The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Scott McLaughlin just keeps winning.
On Saturday, the Kiwi star surpassed Peter Brock's tally of Supercars wins with his 49th on the track, and last Sunday, the 27-year-old added numbers 50 and 51.
McLaughlin was able to take back-to-back Sunday race wins at the Darwin SuperSprint, extending his already sizeable lead at the top of the championship standings.
After winning all three races at the weekend, McLaughlin has eight this season. Jamie Whincup and Nick Percat are tied for second with two wins each. 
Scott McLaughlin joined Mike Hosking to talk about his winning streak.
LISTEN ABOVE

The North v South match has been confirmed for Wellington's Sky Stadium on Saturday 5 September, and it will be played without a live crowd.
The news follows the Government's announcement this week on Covid-19 Alert Levels, with Auckland remaining at Level 3 until this Sunday night and Wellington and the rest of the country will remain at Level 2 until Sunday 6 September.
Under Level 2 guidelines, the North v South match will have to be played with no crowd in attendance.
South captain Sam Whitelock told Mike Hosking the players will just get on with it.
"Playing without a crowd won't change the game itself, if anything it will make the occasion one to remember."
LISTEN ABOVE

Cabinet has agreed to make some adjustments to regulations within the new National Environmental Standards for Freshwater to make them clearer, Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor announced today.
"It became apparent that some of the regulations within the Freshwater standards – including ones around winter grazing – need to be adjusted, so we've done that," O'Connor said.
Regulations on pugging depths around fixed water troughs and gateways "weren't practical" so adjustments were made to make them more realistic, O'Connor said.
"Discrete areas around fixed water troughs and gateways have now been exempted. We've also amended the definition for pugging to provide more clarity."
"It comes down to the sensible application of necessary regulations."
The amendments:
• Change the definition of pugging to penetration of soil of more than 5cm.
• Clarification that the 20cm pugging depth limit does not apply around fixed structures.
O'Connor said there would be other regulations that would need to be adjusted "as we move forward".
One example was issues with maps, which O'Connor said both he and Environment Minister Parker were aware of.
"We've both met about it and officials from the Ministry for the Environment and the Ministry for Primary Industries are working on making the mapping data more accurate."
The intent was very clear – "to clean up our waterways" and farmers had made real progress in the area of winter grazing, O'Connor said.
"There are some challenges ahead of us but I'm confident we'll get this right. Where the regulations are impractical or unclear we will continue to make adjustments."
"It is a change in practice for some farmers but we'll make sure that it achieves the outcomes that the vast majority of farmers say they want – which is better water quality, better animal welfare standards and making sure that we can sell good quality product to the world."

Following mounting pressure to change tack, the British government decided late Tuesday to ditch advice that high school students and staff in England don't need to wear face masks when schools reopen from next week.
In another abrupt change in coronavirus-related policy, the government said children in secondary schools — those above 11 years of age — in areas under local lockdown rules, such as Greater Manchester, will have to don face masks when moving around corridors and communal areas. Though high school children elsewhere won't have to, the government said schools in England will have the discretion to require them in communal areas.
The government said face masks will not need to be worn in classrooms, because other protective measures, such as socially distanced seating, will be in place. It also said that face masks in the classroom may have an impact on learning.
“I hope these steps will provide parents, pupils and teachers with further reassurance,” Education Secretary Gavin Williamson said.
The change in guidance comes in the wake of new recommendations from the World Health Organization that children aged over 12 should wear masks if socially distancing rules can't easily be followed and where transmission rates of the virus are a cause for concern. It also comes just hours after the Scottish government changed its advice to require all secondary school students to wear face masks in communal areas.
It's the government's second sudden change in policy on the education front in as many weeks following last week's decision to drop a controversial system to award grades for key high school exams after they had been cancelled because of the pandemic.
Opposition lawmakers criticized the Conservative government for only changing policy in the wake of pressure.
Kate Green, the education spokeswoman for the main opposition Labour Party, said the change was “half-baked” and criticized the government for not making face masks compulsory in communal areas.
“Parents and schools needed clarity and leadership, but instead the government have just passed the buck back to them," she said.
The government is trying to reassure nervous parents that their children will be safe when they return to school. Schools across the U.K. closed in March as part of the lockdown and bar the return of a minority of some younger children in June, most students have not seen the inside of a classroom for the best part of six months.
“I think that the schools, the teachers, they’ve all done a fantastic job of getting ready and the risk to children’s health, the risk to children’s well-being from not being in school, is far greater than the risk from COVID,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said earlier alongside an indication that he was willing to change the stance of face masks.
The evidence from around the world is that children face less severe virus symptoms than adults. However, they can be sources of transmission and governments around the world are grappling about how school reopenings will affect the virus' spread within families and in the wider community.
“In the absence of clarity, given the known detrimental impact of school closures, we must err on the side of caution in order to ensure that when schools reopen, they remain open," said Dr. David Strain, a clinical senior lecturer at the University of Exeter.
England's nearly 25,000 schools are due to reopen over the coming couple of weeks, and Johnson's Conservative government is focused on making sure the return goes smoothly following the recent exam grades fiasco. That furor claimed its first casualty Tuesday with the resignation of Sally Collier, head of the exams regulator Ofqual.
Within the U.K., which has Europe's highest virus-related death toll at nearly 42,000, Scottish schools reopened first, followed by those in Northern Ireland. Schools in England and Wales are due to reopen in September.
Two weeks...

