Andrew Dickens Afternoons

National has unveiled its new-look line up with big promotions for Chris Bishop and Erica Stanford, now ranked fourth and seventh.Bishop has been reunited with the shadow leader of the house portfolio, which Collins stripped him of.Stanford has taken education from Paul Goldsmith, and retained the immigration portfolio.She has rocketed up the rankings, having been ranked 25th previously.One of the biggest losers is former leader Judith Collins, demoted to 19th. But she still stays in the shadow cabinet, and has the research, science and innovation portfolio.New National Party leader Chris Luxon has decided to part with the tradition of giving the entire caucus - except new and departing MPs - a numbered ranking.Instead, he's given rankings to the first 20 MPs, and left the rest unranked.'Ultimate team sport'Speaking at a press conference after revealing the reshuffle this afternoon, Luxon described politics as the "ultimate team sport".He said his line-up was based on performance, as well as matching people t

So here we are approaching the next hurdle for Christopher Luxon to vault; the choosing of his shadow cabinet.  Last week was spent facing the media and the public in walk abouts. The media indulging in their age old game of playing gotcha politics.  For those who don’t know the gotcha, it’s about asking a question that draws the subject into an awkward reveal.  Jessica and Tova had the opening gambit which was on how many houses Luxon owns. That backfired, as anyone who heard talkback the next day will tell you. All the callers saying that there’s nothing morally wrong with owning property and it’s a sign that he’s successful.  But that wasn’t the gotcha. The gotcha was when Jessica asked how much his Remuera home was worth. Christopher was $2 million off. The implication was that Christopher doesn’t understand the implications of the housing crisis, or has no idea about his own balance sheet, which is a problem if you want to give him the keys to the country’s balance sheet.  There was a double whammy when

It was halfway through last week, and I was having a conversation with a mate about whether MIQ for in-bound citizens was still relevant.  Both of us were noting that with over 2000 active cases in the country, compared to a handful in MIQ, you were more likely to catch Covid in New Zealand rather than from a recent returnee.  So he asked me, can you give me one good reason why we should retain MIQ? There was only one reason I could think of, and that was the possibility of a new variant rising and us needing to prolong our defences as we ready ourselves for another viral invasion.  So imagine my surprise when over the weekend that exact scenario played out.  Omicron was discovered.  Nations immediately prevented flights from Southern Africa.  Australia started the process of re-introducing hotel based MIQ.   The world went on war footing.  And here our slowness to dismantle quarantine measures suddenly looked like an inspired decision, rather than a decision born of fear and a love of being a hermit nation. 

So Auckland waits for 4pm for an announcement that they will be rewarded for their stirling effort in achieving vaccination targets.  They’ve been good little hobbits. They’ve jabbed like their life depends on it.  It’s what being locked down for 98 days will do to you.  The town is desperate for a haircut.  They’re desperate for a sit-down meal.  They live in one of the most highly vaccinated cities in the world.  But I have bad news for Auckland, the chances of them being given that freedom are very low.  Not only has the Prime Minister’s office hinted at that over the weekend, but use your common sense  If the cafes opened on Wednesday under a Level 3.3 model, then one and all, vaxxed and unvaxxed could swan into a café and order a panini.  Then in a few short weeks, the traffic light system comes in and suddenly all the unvaxxed are refused permission to enter the cafes they’ve already been freely entering.  It just won’t work. This means Auckland’s freedoms won’t be denied on vaccination levels but on th

Welcome to the first day of vaccine mandate.  Today was the deadline for teachers and health workers to have had at least one shot of the Covid vaccination.  We all know this has caused some consternation amongst members of those professions who have an antipathy towards the vaccine, and amongst those people against government compulsion.  In fact, there has been a cacophony of calls suggesting that this issue is splitting the nation. Headlines, commentators and talkback callers claim that this is the most divisive issue in our history.  But is it really? To be divisive, you really need to be split 50/50 on an issue, yet in vaccinations we are already pushing 80 percent double vaccinated. That is a very large majority of the country.  What we have is a very loud minority who are prepared to shout division at the top of their lungs.  It is interesting how many of our politicians are pro-vaccination but anti-mandates.  Even the Prime Minister was reticent. Today, David Seymour calls the mandates divisive and me

