The Mike Hosking Breakfast

People are feeling more anxious and angry during the second Covid-19 lockdown than any other time since the pandemic started, according to new social media analysis.
The sense of community New Zealand felt during the first lockdown in March appears to have somewhat dissolved amid growing frustration and despair, suggests the new research by business consultancy Rutherford.
The number of people encouraging others to comply with lockdown rules, by sharing messages such as #stayhomesavelives, has dived by more than 50 per cent, the research shows.
Some mental health experts are also reporting an increase in the number of people accessing online services or seeking help and advice as the stress of the country moving into higher alert levels takes its toll.

Listen to the audio above as Stuart Nash and Mark Mitchell speak to Mike Hosking

The North vs South All Blacks trial game may be up in the air, but if it does go ahead we have unearthed a trophy to be able to hand to the winner.
The Loving Cup used to be awarded to the winner of the North vs South game, but it got lost in the archives in 1932.
But 88 years later, they've found it and the cup could be back in action.
CEO of Eden Park Nick Sautner joined Mike Hosking to talk about how the trophy was eventually found after all these years.
LISTEN ABOVE

Auckland secondary schools are already planning catch-up classes and holiday lessons for students who have fallen behind because of the city's lockdown.
The city's Secondary Principals' Association said some senior students had missed so much they would need to come back next year instead of leaving school at the end of this year.



By the end of this week, Auckland students would have been through two lockdowns that turned more than eight weeks of classroom time into home-based learning - two-and-a-half-weeks more than students in the rest of the country.
Principals told RNZ some students had coped better than others with learning from home.
Year 12 student, Kaia Jamieson, told RNZ she had not found it too hard to keep up with learning during the lockdown, but she knew others who had struggled.
"My school's really flexible in the ways in which we can learn and in taking our own time to make sure we get things to the right standard. Some of my friends, especially my friends in other schools, find it really stressful and feel really disadvantaged by lockdown."
Jamieson said her school's emphasis on self-directed learning had helped a lot.
"Most of my friends who have that mindset seem to be doing quite well, but there are a couple of people I know who are prioritising other things over learning at the moment and who are falling behind because of it."
Auckland Secondary Principals' Association president Steve Hargreaves said many of the city's schools were worried about how much learning their students had missed.
"Right across the board students have lost close to a term now, and this is Year 9 to 13, so I'm considering the whole student body here. If they've lost that much time we can't just carry on in 2021 thinking it's business as usual."
He said schools were thinking about asking some students who were planning to leave at the end of the year to return next year to complete credits.
"Those students who had planned to leave may not have the requirements they wanted to have before they left school so they need to possibly come back and be with us at school for a short time, only a month or two to attain those credits."
Hargreaves said a only small number of school-leavers at his school, 4 or 5 per cent, might need to come back next year.
However, he expected all students returning next year would need catch-up classes of some sort.
"I think we're talking about the whole cohort there. Let's say we missed some crucial topics of maths, we haven't covered a section of algebra, we haven't covered a section of statistics in Year 9, then we need to do all of that work for the whole group before they can progress with Year 10 mathematics," he said.
"You can't just roll into Year 10 if you've lost a quarter of Year 9."
Hargreaves said universities and polytechnics had already indicated they would make concessions for this year's school-leavers.
The principal of Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate Senior School, Kiri Turketo, said it had been running extra after-school classes since the first lock-down ended in May, and those would continue.
"As soon as school finishes at 3pm we give them a half-hour break and then we go from 3.30 to 5pm. So we'll be doing a lot of that, possibly the weekends because we've got some amazing staff that will give up a day in their weekends to come in for our students.
"We'll be doing a lot of catch up."
Turketo said the classes were active lessons rather than supervised homework, and students were keen to attend.
"It's got to a point now where they expect that, which is good, because they know and we know that they aren't where they're supposed to be for a lot of reasons.
"The social and economic ramifications of the lockdown have made our vulnerable community even more vulnerable."
Turketo said the school wanted to ensure learning was not a barrier to its students' life...