The New Zealand stock exchange is being told it could be doing far more to protect itself against the ongoing threat of cyber attacks.
The NZX has been brought down twice in 24 hours, by DDOS or Distributed Denial of Service attacks.
Trading resumed on the exchange at 3pm yesterday, and the exchange is planning to open for normal trading at 10am today.
But IT security expert Daniel Ayers told Mike Hosking the NZX urgently needs to address its vulnerability, to reduce the chance of further attacks.
"DDOS attacks are difficult to protect against, but a basic issue in NZX's network has made it especially vulnerable."
Ayers says the attacks appear to be regular attacks, taking advantage of a basic issue with NZX's network.
LISTEN ABOVE

Team New Zealand boss Grant Dalton says an investigation into the finances around the event have put a massive strain on the organisation as it looks to defend the America's Cup early next year.
Yesterday afternoon Team New Zealand, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) and Auckland Council issued a joint statement saying a report by forensic accountants Beattie Varley found there was "no financial impropriety of any nature".
The statement also indicated that the report showed there was no loan between Team New Zealand and its event company America's Cup Event (ACE) nor was their fraud by either company.
The personal expenses of the team chief executive Dalton — or any other personnel — had not been paid from Crown money.
Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking asked Dalton if the investigation was a "needless waste of time and energy".
Dalton said: "We're totally vindicated and yes, it's been a huge strain on people within the organisation to sort this out and put it behind us.
"I don't know what the motives were (for the original claims which led to the investigation). Over due course these things come to the surface.
"There are certainly questions that still need answering, how it was allowed to get to this point…we suspected something as far back as December last year was going on.
"At that point we didn't know what it was."
Mediation has been ordered over TNZ charging ACE a $3m boat design fee.
Dalton told Hosking that TNZ regard the new AC75 class as a design which has created "the most spectacular yacht in history" and thus part of the event, so the fee was justified.
"From our side it is a 20 minute conversation because we think it is so cut and dried…but those things have a habit of dragging out," he said.
A summary of Beattie Varley's report — all that has been released so far — said Team New Zealand's record-keeping "warrants criticism at a governance and management level".
It also revealed that Team New Zealand was in dispute with MBIE over the way the team charged ACE $3m to design the boats for next year's regatta. Beattie Varley said Team New Zealand's record keeping meant it could not verify how the team had calculated the fee which was being charged to taxpayers.
"The lack of an appropriate time-recording system within [Team New Zealand] prevented any objective verification of the amount that was ultimately recharged to ACE."
The Herald is prevented from revealing details from an earlier report by Beattie Varley after Team New Zealand was granted a High Court injunction blocking publication.
In July the Herald revealed that MBIE was sufficiently concerned about the financial affairs of the team that it had asked Beattie Varley, headed by former Serious Fraud Office officials, to investigate.
While Dalton initially said the team had discovered and expelled "spies" from within the team, it would later emerge that staff from event organising company Mayo & Calder had taken their concerns to MBIE and were acting as whistleblowers.
A letter from MBIE chief executive Carolyn Tremain raised questions both about the design fee, but also the loss of funds by the team into a Hungarian bank account due to fraud.
Beattie Varley's report says whether the $2.8m lost to Hungarian fraudsters was a breach of Team New Zealand's agreement with MBIE and Auckland Council "then it was not an intentional one".
It added that Team New Zealand did not expect the cost of the fraud to fall on taxpayers.
Previously MBIE has refused to say whether Team NZ's record keeping was allowing it to discharge its duties under the Public Finance Act.
Beattie Varley said this was a matter for MBIE to determine.
"We do not believe that ETNZ's failure to maintain a system allowing objective verification of time-recharged (and ACE's acceptance of that failure when it paid ETNZ) necessarily prevents the Crown from meeting its...

