Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Things are getting tougher for Kiwis.
According to ASB’s estimates, households will see an average of $55 a week added to their living costs this year, thanks to global effects of the conflict in the Middle East.
This compounds the struggle for many, with Stats NZ reporting in 2025 that just over half of renters and nearly 40% of mortgage holders didn’t think their income matched their everyday needs.
ASB’s Chief Economist Nick Tuffley told Kerre Woodham the increase isn’t that much different than previous years, it’s just concentrated in one specific area this year – fuel.
He says that means some people will be able to dodge some of the extra spending by changing their behaviour, whereas in the past it was spread out across multiple areas and much more unavoidable.
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Inflation was higher than it should be, even before factoring in the full impact of the war on Iran.
Stats NZ data shows the inflation rate remained unchanged at 3.1% in the March quarter.
Internationally driven tradeable inflation dipped to 2.5% and the domestically driven non-tradeable rate was unchanged at 3.5%.
The Herald's Liam Dann told Kerre Woodham these figures come before fuel rises really kicked off.
He says it's disappointing we aren't heading into that crisis in a better position.
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They're damned if they do and damned if they don't, aren't they? Last week people were castigating MetService for overhyping the incoming storm. And I would argue it wasn't MetService who were overhyping it, it was the media making an absolute meal out of it. Today, people are calling out MetService for not getting enough warning about the life-threatening rain and winds that are slamming Wellington and the Wairarapa district as we speak.
Whatever happened to looking after yourself? Gathering the information, you need and making decisions based on that? We seem to have descended into a national state of learned helplessness. Were we like that before Covid? Were we getting to that level before Covid or has it been exacerbated because of Covid? People with brains, people with rational capability, just sitting there like inert dummies waiting to be told what to do and when to do it. That is no way to live life.
Perhaps it's a rural-city divide. If you are living somewhere where help is not a 111 call away, where you know that if you need help, you're going to have to help yourself and then you're going to have to help your mates. You're not waiting to be told what to do. Last weekend I knew that the storm was coming, you could hardly avoid it if you were listening to the radio or watching the television. So that was helpful. You know, I knew it was coming, I knew what time it was expected to hit the Far North, and I knew the Far North was in the firing line.
So you get prepared. I knew the power would go off, the power goes off all the time, so that means no cooking, no water, so I made sure I had enough drinking water to last a week, that there was gas for the barbecue. I ran the bath the night before the storm was due to land so there was water to flush the loo. The torch had batteries, a good heavy duty powerful torch, waterproof torch, and I had a grab bag in case the stream on the property flooded or there was a landslide, those were the two risks that I identified on the property.
I knew where the nearest community centre was in case I needed help or in case I could give help. And I made sure there were very few perishable foods left in the fridge, don't you worry about that, we did not go hungry. I could have probably, like a camel, lasted a couple of weeks. So, you know, you get prepared. And then I turned off the radio because I didn't need to hear breathless stories on the hour every hour, and again that's not MetService's fault, that's the media hyping it up. And I made the most of the beautiful lovely calm sunny day.
And I knew it wouldn't last. I'd checked the forecast, I knew the weather would change and when I came inside and saw the barometer had absolutely plummeted, I brought in the outdoor furniture, made sure that everything was tied down and nothing could go flying and settled in for the evening. And sure enough at ten that evening the power went off, and I knew it would and I was ready. The power stayed off until the next afternoon. Around about 4pm it came back on and thank you very much to the Northpower team for working in nasty conditions on a Sunday restoring power to the Hokianga.
And I don't have that much common sense. Nobody would ever, if I had to be summed up at my funeral, say, “Well, there was a girl with common sense." I don't have that much of it, and you don't actually need that much to get yourself ready. I don't want to be helpless, and I don't want to be dependent on other people. I was up there on my own so I made sure that I could look after myself to the best of my ability. It takes very little money, very little effort, very little time, and as it turns out, not that much common sense to be prepared.
Am I the last person in the world to use a barometer? I really think every home should have one because if you're not listening to the radio or you're not watching the television news or the cellphone towers go down and you can't look at the apps on your phone, then you've got the barometer. They've been around since 1645 and have been accurate since then and still are today. And when you look at that barometer plummeting down, you know that the weather is going to change for the worse, so you get yourself ready.
I really think we need to drive home the message that it's not MetService's fault if you are flooded out of your home. They didn't cause the deluge, they cannot predict which house in which street will be flooded, that's unfair to expect them to do that. There are so many ways we can keep ourselves informed, even the good old-fashioned barometer which I absolutely swear by. Do not just sit there waiting for people to tell you what to do and when to do it. Use the brains and the common sense that the good gods gave you and stop blaming other people for natural events that can't possibly be pinpointed to your personal address.
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While I was away over Easter and then another week, I was not a slave to the news cycle. I opted out for a while because I figured the insanity would still be here when I came back on duty and I was right.
The Straits of Hormuz are still closed, Trump is still threatening to obliterate Iran. New Zealand homes are still being flooded, roads are still being closed in weather events, they're just in different parts of the country. And political commentators are still saying Christopher Luxon is a dead man walking.
When he came in for his weekly chat with Mike this morning, the Prime Minister didn't sound as exasperated as I thought he might. I thought he'd be getting so fed up with it. He was very calm and seemed to understand I suppose a bit why the questions were being asked.
He said when it came to the dissent within his own party he thought there were about five grumpy backbenchers who were the root cause of all the grumblings, who would lose their jobs if they got their wish and saw him rolled because New Zealand voters in the past have not responded well when sitting Prime Ministers are dumped if you look at David Lange and Geoffrey Palmer and Jim Bolger. New Zealand voters don't like that.
So the backbenchers might be the turkeys voting for an early Christmas or an early Thanksgiving depending on which part of the country you're in.
