The Mike Hosking Breakfast

It appears many Kiwis are not interested in rural work.
The agricultural sector continues to struggle to attract workers they need to fill gaps created by ongoing closed borders.
Despite some exemptions, the process of getting people through the border has proven complicated and difficult.
However Rural Contractors New Zealand chief executive Roger Parton told Mike Hosking employing locals is not a straight forward solution.
He says most Kiwis don't appear to be interested in the remote and rural lifestyle.
"We continue to struggle getting staff who are consistently available for work, it's an ongoing issue for the industry."
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Anthony Albanese has accused the Prime Minister Scott Morrison of pandering and sucking up to outgoing US President Donald Trump along with “fringe dwellers” and “Trumpists” in his ranks.
In a major foreign policy speech to be delivered on Wednesday, the Labor leader will call for a reset for the US-Australia relationship suggesting that the Prime Minister had not done enough to build a relationship with the Democrats and incoming US President Joe Biden.
He also suggests that Australia will be left exposed for not developing a more credible position on climate change policy.
“Let’s call this what it was: Mr Morrison pandering to President Trump and those who follow him in Australia,’’ Mr Albanese says.
“And the Coalition has deliberately run down our diplomatic capability – making Australia weaker in prosecuting our interests.”
Accusing the Trump administration of taking America “close to the brink” in the tumultuous days of early January when Trumpists stormed the nation’s capital, Mr Albanese said US democracy had been forced to demonstrate its resilience.
“Today, Washington time, Joe Biden will be inaugurated as the 46th President of the United States,’’ he says.
“US democracy has shown its resilience. Attempts to undermine it have failed.
“But America came close to the brink. The images we woke to on January 7 diminished those who seek to harm it.”
In a swipe at the Prime Minister, Mr Albanese said he needed to be stronger in his condemnation of US President Donald Trump for inciting the riots.
“It was so important for all of America’s allies to be utterly unambiguous when President Trump sought to undermine the democratic process,’’ he says.
“The great tragedy of the recent past is that the power of America’s example has been diminished from within.
“It is in Australia’s interests as a US ally to encourage the restoration of that power.”
Mr Albanese’s speech calls for Australia to “be the ally that the United States needs, rather than the ally it wants.”
“If it wasn’t already obvious, Malcolm Turnbull’s difficult first phone call with Donald Trump demonstrated the challenges building a strong relationship between our nations’ leaders would face,’’ he says.
“But Scott Morrison went too far – partly out of his affinity with Donald Trump, partly because of the political constituency they share.
“He remains afraid of the far-right extremist fringe dwellers who make up the bedrock of his personal support – and who he cultivates through the avatars of Trumpists and conspiracy theorists like Craig Kelly and George Christensen.”
Mr Morrison has previously labelled the riots and protests in Washington DC as “terribly distressing” and concerning.
But his predecessor Malcolm Turnbull has also admonished Mr Morrison for ever accepting a prestigious gong from US president Donald Trump.
“Well, look, I think it’s a great pity,’’ Mr Turnbull said.
“I think it’s a great pity that Morrison didn’t let it be known, you know make some tactful diplomatic excuse and not accept it.
“It’s a bit questionable. I think it would have been better not to accept it in the first place.”
The speech suggests that rather than an error, Labor’s recent social media posts attacking the PM as too close to Mr Trump are part of a broader strategy.
Featuring an image of the Prime Minister grinning with outgoing US President Donald Trump and giving the thumbs up to the words “it’s the company that you keep”, the post sparked division in Labor ranks.

The Deputy Prime Minister concedes New Zealand's not at the front of the Covid-19 vaccine queue.
With other countries into their second month of vaccine administrations, New Zealand's still expecting to wait until the end of March.
Deputy Prime Minister Grant Robertson says it's clear countries where many people are dying from the virus should be the priority.
He told Mike Hosking going through a proper approval process is important for New Zealand, when other countries authorised vaccine use is under emergency.
'Some New Zealanders are going to have to be convinced to get vaccinated.
"It's about making sure it's safe, by going through the right processes, and as quickly as possible."
Robertson says the hard work continues on properly approving vaccines, and our plan lines up with Australia's.
He says there'll be no delays in vaccine administration once it's approved as safe and supply arrives, which he's confident will happen quickly.
Listen to the audio above as Grant Robertson and Mark Mitchell join Mike Hosking to discuss this, along with Joe Biden, the vaccine rollout and where we are with a NZ - Australia travel bubble.

