Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Let's talk EVs. And I better make the declaration straight away; I am an EV driver. There is a new state of the nation report from an organisation called Drive Electric which has been released. It's calling for consistent cross-party support. The report shows just 11% of new vehicles registered in New Zealand are electric – that is down from 27% in 2023 when we had the rebate. But countries like Norway, they're sitting at, wait for this, 98%. New Zealand also has one of the lowest EV to fast charger ratios in the OECD, despite 88% renewable electricity generation and promises from the Government to actually help. Drive Electric's State of the Nation report, which was launched at Parliament, is calling for long-term cross-party policies to speed up EV uptake and charging infrastructure. And the board chair of Drive Electric New Zealand, Kirsten Corson, spoke to the Mike Hosking Breakfast this morning about how far behind the rest of the world we are.
“I think the interesting thing that this report shows is there's been a shift. This isn't an environmental decision anymore, this is an economic one. And what we've seen in the last three years is a massive emergence of countries like Ethiopia, 60% electric, you know, new vehicle sales are electric, Vietnam 40% Thailand 28% Turkey 22%. These are all emerging nations that are making the transition purely from an economic perspective because they do not want to import fossil fuels.”
We're at 11%. Drive Electric's report goes on to say that New Zealand has a major advantage because we've got renewable energy, but the recent policy changes, the scrapping of that incentive, has really slowed progress. So EVs, by Drive Electric, they're now being framed as more than just transport that doesn't use fossil fuel. The report wants to call them mobile energy assets, so they can store electricity and feed it back into the grid when the demand is high.
Now transport currently accounts for about 18% of our total emissions and nearly half of the CO2 emissions as well. But electrification could boost energy security and reduce the country's $7 to $9 billion annual fuel import bill. There are of course health gains because the air pollution is a little bit lower. The key opportunity they say is vehicle to grid technology, which allows EV owners to sell stored power back to the network while their car's sitting there. Maybe it's on 80% or 90% and it could actually be providing the electricity that does the hot water heating and take the load off the entire network. Vehicle to grid technology. And of course they're asking for government money.
Now look, as I say, I have an EV and I did take advantage of the EV rebate when it was in place, just like the Prime Minister did. But the thing about that, and I felt a little guilty about it, is I didn't agree with it because EVs or a car or any product really have to rest on their own competitive advantage. Mike called it this morning the artificiality of a market, and that's not right. But the current fossil fuel crisis, it is bringing that competitiveness up without us providing any government money. So if we could help, how should we?
I thought about it for a while and thought, well, how could we do it? And one possibility might be the subsidy of home-based smart chargers. If they are capable of feeding back into the grid, and the Drive Electric claims are correct, that if 30% of EV users feeding back into the grid could in fact rival our entire generation capacity at any given time, then isn't that an investment in improving our electricity infrastructure? Which would be good for everybody and would mean that while it might be a subsidy to an EV driver to put in a smart charger that can feed back into the grid, it's actually an investment into the entire electricity network. Can you see the logic in that maybe?
I do not have an EV charger at home. I use fast chargers at the supermarket. I don't have an EV charger because when I bought the car, I looked at how much the home EV charger was going to cost me —$2,000— and frankly, I don't have a lazy two grand sitting around. I don't know if you've noticed, times are tight and the cost of living is high. But hey, what about if the Government pitched in half of that? Would that tip me over? I think it might. So if they put in a thousand and I put in a thousand, then I'd have an EV charger at home, which when I wasn't charging the EV, it would be feeding back into the network and saving the electricity for everybody.
So there's the question for you today: should we as a nation be offering some sort of incentives towards increasing the size of the EV fleet? And what are the ramifications of the EV fleet being expanded as is happening right now? I mean, what are the ramifications of this for us? Do we have enough renewable energy? Do we have enough electricity? We seem to swing from pillar to post in terms of electricity excess to a lack of electricity and then the prices go through the roof. So can we actually really support an EV fleet the way Norway can where 98% of their vehicle sales are in fact EVs, even though they have their own oil?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Let's start with the big story of the day: the Finance Minister yesterday unveiling a major plan to shrink the public service. It's putting thousands of jobs on the line, but it is booking, potentially, billion-dollar savings into this year's Budget. So the interesting thing about her announcement —there were precursors to this, so this is stuff we knew, but it's all brought it into focus— is the pure numbers that we're talking about.
So the Government wants to reduce the size of the core public sector. At the moment it's at 1.2% of the population. 1.2% of working New Zealanders work for the Government – they want to bring that down to 1%. So as we learned the other day, New Zealand's population sits at around 5.3 million. That, if you do the maths, means about 6–8,000 roles should go. The actual number they mentioned though was closer to 9,000. The savings will come from trimming staff numbers. They want to merge departments, and they want to increase the use of AI to improve efficiency.
