish of the Year opens on Saturday.

The competition run by the Mountain to Sea Conservation Trust celebrates New Zealand’s weird, wonderful, and often overlooked marine life.

Much like the well known Bird of the Year, the competition spotlights native species and raises awareness about their conservation status.

“People might not realise that so many of our fish in New Zealand are actually endemic, which means they’re found only in New Zealand waters,” said co-director of the conservation trust Samara Nicholas.

Last year the blobfish, which back in 2013 was declared the world’s ugliest animal, beat the odds to win the competition.

The blobfish was not a contender this year, but there were plenty of other fish in the sea.

“There’s some really interesting deep water fish like orange roughy to some of our highly threatened banded kōkopu for example,” said Nicholas.

“Then some really weird and interesting fish all in between, like the sunfish, which is the heaviest fish in the world, and the torrentfish, which is really well adapted to living in rivers where there’s high water flow.

“So it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the fish that call New Zealand home and to get engaged and excited and try and make your favourite fish win.”

Voting runs from Saturday 28 February – Sunday 15 March.

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea-voting-opens-for-fish-of-the-year-competition/

Source: Radio New Zealand

The Public Service Association is warning hospital IT outages will keep happening due to cuts to Health NZ’s digital team.

Auckland and Northland hospitals were hit by an outage on Thursday afternoon.

It disrupted the transfer of radiology images – including X-rays, CT and MRI scans – for two hours across both regions.

PSA national secretary Fleur Fitzsimons described the outage as “critical”, forcing clinicians and radiographers to text and phone each other scan results.

“The impact of clinicians needing to resort to text and phone to pass on vital information is that mistakes are more likely, it takes longer, and when you’re dealing with patients in ED or in operating theatres, time is everything.

“It is absolutely critical that these systems are of a modern standard and that these outages don’t keep happening.”

Health New Zealand said the outage was resolved quickly on Thursday afternoon, and standard back-up processes were used while it was happening.

A spokesperson said patient care was not compromised.

Fitzsimons said no IT outage affecting critical clinical information was minor.

“These are important systems that clinicians rely on, and that need fixing because they are not set up to a modern standard, and we’ve lost the experts who know how to patch them quickly.”

She said it was the second failure in less than a month, after clinicians were forced to use pen and paper for 12 hours overnight in late January.

“More [outages] will occur, because we’ve lost the data and digital experts from Health New Zealand, after government-imposed funding cuts.”

She wanted Health New Zealand to launch a review into this outage, as it had for the [https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/585415/staff-public-deserve-answers-after-major-it-outage-at-hospitals-union-says

incident on 28 January].

Health Minister Simeon Brown said he was aware of a “brief IT issue” in the northern region on Thursday.

“I want to thank staff for resolving the issue swiftly and ensuring there was no disruption to patient care.”

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/hospital-it-outages-will-continue-due-to-health-nz-staff-cuts-union-warns/

Source: Radio New Zealand

A study into thousands of ambulance callouts for mental health shows most were non-urgent, and should have been managed in the community.

It found “most callouts [89.8 percent] were of low acuity, with a notable proportion of repeat callouts, suggesting unmet need for mental health care”.

That, and the fact that many – 32.8 percent – did not need to be taken to hospital, “suggest that many mental health callouts may be managed outside emergency settings”.

The study, published in the NZ Medical Journal on Friday, analysed 26847 mental health callouts – that was 5.7 percent of total callouts between July 2022 and June 2023 – before police began to retreat from mental health callouts.

Events which counted towards the study included attempted suicide, self-harm and anxiety.

The study also showed inequalities based on ethnicity. Māori accounted for 22.1 percent of these callouts, and Pacific people for 4.6 percent.

There is a disproportionately high rates of mental health related callouts among younger Māori and Pacific people compared to younger non-Māori or Pacific people, and higher proportions of callouts in areas of lower socio-economic deprivation.

Nearly a third (30.8 percent) of mental health callouts occurred in the most deprived areas (quintiles 9 and 10), with the highest proportions among Māori (47.7 percent) and Pacific peoples (49.9 percent).

Female patients accounted for over half of these callouts across all ethnicities.

“Continued reliance on emergency services suggests inadequate access to or insufficient community-based support,” the report says.

One of its authors, Gabby Harding, a lecturer in paramedicine at Auckland University of Technology and a paramedic herself with Hato Hone St John, said the low number of people taken to hospital means many would have been referred to community-based care.

“So it suggests that people are seeking support when other services aren’t available. As we know, people ring 111 when they are at a crisis point or in distress.”

Repeat callouts, where people called back within the year, suggested there may be a gap in continuous, accessible and culturally safe care, she said.

She said it was an opportunity to develop links between ambulances and community-based mental health services.