New child food safety guidelines are receiving little support from the Early Childhood Council.
From next week,  foods deemed "risky" such as nuts and chips will be banned from within centres, and apples or carrots will need to be peeled or grated.
But Early Childhood Council chief executive Peter Reynolds told Mike Hosking the new guidelines are ridiculous.
"These people are trained teachers who know how to supervise children and their eating habits, and the new guidelines are an overreaction."
Reynolds says for some families, it's unrealistic.
"Teachers don't want to be telling hard working families that 90 percent of the food they've provided is going to be turfed."
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President-elect Joe Biden is making a sober entrance to the nation's capital Tuesday, ready to assume power as America reels from the coronavirus pandemic, soaring unemployment and grave concerns about more violence as he prepares to take the oath of office.
Biden, an avid fan of Amtrak, had planned to take a train into Washington ahead of Wednesday's Inauguration Day, but scratched that plan in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.
He instead flew into a military airbase just outside the capital on Tuesday afternoon and was set to motorcade into fortress D.C. — a city that's been flooded by some 25,000 National Guard troops guarding a Capitol, White House and National Mall that are wrapped in a maze of barricades and tall fencing.
Shortly before Biden departed for Washington, the U.S. reached another grim milestone in the pandemic, s urpassing 400,000 deaths from the virus, according to Johns Hopkins University.
“These are dark times," Biden told dozens of supporters in an emotional sendoff in Delaware before departing for Washington. "But there’s always light.”
Biden, who ran for the presidency as a cool head who could get things done, plans to issue a series of executive orders on Day One — including reversing President Donald Trump's effort to leave the Paris climate accord, canceling his travel ban on visitors from several predominantly Muslim countries, and extending pandemic-era limits on evictions and student loan payments.
Trump won't attend Biden's inauguration, the first outgoing president to skip the ceremony since Andrew Johnson more than a century and a half ago. Trump remained out of sight in the White House on Tuesday with a bare announced schedule. Aides said he had recorded a farewell message and was consulting with advisers on final-hour pardons and grants of clemency.
Trump plans to depart from Washington Wednesday morning in a grand airbase ceremony that he helped plan himself.
Biden at his Delaware farewell, held at the National Guard/Reserve Center named after his late son Beau Biden, paid tribute to his home state. After his remarks, he stopped and chatted with friends and well-wishers in the crowd, much like an Iowa rope line at the start of his long campaign journey.
“I’ll always be a proud son of the state of Delaware,” said Biden, who struggled to hold back tears as he delivered brief remarks.
Aides say that Biden's first event in Washington, along with Vice President-elect Kamala Harris, will be to take part in an evening ceremony at the Reflecting Pool near the Lincoln Memorial to honor the 400,000 American lives lost to COVID-19.
Inaugural organizers on Monday finished installing some 200,000 small U.S., state and territorial flags on the National Mall, a display to represent the American people who couldn’t come to the inauguration, which is restricted under the tight security and Covid restrictions.
It's also a reminder of all the president-elect faces as he looks to steer the nation through the pandemic with infections and deaths soaring.
Out of the starting gate, Biden and his team are intent on moving quickly to speed up the distribution of vaccinations to anxious Americans and pass his $1.9 trillion virus relief package, which includes quick payments to many people and an increase in the minimum wage to $15 an hour.
Biden also plans to unveil a sweeping immigration bill on the first day of his administration, hoping to provide an eight-year path to citizenship for an estimated 11 million people living in the U.S. without legal status. That would be a major reversal from the Trump administration’s tight immigration policies.
But Biden's legislative ambitions could be tempered by the hard truth he faces on Capitol Hill, where Democrats hold narrow majorities in both the Senate and House. His hopes to press forward with an avalanche of legislation in his first 100 days could also be slowed by...

Well, it's all been laid a bit bare for large swathes of our local media. They are biased.
Extensive work has been done around coverage of the euthanasia and cannabis referenda. Euthanasia wasn't so bad, but as for the cannabis coverage, it was embarrassing.
A lot of us already knew this to be the case, of course.
If you read a lot like I do, it became fairly evident, fairly fast, that most of the people who frequent newsrooms in this country aren't up to much when it comes to balance.
You could, and I would, argue you see it every day in coverage of the current government. There is plenty of material from offshore observers who were gobsmacked in election year, at just how subservient too much of our media is to the Labour Party and the Prime Minister in particular.
But the beauty of the cannabis vote work is that it's easy to prove. We were simply voting, and the media were simply covering two things, yes or no.
36 percent of all headlines promoted yes, 18 percent were for no. In other words, twice as much of what you saw was for one camp.
When it came to quotes from advocates, the yes position was quoted twice as often as no. There were 67 articles with 100 percent bias towards yes, and only towards no. Of the articles that covered both sides 66 percent of them favoured yes, 34 percent no.
The worst offenders were The Spinoff, Stuff, Newshub, the Herald, TVNZ, and Radio New Zealand.  The Spinoff had 72% of their coverage for yes, as did Stuff.
Newshub has 69 percent, the Herald 68 percent, TVNZ 62 percent and RNZ 59 percent. The last two are particularly interesting as I thought they had a statutory obligation to be fair and balanced.
As we have said many, many times, if these people had been honest and run some editorials and told us they were biased, then we would have no problem.
If they'd said "we have decided as a paper, blog, or TV station that we support the yes vote and we want you to as well," then at least you knew where you are at.
But they didn't do that, did they? Which makes their bias dangerous.  It's brain washing. It's pretending to be fair, open, and honest and all the other strap line hot air they pedal. But the simple truth is they had an agenda, but they just didn't want to tell you about it.
We deserve better, we should have better, and we should demand better.
The work of Family First in exposing this proves it.

