Weekly Select Committee Report Dec 17

An Auckland link will be added to the trans-Pacific submarine cable being built by Vocus and Google. Spark uses MBNZ technology to highlight fixed wireless performance. 2degrees appears to be winning mobile market share.

Based on those poll numbers, the National-led coalition would be out of office if an election were held now. And Luxon’s “preferred prime minister” rating fell further to 23%.

Over the past 36 hours, Christopher Luxon has been dong his best to portray the centre-right’s plummeting poll numbers as a mark of virtue. Allegedly, the negative verdicts are the result of hard economic times, and of a government bravely set out on a perilous ...

In 2014 nearly 40% of GP respondents were practice owners. By 2022 it had declined to 31%. The number of GPs working in GP-owned practice has also fallen from 73% in 2015 to 64% in 2022. Partially filling the practice ownership gap is the for-profit ...

Health Minister Dr. Shane Reti has been only a ghostly presence of the government’s front bench, in a case of the incredible shrinking Minister. Meanwhile, leaked documents reveal planned funding cuts of over $100M to public hospitals that are already sinking ...

This week’s announcement of pay raises of around 2.8% backdated to last October could hardly have come at a worse time, with the economy on the brink of recession, massive cutbacks in public expenditure, public sector redundancies and rising unemployment.