Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

This election is highlighting yet another war being fought on the ideological battleground that is education. Charter schools, as they operate now, are in the sights of Labour because they're doing something different. To be fair, Labour's never liked the idea of schools operating under their own curriculum. Nothing new there. As Chris Hipkins told Mike Hosking this morning, they're all for new ideas in education, so long as the schools follow the party line.
CH: I believe that when you're spending public money on education, there needs to be good, strong accountability. Schools, there should be a level playing field. There are gaps in our education system. Some of those charter schools are doing interesting things. They can do that within the public education system.
MH: Interesting or good?
CH: Well, some of them are good. And but we demonstrated last time, I think of the charter of the schools that were set up as charter schools last time, most of them are still operating. They're still operating within the public education system and they're operating successfully.
Yes, but under the party line, aren't they? Not doing their own thing. Partnership schools, as they were once known, opened in 2014 born out of frustration from parents who could see the state school system was failing their children. They were closed by the Labour Government in 2018 and either shut their doors or became state integrated or special character schools. The charter school model was brought back following the 2023 election. David Seymour, the Associate Education Minister and champion of charter schools, says families are choosing charter schools precisely because they offer something different.
You can see by attendance whether they're working for parents or not. Seymour cites Northwest College. That grew from 22 students in March 2025 to 150 by July of this year. Five of the first seven charter schools, he says, exceeded their attendance targets in the first year. Five exceeded their achievement targets. At Tipene, initial assessments on February 25th found more than half of students were below expected level in maths, reading, and writing. By the end of the year, 81% were achieving at or above the expected level in maths, 79% in reading, 80% in writing.
Parents are choosing to take their children to these different schools. Schools that are run differently, that operate differently, because their kids run and operate differently on different programs. You know, a state school education works pretty well for most kids. The quality of it, well, we can debate that, but for most kids, they fit in. The school suits them, they suit the school. But for other kids, it doesn't. It doesn't work at all. And until the charter schools came along, there was really very little you could do. You just had to try and mash a square peg into a round hole. And it wasn't comfortable for either the school or the student or the family.
If you've got a school that opens with 22 students in March 2025 and then just over a year later the school rolls grow to 150, doesn't that indicate that the school is working? And it's working because parents are telling each other about it, they're sharing the results they're getting with their children. They're saying we don't have to come and pick up the child from school because they simply cannot be there. They're saying our child is willing to get up and go to school. That is a win for a lot of families. Forget about what happens when they get there. The fact they walk through the school gates is a win for a lot of families.
And there's got to be flexibility. I just cannot understand why everybody has to march to Labour's drumbeat. You know, what about what happened to interpretive dance off on the side somewhere? You know, some people are more interpretive dancers than they are rigidly marching in formation. And if the schools are working, if there's accountability, if the teachers are accredited, if you're ticking boxes and teachers and principals and families have the freedom to find the best way to educate a certain cohort of children, then everybody wins. The poor little square pegs who are trying to be mashed into the round hole aren't disrupting the rest of the class. The teachers aren't expected to do specialist teaching when they're generalists. They're not feeling frustrated and cross because they can't give that one child everything that one child needs and they know they're not giving the other 32 the time and attention they deserve.
I just don't understand why, so long as you've got quality control, and surely the parents would dictate that, if you've ticked off all the quality control boxes, why can't Labour let people educate their own children the best way they see fit?
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Hopes new rules will stop people stripping our beaches of kaimoana.
From November 1st there will be a ban on collecting and recreational gathering of shellfish and mussels from Auckland and Coromandel's rockpools and intertidal zones.
There will also be daily limits on crabs, octopus, prawns, sea cucumbers, and squid.
Protect Whangaparaoa Rockpools founder Mark Lenton told Kerre Woodham a local ban on Whangaparaoa, which started in March, has done wonders.
He says there's been a natural regeneration of life.
However, Lenton says guarding the coastlines can be a dangerous job as the law can be tough to enforce.
He says fisheries officers wear stab-proof vests and he's been threatened while patrolling.
