Source: New Zealand Police
Kairanga Bunnythorpe Road is closed at the intersection with Te Ngaio Road following a crash.
The two-vehicle crash was reported at 7:50am.
Initial indications are that there are serious injuries.
Diversions are in place at Railway Road and Roberts Line.
Motorists are advised to avoid the area and expect delays.
ENDS
Issued by Police Media Centre
LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/25/kairanga-bunnythorpe-road-closed-following-crash/
Source: Radio New Zealand
A crash blocked lanes on State Highway 1 in Kaiapoi pm Wednesday morning. (File photo). RNZ / Tom Kitchin
Two separate incidents on State Highway 1 in Kaiapoi, Canterbury, brought early morning traffic to a near-standstill.
Police were alerted to a two-vehicle crash on the soutbound side of the motorway about 5am on Wednesday.
Around the same time, a person stopped their vehicle in a lane on the northbound side, and was later taken to hospital.
Police were working to clear both lanes and said motorist should expect delays.
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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/2026/02/25/early-morning-traffic-incidents-close-state-highway-1-lanes-at-kaiapoi/
Source: New Zealand Police
One northbound and one southbound lane are blocked following two separate vehicle incidents this morning near Kaiapoi.
Police were alerted to both at around 5am.
On the southern side of the motorway a two-vehicle crash occurred – there are no reported injuries.
On the northbound side of the motorway a person has stopped their vehicle in a lane and has now been taken to hospital.
Police are working to clear both lanes.
Motorists should expect delays.
ENDS
Issued by the Police Media Centre.
LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/25/lanes-blocked-christchurch-northern-motorway-kaiapoi/
Source: New Zealand Government
Health Minister Simeon Brown has welcomed the successful ratification of a new collective agreement covering Allied, Public Health, Scientific and Technical (APHST) members represented by the Public Service Association (PSA).
“I am pleased for the approximately 12,300 workers employed by Health New Zealand nationwide who will benefit from this agreement. Allied, public health, scientific and technical professionals play a critical role in patient care, and this settlement acknowledges their important contribution to the healthcare system.”
Around 12,300 employees will receive a 2.5 per cent pay increase in year one and a further 2 per cent in year two, as well as a $500 lump sum payment.
The agreement also introduces a new pay scale for Sterile Sciences Technicians and establishes a $400,000 national professional development fund to support ongoing training and career progression.
“This ratification follows the recent approval of collective agreements for APEX Pharmacy and APEX Psychologists members, continuing progress on workforce settlements across the health sector. I want to acknowledge Health New Zealand and the unions for their work as these agreements are reached.”
LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/25/psa-members-vote-to-accept-settlement/
Source: Radio New Zealand
A study aims to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats across the lowlands of the Motueka (pictured), Moutere and Riuwaka rivers. RNZ/Tess Brunton
A study of river catchments in the Tasman District aims to make native restoration easier for landowners, while also working to protect communities during extreme weather events.
Back-to-back floods last winter caused extensive damage to farms and rural properties, with crops inundated with silt, fences washed away and land lost to swollen rivers. The repair bill for the Tasman District Council alone was estimated at $50 million, while the costs of insurance claims from the event were estimated at $37.4m.
The feasibility study was being led by Kotahitanga mō te Taiao, an alliance of 17 organisations in the top of the South Island including iwi, local councils and the Department of Conservation, and environmental not-for-profit The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa New Zealand.
It aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats across the lowlands of the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka rivers.
For Debbie Win and her family, a stand of mature forest in the middle of their Dovedale farm had always been precious.
She said they fenced the area several years ago and had undertaken dedicated work to trap pests and remove weeds like Old Man’s Beard. The work had transformed the forest floor, which was previously bare.
Now, tiny lancewoods, ferns and beech tree seedlings were scattered beneath the established trees.
Washouts were still visible after last winter’s floods last caused widespread damage across the district, including on the Win farm, cutting off access to stock, washing out a large culvert and scouring out the land.
“It was probably the biggest heartbreak I have ever felt, I got to the stage where I couldn’t walk out the door, our [place] was wrecked, I couldn’t even begin to process what had happened down the valley.”
Former orchardist Dave Easton had spent the past decade constructing a wetland in the place of what used to be an apple orchard, but was originally a wetland on his property near the Moutere Inlet.
He was reversing the work put in by his forebears, but thought they would be proud of what he had done. Easton had funded all the restoration work himself and did not want to think about how much he had spent.
“We’ve got 65 different native species that have been planted so we are trying to establish that biodiversity hub and if we protect it and do predator trapping then we get the birds, in my dreams I would love to have kereru nesting on the property.”
His son, Elliot Easton, who co-ordinates the Moutere Catchment Collective said much of the land in the catchment was heavily modified and had been used to grow apples, grapes, hops and graze stock, which had an impact on sedimentation in the nearby inlet.
He noticed many landowners were starting to think about their properties differently.
“A lot of the land, especially in the Moutere, is not actually that productive so you have a lot of stock that is sometimes there as maintenance, like glorified lawnmowers, so people are really keen to establish natives on marginal land and sometimes across their whole property.”
He said time and cost were the biggest barriers but since the group was formed five years ago, more than 500,000 native trees had been planted and 50 kilometres of riparian fencing installed.
“The inlet has had a particularly hard time with a lot of sediment getting in there so a co-ordinated approach to mitigating sediment and stabilising waterways by planting them up is really important.”
Sky Davies runs the Tasman Environmental Trust and owns a blueberry farm in the Graham Valley.
In the last few years, she and her husband had planted a couple of thousand natives on their property.
She said the planting was the easy part, it was the maintenance and keeping weeds at bay that was the hard part as it could be time consuming and costly.
“What we really need is some ways to make the finances of it stack up and having some practical ways of rewarding landowners for that work, that’s what will lead to more scale and landowners being able to do more of it.”
The Nature Conservancy Aotearoa interim director Erik van Eyndhoven said the study aimed to investigate the most affordable and effective ways of restoring native habitats and would also look at how to increase resilience during increasingly frequent storms.
“This catchment has just been hit by a couple of really big events this last winter and there is a view if you do native restoration in the right places and the right way, it can actually help with some of those storm surges and those flood peaks.”
He said the country needed to find innovative ways of funding restoration work.
“What other mechanisms can we leverage, things like carbon markets or emerging biodiversity markets … or finding people who are willing to pay for this work at scale, and making that accessible to landowners to help take some of the pain out of the equation for them.”
Kotahitanga mō te Taiao co-chair Hemi Sundgren said it was important to take a collective approach, because large scale restoration work could not happen alone, and iwi leadership, combined with community knowledge and technical science was critical when trying to address the challenges the environment was facing.
The organisation had a shared goal of restoring up to 15 percent of lowland forest cover in the top of the South Island.
“This rohe suffers, like any other, significantly from sedimentation so the restoration of the lowlands project and the catchments is really, really important. The approach that we take from the mountains to the sea, is a great values and principles-based approach.”
The study was expected to take a year with landowners and community groups across the Motueka, Moutere and Riuwaka river catchments being called on to share their experiences.
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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/2026/02/25/tasman-district-river-catchments-study-aims-to-protect-communities-during-extreme-weather/
Source: Radio New Zealand
The Wellington Mountain Bike festival kicks off this Friday with three days of racing, shuttle runs, food, beer and entertainment in three different trail spots around the city.
Local riders said up to 265km of trails made the capital a world-class riding destination worth celebrating.
They said riders in the capital were spoilt for choice.
Publicly accessible trails wind through the hills just a short pedal from almost every part of the city.
