The Wire with Castor

Andre Fa’aoso speaks to Senior Lecturer in Business and Economics at the University of Auckland Dr Haipeng Zhang Aotearoa signing a free trade deal with the European Union. 

Last week Chris Hipkins was in Brussels to sign a Free Trade Agreement with the European Union. The much-anticipated deal took years of negotiations with the agreement set to lead to billions of dollars in export savings. 

As the agreement comes into place, more than ninety-one per cent of tariffs will be removed from New Zealand goods, and ninety-seven per cent of New Zealand’s current exports will be duty-free. 

There will be an immediate tariff removal on the export of New Zealand goods such as kiwifruit, wine, onions, apples, mānuka honey and manufactured goods, as well as for almost all fish and seafood, and other horticultural products. 

To talk more about the economic implications of this free trade agreement, Andre Fa’aoso spoke to Doctor Haipeng Zhang, Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Auckland

Homeowners in the North Island displaced by this year’s severe weather events have been thrown a lifeline by the government.

A new interim payment will be available from the start of September to help bridge the gap once insurance payments for temporary accommodation run out.

Caeden interviewed deputy prime minister Carmel Sepuloni on this expansion of the temporary solution and what this will mean in the long term.

They started by asking the minister to outline of what this support will look like.

An independent review of Immigration New Zealand’s continued practice of Dawn Raids has found that the law does need to change. The review by Senior Lawyer Mike Heron looked into out-of-hours immigration visits to communities throughout Aotearoa. 

The report found that out-of-hours visits were still being used by immigration in New Zealand and targeted minority communities, particularly Pacific Islanders. 

In the 1970s, dawn raids overly targeted Pacific communities with 86% of related prosecutions being of people of Pacific descent, even though Pasifika accounted for a third of overstayers. US and UK overstayers accounted for another third of total overstayers but accounted for only five per cent of prosecutions over this period. 

The review found that there had been no change to immigration policy since the government’s official 2021 Dawn Raid apology. 

To talk more about the findings of the review and what it means for communities across Aotearoa, producer Andre Fa’aoso spoke to Dylan Asafo, Senior Law Lecturer at the University of Auckland