Warnings to be careful after a string of fires was linked to lithium-ion batteries.

Scrap metal company Sims Metal has been fined $30 thousand over a 2023 fire that released toxic smoke near Ōtāhuhu.

A massive blaze at a recycling plant near Glenfield last month was also linked to lithium-ion batteries, as well as a number of fires breaking out in rubbish trucks across the city.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand's Community Education Manager Tom Ronaldson told Kerre Woodham that lithium-ion batteries are perfectly safe, as long as they’re used correctly.

He says you should only be charging devices while you’re awake, and unplugged as soon as they’re fully charged.

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Long serving Labour MP and former Minister David Parker gave his valedictory speech in Parliament last night, where he gave his colleagues across the House a list of things to do, among his thank yous and goodbyes.

Chief among them was closing the gap between the very wealthy and the middle class. It could be done, he said, with a tax on capital income, a wealth tax, some form of interest deductibility ban with rules for deductions to avoid double taxation. He said this would pay for a tax-free threshold for income earners up to $10,000 with the next 10,000 subject to lower tax rates.

Another was that he hoped freshwater standards would endure in some form, and called on future Ministers for the Environment not to become Ministers for Pollution. Looking at you, Shane Jones. Parker also suggested a way of future proofing New Zealand against future disasters by getting the Reserve Bank to use a quantitative easing scheme to purchase a long dated bond in the event the Alpine fault ruptures, which is not a bad idea because that would spread the cost of the disaster over generations, rather than have one generation deal with it. He wanted to see the government take on the tech giants with a proposal to make their social platforms liable for harmful content shared on their platforms. And he called out MPP as a political system that is becoming worse over time, that is fuelling culture war politics.

“Under First Past the Post, New Zealand became amongst the best country in the world, but MMP was meant to be better. Perhaps Doctor Hooten is right and MMP gets worse over time. It's the people's system, not ours. As things polarise and the hard issues don't get fixed, we should allow the people to again make their choice. I'd vote STV. All 120 of us would have to serve in a seat - that drives behavioural change. I'd add in a small upper house, 30 people appointed as in Canada, or voted in STV and limited to two terms each.”

That was David Parker last night in Parliament talking about the New Zealand he would have liked to have seen when he left politics. The thing is, the public have had their say and they have chosen and then reaffirmed MMP. My conscience is clear. Like David Parker, I preferred STV – that's what I voted for back in the 90s and I still think it's a better system today. I think he's right when he says that MPs need to have electorates to which they are accountable. And I think STV would be a fairer, less divisive system.

First Pass the Post was undemocratic. There were times when New Zealand elected a government that only had around 38 - 40% of the vote, and 100% of the decision making, and that's not particularly fair. Some form of proportional representation is more representative, it's more democratic. If we're going to live in a democracy, we might as well behave as though we're living in a democracy and vote and get results as if we're living in a democracy.

So from his to-do list, which would you like to see MPs pick up on? And specifically, when it comes to the voting system, I don't think we've got it right yet. There will be some of you who vote, who have grown up with the MMP and that's all you have known. As someone who knows First Past the Post and MMP, I think MMP is better than FPP and producing a more democratic and fairer result. Is it perfect? Nowhere near it. I think we need to keep refining it just because we've voted for it once, reaffirmed it once, doesn't mean we have to be stuck with it forever.

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The Government is being criticised for their use of urgency to pass legislation.

A law to lift the threshold for gender-discrimination pay equity claims and extinguish claims under way is likely to pass today, after only being announced yesterday.

The Government's said it could save the taxpayer billions of dollars.

Taxpayers Union Policy and Public Affairs Manager James Ross told Kerre Woodham that urgency has a place, but it should be an emergency button as opposed to something in the government’s standard toolbox.

He believes the reason urgency is being used in this case is because they don’t want this in the media for too long, as it’s a difficult conversation to be having.

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The unemployment rate has stayed static for another quarter.

Stats NZ figures just out show the rate remained at 5.1% in the March quarter.

The number of full-time workers fell by 45 thousand over the year and part-time employment grew by 25 thousand.

Herald Business Editor at Large Liam Dann told Kerre Woodham today's figures are a surprise.

He says this is good news but it hasn't felt like it, and economists will be scratching their heads.

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A new report from Retail NZ has revealed the state of retail crime in New Zealand - 99% of the membership of Retail NZ has experienced some form of crime or antisocial behaviour in 2023/24, that's up from 93% the year prior.

I remember thinking that's a lot, National want to be working on that because they were very strong in opposition and in the election campaign saying they were going to get tough on retail crime – it seems to have got worse. It ranges from credit card fraud, shoplifting, threatening behaviour, criminal damage, or physical assault. Retail NZ’s membership recorded 140,746 incidents of retail crime over that period.

What I find really interesting from the report is that almost 40% of those retail crimes were not reported to police. There were a range of reasons why respondents didn't report to police. Apparently it was because of low value items not being worth the effort, the retailer discovered the offence too late, or they dealt with it directly. There were also concerns that what was the point? What was the point of telling the police? Nothing's going to happen.