In the Ashley Bloomfield Michael Baker battle over masks versus social distancing, you have the crux of where this country is going wrong on the economic side of the Covid equation.
One of the most overworked phrases from this government of overworked phrases is, "there is no playbook." If that’s true, why would we not err on the side of common sense, progression, and even an element of entrepreneurial risk?
One of the developments of the Covid coverage is you can now pick your specialist, and you, broadly speaking, know what the answer is depending on what expert you pick.
Epidemiologist Michael Baker is, without question, one of the most conservative operators out there. He would probably have you in lockdown for the rest of your life. We would not be coming out of level 3 and 2 this Monday, we'd need longer. He's been like this all along.
Bloomfield isn't seemingly as conservative. But Cabinet papers have shown he's gone for longer lockdowns than the government ultimately have decided upon.
But now we are at a junction that is critical to the economy. And the government seem less interested in the economy than they do the health side of the mixture. What have they said? In another overworked phrase, "the best economic response is a good health response."
And yet, Baker says masks mean more normality. He says with masks you can fill a plane. Wasn't that the deal? With new measures we get more freedoms? Except it appears we don't.
Why have mandatory masks if we don’t get more freedoms? Fill the buses, the trains and the planes. The more people work and move, the more bottom lines are positively affected.
Jetstar is going nowhere, Air New Zealand is heavily curtailed and can't operate commercially with empty middle seats.
With masks, Bakers says fill those rows. Bloomfield says social distancing beats masks, why? Why is he right and Baker wrong? Why does the government not look at every opportunity to leverage our success in having minimal numbers?
Like Australia and their international students, as we still don’t have the answer as to why they can, and we can't. Unless you have concluded like I have, it's only because we don’t want to.
At some point the economic carnage will loom so large and so dangerous even this lot with their blinkered ideological blindness will no longer be able to ignore it.
When you're more conservative than Michael Baker, that’s setting new records in looking to go nowhere fast.

Everyone who attended three services and a wedding at a Mt Roskill church is being asked to get tested after five Covid-19 cases were linked to the venue.
The Mt Roskill Evangelical Fellowship Church cases are yet to be connected to the existing South Auckland cluster, but the chances of them being a new cluster are being downplayed by director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield.
Although officials believe they have contained the cluster, the re-appearance of Covid in the New Zealand community over the past month comes as the worldwide number of cases reaches a grim milestone today - 24 million cases and 821,000 deaths.
The services at the Auckland church were on August 8, 9 and 10 and the wedding was on August 7 - all before the region went to alert level 3 on August 12.

"We fully expect it to be linked to the existing cluster. We just haven't got the epidemiological link yet," Bloomfield said yesterday."They're like a mini-cluster at the moment."
Church services and weddings can be super-spreader events because they are mainly indoors with large crowds.
But Otago University epidemiologist Professor Michael Baker said the "mini-cluster" didn't necessarily mean there would be a big spike in new cases that were previously undetected.
That was because there had already been more than 200,000 tests since the South Auckland outbreak was detected.
"The chief problem with unconnected cases is that contact-tracing can't find them. That's why the high volume testing is vital to controlling this outbreak," Baker said.
Otago University infectious diseases expert David Murdoch said today genomic testing would reveal any links to the main cluster.
There was "nothing obvious" to reveal a link so far - but genomic testing was a "very powerful tool being deployed in close to real time" that would hopefully prove the link. "We have to wait and see," he told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking.
He did not believe that the failure to find the index case - and where the cluster originated - was a major issue. The tightening of procedures, such as border testing, would naturally plug gaps.
The other case of concern is the man in North Shore Hospital, who is linked to the cluster via genome sequencing but how he became infected is still a mystery.
His household and workplace close contacts have so far tested negative.
The Auckland public health unit is looking at a private event he went to at the start of August, which Bloomfield described as "right at the boundary of possibility".
"They'll be leaving no stone unturned."
Baker said that was "good news" for signs of the outbreak being contained.
"There's no indication really that there is widespread transmission beyond the known cases at this stage."
He said the timing of the church events - up to four days before the new outbreak was confirmed - underscored the need for Auckland to have gone into alert level 3.
And the type of venue also pushed the case for wearing masks for indoor gatherings.
"This is the way to spread the virus around. We know it from our own experience with our clusters. Mask use at all indoor environments needs to be part of level 2."
Level 2 already requires physical distancing of two metres in public and in retail stores, and one metre in most other environments.
"That's a proxy for not sharing respiratory droplets, but masks do it better," Baker said.
There is no indication at this stage that the Government will mandate wearing face-masks for indoor settings other than public transport at level 2 or higher.
Undetected spread of the virus is now the target of testing - including of people without symptoms - in south and west Auckland.
The Government is aiming for 10,000 tests a day - there were 8559 tests on Tuesday - and Bloomfield encouraged people to get tested today at stations at Ranui library carpark, Randwick Park School, Mt Smart Stadium...

