The Mike Hosking Breakfast

TVNZ's latest show Creamerie may hit home for a number of viewers. 
It tells the story of a virus that kills 99 percent of men, leaving women on their own. However, three kiwi woman discover a man after eight years of abstinence.
That man is Jay Ryan - the Kiwi star who first broke out on Neighbours and Sea Patrol, before starring in Go Girls and heading to Hollywood for shows like Beauty and the Beast. 
He stars alongside Ally Xue, JJ Fong and Perlina Lau, Creamerie's writers and creators best known for the hit web-series Flat 3. 
Ryan joined Mike Hosking to discuss filming a show about a pandemic during a pandemic, and his time in Hollywood.
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Chris Lendrum, New Zealand Rugby's head of the professional game, remains hopeful the Moana Pasifika and the Fijian Drua  franchises can join Super Rugby next year.
Both have been granted conditional licences. It comes five months after NZR confirmed that the two franchises were its preferred partners to explore the entry of Pasifika-linked teams in future professional competitions.
Lendrum describes one hinge to their involvement.
"The challenge has always been for Pasifika coming into professional competitions is to show they are financially sustainable to do so. We're being doing a lot of work with them, still a bit to come, but they are in a good space at the moment." 
He says they've committed to the cause as a means of gaining public traction and exposure.
"That's going to help them with a platform to finish off those business plans to secure the final funding they need, put together a sustainable PNL, and also start to contract players and coaches and sponsors."
Moana Pasifika took the field for the first time last December when they played the Māori All Blacks, while the Fijian Drua were established in 2017, winning the Australian National Rugby Championship a year later.
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A new Uber service is being criticised by a transport advocate.
The rideshare company is starting a service encouraging people to share their car with others while commuting.
The driver would earn 71 cents for every kilometre travelled.
But Greater Auckland spokesperson advocate Matt Lowrie told Mike Hosking the service might be a hard sell.
He says many wouldn't be comfortable sharing their car with a stranger.
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Air New Zealand is defending its move yesterday to weigh not just bags, but also passengers, at Auckland Airport.
Air New Zealand chief safety officer David Morgan says the five yearly passenger, crew and luggage weight checks are a regulatory requirement.
Morgan told Mike Hosking Auckland is first, but other routes will be checked over the coming weeks too.
"All data is collected anonymously and results cannot be seen by the data collection team or other customers. Although participating is not compulsory, we do really appreciate our customers helping out."
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A Government advisor says issues at vaccination centres need to be ironed out, as soon as possible.
A Newstalk ZB investigation has found people who aren't yet eligible for Covid-19 vaccines are turning up to a South Auckland vaccination centre, and aren't being turned away.
Dr Rawiri Jansen, a member of the Government's immunisation implementation advisory group, says no system is perfect, and he's glad vaccines aren't going to waste.
But he told Mike Hosking the system clearly needs to be improved before the wider vaccination roll-out begins.
Jansen says he can forgive early wrinkles, but they need to be ironed out quickly.
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The Christchurch mosque shooter's requested judicial review will not go ahead today.
Brenton Tarrant had sought a judicial review, which Justice Geoffrey Venning was prepared to hear in the High Court at Auckland this morning.
But Tarrant did not attend.
Tarrant was representing himself.
The hearing was conducted by telephone conference and was in chambers, meaning any arguments or submissions made cannot be reported.
However, Justice Venning will issue a document later today explaining some of the arguments Tarrant had hoped to pursue.
Survivors of the mosque shootings and relatives of the victims were informed of the hearing yesterday.
The hearing had no bearing on the outcome of the criminal case, or the sentence imposed last year, or on Tarrant's terrorism conviction.
Tarrant is serving a sentence of life imprisonment without parole, the only person in New Zealand history to ever receive the sentence.
He murdered 51 people and attempted to murder 40 others at Christchurch's Al Noor Mosque and Linwood Islamic Centre on March 15, 2019.
He was also convicted for engaging in a terrorist act.
At his sentencing in August, Tarrant did not oppose being locked up for life. He claimed in a pre-sentence report he was not racist or xenophobic.
He described his beliefs to a pre-sentence report writer as "not real" and said he was terribly unhappy and in a "poisoned emotional state".
And he said he'd felt ostracised and wanted to damage society. But he accepted it was without doubt a terror attack.
According to the Ministry of Justice, about 180 judicial reviews are heard every year and only a person affected by a decision can apply for a judicial review.

