The Mike Hosking Breakfast

Everyone, it seems, loves a discount especially when it's on the government's credit card.
Early indications suggest that hungry, and often nervous, customers are being enticed back to restaurants in the U.K. as a result of a British government program that provides discounts from Monday to Wednesday this month. The plan aims to protect jobs in a sector that was hit hard during the coronavirus pandemic.
New figures published Tuesday by the Treasury show food outlets claimed for over 35 million discounted meals in the first half of August with the number of covers more than tripling in the second week, when much of the country was basking in unusual tropical heat.
Under the program, sitting customers can receive a 50% discount on food and non-alcoholic drinks at participating restaurants between Monday and Wednesday up to 10 pounds ($13) per person. Food outlets from Michelin-starred outlets to international burger chains can then get the discount reimbursed by the government within five days. So far, it has cost the government 180 million pounds ($235 million). It has previously estimated the total cost of the plan at 500 million pounds.
The so-called “Eat Out to Help Out” program is being used by around 85,000 restaurants, or nearly two-thirds of those eligible, in the hope that it will encourage people to return to dining out, particularly in the traditionally fallow early-week period.
Restaurants and other food outlets such as pubs were only allowed to reopen on July 4, more than three months after they were closed as part of the coronavirus lockdown.
“It’s so nice to see our restaurants full of happy staff and customers again," said Stephen Wall, managing director and co-founder of the popular restaurant chain Pho.
Local favorites have also seen an uptick in business, including the south Indian vegetarian restaurant, Rasa, in Stoke Newington, in north London.
“This makes the customers come out,” said assistant manager Musthafa Kunnummal. “So they may start coming out during the weekends. They are a bit more confident to go out to restaurants. I really appreciate this — it did a great job.”
The government is hoping that the program will stave off job losses.
“Today’s figures show that Britain is eating out to help out with at least 35 million meals served up in the first two weeks alone," said Treasury chief Rishi Sunak. “That is equivalent to over half of the U.K. taking part and supporting local jobs in the hospitality sector.”
When it was launched many critics said the plan was just a gimmick to generate headlines, with many fearing that any rebound in August would lead to a slump in later months.
Francesco Messinas, general manager at Café Amisha, an Italian restaurant in Bermondsey, south London, appears to be more vexed by the end of summer than the end of the discount program.
“75% of my customers sit outside,” Messinas said. “Sometimes, when people see that the outside is full and they can only sit inside, they decide to leave.”
But for now, Messinas is grateful for the help.
“It encourages people to trust the establishment,” he said. “I want people to feel safe.”

An infectious diseases expert is backing the explanation that Covid-19 is a complicated virus.
Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern described the virus as tricky on the back of a maintenance worker at a managed isolation facility testing positive.
University of Otago infectious diseases expert David Murdoch told Mike Hosking it's not a surprise that things haven't worked perfectly.
“It is a tricky virus - and it's one that's led to a number of quite explosive outbreaks around the world from one small incursion."
But there is some concern about the latest issues surrounding testing of high risk groups.
The Government has come under criticism for a failure to regularly test border workers for Covid-19.
David Murdoch says there's room for improvement.
"With the situation we're in,  we deserve to have the best we possibly can have - and we're possibly falling short in a number of places."
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Jacinda Ardern's unlikely to follow Scott Morrison's lead - and force people to have a COVID-19 vaccine.
The Australian leader says he'd expect it to be as mandatory as it can be, with medical exemptions.
Our Prime Minister says New Zealand has achieved herd immunity with vaccines so far, and she expects to see the take-up needed for this virus.
Ardern says people’s freedoms are affected by COVID, so a wide-reaching vaccination programme is in everyone's interest.
ACT Party leader David Seymour told Kate Hawkesby politically and practically, the New Zealand government would struggle to get everyone to sign up to getting vaccinated.
"And the question is, what rights does the community have to protect themselves against people who refuse to go along with a vaccine which is safe and beneficial."
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The Attorney-General could appeal against a ruling that the first nine days of the lockdown was unlawful.
The High Court says it was justified but that people weren't legally required to stay home until April 3.
Former Attorney General and barrister, Chris Finlayson, told Mike Hosking the Attorney-General would want to have a good look at the judgement.
“David Parker has 20 working days to decide whether he'll lodge an appeal. But I consider it to be a very solid judgement.”
Tim Stephens, from the New Zealand Law Society, says there probably won't be any practical implications.
He says the most important thing about the ruling was vindication of the rule of law.
Stephens says it's a declaration about the fact that government statements about what the law was -- were incorrect.