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Well last night I took my mum to the Q Theatre to see a performance of Joseph and his Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, which was fantastic. Last couple of days, I really recommend you get along and see it – I think there's a few tickets left. It was fantastic. And then I had to come home and watch the leaders' debate on demand, and I know what I'd rather have been watching, that's for sure. I agree with Mike, the format of these "debates", in inverted commas, because they're not debates. A debate as I remember it from our cup winning Sacred Heart debating team, was where each speaker got the chance to make a speech around a certain premise or topic, why I would be the best Prime Minister for New Zealand, and then the second speaker got a chance to argue against it and rebut and finesse some of the points that were made by the first speaker. It was a proper speech, debate, argument, considered, reasoned. This is not a debate. I'd say it's a television performance. And I was listening to Mike this morning and he said that he was arguing against the format in 1997, and I couldn't agree more. Oh no, 2017 but he was probably arguing about it in 1997 as well. It's outmoded, past its use by date.
I thought Jack Tame did as good a job as he could given the format. He was very even handed, but he's trying to cover so many topics. I didn't learn anything I didn't already know. But then I have to remember that I'm in a privileged position where I talk the news every single day. I'm reading, absorbing, digesting the news, party political statements, press releases every single day, and most people have the luxury of not having to do that. So I didn't learn anything I didn't already know. And the single word yes or no answers, again it comes back to the fact that's not a debate, it's a performance. It's not elucidating, it's not insightful – all you got to see was who was better on the telly than the other. And on that, within the limitations of the format, I thought Chris Hipkins was very good. He came across well, he acknowledged work that National had done, recognised where he believed he could have done better when he was Prime Minister. I thought he came across well. And Christopher Luxon was way better than I thought he was going to be. I thought Chris Hipkins would wipe the floor with him, but he coped well in that environment.
Ultimately did we learn anything though? That's what I keep coming back to. I get far more from the hour that I get to have with each leader where they can sit down and have the time to properly talk, they can articulate policy, you get to hear a bit about the person. And while I accept that my questioning is more gentle nibbling from a toothless chihuahua than a kind of mauling from an attack dog, Jack didn't really get the opportunity in that format to do the good hard attacking journo questions either. You get far more of that on Q&A, where you can see again that Jack's really done his homework and puts them to the sword when he gets the party/political leaders in. I think we'd have learned more having reruns of Q&A on in that time slot than that debate. More of the long form, less of last night really.
The only thing that really came back when I was, and again I didn't watch it all including the ads, I was skimming through it, but you'd have to wonder why anyone under 50 would vote for Labour when they won't even look at options around the Super. There were some truly dumb questions in there, and I'd have to ask why Christopher Luxon just will not work with Opportunity. Like flat out. I mean he might not want to, but could he not be a little bit more accommodating perhaps in his language? Anyway, love to hear your thoughts on this if you were good citizens and endured and watched, I'd love to hear your feedback. But seriously, there's some really good pieces in the Listener where Danyl McLauchlan has gone through and is looking at policy and each party's response to it and the experts are giving their opinions on whether it's good, bad or ugly policy. There are hour long debates with the different spokespeople on their portfolios. I've got the hours with the party leaders. I'm not sure I'll watch another debate. I just don't get enough out of it to make me invest that time.
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Finally, after much hinting and promising and ooh, winking and teasing, Labour's revealed how it will fund the core pay equity policy it has been promising for the past three years.
Except that they didn't.
"In terms of being able to pay for pay equity, you'll see there's plenty of headroom within the fiscal plan that we've released today. We have a $10 billion unallocated amount of headroom. We've got multi billion dollars for health cost pressures and many of the pay equity claims are within the health system. So we're confident we will be able to meet the costs of pay equity within the flexibility that we've built into the plan."
That was Chris Hipkins at the launch yesterday. So under a Labour coalition Government from the 1st of January 2027, care and support workers, who are the ones who kicked off the whole pay equity drive and who are the first to have had their claim settled, would receive an immediate pay rise of $4 an hour.
That's $2.5 billion right there. But there is no mention of how the 33 other settlements waiting in the wings will be settled.
