The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Calls for the Government to ease building restrictions if we want even a chance of fixing the housing crisis.
A report from the New Zealand Initiative shows population growth will require an extra 30-thousand homes per year.
That's before figuring in demolition rates and the $40,000 homes we're already behind on.
Think tank chief economist Eric Crampton told Mike Hosking decades of building restrictions have caused the construction sector to adapt and reduce its capacity.
"If everyone knew that it would be easy to get supplies and councils would be welcoming, the sector would start taking on more trainees and gearing up for the job to come."
LISTEN  ABOVE

Children in England will return to class and people will be able to meet a friend outside for coffee in two weeks’ time, Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced Monday as he laid out a slow easing of one of Europe’s strictest pandemic lockdowns.
But those longing for a haircut, a restaurant meal or a pint in a pub have almost two months to wait, and people won’t be able to hug loved ones that they don’t live with until May at the earliest.
Johnson said the government's plan would move the country “cautiously but irreversibly” out of lockdown.
“We are now traveling on a one-way road to freedom,” he said at a televised news conference.
But it's a slow road, not a highway.
Britain has had Europe’s deadliest coronavirus outbreak, with more than 120,000 deaths. Faced with dominant virus variant that scientists say is both more transmissible and more deadly than the original virus, the country has spent much of the winter under a tight lockdown, the third since March 2020. Bars, restaurants, gyms, schools, hair salons and nonessential shops are closed, people are urged not to travel out of their local area and foreign holidays are illegal.
That will begin to change, slowly, on March 8, when children in England go back to school and people are allowed to meet one friend or relative for a chat or picnic outdoors. Three weeks later, people will be able to meet in small groups outdoors for sports or relaxation.
Under the government plan, shops and hairdressers will reopen April 12. So will pubs and restaurants, though only outdoors. Indoor venues such as theaters and cinemas, and indoor seating in bars and restaurants, are scheduled to open May 17, and limited crowds will be able to return to sports stadiums. It is also the earliest date Britons may be allowed foreign holidays.
The final stage of the plan, in which all legal limits on social contact are removed and nightclubs can reopen after being shuttered for 15 months, is penciled in for June 21.
The government says the dates could all be postponed if infections and hospitalizations surge.
The measures being announced apply to England. Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland all have slightly different lockdowns in place, with some children returning to class in Scotland and Wales on Monday.
Hopes for a return to normality rest largely on Britain’s fast-moving inoculation program that has given more than 17.7 million people, over a third of the country’s adult population, the first of two doses of vaccine. The government aims is to give every adult a shot of vaccine by July 31.
Johnson said vaccines would help Britain put “a wretched year” behind it.
Johnson’s Conservative government was accused of reopening the country too quickly after the first lockdown in the spring and of rejecting scientific advice to have a short “circuit-breaker” lockdown in the fall.
It does not want to make the same mistakes again, although Johnson is under pressure from some Conservative lawmakers and business owners, who argue that restrictions should be lifted quickly to revive the battered economy.
The Conservative government -- in normal times an opponent of lavish public spending -- spent 280 billion pounds ($393 billion) in 2020 to deal with the pandemic, including billions paying the salaries of almost 10 million furloughed workers.
British Chambers of Commerce Director General Adam Marshall welcomed the “clarity” about reopening dates, but said that “the future of thousands of firms and millions of jobs still hangs by a thread.”
Johnson said the government's annual budget statement on March 3 would contain new measures “to protect jobs and livelihoods across the U.K.”
The government says further easing will depend on vaccines proving effective at lowering hospitalization and deaths, infection rates remaining low and no new virus variants emerging that throw the plans into disarray.
Two U.K. studies...