So here comes the military, again. And here comes Heath Simpson, and here comes Sir Brian Roche.
The Prime Minister, in yet another one of her spin exercises, talked yesterday at the one o'clock lecture from the pulpit of truth of constant improvement. I think most of us know that there is no constant improvement, has been no constant improvement, and that is why we are in the mess we are.
What we have had is no improvement, and indeed no real change. What we have had is a Ministry and a government asleep at the wheel. To be fair it’s a Ministry asleep at the wheel, and a government distracted, wandering around the country banging their drum of success over the never before seen 100 plus days of elimination. That, of course, not to be elimination at all.
The military replacing private security firms is like a lot of the decisions made of late, obvious, and yet nowhere near in time.
Guards were asleep at work, we had concerns out of Australia of guards' involvement in both Melbourne and Sydney. In other words, lots of red flags that employing people with no real stake in the game is dangerous in facilities that, if you have seen the photos, are as slack as.
Sir Brian and Simpson are a direct challenge to Bloomfield and his role. Not only is it a challenge, it's a vote of no confidence. After all Sir Brian and Simpson aren't hands on help, they're not administering tests, they're not doing the genomic work, they're making sure that what Bloomfield and his Ministry says is happening, is actually happening.
Why they're needed I've got no idea, given you'd think the Prime Minister and the specific Ministers were more than capable of being on the phone and in the faces of those who they need to hold to account.
But that’s this government, isn't it? So many people, so many departments, .and so many balls up then requiring extra resource on top of the resource. It's numbers, not efficiency. Just having more people hanging out doesn’t get done what needs doing.
Clark went, Hipkins in, Woods in, Webb in, now Sir Brian and Simpson in, and Bloomfield sidelined. It's shuffling, scrambling, and patching.  
Is this as the Prime Minister spins, constant improvement, or constant panic?

The Prime Minister is warning against expecting perfection at the border as NZ Defence Force troops are brought in to tighten the regime which has seen two strains of Covid-19 infections escape.
Jacinda Ardern has also brought in two top advisors to spearhead the testing strategy after failings saw frontline border workers go untested.
But she has been sideswiped by her coalition partner this morning, with NZ First leader Winston Peters saying he'd been pushing for the military to lead border protection efforts before the first lockdown - for a fifth of the price of hotels.
It comes as epidemiologist Sir David Skegg is calling on the Ministry of Health to release data on the number of people infected by this outbreak who had previously tried to get a test but were denied one.
"With spread of this virus, every day counts. Unfortunately the continual changes in criteria for testing in the community led to an unsatisfactory testing performance."
Skegg said the testing staff at the border - including at airports and sea ports, along with those managing isolation and quarantine facilities - had been "even poorer than some of us feared".
This was because the Government had relied on people voluntarily being tested and "partly due to a clear failure" in executing the testing strategy.
On June 23, Cabinet agreed on a testing strategy but it was slow to be implemented with many border-facing workers - including about two-thirds of MIQ workers - not being tested at all before the latest outbreak.
Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters told Newstalk ZB's Mike Hosking today that the Defence Force should have been leading border protection efforts from the start.
He said the Government could not have people being assured something was happening and when inquiries were made, this was found not to be the case.
The military worked along far more disciplined and organised principles. "We can't have people doing what they like."
"We asked for the military to be used before we went into lockdown in the first place. You have your biggest city in the country, we're bringing people into there, threatening the huge population. We could have isolated properly, in my view, and ensured people were safe and we were not endangering the population of the country."
Peters said military facilities at Whangaparāoa, Ohakea, Burnham, Waiouru and West Melton could all be used. "We have got the facilities, we have got the land and we have the soldiers. The cost [when] put against the hotels could be $1 to $5."
Meanwhile, Peters felt the High Court had got it wrong with its decision that ruled the first nine days of New Zealand's original lockdown were unlawful.
"I'll give you my perspective, only mine," he told Hosking. "We had a disquiet that the laws of this country were not sufficient for an occasion like this. I wasn't surprised. It was only nine days. I still disagree in some context with the court's decision - in the end the number one responsibility of any member of Parliament, let alone a minister or the prime minister, is the safety and security of the population of New Zealand. In that context, I'm still prepared to say I think the court has got it wrong."