Supplied
Matt Farrar – co-founder of festival organisers, Trails Wellington – said organisers could have chosen nearly a dozen locations to hold the events.
“We tried to get the right mix for beginner riders through to the more technical riders. Wainuiomata was perfect for the technical stuff as well as the family stuff. Matairangi’s so amazing being right in the centre of the city – we had to go with that one – and then Mākara’s our original famous mountain bike park, so they’re the three that gravitated to the top,” Farrar said.
Caleb Smith. Caleb Smith
Mākara Peak mountain bike park ranger Mark Kent said the sport’s popularity had exploded in Wellington over the last 20 years.
He said about 72,000 people visited the park – in the suburb of Karori – every year, and there was room for plenty more.
“Every second car coming into Karori on a Saturday has a bike on the back. The spinoff of that, the economic benefits for the cafe’s and for the bars in the suburb’s been fantastic and that’s similar across the city. Biking is social and so is going for a beer or going for a good feed afterwards as well,” Kent said.
The Wellington Off Road Riding Department, or WORD, runs skills courses for kids from seven to 17 years old.
The charity even has its own race team – Fast ForWORD.
WORD chief executive Nicola Johnson rails a berm in Wellington’s Matairangi, Mt Victoria. Nic Johnson
Chief executive Nic Johnson said the festival was a chance to showcase the huge range of riding that had grown from trail builders’ efforts all around the city.
“Rotorua is very much one place, one network and same with Queenstown, you’re on the hill up at Skyline. Whereas we’ve got separate trail areas and it’s all a bit of insider knowledge about where the best trails are. We just need to connect them in a way and I think this mountain bike festival will do that. We’ve got three different venues over three days and people will get to taste a bit of each of them,” Johnson said.
Lisa Ng
Sixteen-year-old Ruben Armstrong said he would been taking advantage of the shuttles running in Mākara on Friday and competing in the Mt Victoria In’Duro Race on Saturday.
He said he loved riding the city’s terrain but it was the people he met out on the trails that made the capital so special for him.
“It’s awesome, it’s so buzzy. There’s always a good crew of people out. The trails are awesome, the location is awesome. It’s not a big drive out from the city. It’s always fun riding with people, everyone’s so friendly,” Armstrong said.
Lisa Ng
Co-founder of the Capital Kiwi Project, Paul Ward, said volunteers’ work building trails had helped provide access to the city’s green spaces, and was supporting planting and pest trapping efforts.
The work – along side Zealandia and groups like Predator Free Wellington – had resulted in a massive resurgence in indigenous wildlife around the city over the last 25 years.
“I grew up in Johnsonville in the nineties and my backyard was blackbirds, sparrows and possums and rabbits at night. Now I can open my door in the morning and hear kaka parrots, tui, kererū, kārearea the falcon and on the edges of Karori and places like Waimapihi you’re probably going to hear kiwi calling at night too,” Ward said.
The Wellington Mountain bike festival begins with a WORD-hosted youth ride, music, food and free shuttles trips about Mākara Peak Mountain Bike Park this Friday.
Ruben Armstrong hitting the roots on Wainuiomata trail Fade To Black. Ruben Armstrong
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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/2026/02/25/wellington-mountain-bike-festival-3-days-of-riding-racing-and-socialising/
Source: Radio New Zealand
Dual British citizens need UK passports to travel there from Wednesday. Gill Bonnett
Dual British citizens need UK passports to travel there from Wednesday – but can try their luck with an expired passport if they have to.
UK dual citizen Chris Betterton is among those outraged by the change to require British passports, describing it as a shambles, with “appalling communication”.
The move meant citizens of UK and Irish citizens needed a passport from one of those countries to enter Britain, and could be turned away at airport check-in if they did not have one.
However, the British High Commission confirmed on Tuesday additional temporary guidance had been given to airlines about travellers using expired (post-1989) passports. It said it was an operational decision for them whether to accept them.
“We recognise that this is a significant change for carriers and travellers, but we have been clear on requirements for dual British citizens to travel with a valid British passport or Certificate of Entitlement, in line with those for all British citizens,” said a spokesman. “At their own discretion, carriers may accept some expired British passport as alternative documentation.”
Emergency travel documents were available to some citizens if they urgently needed to enter the UK.
“In line with current practice, on arrival at the UK border, Border Force will still assess a person’s suitability to enter the UK and conduct additional checks if required.”
The House of Commons library guidance still said that operators were “unlikely to deviate from the guidance because they can be penalised for bringing inadequately documented passengers to the UK”.
The Board of Airline Representatives New Zealand declined to comment.
Betterton, who has a New Zealand mother but moved from the UK in 2017, said using an expired document was not a gamble worth taking. His parents were in their 80s and he may need to travel quickly if they became ill. He was also taking his family to visit next year.
The Wellingtonian wants a rethink, with an affordable and lifelong certificate of entitlement – which currently costs £589 (NZ$1330) – to make sure dual citizens did not have to bear ongoing costs.
“It’s been an absolute shambles, they haven’t given any explanation,” he said. “Like everything else, I don’t think they’ve thought through the consequences, I don’t think they’ve thought through the cost and expense, the fact they’re making it more expensive for British citizens to come to their own country than everybody else.
“I think their communication has been appalling. I did email the High Commission but they just ignored me. I’d like them to have announced it properly, like a good six months to a year ago. I’d also like there to be a grace period. And I’d like the certificate of enitlement to be much cheaper, and then that would be the obvious thing to do – now they’re not charging to transfer it between passports, you’ve got it for life.”
UK media was also now recognising the huge impact it was having on dual citizens including those who had to take up citizenship after Brexit, he said.
“We now need to go to the tremendous expense and waste of money of UK passports for the entire family rather than go on our New Zealand passports like our New Zealand friends can.”
Thousands of dual citizens from New Zealand had applied for passports since last month, many angry at what they believed was poor communication of a significant change.
UK MPs have called on the government to delay the enforcement of needing a UK passport or CEO.
NZ Post had been fielding complaints, too. Customer John Day said it took a month for his application to arrive in the UK, and at one point he and his wife were worried both had been lost – including the New Zealand passports they also sent – and his wife’s application has still not arrived.
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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/2026/02/25/absolute-shambles-dual-nationals-on-uk-border-change/
Source: Radio New Zealand
The Ministerial Advisory Group for Victims of Retail Crime, headed by Sunny Kaushal and set up to give expert advice, has collapsed and three members quit before it was due to wind up, exposing deep differences within the retail industry. RNZ / Samuel Rillstone
The man behind the controversial moves to crack down hard on retail crime is one step closer to getting his way.
Sunny Kaushal has been on a 10-year mission to deal to retail criminals with harsher penalties and give retailers and the public more powerful tools to fight them.
The measures are now part of proposed changes to the Crimes Act 1961 and include the most disputed aspect, citizens arrests.
Submissions closed last week and they will now go to select committee.
If the amendment is passed into law it will be a victory for Kaushal, who has long fronted for dairy owners in the call for tougher laws. But it comes at a cost.
The government group headed by Kaushal, which was set up to give expert advice, has collapsed and three members quit before it was due to wind up, exposing deep differences within the retail industry.
Today The Detail talks to three journalists who have delved into the work of Kaushal and the Ministerial Advisory Group for Victims of Retail Crime (MAG).
The group was set up in July 2024 to tackle rising retail crime by providing independent, actionable, and evidence-based policy proposals. According to a government press release it was set up to advise on “changes to the Crimes Act 1961 to strengthen self-defence, anti-social behaviour policies, and security regulations”.
The Spinoff’s special correspondent, Madeleine Chapman, says she’d been thinking about Kaushal for years as he was often in the media speaking on behalf of small retail businesses, particularly dairy owners, around ram raids and other crimes.