A lobbying scandal swirling around former British Prime Minister David Cameron has deepened, with claims that a senior civil servant held down a part-time job with a now-bankrupt financial firm that was awarded lucrative government contracts.
It is the latest in a growing tide of revelations about links between government ministers, civil servants and Greensill Capital, a financial services firm that collapsed last month, threatening thousands of jobs at a British steelmaker it helped finance.
Opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer said the revelations showed the “sleaze and cronyism that’s at the heart of this Conservative government.”
“We need to overhaul this whole broken system,” he said.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative government defeated an opposition effort to force a parliamentary inquiry into allegations of cronyism and improper lobbying. Lawmakers in the House of Commons, where the Conservatives have a majority, rejected the idea by a vote of 357-262.
Soon after, though, the House of Commons' influential cross-party Treasury Select Committee announced that it would begin an investigation next week into Greensill's collapse and the “appropriateness” of the U.K. Treasury's response to lobbying. The committee has the power to call witnesses, potentially including Cameron and Treasury chief Rishi Sunak.
The government has launched its own investigation, led by a lawyer, but opponents doubt it will get to the truth. Opposition parties are calling for tougher rules on contacts between business representatives and government officials, saying Britain’s laxly enforced lobbying regulations leave the door open to corruption.
The head of the civil service also ordered all government departments to declare whether any officials had second jobs outside government. Cabinet Secretary Simon Case said in a letter to ministries that there was “acute concern” in government about issues raised by the Greensill affair.
A series of news reports over the last month revealed that Cameron had lobbied senior government officials on behalf of a finance firm founded by Australian banker Lex Greensill, a former adviser to Cameron’s 2010-2016 Conservative-led government.
Greensill Capital was given a lucrative role in “supply chain finance” arrangements that saw it pay contractors on behalf of the government before being reimbursed by the Treasury. The system was designed to expedite payments to contractors, including pharmacies supplying the National Health Service, but critics say the government should just have paid the contractors directly.
Cameron worked as a part-time adviser to Greensill starting in 2018, after he left office, and held shares in the company.
On Tuesday it emerged that a senior civil servant, Bill Crothers, began working as a part-time adviser to Greensill’s board in September 2015, two months before he left his job as the government’s chief commercial officer — in charge of government purchasing.
Johnson said he shared “the widespread concern about some of the stuff that we’re reading at the moment.”
“I do think it is a good idea in principle that civil servants should be able to engage with business and should have experience of private sector,” Johnson told lawmakers in the House of Commons. But, he added, “it’s not clear that those boundaries had been properly understood.”
British media began digging into Cameron’s work for Greensill after the company’s collapse forced the owner of Liberty Steel, which employs about 5,000 people, to seek a government bailout. Greensill was one of the company’s key financial backers.
News reports have revealed that Cameron sent text messages to Treasury chief Rishi Sunak in an effort to secure government-backed loans for Greensill under a program to help companies hurt by the COVID-19 pandemic. He also lobbied Health Secretary Matt Hancock on behalf of a Greensill product that would have...

Damien O'Connor has added another industry this Government has destroyed to its growing list.
Live animal exports are done.
While telling us it wouldn't hurt our GDP, and despite admitting it's worth hundreds of millions of dollars - he did concede there had been a bit of a "gold rush" of late.
That’s spin for "the industry is growing". There is increasing demand for it, and in general I thought gold rushes were good.
His argument around GDP appeared to be based on the idea that although we'd lose hundreds of millions of dollars, we would more than make up for it with our shiny new reputation.
He didn’t of course have any figures around that, because 1) There aren't any 2) He made it up.
Stuart Nash, by the way, also made up his stat on the programme yesterday, saying we were the only country in the whole world exporting live animals. We are, in fact, one of many.
So the question is, how many industries does this lot want to lay waste to before enough New Zealanders vote them out?
The oil and gas business got done over, with no consultation and a promise that the end to exploration was years and years away. Which, of course, was not remotely true either.
The oil and gas industry is about the future. It's about intent. It's about the mood of the landscape.
The mood had decidedly changed under Labour so licences were handed back and people went home.
The jobs promised - the clean energy jobs promised -  have amounted to nothing. That is, apart from a clean energy think-tank in the Naki that had $25 million tossed at it.
The cold hard truth around cows on ships is this: This country has an agricultural base and animals is what we do. Food in general, is what we do.
Our biggest trading partner is China. China is one of the few countries in the world actually growing right now, and when times get better they’ll grow even more.
And that’s the advantage of this country. Through thick and thin, good times and bad, the world always has and always will need feeding. And the wealthier the world gets, the better the quality of the product they want - led by food.
This Government has already made life for farmers hard enough, but wrecking multi-hundred-million-dollar industries takes it next level.
National are smart to promise to reverse it.
Let's hope in the ensuing period that the Chinese, who we are now hopelessly beholden to, don't take umbrage and don't see us like Australia.
Australia has already lost $20 billion in income in their scrap.
This Government are wreckers. They're banners, they're cancellers. They stop, they rub out and nothing ever replaces it. It's hot air and ideology.
The SPCA might feel good about this, but the SPCA don’t pay the country's bills. The farmers do.

THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Thursday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) It's a Miracle, Really/That's Another Industry Screwed/Trains Are Going Nowhere/Woke Scrabble/No More Discs

The Government's being accused of blaming individuals for systemic problems with the MIQ system.
Officials have admitted the Grand Millennium security guard - Case B - wasn't tested for six months, even though he was meant to be tested fortnightly.
It's since emerged 450 other MIQ workers also aren't being tested within the required weekly or fortnightly timeframe.
The revelation only came to light due to questions, from National Covid-19 Response Spokesman Chris Bishop.
Bishop told Mike Hosking Jacinda Ardern has been criticising the security guard - rather than taking responsibility for what happened and fixing it.
"The Government is lashing out at individuals, to cover for failures in its systems."
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