Republicans predicted a national "horror movie" should United States President Donald Trump lose in November, flinging out dark warnings on the opening day of their scaled down national convention.
Trump's campaign had promised to offer an inclusive and uplifting prime-time message, hoping to broaden his appeal beyond his hard-core base by featuring the next generation of party stars including two Republicans of colour, Congressman Tim Scott and former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley.
Yet efforts to strike an optimistic tone were frequently overshadowed by dire talk that Democrat Joe Biden would destroy America, allowing communities to be overrun by violence.
Congressman Matt Gaetz of Florida likened the prospect of Biden's election to a horror movie.
"They'll disarm you, empty the prisons, lock you in your home, and invite MS-13 to live next door," Gaetz declared.


Later in the night, Haley and Scott did offer a softer tone as they highlighted their experience growing up as people of colour.
"I was a brown girl in a black and white world," Haley said, noting that she faced discrimination but rejecting the idea that "America is a racist country."
She also gave a nod to the Black Lives Matter movement, saying "of course we know that every single black life is valuable."
And Scott, the Republican Party's only black senator, levelled the kind of personal attack against Biden that Trump and his white allies could not.
"Joe Biden said if a back man didn't vote for him, he wasn't truly black. Joe Biden said black people are a monolithic community," Scott charged.
He acknowledged that African Americans have sometimes been victimised by police brutality, but later said: "The truth is, our nation's arc always bends back toward fairness. We are not fully where we want to be ... but thank God we are not where we used to be."
The GOP convention marks a crucial moment for Trump, a first-term Republican president tasked with reshaping a campaign he is losing by all accounts, at least for now.
A deep sense of pessimism has settled over the electorate 10 weeks before election day.
Just 23 per cent of Americans think the country is heading in the right direction, according to a new poll from AP-NORC Centre for Public Affairs Research.
Trump, who was not scheduled to deliver his keynote convention address until later in the week, made multiple public appearances throughout the first day of the four-day convention. And while the evening programming was carefully scripted, Trump was not.
"The only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election," Trump told hundreds of Republican delegates gathered in North Carolina, raising anew his unsupported concerns about Americans' expected reliance on mail voting during the pandemic. Experts say mail voting has proven remarkably secure.
Trump and a parade of fellow Republicans distorted Trump rival Joe Biden's agenda, falsely accusing the Democrat of proposing to defund police, ban oil fracking, take over health care, open borders and raise taxes on most Americans.
They tried to assign positions of the Democratic left to a middle-of-the-road candidate who explicitly rejected many of the party's most liberal positions through the primaries.
Trump set the tone with unsupported claims about voting fraud and falsehoods about his own record in office.
The Republican convention comes as more than 177,000 Americans have been killed by the pandemic and millions more have been infected. Coronavirus-related job losses also reach into the millions
Trump and his supporters touted his response to the pandemic while standing alongside front-line workers in the White House, although he glossed over the mounting death toll, the most in the world, and his Administration's struggle to control the disease.
Organisers also repeatedly sought to cast Trump as an empathetic...

A majority of Parliament is now calling for the Health Select Committee to be reconvened so MPs can grill key health officials overseeing the Covid-19 response.
In a rare showing of unity, both National and New Zealand First agree that MPs on the committee should come back to Wellington, in light of Auckland's level 3 extension decision.
But the Greens are not so sure; in fact its co-leader James Shaw said both parties were "grandstanding", given the committee would only be sitting for four days.
National and NZ First have argued that MPs should have the right to ask questions of health officials, such as director-general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield, at the committee.


