The Wire with Alex

Earlier this week the government announced a major policy overhaul, they called it a reshuffle, which included dropping some of the less popular or seemingly viable intitaitives like the TVNZ/RNZ merger to focus more on ‘bread and butter’ issues.
Also announced was a $1.50 hike to the minimum wage, a delay to the income insurance scheme and hate speech reform, the scrapping of the biofuel mandate, and ambiguous future changes to three waters.

Casper had a chat with National MP Dr Shane Reti about the announcement and how it’s been received by National.

For this week's Tuesday Wire, Allan Blackman joined Casper and Milly over the phone for Dear Science. Casper spoke to National’s Shane Reti about the government’s policy reshuffle announced this week and Dáithí Stone, climate scientist at NIWA about what’s driving Cyclone Gabrielle.

Milly speaks to Assad Shamseldin from the University of Auckland about improving our stormwater infrastructure. And Milly also spoke to epidemiologist Michael Baker about the new measles case identified in New Zealand.

Recently an imported case of measles has been detected in New Zealand, Milly speaks to epidemiologist Michael Baker from the University of Otago regarding the risks of an outbreak and what we can do to stop the spread of measles, which has mostly been eliminated in New Zealand. 

The industry of disability service providers is an entirely government-funded collection of entities that provide free-of-charge services to those in need. Recent increases in costs of providing services have made it difficult for these organisations to provide the same level of care for a given budget. 

Arno spoke to Peter Reynolds, CEO of the New Zealand Disability Support Network - a society of organisations that provide support to disabled people. He started off by asking if the government was doing enough to meet rising inflation by funding disability worker organisations.