Now, of course some of us had thought that the cull of the public servants had already started. Wellington's economic stagnation has been blamed on that first round of efficiency cull, but it appears that not much was achieved. And here again, the numbers tell the real story. Back in 2017 there were 48,000 public servants. This ballooned under the Labour Government to 63,000. But despite all the angst in Wellington about bureaucratic redundancies over the past two years, the fact is there has not been a dramatic reduction in head count. In 2023, there were 63,000 public servants in this country. Today, in 2026, there are still 63,000 public servants.
It's a dynamic world, the world of business and employment, and it's a bit like whack-a-mole. You cut here, but then you have to increase the cohort there every time you launch a new programme. If David Seymour gets his immigration policy over the line and we're going to crack down on overstayers more, they're going to need a whole lot more immigration workers – but they just fired a whole lot of those. Our search for 500 extra police officers was proof of how difficult all this can be. As fast as we hire a new cop, an old cop quits. So, we're running as fast as we can to stand still.
These 63,000 people in the core public service, guess how much they cost the country? Guess how much? $11 billion a year. On average, and wait for this, each role costs about $175,000. I know. Well actually, the average wage is more like $100,000, but there's a whole lot of guys who are paid a whole heap more, so that brings that up a bit. Also it's the cost of disestablishing the role. But anyway, the fact of the matter is reducing those numbers will save hundreds of millions of dollars annually and potentially billions of dollars over the Government's four-year forecast period.
Here's the thing, it's forecast over four years and even though these job cuts won't happen immediately, the Government plans to count these savings in this year's Budget, which is a week away. Based on the firm target that they're going to reduce head count by 9,000. So they're already talking about it. They're already saying before they've done a thing, hey, we've got an extra $2.4 billion and we'll be able to buy more services with that. And they're going to be doing that this election campaign; they'll be doing it next week over the course of the Budget. That's a very pretty $2.4 billion, isn't it? It sounds really good, but it'll take four years to achieve it if they achieve it. And I would ask you, is that counting your chickens before they hatch?
So the process is easy to say, but I think you'll find it's much harder to do. And if you lay down an arbitrary target, we're cutting 9,000 jobs, that doesn't necessarily mean that the target will be met or met appropriately. So look, it's your show. What do you have to say about it? Are you confident that this can be done? Are you confident that this can be done and our services won't be unnecessarily reduced?
There's another little debate we can have about the cut to the public service right now and that's the political fallout. This is an election year. Now many on the right will congratulate the move, and indeed they already have. And indeed, they're already asking why did this not happen two years ago? We thought the cull had started. I think the number you'll find that they've done is around about 2,000. Now they're talking about 9,000. Why didn't they talk about 9,000 two years ago? But anyway, the right will say great, good job, we need this. How will swinging voters feel about a cull? It's hard times and suddenly neighbours, family, friends are losing their job.
And remember with every job cut, the ripples spread out, affecting the private economy. There's an old rule that says every job lost affects three more down the economic chain. So if we've got 9,000 jobs cut over the next four years, we've got nearly 40,000 other jobs that will be economically affected. So the political fallout, will this just harden the dislike for the Coalition among swinging voters who chop and change? And of course, the left, well they detest it immediately, don't they? They just hate this stuff. So the question politically, in doing this and doing it hard and doing it like this and doing it with such fanfare, is the Government shooting itself in the foot? Or will they be rewarded for finally stepping up their game?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A five month old baby boy by the name of Bodhi lived in Hawke's Bay, and in October 2022 was found unresponsive in his sleeping pod. The sleeping pod was placed inside the cot. He was lying on his stomach. He had blankets around his face. His parents, distraught, immediately called emergency services, but he could not be revived and we lost Bodhi. And after these losses, of course, coroners then look into it. And we've had a coroner look into it and found that Bodhi's death was likely caused by suffocation or re breathing and pointed out the risk factors that Bodhi was experiencing: sleeping on his tummy, loose blankets, and the use of a soft sleeping pod. Experts say babies this young cannot lift their heads to clear their airways, so if you're on your tummy, you've got some loose blankets and you've got these soft sleeping pods all over the place, they can suffocate.
