Category: Public Media

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

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

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/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Angry truckers have banded together with bus, crane and even combine harvester operators to hit out over rules they say make it too hard to get bigger, more efficient vehicles on the road and easily move them round.

They want far-reaching change to the 23-year-old ‘Rule’ around the size, weight and permitting system for heavy vehicles.

They said in a hardhitting letter to the Transport Agency (NZTA) that the old Rule was blocking safer, more efficient vehicles from easily being imported, envisaging a near future when the maximum 58 tonne diesel trucks were scaled up to 62 tonne electric (which allowed for the battery).

“The level of anger from our members and the risk of more pronounced public responses during an election year should not be underestimated if tangible progress is not made,” said a letter from 11 heavy vehicle associations to the Transport Agency’s chair late last month.

Transport Minister Chris Bishop promised last June the government would be “taking the handbrake off productivity through transport rule reform” – and on Monday said he heard operators “loud and clear when they tell us there are more changes they’d like to see”.

The operators had earlier talked of feeling fobbed off, though the Transport Agency late last week offered them another meeting, for Tuesday this week.

“While responsibility is often framed as sitting with the Ministry, NZTA has long led sector engagement and provided all technical advice to the Ministry and ministers. Recent ministerial correspondence shows the full extent of the lack of progress is not well understood,” their letter said.

“We seem to get pushed from pillar to post,” said signatory Dom Kalasih, head of Transporting NZ that represented 1100 firms, mostly truckers.

Crane operators, who also signed, said the old rules were holding everyone up.

“Getting a crane out for a job, the … permit and exemption process, goodness, for a large crane operation, we’re talking hours, hours a day ,” said Sarah Toase of the Crane Association.

Their next stop would be to seek a meeting with the minister, the associations told RNZ.

Bishop said the rules would be modernised.

“Important research and policy work is underway to carefully consider those ideas,” he said in a statement. “This is a complicated area and not everything can be done all at the same time.”

The question of how fast remained open though the first changes under reform were due this coming July.

‘Complex safety, infrastructure and cost considerations’

The Transport Ministry pushed back on the industry group criticism.

“Many of the changes sought by industry – particularly those enabling significantly larger or heavier vehicles – raise complex safety, infrastructure and cost considerations,” it told RNZ.

Research had to be done on the impacts on roads and what additional infrastructure investment may be required, it added.

However, the industry said “frustration … is now acute”.

The agency was unnecessarily outsourcing analysis to consultants, even though the reform’s ambition had been scaled back.

It talked of batteries and extra safety tech being blocked by the old rules.

“In some cases, safety features are being compromised to manage weight.”

Bishop had got their hopes up last year.

“Instead, the work programme was underwhelming in scope and subsequently reduced, leaving industry with no confidence that meaningful change is being prioritised.”

The reform is of what is called ‘the Rule’, the main VDAM or Vehicle Dimensions and Mass rule.

One core change being proposed was to remove the permits on trucks between 44 and 50 tonnes.

These big trucks would still have to fit the weight and design limits of what is called the ’50MAX’ class – and would still have to stick to certain roads and bridges – but they would not have to get an actual permit, as they have done since 2013 when the High Productivity Motor Vehicle (HPMV) regime was introduced. HPMV’s advent was the biggest change in the Rule.

Electronic monitoring of trucks was now widespread and would help keep them to approved routes that were strong enough, a source said.

Another proposal in the reforms would make it cheaper to comply for the likes of electric buses now tipping the scales at over a seven tonne threshold because of their batteries.

Cranes caught in the Rule

Toase told RNZ it was not enough.

Cranes were “always being dealt with in retrospect” and were routinely having to seek exemptions from narrow rules designed for regular trucks just to operate, she said.

They had tried to build change, for instance, through a trial that succeeded in cutting by a fifth how far overweight mobile cranes had to travel, reducing congestion and emissions.

“We’ve sent all the information through to NZTA and it’s just sitting there.”

Another example she gave was that many mobile cranes were now often failing brake tests under an electronic inspection regime.

“It doesn’t produce accurate results for cranes because they are engineered differently. So cranes are failing those tests, which means they are then deemed not roadworthy.

“They’ve failed compliance and they can’t be used.”

Operators then had to revert to manual testing in order to pass, which all took time.

Federated Farmers and Rural Contractors NZ also signed the letter.

Combine harvesters, for instance, faced very restrictive limits on what bridges they could cross which should be managed in a much less complex way, said another source.

“We’re not just talking about road freight, we’re talking about harvesting of food.”