After poring over pages of material about him, going back many years, Chapman says she was impressed by his consistent message.
“He has really been on the same beat for the whole 10 years.”
Kaushal has been calling for more police, longer sentences, and making it easier to charge people who commit the crimes, she says.
“Part of me goes: that seems kind of strange for someone who’s speaking and canvassing lots of opinions to have that same strong opinion the whole time.
“Another part of me was surprised that he has kept the energy and the momentum and I think that is why he has had such staying power,” Chapman says.
What emerged from her investigation was more than the story behind the group of retail leaders unravelling, it was about one man who continued to push through his campaign with a “little bit of tunnel vision” despite strong opposition from many parts of the retail industry.
“It is quite incredible that he has come against all these people, all of his colleagues saying all sorts of stuff. That has worked, they accepted the group’s recommendations and now it’s proposed legislation.”
Jimmy Ellingham, RNZ’s Checkpoint reporter, says when the government announced the Ministerial Advisory Group in 2024, it cited an 86 percent rise in retail crime over five years, while Kaushal pointed out that retail crime costs $2.7 billion a year.
“So this was set up in response to that and the objectives at the time were said to do the likes of empowering security guards at retail premises and give business owners of retailers more power to deal with shoplifting. There was also mention of facial recognition technology. This group was set up to look into those issues,” Ellingham says.
Ellingham and Checkpoint senior producer, Louisa Cleave, looked into ministerial advisory groups, compared their budgets and the time spent by the members.
“It’s not unusual that this was set up and the remit was a bit of a blank canvas. The minister Paul Goldsmith said on this show, ‘I want them to throw any and every idea at me’.’”
Goldsmith told Checkpoint he wanted them to push the barrow, though suggestions such as allowing people to use pepper spray to deter criminals was considered a step too far, says Cleave.
The group had a very good scope of experts but somewhere along the way, something went wrong, she says.
“There’s been one aspect that seems to be the most controversial and that’s the citizens arrest powers. We’ve heard from two quite strong groups, Retail NZ and the Police Association, since submissions closed last week that they have some serious concerns.”
Chapman says submissions show the concerns around arming security guards and making citizens arrests are shared by others in the industry, like petrol station owners.
“They were against any sort of citizens arrest or any sort of expectation that your regular retail worker should be trying to stop armed offenders. Currently what they do is say, ‘keep safe, make sure people are safe, the person will likely leave, call the police’.
“And then when you read the submissions some of them are quite strongly worded about how ridiculous this whole idea sounded.”
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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/2026/02/25/citizens-arrests-armed-guards-and-the-power-of-sunny-kaushal/
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Catherine Kevin, Associate Professor in Australian History, Flinders University
Gisèle Pelicot’s compelling and moving memoir begins with the day she learned that over the course of at least nine years, she had been raped by her husband Dominique and around 80 other men, while she was drugged and unconscious.
On that first day of knowing, in November 2020, she was a few months shy of 68. Her memoir explores the aftermath of that knowing, but also rewinds to her parents’ courtship, her childhood and youth and each stage of her adult life. It reveals how her husband’s crimes forced her to recast her entire adult life to-date – and its relationship to her childhood.
Review: A Hymn to Life – Gisèle Pelicot (Bodley Head)
I moved between reading Gisèle’s chapters and daily reports of the Epstein files. As I read, recent charges were laid against men in Germany and Greater Manchester who also drugged and raped their wives for over a decade.
I wondered: what are the effects of this avalanche of revelations about the shadow lives of men – the wealthy, the famous and the seemingly ordinary? (Gisèle’s rapists were described by philosopher Zoe Williams as “a perfect randomised cross-section of society”.)
How is this public accounting of the thousands of documents, images, videos and testimonials to be processed, by survivors and non-survivors? When does the status quo, the structures of power that enable such abuses, give way to rage and its transformative potential?
The Pelicot case became an international story when Gisèle realised facing the 51 men police had been able to identify and charge (including her husband) in a closed court would rob her of support – and the opportunity to shift the burden of shame from victim to perpetrators.
Her decision to make the case public was an act of solidarity with other survivors – and a declaration of self worth that became increasingly audible as the trial proceeded. Have her actions nudged us closer to a tipping point?
When I reviewed the memoir of Pelicot’s daughter, Caroline Darian, a year ago, I asked: is sexual abuse under chemical submission a new frontier in our understandings of intimate partner violence?
The Pelicot case intersected with more established understandings of drink spiking and date rape. But this sustained injury – perpetrated in the final decade of a 49-year marriage, worsened by access to online communities of predators – revealed a distinct new hellscape in understandings of gendered violence, particularly domestic abuse.
In a terrible irony, Gisèle writes:
I had no interest in the internet and social media, and I had no idea of the extent to which they had altered human relationships.
Gisèle has been intermittently estranged from her two eldest children, David and Caroline, since November 2020. They are now tentatively reconciled. Caroline’s 2025 book, I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again, in part makes a case for activism as a form of survival. In the aftermath of the revelations about her father, Caroline established #MendorsPas (Don’t Put Me Under), a movement to raise awareness of sexual assault under chemical submission.
Her mother’s new memoir, far from going over familiar ground, offers a different story of survival.
Gisèle Pelicot was born in 1952 in West Germany, where her father was serving in the French army and “history’s open wounds and bitterness were all around us”. When she was five, they moved to rural France to be close to her mother’s family. Gisèle was nine when her adored mother died in their family kitchen, after years of being plagued by brain tumours.
Her brother and father never recovered from this death, but she resolved to pursue happiness as her mother had done in life. “I was a steadfast tin soldier of joy.” Gisèle did this with determination, in the face of limited schooling and her grief-stricken father’s jealous and cruel second wife. She described meeting Dominique at the age of 19 as “love at first sight”.
Dominique grew up within an oppressive family, where his efforts to protect his mother from his, domestically “all-powerful”, father’s violence failed. He suffered his own humiliations at the hands of the patriarch, too. The man had an incestuous relationship with a foster child taken into the family aged five, which became “official” when she was 25, after Dominique’s mother died.
Dominique once described his life before Gisele as a “nightmare”. But he felt safe with her. Their instant attraction was fortified by this sense of refuge. Building a family was how they would heal; at least this was the pact they made.
Caroline was born in 1979 into this marriage, the second of three children and the only daughter. Her mother’s career trajectory with France’s main electricity company had afforded the Pelicots’ upward class mobility. Dominique, an electrician and a real estate agent, was in and out of work. Occasionally he brought the couple to the brink of financial ruin, but they were buffered just enough by the stability of Gisèle’s employment.
On the whole, the Pelicot children enjoyed secure, loving childhoods focused on their opportunities to thrive. Each forged meaningful careers in adulthood, married and had children. Both Caroline’s and Gisèle’s memoirs depict comfort and security in the lives of Gisèle’s adult children and grandchildren, even as the shock of Dominique’s brutal betrayal begins to reverberate.
One of the great achievements of this book is Gisèle’s capacity to describe – with coherence and nuance – the singularity of her position. This includes her needs, which she finds must take precedence over those of her children if she is to survive.
She writes of her older two children:
They both wanted to be there for me, to protect me in their own way. But I felt as if they wanted to take possession of my life. I couldn’t bear that.
The determination to be happy that took Gisèle into the relationship with her then-husband is transformed into a determination to survive as she surveys the wreckage inflicted by his abuses and seeks a way out. During the years she was drugged, Gisèle felt like she was losing her mind.