You are about to see, if we haven’t already, that the border is leaking, and that the measures in place aren’t up to it and never were.
A maintenance worker at one of the hotels has Covid. This case isn’t linked to the mess that has the country in level 3 and 2. According to the minister of health, they would not have had contact with guests.
Which, of course, begs the question, how does he have Covid? All the government can say is it’s a mystery. Isn’t everything, conveniently, a mystery?
The man was tested on the 13th as part of routine testing. The routine testing only came into being because of the mess that got exposed last week.
Ask yourself: if the government hadn’t been caught out, would this bloke have been tested in routine testing if there wasn’t routine testing?
The government still insist that operations at these hotels is water tight, and yet i think most of us who have followed this will have seen the photos sent in by guests that show no social distancing no PPE, no gloves, no masks.
We once again ask the question why aren’t we running quarantine like Australia is? You are in your room, you don’t leave, military are in the hallways - full stop.
Sort of like we asked why don’t we round Covid positive cases up and stick them in quarantine, remember that last week? Bloomfield said we round up sheep, not people; later that afternoon, they round up people.
So make no mistake; the hotels are loose, and the trouble has just started.
Add also the growing and yes entirely predictable outcry over air crew who get to fly into the country, get next to no medical attention, then head home and then back to work. If you think that system isn’t fraught, your name’s probably Chris Hipkins.
Hipkins and Bloomfield were asked at the 1pm briefing yesterday about those rules and regulations. Neither had an answer or knew any detail of them. Ask yourself why.
This entire exercise from start to now has been piecemeal, its whack a mole as problem after problem, cock up after cock up is exposed.
Everything is retrospective, everything has a chase your tail feel to it. What we are seeing is we are being led by kindly yet largely bureaucratic incompetents –Bloomfield, Hipkins and Clark before him – who aren’t up to it, and they are led by a prime minister who isn’t across detail or interested in it, and trusts officialdom to a dangerous extent.
If they knew what they were doing, we wouldn’t be where we are in.

NSW Health has declared the City of Sydney a Covid-19 hotspot as cases continue to grow in the area's east.
The local government area covers from Circular Quay all the way to East Lakes in the eastern suburbs and includes more than 240,000 residents.
Anyone who lives in the City of Sydney or has visited there in the past two weeks has been urged to get tested, even if they only have mild symptoms such as a runny nose or scratchy throat.
City of Sydney now joins a number of other LGAs in greater Sydney currently declared Covid-19 hotspots, including Campbelltown, Canterbury Bankstown, Cumberland, Fairfield, Liverpool and Parramatta.
The announcement follows a Covid-19 outbreak in the inner-city suburb of Potts Point, with 37 cases linked to the Thai Rock Restaurant in the area.
A top selective high school in Surry Hills was also forced to close after one of the students contracted coronavirus.
The student attended Sydney Girls High School on August 6, 7, 10 and 11 while infectious.
The school said staff and students have been advised to self-isolate while health authorities carry out contact tracing.
A trial Higher School Certificate planned to be held at the school on Tuesday will be rescheduled.
The NSW Government has announced sweeping changes for schools in the state as the number of Covid-19 cases linked to Sydney Girls High School and Our Lady of Mercy College in Parramatta continues to grow.
School-related "social activities", including inter-school sport, will not be allowed for at least the next six weeks to prevent or minimise "any mixing of students from schools in different regions".
"We're having a particular focus on stopping singing or chanting activities or the use of wind instruments in groups and that is because we have increasingly become aware around the way that droplets and aerosols can be generated by those activities," NSW Chief Health Officer Dr Kerry Chant said on Monday.
"Also school-related social activities, school formals, dinners and dances and graduation ceremonies or parent engagement functions should cease and also school-related overnight events such as retreats, camps, excursions as there is obviously an increased risk of transmission in these residential-type exposures that are a consequence of those activities."
NSW recorded seven new cases of Covid-19 cases on Monday, with six identified as locally acquired. The other case is a traveller in hotel quarantine.