New Zealand's Covid-19 forced lockdown and the subsequent weeks will not be included in tomorrow's all-important Child Poverty report, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern this afternoon confirmed.
Instead, the annual measure will only take into account the nine months to March 2020, and has surveyed 15,000 families rather than 20,000 as in previous years.
Given the lag period of the data, tomorrow's numbers will take into account child poverty levels from between July 2018 and March 2019.
This is because families were asked about their experiences in the 12 months prior to the survey, which was taken between July 2019 and March 2020.
The data deliberately does not include April, May and June because the Ministry of Health did not want officials undertaking face-to-face interviews, given the Covid-19 risks.
Speaking to media in Christchurch Ardern - who is also the Minister for Child Poverty Reduction - said she was not concerned the data did not take Covid-19 into account.
"Statistics NZ are perfectly comfortable with the data sets they have through until March," she said.
"It won't pick up the full effects of Covid, so that next data set will be when we see the full effects of Covid-19."
This year the Government would be looking to see the impacts of their flagship $5.5 billion Families Package, launched in 2018, which last year's Child Poverty figures did not capture.
"The important thing for us is to look at how we've been doing across the past two years, because we're looking against our baseline how we're tracking over time," she said.
"I'll be looking for the full effects of that two-year period at the Working for Families package because none of our data to date has fully taken that into account."
The Prime Minister said she would not only be looking at relative income measures but what was known as material deprivation, which considers a range of factors.
"That's asking ourselves are our children getting enough healthy meals, do they have shoes to wear to school, do they have access to healthcare?"
Last year's Child Poverty report, based on the findings from 2018 to 2019, revealed the number of people facing material hardship had remained relatively stagnant.
At the time Ardern remained confident the Government would meet its child poverty targets.
Last year's figures also found the cost of housing to be a significant factor contributing to child poverty in New Zealand.
The latest child poverty statistics are due to be released on Tuesday.

Seven cases and the country's biggest city, yet again, is locked down. Parts of New Zealand so far away from the seven cases being in level two seemed absurd.
Events like the National Rowing Champs stalled as they stared out at the water wondering what level of inconvenience could be imposed upon them if this thing didn’t get sorted.
As we predicted, it's Americold all over again. The source is unknown, and we'll never know. We have hundreds of millions in lost business and productivity. One hotel last week had three events canned and half a million dollars lost.
As level one is reinstated for Auckland, is it not time for some proper planning? Is the now well-touted idea of MIQ facilities outside of Auckland not actually worth acting on? Just how many more times is this nonsense going to be tolerated?
A government driven by fear is never going to make any other decision than the most conservative one. This cluster's lessons are the same lessons as Americold. The border leaks, testing needs to be more intense, and they need to do better.
But will they?
And in that is the predicament we face. The government don't appear to want to do better,
This, as far as I can work out, is the price they think we should pay to be so called Covid free, which of course is the irony, we aren't. But locking down is part of the deal, doing it over and over is just an inconvenience, not something that needs improving, or avoiding.
The idea that we can be better, or we can do things differently, is not part of how they think. All the ideas from the experts, one of the key ones being you don’t put MIQ facilities in the biggest cities seems to be an argument going nowhere.
There is little, if any, doubt in my mind now given we've been through this too many times. This is a control exercise.
They've worked out too many of us live in fear. Fear brings support. Those one o'clock sessions, even for the slavishly enthusiastic Labour Party supporter surely now can be seen for what it really is.
A platform for politicking. Telling you the level and timeframe of the level is a two or three sentence exercise, not half an hour of propaganda.
They have seized, very successfully, on the idea that locking us down is annoying, but that annoyance is forgotten once they start teasing the chance of freedom. The cleverness of the trick is that half the people falling for it don’t even realise they're being manipulated.
It's a hard truth to stomach. A government not up to much, a system not looking to be improved, a growing level of frustration amongst those awake enough to know when they're being played.
Enjoy level one. History shows it doesn’t last.

Reassurances there's enough vaccines to fully immunise border workers - and their households.
The Government plans to vaccinate more than 12,000 at risk staff over the next two to three weeks.
Jabs are well underway in Auckland and Wellington, and will be rolled out in Christchurch from tomorrow.
Covid-19 Response Minister Chris Hipkins today said there was enough vaccine for a second booster jab to be given to all border workers and their families.
He told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking that MedSafe was working through the approvals process for the three other vaccines expected to be administered to the remainder of the population later in the year.
At this stage, the timetable still remained for this to happen in the second half of the year.
A second shipment of the Pfizer vaccine was expected in the near future, with further smaller batches arriving regularly over the next couple of weeks, Hipkins said.
Hipkins said the remaining vaccines would gain Medsafe approval before any deliveries.
He said when the larger rollout happened later in the year people would not get a choice of vaccine.
"Ultimately it will mostly be determined by logistics," he said.
Hipkins said it would depend on the efficacy of the vaccine to achieve herd immunity and it's success in reducing transmission that will determine whether border restrictions were eventually relaxed.
Wilson's calls came just before Auckland moved back to alert level 1 at midnight, after a week of restrictions to contain and trace the Valentine's Day cluster.
Another family member of the previously confirmed cases tested positive yesterday but they were already in quarantine as a precaution so the case was deemed "very low" risk.
Eight people have tested positive from the outbreak, which is considered well-contained even though the source of the transmission is still a mystery.

THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Tuesday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) Calling it Like it Is/School if You Want It/Vaccine for Prisoners/EV Myths Busted/Movies Are Dead

I was in a hotel in Auckland, I had given an address at a conference.
12.51pm, phones went off. The attention of the room was diverted, the event was off, and we all had to be elsewhere.
The Christchurch quake had happened.
10 years ago today, we remember.
I've always thought it was an odd business remembering things at certain stages. 10 is a big deal for no other reason than it’s a round number. It's not more or less important than four or eight, except for the fact we've decided it is.
We went to Christchurch, broadcast this show from a motel room where the walls had been covered in mattresses to sort the sound out. It was emotional for me given Christchurch is my hometown, and the part I had spent a decent chunk of my childhood, the east, was the bit that got hit the worst.
It wasn’t obviously as bad as living through it, but your hometown is your hometown and there is nothing like an earthquake to remind you of the fragility of infrastructure, far less life.
My sister-in-law had literally just moved south, bought a couple of business bought a house, all of it was gone.
For me anyway that's a marker in time, I remember her shock, I see her now.
Does 10 years seem like a long time ago? Well yes, and no. She, for example, has recovered completely. They’ve moved on they're doing brilliantly. So, in that sense it seems a lifetime ago. A mate of mind owned a café. It was totalled, he's moved on. New career, new life.
But then I went to Christchurch over Christmas, and what hadn't been done in a decade shocked me.
Yes, the market in Cashel Mall is great, the precincts like justice, the library, and the law courts, it's everything you'd expect in a city, given the chance to rebuild.
But my God the fact the cathedral is still in the state it's in, is little short of a crime.
I was shocked that every pile of rubble downtown had been commandeered by Wilsons and turned into a carpark. Pop out the other side of the square heading towards Linwood and it's like no one has visited the place in years. Big bits of barren land. House, gap, house, gap.  
There is so much more to do.
Some of it you'd expect. Infrastructure is big, long, and expensive. But some of it should have been done. There has been too much procrastinating. The stadium is another classic example, it's not ready for years, that's unforgivable.
As much as today will be about remembering, let some of it be about looking forward, let some of it be about hope, progress, determination, getting those gaps filled, decisions made, and the future built.
Let Christchurch be all it can, should, and deserves to be.

After Luna Rossa's victory over American Magic in the Prada Cup semifinals, co-helmsman Jimmy Spithill immediately turned his attention to the next task.
"Now Ineos, boys," he told the crew on board after eliminating the American challenge to book a date against the British.
Now, Spithill has turned his attention to Team New Zealand.
Yesterday, Luna Rossa closed out the Prada Cup final series, winning both races to take a comprehensive 7-1 win in the best-of-13 series and earning the right to challenge Team New Zealand in the America's Cup match next month.
The result is yet another milestone ticked off in the Italians' campaign, and one they did in dominant fashion. Now, only one goal remains and Spithill knows the size of the task that awaits his team.
"It's going to be one hell of an undertaking," Spithill said.
"Now the work begins. This is what we live for, this is what we've been working so hard for year after year. Being based in Cagliari, it just been a relentless campaign this one with everything that's added on that we all didn't expect.
"I can't wait. Bring it on."
Luna Rossa will go into the America's Cup match with the advantage of much more racing under their belts than that of Team New Zealand, whose competitive experience in the AC75 has consisted of just six races in the World Series last December, as well as an incomplete race against Team UK in which neither boat could get on their foils and were forced into a displacement race.
In 2021, Luna Rossa have competed in 18 races across the Prada Cup round robins, semifinals and finals, and have showed improvements in their performance every step of the way. While Team New Zealand had the fastest boat late last year and suggestions are they remain that way, time will tell just how big a factor race time will be in the final stage of the competition.
For Spithill, progressing to the America's Cup match presents an opportunity he has been waiting for.
The 41-year-old, who led Luna Rossa's challenge in 2007, rejoined the Italian syndicate for the 2021 campaign with Oracle Team USA – who he won America's Cups with in 2010 and 2013 – disbanding following their loss in the America's Cup match to Team New Zealand in Bermuda in 2017.
While not trying to hide his desire to get one back on the Kiwis, Spithill took the opportunity to praise the Italian syndicate for what they had achieved particularly given the unforeseen issues that arose over the past few years.
"The America's Cup really is about a team pulling through. The one thing that I've notice here is the culture we've created. We've really had to work on it a lot but where we are now – how candid and honest the group is and how every single person in this team is not satisfied; they want more, they always feel like they've left something on the table and go home, come back the next day trying to improve – that's a culture you always try to create.
"I'm really, really excited to see that in the team and we're going to build on what we just went through against Ineos.
"These Kiwis are going to be tough, but that's the great thing about sport – if it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing."
text by Christopher Reive, NZ Herald