When it came to the polls, Christopher Luxon said well which one do you believe?
That's the problem.
I've seen polls in a given week where I've had one that has us at 36 one that would have us at 30 just a couple months ago.
So you can get bounced around by polls and I listen to it to a degree, but at the end of the day the public do not want me fixated on that.
We've seen examples in the Australian election where polls were all over the place.
So you've got to listen to it because there's some genuinely good feedback in there about what you need to do better, which is good.
Perfectly reasonable. I don't think I would have been as reasonable. Must be so frustrating.
But look, if some New Zealanders think a Labour Greens Te Pāti Māori coalition would get the Straits of Hormuz open tomorrow and gas prices down, well good luck to them.
They probably believe in unicorns and they probably still believe in Santa.
And the polls are starting to trigger oppositional defiance in some people I've been talking to.
They can work a number of different ways. They can be informative for voters, they can give parties feedback about their performance or perceived performance as Christopher Luxon was saying. But Grant Duncan from the Public Policy Institute at the University of Auckland was writing in The Conversation and they can be unhelpful when framed by media in sensationalist or biased ways.
Ya reckon?
He says people should be left to make up their own minds about which candidate or party best represents them rather than view an election as a contest narrated in terms of who's up and who's down.
And I think people do, I think people do start to look at the polls and go don't tell me what to think or do.
He says in the end we should read the polls and the media critically, check for example who's done the survey, who's sponsored it, what the methodology was, and he says remember that they don't predict future outcomes, they're only looking at past trends, they're a snapshot in time of what happened before.
He says they can also, you can't even take anything from the polls like oh well with everybody saying Labour Greens and Te Pāti Māori are going to win, which was almost like coughing up a furball but there we go.
If you see a poll saying that you might think 'oh well better tick them, I'll go with the winner'. Or you might think 'oh well I better give a tick to the centre right, I'll go for the underdog'. Or you might think it's a foregone conclusion and not vote at all.
So, as Grant's saying, you can't even take anything from what voters will do from the polls. If you look at the US presidential election it was neck and neck up until the actual result, which was not. And when you look at our past elections, the polls at this time of the year did not get it right in the lead up to the election. They massively overestimated National support and underestimated the sort of support that Labour would get.
So the polls in a way are a media construct. They're sponsored by media organisations, the media organisations have their names in them and it helps generate a headline.
Bang, kapow, wham as Mikey Sherman might say on 1News. They're feeding themselves.
We all have a vote, we all have different views about how best this country should be run, we all have a view about the sort of priorities a government should have and we'll be able to exercise our democratic right later in the year.
Are the polls going to make a blind bit of difference to you?
We're not allowed to publish polls on polling day. In European countries there's a blackout on polls a little bit earlier than that. Quite frankly I'd like to see a moratorium on them for three years.
I'm sick to death of them.
It's a bit like the weather news, you know, in a way I want to be informed, I want to know where the storm is coming and when it's supposed to be hitting, but once a day, not every minute of every hour because otherwise you just become inured to the news that they're supposed to be giving you.
I'd like to know perhaps once a day, but turning it into a media circus I don't think is very helpful. And it's the same with the polls. In the end you get a bit of oppositional defiance and stick one finger and say 'I'll vote exactly how I want to vote thank you very much and all of the hype in the world is not going to make me change my mind'.
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The story that has made the front page of the Herald this morning and dominated the conversation was the leadership of Prime Minister Christopher Luxon. He is facing what party insiders describe as “the most difficult fortnight of his leadership”, with growing speculation about his support within National's caucus as Parliament returns next week. Sources say that the whip, Stuart Smith, tried to present Christopher Luxon with evidence that caucus backing for his leadership had weakened. He tried to do that before Easter, but Christopher Luxon did not want to hear this. They did not have the meeting. It's understood those who believe Luxon should step aside might act in the next two weeks, although a formal leadership challenge or confidence vote is still seen as unlikely. Instead, the preferred option amongst critics appears to be having a good old chat with Christopher Luxon with evidence of his diminished support within his caucus, and that might prompt him to resign or step aside and bring about a change of leader. Now, if that doesn't happen, a challenge could follow, but there's no declared challenger at this stage.
All of this is at a critical time. Parliament's back for a short sitting block before recessing again ahead of the Budget. Here comes the Budget. Political analysts say removing a Prime Minister during the Budget period risks destabilising the Government. So it's this next fortnight or not, because after that we're into Budget time and that would be even worse for National.
National Minister Chris Bishop, who has been widely rumoured as a potential contender, was on the radio with Mike Hosking this morning. He came on to talk about the changes to the Warrants of Fitness, but instead he got a little surprise of talk of a coup. Chris Bishop described the situation as “untidy and unhelpful”. He said there's no leadership challenge underway, and he said he will not be the National leader before the election. But the general consensus to that interview was that he was being a little shifty, and he knows a lot more than he was letting on. How could he not know the feeling in the caucus? He's around there the whole time. How could he not know that three guys had actually come to Thomas Coughlan? But he claimed he didn't.
Furthermore, can I just remind you that Chris Bishop is scheduled for an interview with Jack Tame on Q&A on Sunday, so you know this issue is going to continue bubbling away. Behind the scenes, tensions were already evident before Parliament recessed. We reported, everybody reported, that Christopher Luxon faced pressure from within caucus during the final sitting week and he ended up reshuffling the party, hopefully to stabilise it, but look at this, it's still rumbling on. When party whip Stuart Smith got ghosted by Christopher Luxon, he ended up raising all his concerns with deputy leader Nicola Willis instead. We've got a poll out right now and those numbers are adding to the pressure. National is currently sitting well below Labour and another major poll is due next week. So, all eyes are now on the coming days and how Christopher Luxon and his senior colleagues respond.
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