Around about 30 years from now the AI bot, who will be presenting the 9am to midday show, will announce breathlessly that single-cell classes are to be done away with and open plan classrooms are planned for future school builds to allow greater collaboration between students and teachers. A more relaxed style of learning, yadda yadda yadda – what do you think? 0800 80 10 80, the AI bot will say, because as sure as God made little apples, this is going to come around again.

Anybody who's been around since the 70s, perhaps earlier, will know that the great open plan versus single-cell classes debate has been going on, and on, and on for decades. Honestly, for people who preach collaboration and open minds, academics within education are awfully territorial and guard their own patch. Whole word learning versus phonics is another cracker, but we'll save that for the AI bot of the future.

While open plan designs were originally designed to foster collaboration, they have often created challenges for schools. So it was stop the presses yesterday when the Minister of Education announced that open plan classrooms aren't meeting the needs of students and teachers. Colour me pink and call me shocked! Whoever would have thunk it? We did. We all knew it.

They were originally intended to foster collaboration, and you can imagine a bunch of pointy heads sitting around a table saying: it'll be amazing – teachers will be able to draw support from one another, and those that perhaps aren't getting results from one student can look to another. Teachers will be able to foster the kind of energy and creativity that we need to see, and the children will be able to mingle. But no, it's been an abject disaster. It was an abject disaster in the 70s. It was an abject disaster in the 80s and it's been an epic disaster since John Key and Hekia Parata introduced them in 2011.

Erica Stanford says in many cases, open plan classrooms reduce flexibility rather than enhance it. She says we've listened to the sector; new classrooms will no longer be open plan. But this is the good thing: they're not going back to the future again. They’re going to create classes that prioritise flexibility over open plan layouts, so the use of glass sliding doors means spaces can be open when you want to have a wider collaboration, but then they can be closed for focused learning.

This idea doesn't mean we're going back to the prefab – the cold, uninsulated prefabs for every class that possibly you went to school in. If teachers want to open up space, they can, when they want to shut themselves off, they can. There is no one-size-fits-all for every class and that is the way it should be. The thing I really liked about Erica Stanford's announcement was the flexibility. This is a good thing. This is a very good thing. And I want to hear positive, joyous, fabulous response to this announcement from the Minister of Education, as one Minister who really understands her portfolio.

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The Education Minister's stressing schools can still be flexible as the Government pulls the plug on open plan classrooms.

It was introduced by John Key's Government in 2011.

Erica Stanford announced yesterday all new builds will now have more traditional layouts.

She told Kerre Woodham there are good examples in the best modern learning environments.

She’s also looking into helping fund schools to modify existing open-plan rooms.

Stanford told Woodham she's tasking the school property agency to look into ways to help schools revert their teaching spaces.

In the meantime, she says, schools have five year property budgets, with a category for classroom modifications they can use.

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Over 8,000 divorces are filed in New Zealand annually, and the process isn’t cheap.

While the dissolution fee only costs $242, legal costs can reach into the thousands.

Many couples fall into the so-called ‘missing middle’ — earning too much to access legal aid, but not enough to afford private lawyers.

Australian divorce and separation lender JustFund has launched in New Zealand with the sentiment that access to justice isn’t a privilege, it’s a right.

Their Director of Family Law, Lauren Milne, told Kerre Woodham the average cost of divorce in New Zealand is $30,000 – $15,000 per person.

She says that most people aren’t putting aside a nest egg in case they get divorced, so it can be a struggle to pull together the funds.

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Just how well served or poorly served are we by the engineering and the design of our roads? Residents of Waiuku are reeling after a crash yesterday that has left an adult and two children dead. Some locals say they've been calling for safety measures to be introduced on Masters Rd, known as ‘roller coaster road’, for years.

One poor man who was first on the scene yesterday lost his best mate on the same road two years ago and says he fears for his life every time he turns out of his driveway. He said if they could start focusing those speed cameras on actual known death trap sites, like Masters Rd, instead of on random corners or at the bottom of pretty safe downhills where they're just revenue gathering —please could they put those cameras where it would save people's lives instead of just collecting the tax?— “that would be a great start”. We need them on this road. He described the area where the crash occurred as being akin to an old school BMX jump.

I received an email a couple of days ago from a woman whose friend had his house destroyed in May by a speeding driver in a stolen car. She said she'd spoken at a Whangarei Council meeting to plead for barriers to stop this happening again, but they've refused to fund it, despite the fact that 10 years ago the same house was totalled and had to be rebuilt because the same thing had happened. And pleas from that owner to put barriers were ignored then too.

Franklin’s Whitford-Maraetai Rd has seen crashes every month. Locals say it's a regular traumatic experience to drive the roads, despite efforts from Auckland Council to improve it. There's been road widening along parts of the stretch, resurfacing of some of the bends in asphalt, and it's reduced the number of accidents there, but locals say they still expect to hear that awful sound of metal crunching every time there's rain.