Although Parliament was reconvened after Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern delayed the election, select committees are not sitting.
National's health spokesman Dr Shane Reti said that given this, the committee also needs to come back.
"Kiwis, who have already sacrificed so much, deserve answers as to why they were forced into lockdown again. The Health Select Committee is the best way to find those answers," he said.
New Zealand First leader Winston Peters agrees.
"It's logical for the Health Select Committee to meet to canvass the advice of the director general of health and other senior officials pertaining to the alert level decisions taken by Cabinet on 24 August."
Reti wrote to the committee's chair, Labour's Louisa Wall, asking for the committee to be reconvened.
According to Ardern, bringing the committee back is a decision for Wall.
Wall has been approached for comment.
Speaking to media this afternoon, Ardern said neither National nor NZ First raised this as an issue when she spoke to their leaders before she announced the election's delay.
She said both parties were more focused on having Question Time – which occurs in the House three days a week at 2pm.
In fact, Ardern said that when she spoke to National leader Judith Collins, she had no desire to reconvene the Epidemic Select Committee – the bipartisan group of MPs who questioned officials during the first lockdown.
Shaw was more critical.
"Given that National can't ask all of its allocation of questions during Question Time, suggesting that we reconvene the health select committee for four days is probably just grandstanding."

I don't know Damien Grant, never met him, but he writes a solid column. He seems bright and well informed and periodically I've featured a little bit of his work on our programme.
I mentioned something about a recent column to my wife who then added the fact he was a convicted felon. Funny old pivot, that. You're in the middle of a chat about something you’ve read and next thing you know he's been a crook.
I looked it up, sure enough many years ago, he was sprung for credit card convictions in the 1980s, then a share dealing scam in 1994. He's since gone to run what I am led to believe is a successful insolvency firm employing 10 people.
Now, as of next month new rules come into play when it comes to running insolvency firms, you need to be licensed by an accredited authority. That authority has had a look at Grant's application and turned it down.
You get a review, he got one, they turned him down again. He's now off to court.
So my question is this, assuming he's done nothing in the ensuing period from the 1990s, why are we still penalising him? And if we are, how long does that go on for? His fraudulent activities, I should point out, aren't secret he's talked quite openly about them.
In a world where we seem desperate to reduce the recidivism rate, reform people, encourage them to go on, leave their past mistakes behind, and make new productive lives, what sort of mad message is this sending?
The bloke, when he was in his 20s, clearly made some pretty serious mistakes. He's learned, put them behind him, started fresh, started a business, and started employing people. I am assuming he has clients who like his work.  
I get you want some regulation around practitioners of all sorts, but if their thinking is that after a quarter of a century, we need to keep revisiting past wrongs and keep making you pay for them, what hope is there for anyone? Far less someone who was determined the past was in the past and a productive life going forward was the only answer.
If a 26-year-old finite sentence is, in fact, a life sentence, then why bother? And we'll have the recidivism rate and social fallout to show for it.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson says the Government's focussing more on the economy, than extending the wage subsidy.
He's ruled out pushing out the subsidy, even by four days, to cover the extra lockdown period in Auckland.
Robertson says the financial help remains for businesses - 30,000 firms have taken up the two-week resurgence wage subsidy, totalling $108 million, he says.
"We took the call to get that out as quickly as possible," Robertson told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking today. "We have had 22 weeks worth of support for businesses through the wage subsidy scheme, about 12 and a half of which - if you're in Auckland - would have been at levels 2 and 1 ... when trading was good.
"This is a tough time for everybody, I absolutely accept that. I think if you look at that level of support, it has been significant."
He said he did not under-estimate how tough businesses were finding the return to lockdown.
"This is level 3 ... you have got probably 80 per cent operating at the level they want to, but 20 per cent not. It's tough for that group but there is a huge amount of support and that funding is available right now."
A company with 40 fulltime staff and who met the criteria around lost trading could receive around $46,000 for the two-week extension.