The coroner is now urging urgent action to prevent similar deaths. She's called on MBIE, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, to work with the Ministry of Health to introduce clear safety standards for infant sleep products like sleep pods, which apparently at the moment currently face no specific regulation in New Zealand. She says they could use the unsafe goods notices under the Fair Trading Act to restrict or remove dangerous products from the market. She's basically saying it's the sleeping pod, the sleeping pod is dangerous, and experts agree as well. Many of these sleeping pods are actually sold as lounges, but they're also of course sold for sleep, and all the experts say we need some stronger warnings and potentially an outright ban.
And of course the coroner came out and said the obvious thing, she wants better education for parents whose health providers are encouraged to actively discourage the use of these products, right? So remember your guidelines, I still remember them from 25 years ago when I was looking after babies: always put your babies on their backs, always put them on a firm, flat surface, don't have loose blankets or soft items around them, and avoid unapproved sleep devices altogether.
Have we just forgotten how to do this very basic thing? Because we've had talkback about this, sudden infant death syndrome, cot deaths, for ages, but then suddenly we have not. Put it this way, back in the 1980s, we used to have about 250 public health campaigns a year about how to put baby to bed. These days we have about 50 – that is a huge cut in public health campaigns. Can you remember the last time you saw an ad in a paper or on the telly or on the radio saying look after baby, put baby to sleep on back? And the thing I remember from back in the day was swaddling, making sure that baby is securely wrapped, restraining their movement, preventing them from rolling on their tummy and preventing the blankets to go and block their noses and their mouths. Have we forgotten this?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The government has confirmed major changes to New Zealand’s secondary school qualification system, officially replacing NCEA with a new subject-based model.
Prime Minister Christopher Luxon and Education Minister Erica Stanford announced the shift in Orewa, saying the current NCEA system is too complex and doesn’t clearly show how well students have mastered their subjects.
From 2029, Year 12 students will begin the New Zealand Certificate of Education, followed by the New Zealand Advanced Certificate of Education for Year 13 in 2030. Level 1 will be removed in 2028.
Under the new structure, students will take at least five subjects, and must pass a minimum of three to earn the qualification. Every subject will include internal assessments and an exam, and results will be reported using a six-point grading scale from A+ to E. Certificates will list each subject and the grade achieved, with endorsement awards for top performers.
Year 11 students will face new compulsory subjects — science, English or te reo rangatira, and mathematics — and all students will need to pass the new literacy and numeracy Foundational Award.
The curriculum will also expand to include new subjects such as Civics, Politics and Philosophy, Advanced Mathematics, and Journalism and Media, alongside industry-developed subjects like building and construction and primary industries.
Stanford says the changes are designed to move students away from “credit crunching” and toward genuine learning progress.
Current Year 9 students will be the first full cohort to move through the new system.
So all the statistics point to NCEA failing but like all tools it's because of the people who used the system not exclusively because of the system
A common reaction amongst older New Zealander is how tis resembles the School C, UE system we grew up with so it was less of a revolution and more of a return to basics that were well understood
The easy criticism for older folk was the marking system. For some reason parents and employers did not understand the Excellence, Merit and Acheived rankings when obviously Excellence means an A, Merit a b and Acheived a C. The A to E system is one that parents grew up with but in the cold light of day is just as abstract as the NCEA rankings.
The real problem lay in the rorting of the credits with students choosing easy to pass subjects and avoiding anything that seemed challenging. But the real responsibility for the credit crunching surely lies with the parents as well
And the strength of NCEA was recognising that there is not one education for all. That some people don't cope with maths or English or Science and the system recognised what talents they had.
My youngest and I had a big to do over his Year 13 subject choice. He detested maths and wanted to study photography. I said you have to have maths. he argued that he had as much maths as any average student would need for real life. He won. And now he is a successful photographer doing his own taxes and playing Sharesies particularly well. So he was right. But I'm just lucky he's such a rounded individual
But while the new system re-emphasises 3 basic pillars of knowledge in English Maths and Science a lot of those BS credit crunching subjects remain.
Other arguments are amongst those who say exams are artificial and how do you sit an exam on Food Technology which is the new fangled name for cooking. Or photography which still exists.
The question exists is this a brave new world or will the old problems still remain.
Luxon also used the event to comment on global instability, national security, and recent speculation about a potential National–Labour coalition, dismissing the idea outright.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The Blues are celebrating their 30th anniversary with their inaugural Blues Hall of Fame.
It’ll honour the legends, stories, and defining moments that have shaped the club since its inception in 1996.
The first class of inductees will be honoured at a formal lunch today.
Former All Blacks coach and Blues board member John Hart told Kerre Woodham that initially, while they catch up on history, the Hall will focus on the players and coaches.
But after that, he says, the ‘Guardians’ class will be added, which honours people like managers, administrators, supporters, or sponsors.
LISTEN ABOVE
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.