Category: LiveNews

Source: Radio New Zealand

Christchurch police are investigating the electrocution of a man who is believed to have been attempting to take copper from a transformer.

Emergency services were called to a fire at a transformer in Brooker Avenue in the suburb of Burwood about midnight.

Superintendent Lane Todd said a person was found critically injured and died at the scene.

“We are making a number of enquiries, however it appears the man may have been attempting to retrieve copper from the transformer,” Todd said.

“Emergency services were unable to reach the man immediately as the transformer was still live. Power had to be cut to the transformer and about 700 homes before first aid could be provided, but the man was unable to be revived.

“While our enquiries are ongoing, this is a reminder of the dangers of power infrastructure and why it should never be interfered with. Anyone who sees suspicious activity around power infrastructure should call Police immediately on 111.

“This was a traumatic incident and we’re making sure the officers who responded have support.”

St John sent an ambulance, two critical care units and an operations manager.

Fire and Emergency was called by St John to provide medical assistance.

The death has been referred to the coroner.

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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/2026/03/24/christchurch-man-could-have-been-trying-to-take-copper-from-transformer-when-electrocuted/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Intermittent fog at Christchurch airport is leading to flight delays and cancellations on Tuesday morning.

Eight domestic flights were cancelled when fog descended on the airport at about 7.25 am but by 8 am the initial pall had cleared.

Airport spokesperson Sean Tully said the fog had returned shortly after 9.15 am and more disruptions were likely.

“Visibility at the airport is about 400 metres so we’re in low visibility operations which slows traffic between arrivals and departures,” Tully said.

Tully said the fluctuating conditions could continue to disrupt flights and advised passengers to check with their airline for any delays or cancellations.

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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/2026/03/24/fog-cancels-and-delays-flights-at-christchurch-airport/

Source: Radio New Zealand

The government will be hearing from officials later this week on possible steps towards “demand restraint”, Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones says.

Petrol prices have increased by almost $1 per litre on average in the past month, according to price tracker Gaspy, and diesel even more, as global energy markets react to Iran’s military grip on the Strait of Hormuz following the war launched by the US and Israel.

Around 20 percent of the world’s supply usually transits through the strait.

The government is expected to unveil a support package later on Tuesday which it says will be highly targeted and temporary. Finance Minister Nicola Willis has regularly stated there have been no plans to restrict usage, with stockpiles remaining healthy and supplies still arriving as scheduled.

The latest data from the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment showed stocks for about 47 days of fuel, including about 50 days worth of petrol, 46 days of diesel, and 45 of jet fuel.

Jones, speaking to Morning Report on Tuesday morning, said New Zealand consumed 24 million litres a day – nearly half of which was diesel, a third petrol and the rest aviation fuel.

Towards the end of the week… we’re going to be briefed at a granular level by the officials who are in contact with different industry groups as to the steps we would take if we move towards demand restraint.

“I am focused more on enhancing advancing, broadening and simplifying access to greater levels of supply.”

Reports from importers such as Z Energy were coming in daily, he said.

“We have never once been told that they are unable to deliver, or contracts are being terminated. Naturally, we’re watching that with a pair of hawk eyes. The challenge remains… the access of the refineries owned by Exxon and other such global giants to enough feedstock so they can produce the fuel in suitable quantities.”

New Zealand no longer refines crude oil, with the Marsden Point facility shutting down a few years ago.

“The fuel import companies are operating exactly within their statutory envelopes. They are observing what they promised to bring to New Zealand.

“If we are to increase and store more diesel fuel in New Zealand, we need to increase the storage. And I keep saying, the reason we can’t do that at scale is because they closed down the refinery, and I don’t care if you get annoyed with me saying that. I want New Zealanders to bear that in mind. This is the consequence of closing down the refinery.”

Jones has falsely claimed the Labour government closed the refinery down, repeating that claim again on Morning Report. Refining NZ (now Channel Infrastructure), a private company, made the call to end refining at the Marsden Point site and transition to being an import-only hub. The government considered stepping in, but decided against it, with advice to ministers being that risks to fuel security were “very low”, because any event that cut off the supply of refined oil would likely cut off crude as well.

Jones said the government was working with Channel to “enhance” how much product could be stored at Marsden.

“That will give us additional diesel storage. However, I don’t want any Kiwi this morning to doubt whether there’s diesel in the country on its way. There certainly is.”

Speaking to Morning Report after Jones, Labour leader Chris Hipkins said it was a “private decision made by the fuel industry” that would not have hindered New Zealand’s fuel security.

“Marsden Point was refining crude oil that was imported from overseas, so the same supply constraints would be hitting us now whether MarsdenPoint was operating or not.”

He suggested it was ironic that coalition MPs were criticising Labour for having spent “too much money” during the Covid response, yet were now saying “we should have kept a refinery that was going out of business because it was obsolete technology and because it wasn’t economic”.

Asked whether the crisis had shifted his thinking on electrification and moving away from fossil fuels, Jones said it was a “fair point” to stay open-minded.

“There is a source of hydrogen energy in New Zealand. It’s called white hydrogen. It’s called natural occurring hydrogen. I met last week with the Auckland University who are doing extraordinary work in Wairarapa, and they believe they’ve tapped into a vein of infinite power of a hydrogen character, of all places in the hills and the valleys of the Wairarapa coast.

“So I think it’s a fair point that you’re making that we need to be open-minded. And then I say to Kiwis, OK, how do you imagine we’re going to pay for it? To do that, certain things, if we are to underwrite this electrification journey, will have to go by the way.

“And that’s why we have an election. No doubt people will be contesting all of those ideas.”

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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/2026/03/24/fuel-demand-restraint-being-considered-by-government-shane-jones-says/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Five groups are vying to take over the country’s largest farm.