Her memory failures, blackouts and exhaustion instilled in her a deep fear of brain tumours and the inheritance of her mother’s fate. As she comes to terms with the true source of these struggles, she writes “I am the enemy of death”. She must chart her own course, and she does so instinctively.
In the immediate aftermath of the revelations, the children’s fury and desire to destroy all traces of their father as they prepare to remove Gisèle from the scene of Dominique’s most recent crimes will make sense to many. But its effect on Gisèle was to return her to a state of desolation, familiar from childhood.
She describes arriving at the Gare de Lyon in Paris with her children after her final night in the home she had shared with Dominique in Provence:
mostly I had the feeling of being inside an enormous shredder. My children had lives to go back to. I had nothing […] It was the old fault line beneath my feet; it had been there all along and now it was opening up again, swallowing everything that I held dear.
Through her efforts to control the pace of her confrontation with Dominique’s countless betrayals, a chasm opens between Gisèle and her eldest son and daughter. Her children, she writes, were “unable to distinguish their father from the poisoner and rapist”, whereas she tried to separate her memories of the husband she’d loved from her new knowledge of the one who had violated her.
Through processes of splitting apart, quarantining and dismembering her images and understandings of who Dominique was in their marriage, she holds at bay the full tsunami of deeply knowing what has been done to her.
She takes the time she needs, insisting on being alone, seeking solace in friends old and new rather than her children, to integrate the full force of her new history. That these decisions are integral to her survival is clear. Their impact on her family reminds us of the weight of the mother-load.
In her own memoir, Caroline vividly evokes the horror of learning, within days of her father being detained, that he took photographs of her asleep in her underwear. She is currently pursuing a separate case of chemical submission and rape against him, crimes he has repeatedly denied. Enduring the uncertainty around the nature of her victimisation has been a feature of Caroline’s experience.
As Gisèle processed the catalogue of Dominique’s abuses, for which there was clear evidence, her response to her daughter’s distress left open the possibility her daughter had not been raped by her father. This attempt at offering solace and some way for Caroline to hold onto memories of her father’s love was an extension of Gisèle’s splitting and dismembering of him for her own protection. “I was warding off the worst-case scenario, while my daughter was heading straight for it,” Gisèle writes.
For Caroline, this felt like dismissal.
I found Gisèle’s account of the tensions in the relationship with her daughter more explicit than in Caroline’s memoir. Where Caroline expresses frustration with her mother’s early reluctance to give up all feelings of care for Dominique, Gisèle conveys a sense of the limits of her own ability to readily respond to a child whose emotional expression had always been more voluble than her own.
In a recent New Yorker essay, Rachel Aviv quotes Caroline’s August 2025 description of Gisèle as failing to fulfil her maternal contract. Aviv wonders if the terms of the contract had ever really been settled and suggests this disagreement took on new weight as the two women grappled with Dominique’s crimes.
Aviv reads this as two clashing versions of feminism: a daughter’s expectation she should have maternal love that affirms and consoles her, versus a mother’s choice to prioritise her own emotional integrity and agency in order to express the values of a wider feminist movement.
But this oversimplifies feminism and the narrative we can assemble from the various accounts of daughter and mother. Dominique’s harm has extended to undermining relationships between his victims, the origins of which were love and protection.
The feminism of the two women is varied by the impacts of the injury. Their solidarity is marred by the monumental and distinct tasks each has faced in rising from his wreckage.
Aviv draws on French anthropologist Dorothy Dussy’s observations about the taboo of incest in this case. The court evidence demanded confrontation with countless taboos but still “the injunction to remain silent about incest” remained. It surfaced in the back stories of a number of the perpetrators, though – and was part of the violence of the chief perpetrator’s family of origin.
Yet, while he admits to the crimes committed against Gisèle, Dominique cannot admit to sexualising his own offspring, even when directly confronted by his children in the court.
Last year, Caroline referred to her mother’s psychological and emotional incapacity to recognise incest to help explain the mother–daughter rift. We can’t know if the daughter sees this as the central driver of their estrangement, or as one of many ways she has to understand it.
A Hymn to Life suggests a more complicated relationship between Gisèle and the spectre of her ex-husband’s abuse of Caroline and other members of the family. At one point she refers to his “unbearable incestuous gaze”.
One senses the awareness each woman has of the potential for these struggles to overwhelm everything else. Their published accounts give us a means to digest the extent and complexity of the harm Dominique has caused. The fracturing of this once-close family is the tragic collateral damage that compounds the original injury.
At the same time, Gisèle’s memoir reveals that in the lead-up to the trial, she met (through a friend) and fell in love with Jean-Loup, a widower she calls a “very beautiful person”. Her description of this burgeoning relationship will give joy to the many awed by the story of her endurance and survival.
Gisèle repeatedly describes her ex-husband’s quest to possess her sexually: expressed as an element of desire within their shared sex life. It had annoyed her but seemed normal enough – before that day at the police station, when it took on a far more devastating meaning.
Coverture (puissance marital in French law), a medieval legal doctrine making a woman the legal property of her husband after she marries, has a long history in laws governing marriage. As new cases of men drugging and raping wives emerge, with their long tentacles into online communities of men exchanging techniques, images and sexual access, it seems coverture, overturned in marriage laws in the 19th and 20th centuries, has gone underground.
Outside of marriage, the possession and commodification of girls’ and women’s bodies still turns them into currency: perhaps most clearly demonstrated by the Epstein files.
– ref. ‘I am the enemy of death’: Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir is a remarkable tale of survival – https://theconversation.com/i-am-the-enemy-of-death-gisele-pelicots-memoir-is-a-remarkable-tale-of-survival-274628
Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/25/i-am-the-enemy-of-death-gisele-pelicots-memoir-is-a-remarkable-tale-of-survival-274628/
Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Brodie Fraser, Senior Research Fellow in Housing and Health, University of Otago
The government’s plan to empower police to “issue move-on orders as a tool to deal with disorderly behaviour in public places” will effectively apply to people as young as 14 who are experiencing homelessness and who “obstruct” access to businesses, beg or sleep rough.
Critics have called the policy unworkable and “draconian”, particularly the provisions for NZ$2,000 fines or up to three months in prison as penalties for breaches.
While the approach may move people out of central business districts temporarily, it won’t tackle homelessness in the long term. In fact, the focus on those who are visibly sleeping rough obscures the true extent and nature of homelessness in New Zealand.
Rough sleeping is just the tip of the iceberg. On the night of the 2023 Census, there were 112,496 people experiencing homelessness. The most common form of homelessness was living in uninhabitable housing, followed by sharing accommodation.
New Zealand is also an outlier internationally in that more than half of those experiencing homelessness are women. This is in large part because New Zealand defines and measures homelessness comprehensively as:
[…] living situations where people with no other options to acquire safe and secure housing are: without shelter, in temporary accommodation, sharing accommodation with a household, or living in uninhabitable housing.
Unfortunately, we are set to lose the continued collection of such high-quality data with the end of the traditional Census.
Homelessness among women, and mothers in particular, also occurs because our welfare state doesn’t provide sufficient support to prevent homelessness. Homelessness is systemic; quick-fix “solutions” like move-on orders don’t solve anything.
There are many different ways to tackle homelessness but there is no evidence to suggest simply moving people away will do anything to address the problem.
Despite the Census data, there is very little research, policy or funding focused specifically on the needs and experiences of women experiencing homelessness. This makes it difficult for housing support services to provide appropriate accommodation.
However, one successful model New Zealand has adopted is called Housing First. Initially championed in the US, it starts with the idea that the complex issues that lead to people experiencing homelessness are best addressed with permanent housing as the starting point.