Team New Zealand helmsman Peter Burling remain undaunted by what he's witnessed in the challenger final won by Luna Rossa in the America's Cup.
The Italian syndicate will contest for the Auld Mug from March 6 on Auckland's Hauraki Gulf.
Burling told Mike Hosking he's grateful for the opportunity to practise on the periphery of the competition because of the level of improvement they've made.
"I'd say it's still pretty exponential. I think you're getting more towards the sharp end of it, but you keep getting these little breakthroughs."
Luna Rossa's had 17 races since the defender last competed - and Burling agreews that could give them an 
"We've definitely had a lack of racing, but in that same regard, we've had the opportunity to keep pushing the development of the boat and keep developing the gear." 
LISTEN ABOVE

Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison was among the first Australians to receive the Covid-19 vaccination in Sydney today, but the historic moment dissolved into giggles when Morrison's attempt at a photo op went wrong.
Jane Milysiak of Marayong was selected to be the first to receive the jab and she did so alongside Prime Minister Scott Morrison at Castle Hill Medical Centre in Sydney's northwest on Sunday morning.
She was all smiles as she received the injection, seated next to Morrison in a face mask emblazoned with the Australian flag.
Like any good politician, Morrison is not one to miss a photo opportunity, so after she received the jab he encouraged her to flash the peace sign for the cameras, saying it meant "V for vaccine".
After a confused few moments, Jane obliged, but turned her hand the other way and inadvertently flipped the nation the bird.
The room erupted into laughter, and the PM quickly pushed Jane's hand down, saying "always front, always front".
Australian Health Minister Greg Hunt said the vaccinations were an important step in building public confidence in the vaccine before the nationwide rollout begins in earnest tomorrow.
"Today the first group of people will be vaccinated, commencing with two of our aged-care residents, our critical aged-care staff, frontline workers," Hunt said.
"We also know that the chief medical officer and the chief nurse and the Prime Minister – in order to provide confidence, the Prime Minister will be the last of that group."
Insiders host David Speers asked whether there was a danger Morrison would be seen as "jumping the queue".
Hunt said there "was a very strong focus on the need for key leaders, not the Parliament, not the Cabinet, not even the leadership group, but a cross-party group, to provide that confidence".
He added that Australian opposition leader Anthony Albanese would be vaccinated this week.
Earlier this month Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern said she and her family members will be vaccinated but they weren't the priority - frontline border workers are.
"I will absolutely be vaccinated."
Yesterday, New Zealand's first MIQ worker received the Covid-19 vaccination.
Border and managed isolation and quarantine (MIQ) workers will be the first to be vaccinated.
It's expected to take two to three weeks to vaccinate border workers including cleaners, nurses, security staff, customs and border officials, airline staff, hotel workers and all of their household contacts.
Healthcare, essential workers and those most at risk will follow in the second quarter of the year.
The recommended dose is two jabs, 21 days apart. It's not yet known if people will need to get a new jab each year.
text by James Law, news.com.au