With thousands of travelers being tested at Italy's airports and some ports, the nation where Europe's COVID-19 outbreak began registered a seventh straight day of increasing new infections Sunday, mostly driven by returning vacationers.
Sicily’s governor, meanwhile, ordered all migrant residences on the Italian island to be shut down by Monday, part of a push-back by Italian regions alarmed by a steady climb in COVID-19 cases a few weeks before schools are to reopen.
But people coming in from Mediterranean Sea resorts abroad as well as from the Italian island of Sardinia have accounted for far more of Italy's new coronavirus infections lately than have migrants.
Italy registered 1,210 new cases Sunday, the highest daily number since May 12 and only weeks after it saw new infections plunge to about 200 a day.
The Lazio region, which includes Rome, and the hard-hit Lombardy led the nation in regional new caseloads Sunday. Thousands of returning travelers got tested at Rome-area airports and a port north of the capital, as well as at airports that serve Lombardy's main city, Milan. Other cities, like Turin, also have set up airport test facilities.
People arriving from Spain, Malta, Greece and Croatia must be tested within 48 hours of entering Italy, after those nations saw worrisome upticks in infections.
And many recent coronavirus clusters have been traced to people who vacationed on Sardinia. With many people taking ferries from Sardinia to the Italian mainland, Lazio set up a testing facility at the dock at Civitavecchia, so those driving vehicles off the ferries could line up for immediate testing.
Lazio Gov. Nicola Zingaretti appealed to the governor of Sardinia to test vacationers before they sailed or flew to the mainland, saying his region would do the same for travelers leaving for Sardinia, but there was no indication Sardinia would oblige.
Sardinia, which had been counting barely a handful of new daily cases in recent months, registered 81 new infections, compared to 44 a day earlier.
In Sicily, Gov. Nello Musumeci's order took effect on Sunday, requiring that all migrants who reach the island by sea be transferred off to combat the spread of COVID-19 and all centers housing migrants awaiting asylum applications must be shut down by Monday.
His order, effective through Sept. 10, also forbids any boat, including charity vessels, from bringing migrants to the island.
“I can’t ask our people to keep a (safe) distance, wear masks and do other measures while the state amasses people in two rooms,″ Musumeci said, referring to the migrant centers.
But the national government is in charge of migrant policies and Musumeci acknowledged that his directive might be challenged in court. On Saturday, migrants accounted for 16 of Sicily’s 48 confirmed new infections.
Although in past years, nearly all migrants reaching Italy by sea were rescued by humanitarian groups or ships, this year, nearly 80% have reached Italian shores on their own, most setting sail from Tunisia.
Many come ashore on the tiny island of Lampedusa, whose migrant residence is dangerously overcrowded. Italy has taken to quarantining the latest Lampedusa arrivals aboard chartered ferries offshore Sicily.
Gov. Vincenzo De Luca, who leads the Campania region including Naples, raised the possibility that if daily infections keep surging, he will ask the national government to reinstate travel restrictions between regions.
Some wrote off De Luca's warning as posturing before gubernatorial elections in September.
“What is he going to do, send in the Carabinieri (to block those outside his region from entering)?" Tuscany Gov. Enrico Rossi told the Corriere della Sera newspaper.

Britain’s prime minister is asking parents to set aside their fears and send their children back to school next month when schools in Britain fully reopen for the first time since the coronavirus pandemic shut then down more than five months ago.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson said it was the government’s “moral duty” to reopen the schools as he stressed that authorities now know more about COVID-19 than they did when the country went into lockdown on March 23.
Johnson’s comments came hours after Britain’s top public health officials issued a joint statement saying that children were more likely be harmed by staying away from school than from being exposed to COVID-19.
“This is why it’s vitally important that we get our children back into the classroom to learn and to be with their friends,’’ Johnson said in a statement released late Sunday. “Nothing will have a greater effect on the life chances of our children than returning to school.”
The statements come as parents and teachers have express concerns about reopening schools amid fears that social distancing measures won’t keep children safe. Unions have demanded that Johnson's Conservative government make sure that social distancing measures and other protective procedures are in place to ensure the safety of students and staff.
Schools across the U.K. closed in March as the government sought to control the spread of coronavirus. Some students were allowed to return in early June, but classes weren’t mandatory and only about 18% of students nationwide took part.
The chief medical officers of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales said in their statement that children are less likely to catch COVID-19 than adults and they have "an exceptionally low risk’’ of dying from the disease.
By contrast, they said studies show that not going to school limits children’s ability to succeed in life and may worsen physical and mental health problems.
“Very few, if any, children or teenagers will come to long-term harm from COVID-19 due solely to attending school,’’ the medical officers said. ”This has to be set against a certainty of long-term harm to many children and young people from not attending school.’’
Britain has the highest confirmed virus-related death toll in Europe, at 41,515 people, and Johnson's government has been strongly criticized for not locking down sooner, not getting medical workers enough protective equipment and not properly protecting the elderly in care homes from the virus.
Thousands of British travelers had to cut short vacations and rush home earlier this month after the government abruptly announced it was slapping 14-day quarantines on people returning from France.