Ambulance services could refer people back to community services, but people’s access would still rely on those services being available, which was different by area.

Recommendations from the report

The study says future mental health policies should make it a priority to ensure appropriate systems, services and support for Māori and Pacific peoples were in place.

It also points out that addressing socio-economic determinants of mental health, like financial strain, unemployment and poor access to healthcare services, could improve people’s mental health.

“Addressing these issues requires comprehensive policy changes and a targeted approach to mitigate stressors such as racism, socio-economic inequities, stigmatisation and systemic barriers to healthcare,” the study says.

Wellington City Mission says sometimes people just need to talk

Pip Rea from the Wellington City Mission said people experiencing mental health distress could be having suicidal thoughts or a panic attack, and at that point, “they don’t know where to go, they don’t know what to do”.

“Something that’s ingrained in us as New Zealanders is to call 111, ask for an ambulance, and they will help us, they will know what to do – and so that’s what people do.”

Often by that stage, people had tried places like their GP or talking to someone, and had reached crisis point.

She said the City Mission had a good relationship with Wellington Free Ambulance, meaning people could be redirected to their Crisis Cafe, which was open all hours.

“A community, peer-led response – that’s what works, not a clinicalised model such as ED.”

It also meant repeat callers had somewhere else to go, rather than calling 111 in future.

Their service was “not over capacity, but we definitely are busy”, with numbers increasing month-on-month. In the Crisis Cafe’s first 11 months of operation, they had had more than 750 people through the doors, she said.

Minister says people reach out for loneliness and stress – issues which are ‘serious’ but ‘non-urgent’

The Minister for Mental Health, Matt Doocey, said his office’s own work had shown similar trends to this recent study.

“When we started working toward a mental health response to 111 calls, we started by examining the data. What we found was that a significant number of calls were being coded as “1M” by police, a category used for mental health,” he said.

People were reaching out, some repeatedly, for issues like loneliness, stress about housing or finances, or other social challenges.

“While these are serious and important issues, they are not always situations requiring an immediate response,” Doocey said.

He said this data backed the need for the government’s rollout of mental health co-response teams, which would work alongside police or ambulance staff to respond to 111 calls.

“I recently visited a co-response team who spoke about the value of having a joined-up response, particularly in dealing with repeat callers, as they know the person well and can respond accordingly,” he said.

Health NZ says more work to do, but investment is being made

Health NZ national director for mental health and addiction Phil Grady said the agency was committed to providing faster access to primary and specialist mental health and addiction services while growing the mental health workforce to meet increasing need.

Investment so far included:

• The $10 million Mental Health Innovation Fund, aimed at supporting faster access to a greater range of community-led support, like Ki tua o Matariki to run peer support groups for expectant mothers aged 15-24 in Auckland.
• A $61.6m investment, announced in late 2025, to expand crisis recovery cafés and peer support in emergency departments.
• Money from Budget 2025 was being used to roll out co-response teams and expand telehealth capacity.
• $3.5m annual funding boost to specialist mental health services for infants, children and teens in Tairāwhiti, Counties Manukau, and Waitematā.

Uptake was increasing for community-based services, with the Access and Choice programme having provided more than a million sessions since it began in 2020.

An additional 6072 people had received specialist services compared to the previous year, Grady said, and an additional 557 full-time-equivalent mental health workers had been recruited since March 2023.

“This is promising – but we know there is more to do, and we remain committed to improving services to meet the needs of communities,” Grady said.

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/thousands-of-ambulance-callouts-for-mental-health-non-urgent-study-shows/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Voting for Fish of the Year opens on Saturday.

The competition run by the Mountain to Sea Conservation Trust celebrates New Zealand’s weird, wonderful, and often overlooked marine life.

Much like the well known Bird of the Year, the competition spotlights native species and raises awareness about their conservation status.

“People might not realise that so many of our fish in New Zealand are actually endemic, which means they’re found only in New Zealand waters,” said co-director of the conservation trust Samara Nicholas.

Last year the blobfish, which back in 2013 was declared the world’s ugliest animal, beat the odds to win the competition.

The blobfish was not a contender this year, but there were plenty of other fish in the sea.

“There’s some really interesting deep water fish like orange roughy to some of our highly threatened banded kōkopu for example,” said Nicholas.

“Then some really weird and interesting fish all in between, like the sunfish, which is the heaviest fish in the world, and the torrentfish, which is really well adapted to living in rivers where there’s high water flow.

“So it’s a great opportunity to learn more about the fish that call New Zealand home and to get engaged and excited and try and make your favourite fish win.”

Voting runs from Saturday 28 February – Sunday 15 March.

Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.

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

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/27/plenty-of-fish-in-the-sea-voting-opens-for-fish-of-the-year-competition/