It has been revealed the New Zealand media were more biased towards cannabis becoming legalised.
In-depth analysis by an emeritus professor shows twice the amount of stories were written about cannabis than euthanasia.
The 'Yes' side for cannabis was quoted twice as often and more than half of the cannabis articles didn't quote anyone from the 'No' side at all.
In other words, the media pushed one side of the cannabis debate.
The most biased outlets were The Spinoff, Stuff and Newshub, with Newshub doing 20+ more articles than the next media outlet.
The information was commissioned by Family First National Director Bob McCoskrie, who joined Mike Hosking to talk about the analysis.
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America is a political crossroads, with Donald Trump hours away from leaving the White House for what could be the final time.
Joe Biden will officially take over as US President about 6am tomorrow, New Zealand time.
Whether Trump stands for President again in 2024 could depend on the outcome of the Senate impeachment trial in the coming weeks.
Matt Terrill, the former chief of staff of prominent Republican Marco Rubio, told Mike Hosking it could also depend on whether Republicans embrace or abandon him and his supporters.
"His supporters find him to be the most authentic truth teller in Washington, yet his detractors believe the exact opposite. It's a very polarising environment."
Trump's expected to spend his final hours in office pardoning up to 100 of his closest allies.
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THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Wednesday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) What Not to Think/Forgetting Your Specialist Topic/Chinese Conspiracies/Obsessing About Assange

The approval process for the Covid vaccine is on track to be granted in the coming weeks, according to the director general of health.
This morning, Dr Ashley Bloomfield told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking that Medsafe was not far from finalising the official process to ensure the first tranche of vaccine was safe for New Zealanders to use."We are completely in step with Australia, we've got our approval process robust and it is on track for providing us with approval in coming weeks and then getting the vaccine on shore as quickly as possible," he said.
Bloomfield said Medsafe, the Government medicine regulator, had been receiving data from Pfizer about the vaccine since last year, including a large document drop last week.
"They are really onto it and working very closely with their Australian counterparts."
He said New Zealand was undertaking the proper approval process, with countries that were rolling out vaccines grappling with public health emergencies.
In those countries, governments had given the authorisation to use the vaccines, rather than approval.
"We're going through a proper approval process, as is Australia. They, like us, are trying to do it as rapidly as possible.
"As soon as we've got approval then Pfizer are committed to providing us with the first tranche of vaccine which is 225,000 courses - that's a two-dose course - and we're in contact with them very regularly and making sure that they know when we're likely to approve."
He said border workers would be first, then those in the community deemed at highest risk.
"What I want to be assured of, and I know New Zealanders do too, is that given the position we are in, that we're really confident the vaccine is safe and effective and if it is then we will making sure New Zealanders get vaccinated as quickly as possible," he said.
Covid Response Minister Chris Hipkins this week indicated essential border staff and health workers would likely be immunised by March, but the rest of the population would have to wait until spring.
The Government has officially made it mandatory for almost every traveller coming to New Zealand to produce a negative Covid-19 test before they board a plane.
Meanwhile, further measures are being undertaken at the border to try and prevent the highly infectious Covid variants from the United Kingdom and South Africa from escaping into the community.
Yesterday, the Government officially made it mandatory for almost every traveller coming to New Zealand to produce a negative Covid-19 test before they board a plane.
The new rules will come into force at 11.59pm on Monday, January 25 – this is in a bid to minimise disruption for those passengers with imminent departures.
Previously, only travellers from the UK and the US had to produce a negative test to come to New Zealand. This came into effect last Friday at midnight.
There are currently 85 active Covid cases in New Zealand. All are in isolation.
It includes travellers with the potent new variants from the UK and South Africa.
All travellers arriving into New Zealand - excluding Australia, Antarctica, and some Pacific nations - are now required to have day 0/1 tests and stay in their rooms until the result is known.

At the same time, there has been a marked drop off in the use of the Covid Tracer app which is alarming public health professionals.
Data has revealed the number of daily scans on the tracer app has plummeted from its peak of 2.5 million in September to around 500,000 in recent weeks.