Covered up faces and social distancing looks to be with us for some time yet.
Auckland is to endure an extra four days of level 3 lockdown - then on Monday the country's biggest city will join the rest of New Zealand at level 2, but with some caveats.
Mass gatherings will be restricted to just 10 people in Auckland, with the exception of funerals and tangihanga where 50 will be the limit.


And as long as the whole country remains at level 2, face coverings will be mandatory for everyone using public transport, including airplanes and taxis.
Whether or not the public should wear a mask soon will not be a question up for debate.
"We're not mandating a singular type of mask, it is a face covering. So as long as people are making efforts to cover their face, we encourage they look up advice on the best forms of that, that would then satisfy that order,'' Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern says.
Catching a bus to work, hopping on a train or grabbing an Uber home after a night out will require a face covering from Monday.
Director general of health Dr Ashley Bloomfield recommended that rule for level 3 and above but Cabinet went further, mandating it from level 2.
"We thought it was definitely worth doing and it was a line call about whether you mandate it or whether you strongly encourage, and Cabinet has gone with the mandating for level 2 and above,'' he says.
Ardern says the onus will be on drivers to stop those flouting the rules from boarding.
"Entry will be mandated at level 2 or above on someone having a face covering."


And for any vigilantes planning on taking the law into their own hands, Ardern has this message.
"I'd just ask other users of public transport to have faith that we will enforce it and that they therefore don't need to."
Bloomfield says mandated face coverings could make the difference when it comes to future yo-yo-ing between alert levels.
"If use of masks on public transport at alert level 2, alongside all our other tools, helps us avoid going up to alert level 3, then I think that's a very good idea."
But those in the industry now tasked with enforcing the rules are not convinced it will be that easy.
The executive director of the New Zealand Taxi Federation, John Hart, says maskless passengers could be put in harm's way if drivers refuse to give them a ride home.
And, he says some rideshare operators may not care to police their customers.
"The structure of the industry as it is now where there are lots of people who come out in the family car and get whatever work they can and they're not responsible to anyone, I think it's highly likely that many of those will simply ignore the law," Hart says.
The Prime Minister says the case for covering up has been made by the community transmission cases in Auckland involving public transport.
And while there will not be many exemptions, Bloomfield says children up to the age of 10 are likely to be excluded.
ACT Party leader David Seymour is accusing the Government of making it up as they go for the most part, but on masks he says the right call has been made.
"Clearly our species is under attack from a virus. We need to defend ourselves against it."
But he says eliminating Covid-19 also needs to be affordable.
Ardern is insisting there will not be a supply shortage when it comes to masks and people do not need to rush out and panic-buy.
National Party leader Judith Collins says it's about time for the mandating of masks.
"Some of us have been wearing masks when sharing cars or anything like that. I think it's really important to have that compulsory and for people to say 'what about the drivers having to deal with it?' Well drivers shouldn't be having their health put at risk."
With the Auckland lockdown continuing political leaders will be staying put in Wellington, and Parliament will meet again today and...