Then, once people are housed, staff provide ongoing intensive and specialist support for any other needs a person may have. To obtain housing, clients don’t have to meet any strict behavioural criteria such as sobriety, which is often a requirement in “treatment first” models.
Instead, housing is treated as a human right.
In partnership with The People’s Project, New Zealand’s first Housing First provider, we have evaluated the outcomes of about 400 of their first clients to see whether this approach works in New Zealand. Our findings repeatedly show it does.
In our newly published research, we examined the demographic differences of the women in this cohort and found they were much more likely to be younger than men in the group, Māori and have dependent children.
In the fifth year after being housed and supported by The People’s Project, circumstances had improved noticeably for these women.
Most striking were their health-related outcomes. There was a statistically significant drop in hospitalisations; 65% less than in the one year before they were housed.
Their pharmaceutical dispensing increased significantly by 14%, which suggests they were able to access healthcare earlier and get the medications they needed in a timely fashion.
Once people have been housed, one of the first things The People’s Project does is to enrol them in a general practice clinic and help them sort out any ongoing health issues they might have.
While not statistically significant, other healthcare results showed a promising decrease across all forms of mental health related events and a drop in emergency department visits.
Overall, access to permanent housing has improved health and wellbeing.
When examining justice sector outcomes, we did not find any statistically significant changes for women in the cohort; although there was a drop in offences and charges.
What we did see, though, was a significant drop in police offences, criminal charges and major events for the men in the cohort.
We also looked at changes in incomes, both from wages or salaries and social welfare benefits.
For women in the cohort, their incomes from wages and salaries rose by a significant 101%, and a 19% increase from benefits.
Over the years, we have heard repeatedly from our community partners about how hard it is for people to navigate the social welfare system and to know what financial support is available to them.
A key role of Housing First providers across the country is to help make sure their clients are getting the correct financial support they are eligible for.
However, despite these great improvements in income, the women were only earning about $20,000 per year; not enough to raise a thriving family. Most of these women (84%) had children.
As the saying goes, raising a family takes a village, and for women experiencing homelessness, the support from Housing First providers can contribute to that village. However, no amount of support can fully ease the impact of living in poverty.
To support women and their children, we need better policies to prevent poverty and homelessness in the first place, alongside increased and targeted funding for successful models such as Housing First.
– ref. New police powers to ‘move on’ rough sleepers only mask NZ’s deeper homelessness problem – https://theconversation.com/new-police-powers-to-move-on-rough-sleepers-only-mask-nzs-deeper-homelessness-problem-276621
Evening Report: https://eveningreport.nz/2026/02/25/new-police-powers-to-move-on-rough-sleepers-only-mask-nzs-deeper-homelessness-problem-276621/
Source: Radio New Zealand
Liam Lawson. FLORENT GOODEN / PHOTOSPORT
Former Red Bull boss Christian Horner has revealed that it was team advisor Helmut Marko that made the decision to swap Liam Lawson and Yuki Tsunoda early in the 2025 Formula 1 season.
After a difficult start to the 2025 season, the New Zealand driver lasted just two rounds in the top team before he and Tsunoda swapped places with Lawson demoted to Racing Bulls.
Speaking on the new Drive to Survive series Horner said it was Marko that was the driving force behind the change.
Horner was ousted from Red Bull in July with the team underperforming and the future of world champion Max Verstappen uncertain.
Red Bull advisor Helmut Marko and driver Liam Lawson. PHOTOSPORT
Marko announced in December that he would be leaving Formula 1 after 20 years with Red Bull.
GP Blog is reporting that Horner said the decision to switch both drivers after just two races was heavily influenced by the Austrian advisor.
“I was always pushed to take drivers from the [Red Bull] young driver programme. Helmut was a big driver in it,” Horner said.
Former Red Bull F1 boss Christian Horner, 2024. David Buono/Icon Sportswire / PHOTOSPORT
Tsunoda also struggled in the Red Bull car and was dropped to reserve driver status following the 2025 season.
Horner also singled out Marko as integral to the decision that led to his dismissal at Red Bull Racing.
The 52-year-old Englishman described his reaction to the news that he had been sacked as like receiving a “shit sandwich”.
Horner has said that he is keen to get involved in Formula 1 again, possibly as a team owner.
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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/2026/02/25/horner-blames-marko-for-liam-lawsons-demotion-from-red-bull/
Source: Radio New Zealand
The number of rough sleepers known to outreach teams has dropped in Auckland. Nick Monro
The number of rough sleepers known to outreach teams has dropped in Auckland, but those on the front line are treating the figure with caution.
Auckland Council’s latest tally shows the number of homeless people social services know of across the region fell from 940 in September to 668 in January – a decrease of 272 that almost matches the number of extra homes funded in that time.
It comes as the government plans controversial move-on orders for those begging or rough sleeping in public.
Council’s head of community impact, Dicky Humphries, said it was too early to tell if the quarter’s drop was a trend or seasonal dip.
“They carry a bit of hope but we do need to do some analysis as to why that might be the case,” he said.
“One quarter drop is not necessarily a trend so we will be looking to the next quarter figure and the one after that to see if this quarter is an anomaly or the start of a trend downwards.”
Humphries said across the region, homelessness had been increasing for some time and numbers could fluctuate.
The count included those working with people experiencing the extreme end of homelessness to those rough sleeping or living in cars.
“Any figure that we have, counted that way, is a sub-set of a much larger figure that is unknown to everyone,” he said.
“There’s a lot of work that’s happening between the social services sector, council and government so it is a figure that we would like to see fall, ongoing.”
Council’s head of community impact, Dicky Humphries, said it was too early to tell if the quarter’s drop was a trend or seasonal dip. Nick Monro
Heart of the South business association general manager, Audrey Williams, said it had noticed an increase in homeless people turning up in recent weeks.
“Since the government started talking about moving people out of Auckland, our numbers have increased. We’re still only at about 15 not huge levels but it has definitely increased and the mental health state of the newcomers is a lot more severe than we’ve ever noticed before.”
Williams said it had not seen a drop in rough sleepers in south Auckland.
Local community liaison officers talked to new arrivals living on the street and she said it appeared they had been told to leave the main city centre.
“They’ve been told that they’re not allowed to rough sleep in the central city, they are told that by the security guards, by the locals,” she said.
“People have taken that as factual ‘you can go somewhere else you’re not allowed to be here in Auckland city’.”
Williams said the business association worked with social agencies and in the last 18 months had helped 30 people get a roof over their head and wrap-around support.
The homeless count was in a Regional Homeless Activity Update, to council’s Community Committee, by council’s homelessness lead Ron Suyker.
The report pointed out that the 272 decrease in rough sleepers coincided with the provision of 207 extra housing places in the Housing First programme, which “has had a positive impact”.
But Suyker said several registered community housing providers that offered wrap-around support and housing for the homeless were exceeding the caps on their contracts.
“The demand is greater than the capacity they have been provisioned to manage,” he said in the report.
“Government target settings in relation to the reduction of reliance on emergency housing have seen an impact, reflected in this report’s numbers, on the ability for homeless tangata to access emergency housing.”
That change was made in October 2024, and between September that year and January 2025 homeless numbers in Auckland jumped 53 percent.
Heart of the South says it’s helped 30 people get a roof over their head and wrap-around support in the last 18 months. Nick Monro
Suyker said the council had provided support to several business associations responding to increased street homelessness in their areas.
“Physical and mental health issues, along with addictions, are presenting in most cases of rough sleeping and individuals needs can be incredibly complex,” he said.
The government funded an extra 300 Housing First places in September last year in a bid to curb homelessness, and the housing ministry said almost 200 rough sleepers had been housed as a result.