At the trucking coalface, the old Rule meant heavily specced new vehicles could not be easily imported as-is but needed bespoke modifications, in a market that was already isolated due to being minority righthand drive, the letter said.

The industry ideal for keeping up internationally, allowing for the state of NZ’s roads, was to lift the 58-tonne HPMV limit to 62 tonnes, Kalasih said.

At 62 tonnes they would not be much bigger to overtake, and the distribution of weight between the axles would spread the impact on the road, he said.

The AA did not want to comment on that from a car driver’s point of view.

‘Totally at odds’

Consultation has opened on phase two of the reform following on from phase one that began last October.

But the meetings with officials earlier this year were a final straw for the industry associations.

“The scope of that work is frankly incredibly underwhelming and lacks ambition,” said Kalasih.

“It seems to us totally at odds with what Minister Bishop has asked for.”

They felt the time was up on more reviews, research and meetings, and they were tired of being passed from NZTA to the MOT and back, he said.

But MOT said the latest research was a “necessary step to ensure that any larger changes are safe, durable, and deliver real benefits to industry and the wider transport system”.

Other changes are going on into bridge designs, which determine what weight of trucks can pass, although NZTA has played down how that work would alter old or new bridges.

NZTA said it understood the impact of the Rule’s settings on the industry.

“This is why we are engaging with industry representatives to understand the specific challenges they are facing, and the opportunities which they see for improvement,” it said in a statement.

NZ Transport Agency Waka Kotahi chair Simon Bridges, in a letter responding to the associations, acknowledged their concerns, telling them the minister made the rules and offering another meeting on Tuesday this week.

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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/road-rage-of-a-different-kind-how-cranes-and-trucks-are-feeling-jammed-up/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Attendance services warn rising fuel prices are likely to drive up truancy.

Two service providers, one in rural Northland the other in Auckland, say transport costs are a big driver of student absences and they expect it to get worse.

Meanwhile, one of the providers, Mangere East Family Service Centre, said long-term truants had often lost the physical fitness they needed to cope with a school day and had to be eased back into classes.

The centre was the new attendance service provider for 22 schools in the area after the government regnegoiated 83 contracts last year.

Chief executive Caroline Tana-Tepania said bidding for the contract was a logical progression because its social workers in schools were already working a lot with truants.

Even so she was surprised by the scale of the problem in the area – so far the centre had been charged with tracking down 400 children who were not enrolled in any school, about 230 of them historical cases from last year.

“I knew that it was an issue, but I certainly wasn’t aware of the extent of the numbers,” she said, adding that schools would be starting to alert the service to their chronic truants.

Anika Channa managed the centre’s nine-person attendance team and had previously worked in attendance for three-and-a-half-years.

She said one of the biggest changes she had noticed in the government’s attendance service overhaul was greater involvement of other social services.

“In my experience, there are a lot of factors as to why children are not going to school. It’s actually not just that they don’t want to go. There’s barriers like transport, housing, health. So having those community organisations involved helps us navigate the families into the correct supports for them,” she said.

In addition, the service’s ‘attendance navigators’ now stayed in contact with children after they returned to school to ensure they maintained their attendance and dealt with any new barriers to attendance that might crop up.

“It just means that we’re able to intervene more quickly rather than having to wait for another referral to come through,” she said.

Channa said a major group of chronic truants was the children of families who had moved out of the area, but kept their children enrolled in a Māngere school.

She said many such families struggled to get their children to school every day and the rising price of petrol would make that problem worse.

Channa said finding non-enrolled children took a “bit of investigation”.

Often the family was not at their last recorded address and attendance officers had to ask schools for children’s emergency contacts, often members of their extended family, in order to track them down.

Channa said once children had been found, they had to be eased back into school.

“Going straight back into school for five days is just so much for them, it’s very overwhelming. It’s not just going to school, it’s socialising, it’s being out in the environment,” she said.

She said that was because many truants spent their time “bed surfing”.

“They just stay in bed and so when they go out to do anything, they get really, really tired so it takes them some time to adjust.”

Channa said consistency and “awhi” or support were the keys to a successful return to school.

Transport a massive problem

Ara Whakamaua has been the attendance service for 26 schools across Hokianga and Kaipara for more than three years.

Director Lisa Halvorson said it usually worked with more than 500 students each year, successfully closing 70-80 percent of the cases by returning children to class or finding other education options for them.

She said this year was already “way better”, thanks largely to a new computer system that showed when and where children last attended school.