So once again, we await another announcement about our gradual stumble towards something someone might laughably call freedom  At 4pm, the Government should confirm their in-principle agreement to lower Auckland to Level 3 Step 2.  Otherwise known as a bit of a shop and up to 25 people outdoors, otherwise just as you were, please.  The whole thing is dependent on vaccination rates and hospital beds.  The Government has specified 90 percent double jabbed for freedom, but that could all be reversed if a surge depletes our hospital capacities.  So, everything is based on vaccinations.  Which is why the conversation needs to be re-framed.  It’s not about taking Auckland out of lockdown and allowing them to travel.  Auckland has beds and will break the 90 percent barrier in just over a week.  It’s about closing down the areas with the lowest vaccination rates and least hospital beds.  Which is why Christmas holidays are still under threat.  The places with the best beaches have the worst vax rates.  Gisborne, Coro

Another day with so much going on submerged under the tsunami of reckons that is Covid.  4pm today we find out the next phase.  It really is six of one and half a dozen of the other.  Pure health theory would be to wait until the magical 90 percent is reached.  But political reality is that compliance is waning. Unless you bring out the water cannons and the rubber bullets there will be an erosion of standards tomorrow whichever way the decision goes.  Fun fact.  Wales.  Population 3.2 million people had a 7-day average Covid case number of 2700 this past week.  10 people died.  6140 have died in the pandemic and they have 71% double jabbed.  Yet 70,000 screaming Welsh fans without masks gathered in the Principality Stadium and then flooded downtown Cardiff.  As a matter of comparison NZ is currently 75 per cent double jabbed and Auckland is 80% and yet shut down.  Meanwhile other stories are pushed aside.  NZ this weekend made a pledge to cut Carbon emissions in half by 2030.  Just 8 years. But it’s a game o

Well since I was on air last week things have devolved into a right royal mess.Last Monday, the Prime Minister kept Auckland in Level 3 but threw the city a bone.You're still locked down but you can have a little visit with another family or your yoga class.Her mistake was fooling with the settings.What Aucklanders heard was socialising is back on the menu boys. They heard Level 2 with restrictions. Not Level 3 with picnics. Give a city an inch, it'll take a mile and it did and lo and behold, case numbers are up and the spectre of Melbourne and Sydney is upon us.Those cities got into a mess by going into loose lockdowns which don't work. The Government last week lost their bottle and made exactly the same mistake.They've bowed to the pressure from business who are constantly advocating for opening up, meanwhile they've let down the population who believe that the suppression of Covid cases until we're as fully vaccinated as we can be is the best course for the country.In trying to make everybody happier they'

Well haven’t we worked ourselves up into a tis was. Frustration with 7 weeks of lockdown in Auckland is starting to boil over in public with claims that everything is failing and not working and will never work. We’re being left behind and there is no plan.  And it’s all this Labour government’s fault.There have been calls to give up the lockdown strategy. To open our borders and start to live again. But has New Zealand’s strategy against Covid really been such a failure. Melbourne today celebrates it’s 246th day in lockdown becoming the world’s most locked down city.  Meanwhile Sydney approaches their 100th day in a row.  A rough back of the envelope calculation shows that Auckland is around 120 days all up since March 2020. On Saturday Melbourne had 1176 cases and 3 deaths. On Saturday 10 people died in New South Wales.  No body died in Auckland and there were 33 cases. While Covid was not eliminated, it was mitigated by the lockdown strategy preventing hospitalisation that we could not cope with. Call me a