Theatres and venues want the curtain lowered on Level Two restrictions preventing more than 10 people in a room.
They are calling on the Government to give them some creative leeway,  so they can carry on performing when the alert level is lowered.
Auckland Theatre Company's chief executive Jonathan Bielski told Mike Hosking they can't operate under social distancing rules intended for boozy weddings.
"Certainly not the one where we're currently facing in Aucklnad which is with a 10 person capacity limit. That's not viable for anyone.
"And I think even at 100, we're really going to struggle."
Bielski says a 100 person cap includes performers and staff - and would only be 12 percent of their capacity.
He says the restrictions are a blunt instrument and believes there are ways to make it work.
"Our industry is an innovation sector, we're always coming up with ideas.
"We think we can have masks, we can have separated queuing, we can assign people to distinct parts of the venue."
Mark Gosling of the Entertainment Venues Association says those measures could also work at stadiums and other large entertainment venues. 
He says that the gathering restrictions will mean many arts and entertainment events won't be able to happen, even though their environments can be more controlled than other businesses reopening after Monday.
"We feel that terminology, controlled environment, is what the Government uses to describes schools and universities when they reopen on Monday with four to 10,000 people in them."
He says the uncertainty around event restrictions and lockdowns means events have already been postponed or cancelled, and there are growing concerns venues will go under without revenue coming in.
"For venues, we carry huge overheads. We're a giant building with massive insurance costs and utility bills."
 

Labor leader Anthony Albanese has made a dig over Qantas’ recent cuts in a TV appearance overnight.

Following the announcement of almost $2 billion in losses and 6000 job losses already, the Australian airline announced on Tuesday that it shed a further 2500 jobs from its groundhandling operations sector after the company had received taxpayer funded support through JobKeeper.
According to the airline, the decision will save the carrier almost $100 million, with the jobs set to go from ten major airports across the country.
Jetstar will also outsource ground handling at the six remaining Australian airports where the work is done in-house, impacting 370 jobs.
On ABC’s 7.30 program on Tuesday night, Mr Albanese said the announcement was of “great concern”.
“It’s unfortunate that some employers will take opportunities to attack wages and conditions”, Mr Albanese said.
“I’m concerned that’s the case and I know that the union movement’s concerned.
“It’s of great concern that Qantas has had support of JobKeeper for these employees for a considerable period of time, so they’ve had the subsidies for those wages.
“I think it is very regettable that they’ve announced these changes which amounts to contracting out of work that has been done by a group of workers effectively for a long period of time.”
In a statement sent to news.com.au, a Qantas spokesperson said the measure will outsource its ground handling operations at the ten Australian airports where the work is done in-house.
The announcement follows a $2.7 billion statutory loss for the Group in FY20 and a $4 billion drop in revenue in the second half due to the COVID-19 crisis and associated border restrictions. Further significant losses are projected in FY21 and an at least $10 billion drop in revenue due to the ongoing impact of COVID.
Qantas Domestic CEO Andrew David said the job losses amid the pandemic had been “the greatest challenger the aviation industry has ever faced”.
“Airlines have to change how they operate to ensure they can survive long-term,” he said.
“We’ve already taken drastic action, with more than 220 aircraft grounded, the vast majority of our workforce stood down and assets mortgaged to raise cash. Right now, our domestic capacity is at 20 per cent of pre-COVID levels and international travel is expected to take years to recover.”
Mr David said the outsourcing of the work to specialist ground handlers would save the airline millions in operating costs.
“Today’s announcement will be very tough for our hardworking teams, most of whom have already been stood down for months without work,” he said.
“This obviously adds to the uncertainty but this is the unfortunate reality of what COVID-19 has done to our industry.”
When questioned about Mr Kaine’s comments, Mr David declined to respond.
As part of the airline’s $2.7 billion loss, the Qantas Group received $515 million in gross Government support.
A spokesperson for the airline said $267 million was in the form of JobKeeper payments, most of which went to the 20,000 employees stood down by the airline.
It is understood the balance of $267 million was used as a wage subsidy for those still working.
The remainder of the $515 million went to run repatriation flights on behalf of government, which included more than 100 international services as well as domestic flights, meaning the net benefit to Qantas from government support was $15 million.
The 10 airports that Qantas proposes to outsource this work are Adelaide, Alice Springs, Brisbane, Cairns, Canberra, Darwin, Melbourne, Perth, Sydney and Townsville.
Job losses of at least 6,000 have already been announced as part of the airline’s restructure in response to border closures and more permanent structural changes to the aviation industry.
Jetstar will also outsource ground handling at the six remaining Australian airports where...