I would love to know from retailers at what point do you give up caring? 40% of retail crimes are not reported to police. That's a hell of a lot. When do you reach the stage of simply shrugging your shoulders and saying, what are you going to do about it? Have you become so inured to retail crime, to abusive language, to people just putting something in their pocket or putting something in their bag and walking out, you're like, well another day?

I remember Chris Quinn from Foodstuffs when we were talking about people walking out with trolleys full of groceries. And I said, well, why don't you put in the measures that people have told me about overseas, where you scan your receipt and then the gates open, and your trolley and you, can walk out. If you don't have a receipt, the gates don't open – make it jolly hard to walk out with a trolley full of groceries. He said, I just don't think the public could put up with that. Yeah, we would, wouldn't we? I thought that was a really defeatist attitude. He said, you know, the majority shouldn't be punished for the minor, obviously, but I mean that is the way society works. We have rules and legislation to cater to the numpties and the low lifes and the stupid and the criminal.

I personally don't mind putting my receipt to a scanner and having the gates open if it means that some arrogant arse is prevented from walking out with a trolley full of groceries and sticking two fingers to us all. I really don't mind. It would be minimal in terms of hassle, in terms of hold up. The same would be true of many retail security measures. It makes more sense to have security measures in shops and supermarkets than it does at the airport. Me taking my boots off does not help us find the Malaysian Airlines plane that crashed. It makes more sense to me to be held up slightly at the supermarket, ever so slightly if it means that people aren't getting away with it.

They seem to take great delight in it, and that's what annoys me. We've got to have a zero tolerance policy to this sort of retail crime. And that means you and I have to be part of the solution. It's not just retailers, it's not just police that are going to make a difference. It's when you and I are willing to accept a little bit of inconvenience to tell the toerags and the freeloaders and the criminals that up with this we will no longer put. Draw a line in the sand and for once let the good guys prevail.

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I don't know if you caught the story over the weekend - Ngāpuhi, the iwi of Northland, are calling for police to round up the drug dealers in Northland using the same strong tactics they used in drug raids on Ōpōtiki last year.

You'll remember there was criticism of how the police dealt with some of the individuals in Ōpōtiki, mainly coming from the individuals and their families themselves. Now Ngāpuhi is saying bring it on. The leader of the country's largest iwi, Mane Tahere, said he asked the Police Minister for decisive action after recently seeing a group of youngsters smoking a meth pipe in broad daylight in the Main Street of Kaikohe, just down the road from the police station.

As somebody who has been going to the Far North for the past eight or nine years, I've certainly seen a change for the worse in Kaihohe. There are tiny little fragile grass shoots of hope, but the meth is a huge problem there, an absolutely huge problem.

Locals in Opononi stand outside the local dairy, the local shops on benefit day to try and stop the dealers from getting to the kids first. The community is trying to do what it can to stop the dealers getting a strong hold in the community, to try and thwart their attempts to get more young people hooked on the drug. But they are a tiny, tiny, tiny bastion against what is a multimillion-dollar business.

The cold, harsh reality is that Northland has the highest consumption of methamphetamine in New Zealand. Nearly 2000milligrammes per day consumed per 1000 people. And Mane Tahere has said we are doing what we can as a community, as an iwi, as a people but we can't do it on our own and we need the police to step in. He said a crackdown isn't the solution to all problems in Northland but it's a major part. He knows he is calling down a whole heap of criticism on his head by asking the police to step in, but he says our hard, staunch kind of hate for the police is not the future.

Compare his pragmatic, proactive hard line on drugs with the words of Green MP Tamatha Paul. You'll remember she criticised Wellington's beat patrols. She accused the police of rounding up the homeless, without providing any evidence other than the musings of a couple of street people themselves. She said some people felt less safe because of the police’s presence.

Right. This is a very bright young woman, Tamatha Paul has won numerous scholarships for academic excellence. She has graduated with the Masters in Resource and Environmental Planning. This is a very bright young woman talking to other very bright young people on a university campus, postulating and theorising and coming up with all sorts of grand plans about how a different world could look, and that's what you do at a university when you're young, when you're bright, when you've got all the answers, when you're at a peace action conference. You have the luxury of theorising.

I would venture to suggest most of the young people there were just like Tamatha Paul. They may not have started in a world of privilege, but they've taken the opportunities offered to them, they've worked to realise a future for themselves. And that's a future that looks very, very different to the lives of the same young people in Kaikohe. The sort of people that Mane Tahere is trying to help every single day.

He knows to combat the absolute evil of drugs, his people don't need to read another thesis on colonisation, Hauora and whenua in Aotearoa published in 2019, among many. He knows what they need are not the academics, but addiction and rehab specialists. They need to keep up that community involvement, that community fight against the drugs. And they desperately, desperately need police boots on the ground.

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