Is Covid-19 increasing the risk of leader burnout?NZ Herald Business reporter Jane Phare researched into the issue, and found that leaders are feeling even more overworked as a result of Covid, compared to 2019, and that leaders are caught in between their staff and their businesses.86 per cent of business leaders are feeling stressed, but Phare says they carry the burden of the entire company.Jane Phare joined Andrew Dickens.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Here we are in yet another Monday of decision and it seems that the powerhouse of Auckland is going to remain in lockdown longer yet as the long tail of Covid seems peskily hard to stamp out.Another week, another billion down the drain. Once again last week I heard business advocates asking what's the plan to get out of this. Actually more accurately they want to know when. Well your guess is as good as mine. That's the funny thing about wars and pandemics and the weather. They don't follow arbitrary timelines as defined by humans. The thing is, there always has been a plan. The plan is get everybody vaccinated.  Now I know that’s not much of a plan but that’s the plan.  That’s the only option humans have.  Get vaccinated or lockdown every time hospitalisations overwhelm the health system. It is a great pity the plan did not include the phrase “as fast as possible”.  In the the historical reckoning that will be seen as the government’s greatest mistake.  But it is fair to say we’ve sped up. Businesses want da

It started on Friday.First I saw my neighbour struggling down the street on crutches. He'd had a knee operation at a private hospital.It was the last operation they did before lockdown he said. Then he added that the hospital was preparing itself for any overflow from the public system in the event of a surge of Covid cases. That's a worry I thought.Later that night the tweets and social media posts from friends in the health system started.Auckland and Counties Manukau were bracing for an increase in cases.Staff were being sought from Waikato DHB.Covid cases amongst the staff combined with a rise in hospitalisation was starting to stress the system.It was a reminder what all our battles against Covid are about. Preventing a meltdown in healthcare.We have 500 odd cases so far and 34 hospitalisations. Thats a conversion rate of around 7 per cent. Added to that the fact that our health system was at capacity even before an outbreak of Covid then we sit in a perilous place where the only option was lockdown. Or

A mother in the US has felt the wrath of parents worldwide after revealing on TikTok that she charges her 7 year old daughter rent to teach her the value of money.Felicia Farley told TikTokkers, "every week my daughter has a list of chores. If those chores are completed daily, she will get $7 at the end of the week."She then went on to say "In total she pays $5 for bills, leaving $2 left over which she can then keep and save or spend."Andrew Dickens asked callers what they thought was appropriate for kids to do to learn the value of money.LISTEN ABOVESee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

So since I last spoke with you the Government have announced their plan to transition towards more open borders and Amazon have decided to pull the Lord of the Rings out of New Zealand.  The 2 stories are linked. There are parts of Amazon’s reasoning that haven’t been widely reported.  They’re moving to Shepperton Studios in England which is currently in major expansion mode.  It’s merged with Pinewood Studios and now provides the second biggest studio in the world behind 1 in China. 18 new sound stages have been built this year.  Netflix has announced it’s putting a production hub in Shepperton taking productions out of Europe and North America.  There’s talk that Amazon is about to take a stake in the studio. It also has to be remembered that Amazon’s Lord of the Rings is heavily dependent on studios.  It’s being done with sets and CGI.  So it’s no sweat to move the sets to England and keep going.Then there’s an instant saving on cast cost. My point is that even if we were open and easy to get to the probab

Firstly, my condolences to the people of Timaru and particularly the parents of the boys who lost their lives in the horrific incident. I’m not going to draw any conclusions from the particular event because I feel it’s too soon and the whole district is feeling it, as are we all. No one needs a radio host or talkback callers pontificating on the should have beens. But in the course of the conversation today we have heard talk on perception of risk and how poor it is in young brains. And that’s not the first time perception of risk has been mentioned over the past few days. We heard it from Sir John Key in the weekend.  He suggested that many New Zealanders had little perception of risk from Covid 19 because we have been spared the worst ravages of it and that may be why so much vaccination hesitancy exists. Why get vaccinated when there’s no Covid about.   Sir John suggests that if New Zealanders were told the next stage of the plan which would include fewer lockdowns and more ease of travel then people migh