California sizzled to a triple-digit temperature so hot that meteorologists need to verify it as a planet-wide high mark.
Death Valley recorded a scorching 130 degrees (54.4 degrees Celsius) Sunday, which if the sensors and other conditions check out, would be the hottest Earth has been in more than 89 years and the third-warmest ever measured.
The temperature, measured at the aptly-named Furnace Creek during a blistering heat wave, would be the hottest temperature recorded on Earth in August, said Arizona State University professor Randy Cerveny, who coordinates the World Meteorological Organization’s extreme temperature team, which is already investigating the mark.
That 130 is only below the disputed all-time record of 134 degrees (56.67 Celsius) at nearly the same spot in 1913 and a 131-degree mark (55 degrees) in Tunisia in 1931, but both were in July, traditionally the planet's hottest month.
The relentlessly hot weather conditions at the spot support such an extreme reading, so much of the verification effort will be looking at how the measurement was taken and the sensor itself, Cerveny said. Sunday's temperature would beat marks of 129 (53.9 Celsius) recorded three times in recent years, he said. The monitor is an official one that follows world guidelines, but still needs to be examined in a process that takes months, he said.
“We are having more extremes than we had in the past,” Cerveny said.
The world is “creeping up on (the 134-degree record) year after year. That is something that cannot be denied,” Cerveny said Monday. “These extremes tell us a lot about what will happen in the future.”
The western heat wave is due to a “massive dome of high pressure” that keeps roasting the West and the normal Southwest monsoon that would provide rain and relief is missing, so there has been no cooling, Cerveny said. Phoenix has gone weeks with temperatures not dipping below 90, even at night or early in the morning, he said.
The 130-mark capped a week and an ongoing summer of “very strange” weather, said Deke Arndt, director of the National Weather Service's Center for Weather and Climate and former chairman of the U.S. national weather extremes committee.
On Saturday, a fire tornado formed during a wildfire near Chilcoot, California, worsened by the western heat wave. The fire was “burning so incredibly intense, so there is just so much heat going into it" that air rose in a swirl just like what happens in some thunderstorms, said Dawn Johnson, senior meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Reno, Nevada. “It almost looks like a bomb went off.”
And days before that, a violent straight-wind derecho devastated parts of Iowa, Illinois and Indiana, killing four people and causing billions of dollars in damages. Also, the Atlantic keeps setting records for earliest hurricanes, with 11 forming before mid August and the beginning of peak season.
“These kinds of things are certainly consistent with everybody's expectation for what we expect to see more often” with man-made global warming, said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center, formerly Woods Hole Research Center, in Cape Cod, Massachusetts.
Death Valley's National Park's 130-degree temperature was recorded at 3:41 p.m. at Furnace Creek near the park's visitor center. It's the same area that holds the world record for highest temperature ever recorded — 134 degrees (56.67 Celsius) — set on July 10, 1913, although that record remains in dispute. Arndt said meteorologists have made good cases for and against the record's legitimacy.
With this new temperature, Arndt said his former committee might look yet again at the 1913 record, which Cerveny said is based on peer reviewed research and is official.
While individual one-day records shouldn't be used to make a case for or against climate change, scientists say the overall context of more extreme weather...

Donald Trump has hit out at former First Lady Michelle Obama on Twitter, after she delivered harsh criticism of the US President.
Trump took aim at Obama, blasting her endorsement of his opponent Joe Biden as "unenthusiastic" and claiming the reason he is currently sitting in the White House is because of her husband, former President Barack Obama.
Trump then went on to criticise the response by former President Obama and Biden to the 2009 Swine Flu pandemic as "weak and pathetic".


The President's Twitter posts come after Obama delivered a slapdown of Trump, saying he is the "wrong President" for the United States, and is "clearly in over his head".
In a clear reference to Trump's viral Axios interview at the start of this month, where he downplayed the US Covid-19 death toll, Obama appeared to use the President's own words to say he is not up to governing: "It is what it is."

Michelle Obama speaks during the first night of the Democratic National Convention. Photo / AP
Obama's words were uncharacteristically pointed, and she referenced her own phrase from four years ago at the last Democratic convention: "When they go low, we go high."
"When they go lie, we go high. Going high is the only thing that works," Obama said.
"But let's be clear. Going high does not mean putting on a smile and saying nice things when confronted by viciousness and cruelty. Going high means taking the harder path. It means scraping and clawing our way to that mountaintop.
"Going high means unlocking the shackles of lies and mistrust with the only thing that can truly set us free – the cold, hard truth. So let me be as honest and clear as I possibly can.
"Donald Trump is the wrong President for our country. He has had more than enough time to prove that he can do the job, but he is clearly in over his head.
"He cannot meet this moment. He simply cannot be who we need him to be for us. It is what it is."
Obama's comments were in reference to Trump's downplaying of the surging coronavirus death toll during an interview with Australian reporter Jonathan Swan earlier this month.
During the now-infamous interview, Swan asked the President about the government's coronavirus response — and the President responded, "It is what it is".
"I've gone to your rallies. I've talked to your people. They love you. They listen to you. They listen to every word you say. They hang on your every word," Swan said to the President.
"And so when they hear you say, 'everything's under control. Don't worry about wearing masks,' I mean, these are people — many of them are older people."
Trump responded: "Well what's your definition of control? I think it's under control."
"How?" Swan responded. "A thousand Americans are dying a day."
"They are dying. That's true. And you, it is what it is," Trump said. "But that doesn't mean we aren't doing everything we can. It's under control as much as you can control it."
The Former First Lady was speaking at the Democratic Party's National Convention, a four-night event which will end with Joe Biden formally accepting the nomination as the party's presidential candidate.
"Now I understand that my message won't be heard by some people," Obama said. "We live in a nation that is deeply divided and I am a black woman speaking at the Democratic Convention.
"But enough of you know by me now. You know that I tell you exactly what I'm feeling. You know that I hate politics. But you also know that I care about this nation.
"You know how much I care about all of our children. So if you take one thing from tonight let it be this — if you think things cannot possibly get worse, trust me, they can and they will, if we don't make a change this election."