“Already we’re seeing that the closure rates are reducing and that the active cases are turning around a lot faster. So that’s really pleasing to see,” she said.

“In the past, we have just been chasing kids to look for them. Whereas now we actually have that last point of contact and we’ve got the ability then to see … a little bit of a pattern or to see how often they were attending and what that looked like. So it does make it so much easier,” she said.

Halvorson said there were a lot of reasons families might not send their children to school.

“Some of it can be as simple as the child doesn’t have the right PE uniform or no shoes, they don’t have a school bag or a lunch box or a drink bottle, and so the whakamā about that child walking into a school without that is hard,” she said.

“Transport is a massive one for us in our region, so the ability for our whanau to have warranted and registered cars or to be able to afford to run their children to school – we’re talking some distances of children having to travel 30 kilometres to get to the closest school one way.”

She said some cases had relatively simple solutions while others involved multiple agencies.

“They just don’t have a pair of shoes on their feet then sure, we’ll go to the Warehouse and buy them a pair of shoes and put them into school,” she said.

“If it’s a bit bigger than that, then yes, there are other avenues that we can support whanau to complete application forms or do hardship grants … We also connect with a lot of other social services in our regions.”

She said the job was rewarding when families received the help they needed and created stability for their children.

“To get the kids back to school and have a sense of well-being and self-worth and some mates around them and a bit of social connection, that goes a long way,” she said.

“Once we see the right supports in place, and then you see the attendance stabilise, and then you see the whanau feel a bit more confident, and then everyone’s navigating the system really well. That’s a massive win,” she said.

“Some of those children would never have had that stabilisation in their lives, because sometimes you’re dealing with little six and seven-year-old children, they’re too young, they don’t know any better.”

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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/school-attendance-services-warn-rising-fuel-prices-likely-to-drive-up-truancy/

Source: Radio New Zealand

Dual United Kingdom-New Zealand nationals say it is unfair some European Britons are allowed to dodge new passport rules, while British migrants in other parts of the world have to fall in line.

British citizens or their children who used to visit family and friends there using only a New Zealand passport and an ETA were “bodyslammed” by news last month they would need a UK passport, one migrant said.

Steve Horrell, of Upper Hutt, had already applied for and received his passport, but his son overseas had to scramble for documents so that the whole family – including young grandchildren classed as British – could join him on a trip to the UK next month.

He said Monday’s revelation that European Union nationals granted British citizenship post-Brexit under the Settled Scheme (EUSS) could get permanent exemptions from needing UK passports to travel there was unfair.

“I find it disappointing, actually, because it would be very easy to treat everybody the same. To my mind, if you’re going to apply something and say, you know, in my son’s case, they have to have British passports, why can’t they just apply that around the world? Because there might be a guy living next door to him who falls under this EUSS thing, whose kids might not have to do this, but his do.

“I do think it’s unfair because, Britain voted to be not part of the EU anymore and in many cases, I’ll be quite frank, I think that the government in the UK, whichever government, they sort of can choose between the laws they want to interpret, which suits them best.”

Mark Stocker, also born in the UK and a dual New Zealand citizen, said he was feeling disaffected about the UK policy and response, and sorry for travellers who were affected in more extreme ways, such as needing to visit sick relatives.

The change for EU settled status citizens reinforced the feeling that dual citizens elsewhere now had second class status, he said – behind those who only needed a $37 ETA or a third country’s identity document.

“If you’re being charitable, it’s a small step forward from a realisation of how god-awful the change policy was. But the expat Canadians, New Zealanders, Australians and more, it does nothing whatsoever for us.

“It’s perfectly consistent with the abysmal way in which the whole thing was introduced in the first place, where lies were told by the British government about us being told in good time.

“If the government had fairly signalled the new policies, then one might grin and bear them”.

But the way it has been introduced was “pretty dreadful, pretty abysmal really.”

He could not use an expired UK passport – one of the suggestions the UK put forward as a temporary measure if people also had their valid New Zealand passport – because he threw it away when it expired.

Countries such as Australia and Japan were looking like more attractive alternatives to Britain for a holiday, especially with the war in the Middle East, he said.

The Home Office said the change was made to ensure rights under the EU-UK Withdrawal Agreement were upheld.

The British High Commission in Wellington has been approached for comment, including whether it has had to help citizens who have been trying to travel to the UK but did not have the right passport.

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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/abysmal-unfair-nz-brits-say-they-count-for-less-than-eu-migrants/

Source: Radio New Zealand

LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/03/24/tattoo-ink-induced-blindness-rare-but-rising/