The Housing First programme helped people who were chronically homeless into stable, long-term homes and its manager Rami Alrudaini said that showed there was a need for more housing – he did not believe the move-on orders would help.
“We are now seeing the impact of that investment with more than two thirds of those places already filled and now they’re introducing move on enforcement which undermines the very investment they have made, by making it harder for people who are already doing it tough to access the support and housing they need.”
At Wellington’s Downtown Community Ministry (DCM), chief executive Natalia Cleland said there were not enough homes to go around.
DCM was allocated 30 of the extra 300 places in the one-off government provision and had managed to house 10 rough sleepers in the last two months.
Cleland applauded the government for supporting the programme, and the private landlords who leased their homes to people in need, but said there were not enough homes.
“We still have a huge number of people under our service that are waiting for housing that have signed up to Housing First who have said, ‘I’m sleeping rough, please help me to get a home’,” she said.
“Ten is great, but there’s at least 52 people as of today that are rough sleeping under our Housing First service that don’t have access to or a clear pathway to housing.”
Cleland said many homeless people were waiting for housing.
“It’s not that someone’s rough sleeping and needs to be walked down to DCM for support. It’s that they’re rough sleeping and they’re waiting for a home to move into.”
Auckland Council Community Committee chair Julie Fairey. Supplied / City Vision
Auckland Council’s Community Committee would discuss the regional update and impact of move on orders on rough sleepers this Thursday.
Its chair, councillor Julie Fairey, expected discussion to be robust.
“The increase in funding for Housing First places has helped. This is part of the frustration, we know what will work here, the sector has been very clear about what is needed which is more funding for services like Housing First.”
She said there was widespread recognition that anti-social behaviour was a problem that needed to be addressed but questioned whether move-on orders would be effective.
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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/2026/02/25/number-of-auckland-rough-sleepers-drops-advocates-say-true-figure-remains-unknown/
Source: New Zealand Government
Golden Bay Air will be the first airline to receive a loan from funding ear-marked for at-risk regional air routes, Associate Transport Minister James Meager says.
The airline will receive approximately $1.1 million from the $30 million package set aside by the Coalition Government from the Regional Infrastructure Fund (RIF), designed to stabilise the sector and support regional routes in the short to medium term.
“Golden Bay Air’s loan will ensure the regional airline can refinance existing aircraft debt and fund essential ongoing major maintenance checks. This targeted relief will support it to maintain flights from Tākaka to Nelson, Karamea and Wellington,” Mr Meager says.
“The airline moves freight and supports essential access to health care and emergency services, when Tākaka Hill Road is cut off during severe weather events. It also provides an important tourism link for visitors accessing the Heaphy and Abel Tasman tracks.
“The loan will help safeguard flights in and out of Golden Bay and improve the company’s operational reliability. Crucially, the support will strengthen economic resilience for a remote region by helping to keep businesses and people connected.”
“Ensuring the viability and connectivity of Golden Bay is vital for such an isolated community. This loan funding gives certainty to the tourism sector, helping build their future,” West Coast-Tasman MP Maureen Pugh says.
Fund administrator, Kānoa, has received several loan applications from other airlines and is working to fully allocate funds as quickly as possible.
The RIF package also includes additional funding to support regional airlines to integrate bookings with the platforms of larger carriers. Known as ‘interlining’, this will allow passengers to book multi-leg journeys on a single ticket.
“This initiative has the potential to be a true gamechanger for smaller carriers, by strengthening the commercial sustainability of regional airlines. It will support our regional connectivity and bolster Kiwis’ accessibility to travel around the country,” Mr Meager says.
Airlines will be invited to apply for the interlining funding in the coming weeks.
LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/25/government-support-for-regional-air-routes-takes-flight/
Source: Radio New Zealand
A crash blocked lanes on State Highway 1 in Kaiapoi pm Wednesday morning. (File photo). RNZ / Tom Kitchin
A crash on State Highway 1 in Kaiapoi, Canterbury, brought early morning traffic to a near-standstill.
The Transport Agency said a crash shortly after 5am on the Kaiapoi River Bridge on Wednesday blocked the northbound lanes as well as one lane southbound.
It said motorists should expect delays.
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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/2026/02/25/crash-blocks-lanes-on-state-highway-1-at-kaiapoi/
Source: Radio New Zealand
The government has proposed new options to improve pig and sheep traceability. RNZ / Cosmo Kentish-Barnes
The government has proposed new options to improve pig and sheep traceability so it can better respond to disease outbreaks.
While counting sheep may put some to sleep – keeping track of the animals and where they had been could be vital when it came to disease management.
At the moment, when sheep were moved between farms, saleyards and meatworks, farmers were required to fill out animal status declarations or ASDs – on paper or in PDF form.
The Ministry of Primary Industries (MPI) has put out a proposal to improve traceability for sheep and pigs.
The three options included – staying with the status quo, moving to a fully electronic mob tracing system or including sheep in NAIT, The National Animal Identification and Tracing System.
Beef and Lamb chair Kate Acland said moving to electronic monitoring was the preferred option.
“Beef and Lamb supports doing it under it the ASD system but moving to fully electronic forms – it’s already in place and relatively low cost compared to the other options and it’s simple and practical.
“We support improving the traceability in the livestock system, sheep is a gap at the moment – we just need something that is practical and useful on farm.”
Currently cattle and deer were tracked individually under NAIT and farmers paid a levy per animal.
Acland said that was not necessary with sheep.
“Bringing sheep under NAIT would be a lengthy process as it would require changes to the legislation and there would be a greater cost for farmers whereas an ASD is something farmers already use so it just makes sense to use a system that’s already in place.”
Kate Acland © Clare Toia-Bailey / www.image-central.co.nz
One option the MPI proposal did not include was individually tracking each sheep – as Australia, Canada, the UK and the EU did.
The proposal pointed out that of the 38 members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), New Zealand was one of 11 countries that did not individually trace sheep.
“Of these 11 countries, New Zealand stands out as being highly reliant on exports of animal-based primary products.”
MPI said New Zealand could be expected to follow global practice and move towards traceability of individual sheep in the future.
“However, we do not discuss individual traceability as an option because a significant amount of work with stakeholders and providers is needed to understand the costs, benefits, and operational resourcing required for this option,” the consultation document said.
Acland said sheep were run in much larger mobs in New Zealand and the benefits of individual tracing would not outweigh the significant costs this would impose on farmers.
Submissions on the proposal close on 5 April.
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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/2026/02/25/mpi-proposes-new-options-to-trace-pigs-and-sheep-for-better-disease-response/
Source: Radio New Zealand
Should we do couples counselling? Are we happy? Are we both pulling in the same direction? How can we get our spark back?
These kinds of questions are normal in a society that places such importance on coupledom, despite there being no handbook or one-size-fits all approach.
Many people seek out couples counselling when going through a rough patch, or wondering how to improve their relationship. And no doubt the hit show Couples Therapy has boosted public interest in this type of counselling.
Many who seek couples counselling do so because they’re arguing and disagreeing a lot with their partner.
Unsplash / Rizki Ardia
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand
LiveNews: https://nz.mil-osi.com/2026/02/25/will-a-couples-therapist-take-sides-an-expert-explains/
Source: Radio New Zealand
MediMap is used by some health providers in aged care, disability, hospice and the community to accurately record medication doses. RNZ/Calvin Samuel
A hack at a second healthcare portal is being labelled a concern and a worry by a cyber security consultant who also used to work at the National Cyber Security Centre.
MediMap has shut down access to its platform while it looks into how it was breached on Sunday.
Health New Zealand is supporting it but said as a privately owned company, it is MediMap that is solely responsible for its security and it needs to do everything it can.