Molesworth Station, the iconic high country property, is run as a cattle farm by state-owned Pāmu.

The area, known formally as the Rangitahi/Molesworth Recreation Reserve, at the top of the South Island, covers 180,000-hectares of land owned by the Crown and administered by the Department of Conservation (DOC) .

However, with Pāmu’s lease ending in June, DOC has been seeking new applicants to take over.

Applications closed last week with five groups putting forward applications to take over running farm operations at Molesworth.

DOC’s South Marlborough operations manager Stacey Wrenn said it was a “big decision”.

“We’re looking at the next 30 years of this absolutely, incredibly and nationally important place as well as New Zealand’s largest farm,” she said.

“So we are so excited that we have got this set of really high quality proposals. And we’re looking forward to working through those and working out who the best and most appropriate person is to take Molesworth forward into the future.”

Molesworth’s former-manager of more than 20 years, Jim Ward, confirmed he had been involved in a proposal to see it run as a not-for-profit with heritage status.

“There’s three things that everything revolves around,” he told RNZ.

“The first is the vision for the proposal is we’re calling it the ‘Station for the Nation’, and the values are ensuring accessibility for all and the mission is to maintain the integrity of the land and ensure the longevity of the cultural and historic assets.”

The existing lease with Pāmu expires on the 30th June 2026. It would not confirm if it had put forward an application.

DOC and Pāmu were working together to ensure operations continue smoothly while the preferred operator is selected and new concession processed, and to work through the change of operators, if necessary.

“As the incumbent, Pāmu continues to engage closely with the Department of Conservation regarding the future of the Molesworth lease, and we’re committed to working constructively through their process,” a Pāmu spokesperson said.

Wrenn said she appreciated the effort that had gone into preparing the applications which would now be carefully assessed against set criteria with DOC hoping to select a preferred operator by the end of May.

“Assessment criteria includes the operator’s experience, skills and resources, how biodiversity and heritage values will be protected, how cultural values will be upheld, and how public access will be improved and facilitated.

“Once a preferred operator is chosen, they will be invited to apply for a concession, which will be publicly notified so people can have their say on the proposal.”

Wrenn previously said Molesworth was a special place that was home to threatened plants and animals so there would be restrictions on any lease – the farm can not be used for deer farming, forestry or for activities like game hunting or safari parks.

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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/2026/03/24/molesworth-station-the-groups-vying-to-take-over-the-countrys-largest-farm/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Follow Our Changing World on Apple, Spotify, iHeartRadio or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

The lines of apple trees look lush and healthy, some garlanded with a heavy crop of coloured orbs – greens, bright reds, yellow-striped. For some, the variety is apparent even on the same tree, hosting, as these trees are, two to three different apple cultivars.

And keeping this variety alive is the whole point of this orchard.

The Jim Dunckley Heritage Orchard

Ann Dunckley remembers her dad stopping to look at apple trees at the side of the road or in old orchards when they were out and about. “He liked apples,” she says, “And he was worried about the fact that the old ones were disappearing, old farm orchards were being bulldozed.”

Jim was a founding member of the Coastal Otago Branch of the New Zealand Tree Crops Association and, along with friend Paul Snyder, he started collecting different varieties of apple trees in the 1990s.

Unfortunately, Jim has passed away but the orchard lives on, having moved to a site near Mount Cargill just outside of Dunedin city, in the early 2000s.

Here, neat rows of about 300 root stock apple trees have different cultivars, or varieties, grafted on to them. The root stock trees are clones, chosen for their growth and disease resistance characteristics. Each cultivar is also a clone grafted on, to maintain its genetics.

The idea is that the orchard acts like a living library. New growth or scion wood can be harvested off these trees, stored over winter and then grafted on to new root stock trees to replicate the cultivar.

However, across time, notes and labels were misplaced and uncertainty about the varieties crept in.

It was a chance encounter on an orchard open day that would provide the solution.

Science to the rescue

It was their first orchard open day in 2023 that kicked it all off, says Donal Ferguson. Until recently Donal was the chair of the Coastal Otago Branch of the New Zealand Tree Crops Association. Associate Professor Lynette Brownfield from the University of Otago’s Biochemistry department came along and when she learned about the identification problem, she offered up a solution – genetic testing.

Masters student Aaron Hewson was given the task. Starting with 336 leaf samples, he used genetic analysis to compare the varieties in the orchard to those in the Bioeconomy Science Institute’s heritage orchard records. Some of them matched genetically, but were labelled differently, so he was forced to go further afield.

Luckily there has been a lot of work overseas looking into heritage apples, including compiling genetic and physical trait databases. Aaron was able to use these as a “gold standard” reference to compare his samples against.

To the team’s surprise, 80 percent of the samples matched with apple tree cultivars in this database and some of them were duplicates.

The remaining 20 percent are likely seedlings, says Aaron. While grafting an apple tree creates a clone that is genetically identical, it is quite different if you grow a tree from seed, says Aaron. “They’re quite a genetically diverse species. So, if you cross any two apples together and get a seed, it’s going to look very different to the parents. It’s going to be a random mix up.”

It’s a bit trickier to identify seedlings then, because that means working backwards to figure out a ‘family tree’ for the apple that traces back to the varieties in the database.

But these seedlings might also represent the interesting variety that the orchard was aiming to conserve – apples with desirable traits that grow well in Coastal Otago conditions.

It’s these traits that Aaron finds interesting to think about. For commercial growing, breeders are focused on characteristics like storage, resistance to bruising and disease, or a certain colour or crispness. But this orchard contains a much wider variety of colour, texture and flavours than can be found in our supermarket apples.

Now, thanks to the research, these varieties can be confidently shared with whoever might want to grow them.

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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/2026/03/24/our-changing-world-the-tree-keepers/