This morning I was driving to work listening to Steve Price talking to Mike Hosking at 8.40am. It wasn’t a pleasant listen.  What’s happening across the Tasman is a recurring nightmare.A nightmare that somehow we have avoided so far. Lockdowns popping up like mushrooms.  Case numbers growing and worrying hospitalisations. Two thirds of the new cases are under 40s.   Of the 53 people in intensive care, six are in their 20s, four are in their 30s, one is in their 40s, 18 are in their 50s, 14 are in their 60s, nine are in their 70s and only one is in their 80s.  So, so much for Covid being the disease of the old, frail and feeble. There are 203 people in hospital with Covid-19 in NSW.Twenty-seven are ventilated.Imagine that here where our ICUs are already at limit. Meanwhile lockdowns into October are being mentioned and the Australian treasure is warning this may create a second recession for the so called lucky country.  Not a pretty picture. The question is how did Covid get into Australia?  The common wisdom

Sometimes I wonder how we have become the architects of so many bad administrative decisions. This is the story of British GP Ann Solomon which featured in the Sunday Star Times this weekend At the beginning of the pandemic New Zealand made some border exemptions to fill critical worker shortages Ann Solomon responded and has been living and working in New Zealand with her family since last August. But the temporary visa is running out and Ann Solomon’s family’s future hangs in the air. One of her children is just about to leave school and without the permanent residency will not be able to legally work here. Ann Solomon is not just a doctor, she’s also a woman and she’s living in Foxton. As a female rural GP she is in very high demand and is a very rare breed. She is not someone we can afford to lose. She’s not alone; there are 1129 other similar cases, many dating back to the Key Government. People who have made the effort, brought skills to the country, settled themselves and now facing an immigration rese

In the aftermath of the farmer protests on Friday, some tempers have been running high as farmers allege city residents don’t understand them.  But in fact, there are many issues that should unite farming and city folk. As I drove in this morning, I heard a farmer on ZB claiming that city folk have no idea of the environmental regulation and the cost of compliance that the farming community have to bear. I thought that was a bit unfair. Currently Auckland Council is spending $1 billion dollars on the interceptor project which is to prevent wastewater from entering the watercourses that crisis across the city. That’s part of the costs of keeping rates high. Then there’s the story of the service station that’s being developed in my suburb.  This is a saga that has rumbled on for years.  The service station operator has now spent more than $500,000 on getting resource consents and will spend just about as much on environmental safeguards. City businesses will complain about compliance costs as much as any farmer

So look at that: the Pfizer vaccines that we were freaking out about arrived. Not only that, they arrived two days early.So what was all that panic about? We only knew about the potential delay because the Minister told us about it. So why do that?It's because the government is becoming increasingly gun shy. Afraid of negative headlines, they are choosing to pre-empt the bad news to try and mitigate any possible damage. But in this case, they shot themselves in the foot unnecessarily.The public perception is that this vaccine rollout is less than perfect and so the government is defensive.When I said that on social media last week, many supporters of the roll out and the government took issue with me. Our roll out has a 107 per cent success rate, they said.This is true. We are seven per cent ahead of schedule. But that means nothing if the schedule was too slow in the first place. The government is doing exactly what they said they would do but with hindsight we see that was not enough.Today we learn that Oak

Here we are with lockdown's popping up across Australasia. The Delta variant is causing some havoc amongst two nations universally praised for their handling of Covid over the past 16 months. Two nations who on the whole went hard and early and reaped the harvest of return. Much to the globe's jealousy, we opened one of the first and most successful travel bubbles. We've been smug about our full stadiums and enjoying concerts and the ability to keep a large part of our domestic economies functioning. But all that sways in the balance today. And one of the reasons our two nations are here is because we lag much of our comparable countries of the world in vaccinations. Much has been made that we are last of 122 OECD nations in the vaccination table, and that’s true, but the Prime Minister is also right when saying that table is based on the number of first shots given. On fully vaccinated figures, we do a little better.  As of this morning just 7.8 per cent of New Zealand has had two shots. The global average i