“I think any incident involving health information is concerning,” Jan Thornborough from Outfox told RNZ.
“Because we expect our most sensitive information to be well protected.”
That’s what Health NZ says too.
Its digital services acting chief information technology officer Darren Douglass said New Zealanders expected companies involved in healthcare to secure systems and platforms so private information was safeguarded.
MediMap is widely used in the likes of aged residential care, disability services, hospices and community health for prescribing and giving medication, and administration.
Facilities using it are now back to manual pen and paper.
Palliative Care Nurses New Zealand said it was very worried by the breach.
“Palliative care nurses are deeply concerned about the impact this may have on the safety, privacy, and delivery of care for our patients,” the group said.
“Any disruption places vulnerable patients at risk.”
In a message provided by the Nurses Organisation, one of its members at George Manning Lifecare and Village in Christchurch said staff were worried for their residents.
“Since MediMap stopped working we have had to double the number of registered nurses on each shift just to give medication, this requires a paper form from the pharmacy, everything from paracetamol through to controlled drugs requires a second checker to observe and sign along with the registered nurse administering,” they said.
“This process makes each medication round longer and means the risk of residents not receiving their medicine on time is high.”
Jan Thornborough from Outfox said it was the right move by MediMap to close its platform down to put a halt to further damage.
“So usually in the first 24 to 48 hours, it’s really important for them to assess what’s happened so that they can contain the risk and preserve any evidence so that when they get the right experts in, they can investigate it properly and actually find out exactly how the hacker got in,” she said.
“And once they’ve contained the problem and they understand the scope of it, then they can determine what the impact is both on the service itself, but also for their customers and implement an appropriate recovery plan for them.”
MediMap said the breach, which it called unauthorised activity, resulted in patient records being modified.
It said this involved information like resident names, dates of birth, assigned prescriber, location of care and resident status.
Thornborough said users of software or platforms had their own responsibilities as well as the companies providing it.
“Really this is a wake-up call for all New Zealand organisations, if they haven’t worked it out yet that cybercrime is not going away,” she said.
“We’re all operating in a digitally connected environment these days and they need to take ownership of where they put their information and who they trust holding on to it because at the end of the day, it’s a shared responsibility between the business and the vendor of a particular piece of software or a portal.
She said software or platform users had to do their own due diligence.
“And until the general consumer says ‘okay, I expect this level of security’, they’re not going to get it, basically.”
The latest health portal breach comes after a top-level review into the earlier Manage My Health hack was already underway.
Health Minister Simeon Brown, who called that breach unacceptable, commissioned the review and said there were lessons that needed to be learned.
The review started on 30 January and was expected to provide a final report on 30 April.
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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/2026/02/25/medimap-health-portal-hack-a-wake-up-call-cyber-security-expert-says/
Source: Radio New Zealand
There are 42 people registered with individual real estate license who are aged over 83. RNZ
If you picture a real estate salesperson, you probably don’t imagine someone living in a retirement village. But it might be more common than you think.
Ray White general manager and licensee agent Antonia Baker can remember having a meeting with a client in a retirement village at one point, talking about selling her portfolio.
“As I walked out of the lift, I spotted a someone that I know as a real estate agent in West Auckland. And I could tell from the conversation that she was having with the people around her that she was a resident, not visiting like I was. So she was still getting up on a Saturday morning and trotting out to open homes as a Ryman’s resident.”
Real Estate Authority data shows that Baker’s acquaintance is probably not the only real estate salesperson in that situation.
There are 42 people registered with individual real estate license who are aged over 83. Another 168 are aged between 78 and 82. More than 3560 are aged between 73 and 77.
“I have a feeling that’s going to be me one day … why wouldn’t you?” Baker said.
“Some of them are actually quite high volume … There are a couple of legends in the industry who are still quite happily trading and trading decent volumes.”
It isn’t just the older crowd proving stickability, either. Despite a soft housing market, the number of people working in it has stayed relatively constant in recent years.
At the end of October 2025, there were 15,980 active real estate licenses, compared to 15,540 the year before and 15,870 in 2023.
There were 23,078 new licenses issued in the year to June last year, up 22 percent from the same time the year before. There was a 18.4 percent jump in the number of branch manager licenses active, a 1.1 percent increase in salespeople and a 0.9 percent drop in the number of individual agents.
Baker said people who had made it through the pandemic years had probably figured out a way to keep going.
“You were resilient by that time. My assumption around that was that we had baked in sufficient resilience into the industry and into people’s roles and their businesses by that time, that the external factors didn’t have all that much of an effect.
“And if I think about our network, it has just done so much to help the agents that work within it to drive their businesses and to make them resilient so that it doesn’t matter what the trading environment is, we can still survive.”
Real Estate Authority chief executive Belinda Moffat. Supplied
Real Estate Authority chief executive Belinda Moffat said the number of real estate licenses was down from a peak of nearly 1700 in the post-Covid boom.
“We had that really hot market, and … that’s when we saw a really sharp increase in joiners, so June 2022, we had nearly 17,000 active licenses, and we were issuing about 2600 new licenses a year.
“We then had a bit of a drop over a little bit of a period of time, and we’ve now got about 15,914, and we’ve issued in the last year just over 2000, so there has been, it does shift and fluctuate with the markets, but at the moment, it’s sort of holding steady.”
She said it was noticeable that a lot of people stuck with the industry for a long time.
“I think there’s a number of reasons why people come to real estate of itself.
“I think obviously the economic environment there is … I think people are exploring different professions, but I’d say that the reason people have come to real estate or also why they may not have left real estate is because it offers flexibility.
“Some people find it’s a great profession where you’re working with people, you’re helping people to realise their aspirations of a home and a business or a farm. It’s a pretty busy and dynamic profession, but it is also one that does offer a bit of independence. Most of our licensees are contractors, but having said that, they do have to meet both the expectations of our regulatory system and they also have to meet the expectations of the agency that they work for.”
Collectively, there was about $70.3 billion in residential real estate sales through salespeople last year, according to Cotality, which at a rate of 3 percent commission could have netted real estate salespeople $2.1b or about $130,000 each. But that amount is generally split between the salesperson who makes the sale and the agency they work for. Some earn significantly more and others much less.
There were about 80,000 sales.
In 2023, the $56b in sales would have made agents about $1.68b or $105,860 each.
Moffat said people should not expect the job to be easy money. Some people left after a couple of years, she said.
“Being a real estate licensee is not an easy job. There is a lot that’s expected of our profession, they have to be over 18, got to have the qualifications, they have to be fit and proper, they have to undertake ongoing CPD or education every year, and then they have to meet the standards of our Code of Conduct that’s overseen by REA, and they can face complaints and disciplinary processes if they don’t, so they have to know a huge amount in order to be successful, and those first couple of years can be pretty tough.
“You’ve got to have some good financial backing, because you’ll look for your listings, then you might get your first couple of listings through people that you know in your networks, but then you’ve got to really be able to just make sure you maintain a pipeline, so it does require a lot of hard work, it’s like starting your own business, you’ve got to really be prepared for getting yourself through the slower months, as well as working hard when you do have a couple of listings on the go, so it’s a profession that does require some really concentrated work, and it’s not surprising because you’re always dealing with people who are perhaps engaging in the most significant transaction they will ever engage in, and it’s full of emotion and risk and financial obligations.”
Some people were working more than one job when the market was tougher, she said.
“That’s something we’ve seen in the cooler market, and as I said, the flexibility of the role can add to that, but at the same time, where they do have a listing, then they are having to work really hard to deliver the best service they can to their customers and clients and meet all the demands that go with being part of a profession that does have quite a few requirements for people to meet.”
Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub. Supplied
Simplicity chief economist Shamubeel Eaqub said people would “live and die” by their sales.
“It’s a very high risk gamble in good markets it works but the way it works is the offices tend to have quite a lot of base income from the advertising and those bits and pieces. So they can sustain a group of people and then there is the whole bunch of people who are at risk.
“If you’re at the top and you’ve been around for a long time … you’ve had some spectacular years. I’m not surprised people are not leaving. My understanding is the more senior you are the less turnover there is. You’re less likely to be out there doing the putting up the signs and those kinds of things and in more of a leadership role. Those positions are still quite lucrative and they’ve been through many cycles so they know how to manage that.”
Lincoln University professor of property studies Graham Squires said people sometimes teamed up to share commission, which also helped.
“If you get say 4 percent on an $800,000 house you could be getting $32,000, so there’s probably enough in the market for people to say well as long as I break even or get a few sales, enough to keep me going, that will keep me in the industry.
“You could argue estate agents have a mindset where they’re optimistic that the market will improve. We see a lot of professional institutions talking up the market a lot even when it might not need to be talked up.”
Moffat said there was change happening. Salespeople were being given guidance in the use of AI.
Baker said salespeople were being offered training on how to “beat the bot”.
“I think fundamentally it is what everyone laughingly refers to as a belly-to-belly transaction. There’s no getting around the requirement for a human. And in fact, it’s the human that tips it over the line, not the bot. And it will always be like that, always.”
Lincoln University professor of property studies Graham Squires. Supplied
Squires said flat-fee competitors had not been able to get as much of a foothold in the industry as might have been expected, given consternation sometimes expressed about the level of real estate commission.
“I think the franchises probably have value to add and have some power and weight in the market in terms of reach and marketing and those sorts of things.
“I suppose they have education and marketing and training that’s allied with being part of the franchise that you contribute to when you make the sales.
“There’s a few big players … some of the larger organisations do buyouts and things like that so it sort of evolves in a larger space.”
Eaqub said it was a difficult industry to change. “It’s your biggest purchase or sale and tradition and brand awareness and trust and all those things matter a great deal. It’s not a price driven thing for a lot of people, if you’re spending millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars one percentage point here or there is like in the margin of error in terms of house prices going up and down.”
Baker said when the economy was difficult, people tended to move towards brands they knew.
“Then they tend to go back to the old, big, tried and tested providers. And I think that is the same in our industry. When the economy gets a bit scary, people go back to the big brands that they trust that have been around for 125 years and that they know.”
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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/2026/02/25/fancy-being-a-real-estate-agent-in-your-80s-why-salesforce-has-weathered-market-fall/
Source: Radio New Zealand
Lyall Bay beach and the rest of Wellington’s south coast has been off limits since the Moa Point treatment plant failed on 4 February. RNZ / Krystal Gibbens
Lyall Bay businesses are excited by the prospect that beaches along the south coast in Wellington could soon reopen after being off-limits since since the Moa Point treatment plant failed catastrophically pumping millions of litres of untreated sewage into the sea.
On Tuesday Wellington Mayor Andrew Little said the current blanket direction for people to stay off south coast beaches was not sustainable when water testing results showed little risk.
The impacts of the untreated sewage being discharged into the Cook Strait on south coast beaches has been monitored now for over two weeks, and Little has hinted a change in policy could be coming.
“What we are looking at being able to say to people is: ‘here are the results, this is what it shows, the risk is pretty low, you make your own decision about whether you want to go onto the beach and and have a swim in the sea’.”
The founder of Wonderland Chocolate in Lyall Bay Kate Necklen says they’ve seen less people since people have been told to stay off Wellington’s south coast. RNZ / Krystal Gibbens
A rāhui is in place on the southern coast from Ōwhiro Bay to Breaker Bay which covers anything the water touches or can touch with the high or low tides.
Anna Janiec owner of the Polish Sausage Company which is located in Lyall Bay Junction said businesses had really felt the impact of people not going to the beach in the past few weeks.
“We don’t see new people coming. There is no people wandering around. Obviously no one on the beach. People with dogs that come for walks are not here. So we can feel it.”
She said if the beaches were safe for people to return to, she would expect it to boost business.
Kate Necklen thinks plenty of surfers will want to return to the beach. RNZ / Krystal Gibbens
Kate Necklen founder of Wonderland Chocolate had also seen less people in the area.
“We’ve certainly seen less people come through our tasting room.”
“It would be awesome to see people back in the Bay and I know there’ll be plenty of surfers out there who want to get back in the water,” Necklen said.
Botanist general manager Kais Letfi said they had seen a 20-25 percent decrease in customers.
“I’ve had to cut hours, I’ve had to reduce wages,” he said.
He said they could not wait for the beaches to reopen.
“Hopefully it brings people back to Lyall Bay and we can start working again.”
Seaview Takeaways owner Vicky Shen. RNZ / Krystal Gibbens
Vicky Shen owner of Seaview Takeaways hoped that if the beaches reopened it would bring more people to Lyall Bay.
But would people even swim at the beaches if they reopened? Most of those RNZ spoke to wouldn’t be diving straight in.
“I think if I see others swimming, maybe. But I would have to be 100 percent sure that it is safe,” Janiec said.
“I’m not really a beach swimmer myself but my kids swim in the beach and they’d certainly go into the water once it reopened for sure,” Necklen said.
Shen was also willing to dip her toes back in the water, but also a little wary of getting a skin rash from bacteria in the water.
Letfi said he would put his trust in the council and swim once it was safe to do so.
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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/2026/02/25/lyall-bay-businesses-excited-at-prospect-of-wellington-south-coast-beaches-reopening/
Source: Radio New Zealand
The report revealed that 23 percent of people aged 15 to 25 had experienced high or very high psychological distress in the four weeks leading up to the survey – up from 8 percent 10 years ago. RNZ/Michelle Tiang
Young people are facing more psychological distress and finding it harder to get specialist help, a new report says.
The Mental Health and Wellbeing Commission has released a snapshot of mental health and addiction services in the year to June 2025, using data from the NZ health survey.
It revealed 23 percent of people aged 15 to 25 had experienced high or very high psychological distress in the four weeks leading up to the survey – up from 8 percent 10 years ago.
The commission’s chief executive, Karen Orsborn, said more work was being done to find out exactly why.
“We know that for young people, they live in a very rapidly changing world. They experience challenges due to what they see around climate change and financial challenges and the world at large. Online safety fits into there as well,” she said.
Young people were also struggling to access specialist care – like psychologists, psychiatrists and other mental health professionals, with almost 400 fewer getting help than the previous year.
That was bucking one of the positive trends in the report which found, across all ages, about 6500 more people were able to use specialist services than the previous year – at total of 164,555.
Orsborn wanted to see the system really focus on reaching young people.
“The earlier somebody can have access to services when they need it… they do have better outcomes in the longer term. So getting that early access is really important,” she said.
“There’s a lot of really positive initiatives underway. So we have seen some great things happening and it’s really just keeping that focus, keeping that leadership and the actions to really make a difference for change.”
Across all ages, the report showed a mixed bag.
The number of people being turned away when they were referred to specialist services had increased.
However, waiting times had decreased, likely because there were 557 more specialist mental health workers than in March 2023, the report found.
There was still a 20 percent vacancy rate for psychiatrists.
Orsborn said the commission was carrying out its own detailed study to try to find out more about what is behind the statistics.
If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.
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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/2026/02/25/youth-facing-more-psychological-distress-finding-it-harder-to-get-specialist-help-report/
