Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

Time is running out for the businesses that generate billions of dollars worth of GDP and that employ a quarter of a million New Zealanders.
They're the businesses that run on gas. Your bakers, your coffee roasters, your wineries, your wood processors, your ag sec. And that's not counting the schools and hospitals dependent on gas to heat their buildings.
Time is running out because the gas they operate on is running out. It's a finite resource. And as yet, they haven't found anything to replace it.
And yes, we've probably heard about the high profile businesses like Glenbrook Steel Mill and Spates Brewery in Dunedin who've transitioned to electric arc furnaces and electric boilers respectively. But for a huge number of businesses, a shift is not yet technically or financially possible but the gas is going to run out.
They can't say, we'll just keep it going until we transfer over because when it's gone, it's gone. And when it comes to making the transition, it's not just the cost of a new electric furnace.
If bakers, for example, want to make the move from gas to electric, that will cost upwards of $10 million. And that's just the beginning. There are the connection costs. That starts at a couple of million, just to get the thing connected. And then there's the backup plan. Electricity isn't as reliable as gas.
BusinessDesk quotes the country president of Schneider Electric who had a customer that had to dump 19 million litres of milk because they lost energy for 30 seconds.
As a result, businesses that are transitioning are spending capital on battery stabilisation just to make the grid usable before they can completely transition over. And it makes for a really uncertain environment and that's reinforced by a Schneider Electric survey.
They looked at 288 senior business leaders and found 39 percent of them had delayed expansion or lost contracts due to energy costs or supply issues in the past year. We've talked about it before.
I think we've talked about it and about the fact that it's coming, that the end of the gas is coming, and yet people and businesses, don't seem to be able to afford to make the transition or else they've looked at the numbers and thought - we'll have to go overseas because there we'll have a reliable energy source. It won't be as expensive as it is here.
It's a shame. But we've still got the business and we can set up offshore.
Energy costs have doubled over the past five years. But even though we've complained about the cost of everything going up, the cost of a loaf of bread hasn't doubled.
Where are you at if you are one of those businesses? They're big and they're small in terms of those that rely on gas. With the smaller ones, is it even worth transitioning?
Do you just shut up shop and start again? With the bigger ones, I mean, you probably can't afford not to. Now, the eventual exit, as BusinessDesk writes, of Methanex, New Zealand's single largest user, would free up some volumes currently used for methanol production, but that's only a temporary reprieve.
What are we doing here? I can't even imagine what the future looks like. That is, one day you'll go to turn on the gas and it won't be there. What will you have done before that?
Will you be long gone, reading about it from Australia? Will you be in another business entirely? Where do we go from here?
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There's uncertainty from those whose businesses rely on gas as the Government hits pause on an LNG import terminal procurement process.
The Energy Minister wanted to secure a deal with one of two possible candidates before the year's end, but time has run out before the election.
New Zealand Association of Bakers President John Cockburn says it's not the news he wanted.
He told Kerre Woodham many bakeries are built around a large oven, which would take years to replace if a new energy source was needed.
Cockburn says continuing to play ping-pong with this issue means people in his industry don't know where to put their money.
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Let's start with the good news. The annual State of the Thriving Nation report prepared for the Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says workplace injury claims have fallen 28% over the past decade, and some of the biggest drops have come in the industries with the worst histories of harm, those like forestry and construction and the like. Although the report says rates of harm are still much higher than in Australia or the United Kingdom – that's the bad news. And that work related mental wellbeing is the one area getting consistently worse.
One of the reasons for the lower rates of workplace injuries in other countries, according to the Forum CEO Francois Barton, is that it costs businesses more in Australia and the UK if their workers come to grief, as he told Ryan Bridge.
"In short, it's more expensive in those countries when we get safety wrong. In Great Britain and Australia, there are much clearer signals, I think, to business and workers alike from the regulatory system, the insurance system is obviously a different industrial makeup over there. So it can sound a little brutal, but in essence it's cheaper to injure and hurt people in New Zealand than some of these other countries."
The Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill passed its third reading at the beginning of July. Workplace Relations and Safety Minister, as she was then, Brooke van Velden, argued the existing regime was confusing and expensive for businesses without making workers safer, and that attention should go to the risks most likely to cause death, serious injury or serious illness. Labour's promised to repeal the bill and will go one step further, introducing a corporate homicide law that could send employers to prison for life when failures kill workers.
The Government's argument is that smaller businesses shouldn't have to go through the red tape and the hoops and hoopla that larger businesses do. But if you look at some of the worst workplace accidents, there was a Timaru lumberyard, which would be classified as a small business, where one of the young workers was crushed to death on a conveyor belt that didn't have a guard on it. And a year earlier, a three-year-old boy was crushed to death after a stack of logs collapsed and rolled on him while he was visiting his dad at the same yard. So this is a small business that presumably wouldn't have to go through the bells and whistles that some of the larger businesses do, and yet it's clearly an unsafe working environment.
The young scaffolder, Jaden Nelson, who lost both his arms when he was electrocuted setting up scaffolding back in 2022, that one still fills me with horror, that poor young father of three is having to navigate life now without his arms after numerous surgeries to repair his kidneys and his heart and his organs after a massive electric shock. That scaffolding business would have been a small business too.
The Business Leaders Health and Safety Forum says neither more legislation nor lighter rules will fix a system that businesses struggle to navigate in the first place. The report says we need better regulatory practice, not more law. National argues, or the coalition government argues, that the Health and Safety at Work Amendment Bill will make things less confusing, that businesses won't have to read through all practice for all business, only that which relates to their particular way of doing things, like an accounting firm wouldn't have to go through the same hoopla as a lumberyard, perhaps.
There has been more money for workplace safety inspections, but as Sharmabel Jacob says, who prepared the annual State of the Thriving Nation report, you can't inspect your way to a safe workplace. There just simply aren't the inspectors to do that. You are dependent on the owners of the businesses doing that.
Should small businesses carry lighter health and safety duties, or should the same rules apply to every workplace? I would have thought it would depend on the business. If you are a timberyard, it wouldn't matter if you employ three people or 300, you should have the same safety practices, whereas if you're an accountancy firm, surely you wouldn't have to go through the same standards and the same procedures, the same kind of box ticking exercise as somebody working in forestry?
According to the report, there's quite enough law already designed to protect workers, it's just the way it's interpreted, it's the way it's followed, it's the willingness of employers to put procedures in place to keep their workers safe and to insist that they use the safety gear they've provided and follow the rules that they've laid out. Because I've heard from a number of employers that they do all they can to protect their workers, who continually refuse to wear the glasses because they fog up, or won't clip themselves to safety harnesses because they can't get to where they need to get to.
I'd love to hear from you on this one if you're an employer, and indeed if you're a worker working in an unsafe environment. Are your concerns listened to? Do you feel protected? And in many cases, the workers who have been injured are uneasy about the business and the business practices, they think it's a bit shonky, that they're cutting corners, but they don't feel they can speak out otherwise they'll lose their job.
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National's proposing to scrap the Fire and Emergency board, if re-elected.
Under the policy, the agency would be directly accountable to the Minister for Emergency Management.
A damning report released last week details delays in procuring new fire trucks and slams the organisation's leadership.
Mitchell told Kerre Woodham they feel very strongly the plan will deal with a lot of the issues that have been highlighted through the select committee process.
He says he's been through a similar process with the Police —making the back office more efficient, pushing services, investment, and resources to the front line— and it's been very successful.
"We want to do the same thing with FENZ."
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Brooke van Velden has officially called time on her political career, delivering her final speech yesterday.
Van Velden was elected to Parliament in 2020 and this term served as Minister of Internal Affairs and Workplace Relations and Safety.
She was the ACT Deputy until replaced by Nicole McKee when she announced she was leaving.
Van Velden told Kerre Woodham it's been an absolute privilege, and she recommends it for anyone, of any age, who genuinely wants to leave the country a better place.
She says it's not glamorous or about gaining power or any particular title, but instead about representation and putting other people before yourself.
"You have to have an element of resilience and an element of knowing what your values are and being able to back yourself, but recognising that at the end of the day, everything that you're doing is on behalf of other people."
Van Velden says she's proud of the work and the legacy she's leaving behind.
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