There was an allusion to the fact that the midwives and those associated with the health sector who have their pay equity claims waiting to be settled, that might be accounted for within the health budget, but not really because further along in the fiscal plan, Labour stayed pretty close to the National Government's party line.
So the surplus is going to arrive in the exact same year as National promised it would. Core crown spending would continue to drop relative to the rest of the economy.
It would be slightly higher than National spending, but not much. And when it comes to health, cost pressures in health are forecast to be the same under both National and Labour and the narrow budget operating allowance is exactly the same.
When he says that they're going to be able to settle the healthcare workers' equity claims and he said, oh well and that will come in under health, well not really because if they're saying that they think that the cost pressures will be the same, that's if you don't take the pay equity claims into account.
That really is become an albatross around their necks. They have been promising this for three years. They excoriated the coalition Government for not settling the claims.
But I still can't see it myself. I mean, you might be able to. Chris Hipkins said, look, we've got $10 billion to play with and that came from PREFU and that's what the coalition Government said is around. But that will be it.
If you lead a Labour led coalition, there might just be the ability to settle equity claims, but there'll be nothing else. No money for anything else at all. And that includes anything that the coalition partners might want to spend on.
All very well and good to say - we're Labour and this is what we're going to spend every spare cent on. We're going to die on this hill. And that's fine. That's Labour's choice and that's the people who vote for them, that's their choice and that's great.
But what about the Greens, Te Pāti Māori and possibly the Opportunity party? I mean, the Opportunity party's not asking for much, just get us into Parliament please, anything.
But the Greens have got a shopping list and I can't imagine savvy political operators like Chlöe Swarbrick and Marama Davidson saying, oh yeah okay, no you settle those claims, that's absolutely fine.
Barbara Edmonds, Labour's finance spokesperson, says just because Treasury has costed pay equity claims at around $13 billion and rising, it doesn't mean that's what the bill will be.
She says it's all about negotiation and Labour's fiscal plan is credible because as she told Mike Hosking this morning on the Mike Hosking Breakfast, she knows her stuff.
"I'm absolutely credible. You've asked me a whole bunch of questions and I've answered them every single one. I'm absolutely credible. This is not my first rodeo, as another politician would say. This is my 17th budget I've had to analyse. I've been in tax for over 10 years. I know my stuff and this is why our fiscal plan is credible."
Well yeah, I mean she has got a great track record, but she can't sit there spinning and weaving and making gold out of straw, can she?
If you've been taking an interest in politics, you'll have heard Labour's announcement over the weekend. Do you think it adds up? Nicola Willis doesn't, in a stunning revelation.
She says the release of the plan over the weekend was an opportunity for Chris Hipkins and Barbara Edmonds to make Labour's numbers add up and they've failed. She says far worse than anyone could have expected.
She says Labour says the rest of the money to fully restore the previous pay equity scheme will come from cost pressure funding.
If that's true, she says, that would mean taking almost every dollar of unallocated funding for the next four budgets, which will mean nothing for schools, police, prisons, defence and other frontline social services. So who do you believe?
Labour says they won't be putting up any taxes other than the ones they've already stated. Where's the money going to come from?
I'm sure Barbara Edmonds is a very savvy negotiator. I'm not entirely sure she can negotiate $13 billion and rising down to three or four billion. And even then it's still not much to come and go on.
If you are big on pay equity, do you believe in it sufficiently to have every last spare cent that the Government has spent on it? Is that how important it is to you?
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The topic of New Zealand-owned banks is arising again, with NZ First pitching to buy back BNZ to bolster competition.
Kiwibank is already New Zealand-owned, but only holds a little over 6% of the lending market, raising the question – how much do Kiwis actually care about backing a Kiwi bank?
Kiwibank CEO Steve Jurkovich told Kerre Woodham that they've been in operation for much less time than some of those bigger banks —around 25 years compared to over 150— so they've had less time and capital to grow.
Jurkovich told Woodham they could always be bigger and have more impact, but over the last few years they've been growing pretty strongly.
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