What is a dangerous road? It's very subjective, but one indicator is a high number of fatal or serious crashes over an extended period of time. If you look at Old North Road in Waimauku, from 2014-2019 there were 13 deaths and serious injuries in five years. State Highway 2 from Katikati to Tauranga, one of the highest risk roads in the Bay of Plenty: between 2009-2018, 27 people were killed and 77 seriously injured. In response to that, speed limits were lowered in a number of places, and then flexible wire rope median barriers were put in on sections of State Highway 2 South of Katikati. But you'll remember we've had people phoning in about those because they say it's impossible to turn into side streets – it makes residents lives a misery having to drive for kilometres before they can turn around. So yes, it might stop cars from crashing into one another on a dangerous stretch of road, but it also means risky behaviour from those who are looking to avoid travelling many kilometres just to turn around and come back again. State Highway 1 from Kawakawa to Springs Flat, Northland: 14 deaths, 41 serious injuries from 2012-2016.

There is the factor of people not wearing a seat belt, that causes deaths, where they've been drinking or drug impaired, of course that comes into play, but at the same time, there are stretches of road that New Zealanders drive that are completely and utterly unforgiving. You make one small mistake, and humans do, a moment of distraction, one small mistake, and the consequences are absolutely devastating because the roads are unforgiving. Many of them are still the goat tracks that they once were. Just had a bit of metal put on them and call them a highway.

At what point do you get a road engineered? And again, it probably comes back to the resource management and the RMA and the problems we have with getting permission to reconfigure roads around the country. You would think though, in the case of the woman who emailed me, that putting a barrier up on the corner to stop a car leaving the road and barrelling into a house for the third time - surely a barrier fence wouldn't be a huge cost to ratepayers of Whangarei?

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Yesterday we were talking about Chlöe Swarbrick's grand plans for economic reform, and today brings another interesting suggestion for economic reform, this time from Sir Roger Douglas and Professor Robert MacCulloch. I wonder if now is the time to be seriously looking at reforming our taxation system. Over the years, we've experimented with, we’ve dabbled in various taxes on wealth: estate duties, gift duties, stamp duties on property sales, the sort of things that other countries have and have adapted, but most were eventually abolished.

The absence of a general wealth tax, capital gains tax, or inheritance tax has been a recurring topic of debate. No New Zealand government has been able to introduce a wealth tax and maintain it, but it's a staple of the Green Party's proposed Green Budget. Chlöe Swarbrick says we've done really big things in the past and there is no reason why we shouldn't again. She says in the 1930s and 40s, after world wars and the Great Depression, we came together as a country and decided to build a nation which looked at the foundations of public health care, public education, and public housing.

Now, Sir Roger Douglas, former finance minister and the architect of the most sweeping economic reforms since the establishment of cradle to grave social Security and the one who did away with the high taxes, and Professor Robert MacCulloch, who you will have heard from time to time on the show, have released their plan for an economic reform. They first developed the plan for economic reform in 2016 but have updated it for 2025. They point out that by 2060, 26% of New Zealanders will be over 65, up from 16% in 2021. Professor MacCulloch and Sir Roger said that income tax on earnings up to $60,000 a year should be redirected into individual savings accounts to fund each person's health care, pension, and risk cover, and that would replace much of the current public system with private provision. This needs to be done, they say, because Treasury and Inland Revenue have both raised questions in the past year about how the government will be able to collect enough tax to fund the increasing cost of NZ Super and healthcare, the Superfund notwithstanding. People who didn't have enough in their individual accounts could still be helped by the public system, which would be funded on taxes collected on income over $60,000 a year.

So under $60,000, you pay tax of a sort, but it's for you and it goes into a savings account to fund what you'll need in the future. So this would mean larger numbers of middle and higher income people paying for themselves while the system helped lower income people. MacCulloch said that would mean government costs were reduced, the quality of outcomes would be increased, and the plight of low-income earners would be improved. He says too many low-income people have no savings in KiwiSaver because they're going from paycheck to paycheck, this model would help to address that. And if you look at his model, it shows that an individual could save around $21,000 annually. You'd put $9,450 into a health account, $7,350 for superannuation, and $4,200 for risk cover. And they'd drop the corporate tax rate to help fund employer contributions.

Robert MacCulloch argues that savings, not taxation reform, offers the ability to gain efficiencies in healthcare. A drop in corporate taxes would help fund employer contributions and rather than the government dictating where to go, people could choose their preferred public or private supplier.

So bold suggestions. Douglas and MacCulloch’s more bold than Swarbrick. But does Chlöe Swarbrick have a point that we can initiate institutional reform if we want to? It's been done before. It's bold and it's visionary and it's scary. The bigger question though, is: should we? Is the tax system that we have right now working? Chlöe Swarbrick, Sir Roger, and Professor MacCulloch argue it's not. Unlikely bedfellows, but bedfellows they are in terms of saying what we have right now is not fit for purpose and certainly will not be fit for purpose at all in the future. Do we need to make institutional change around our tax system and the way we pay for health care, the way we pay for superannuation as we get older? The cradle to grave Social Security plan, devised in the 1930s is still pretty much around in the year 2025, nearly 100 years later. Times have changed, does our tax system need to change with it?

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Starting with some good news on a good news Monday, Health NZ added 2100 nurses and more than 600 doctors to its ranks since the election in March 2025, according to new figures published.

The most recent health workforce data showed that as of March 2025, there were 35,341 nurses, 5188 resident medical officers, and 6419 senior medical officers - both the categories of doctors. Not all of these people are working full time, but they're all on the books.

And yet, despite the fact that since the election there's been a major recruitment drive, more than 36,000 Te Whatu Ora nurses, midwives, healthcare assistants have voted to strike for 24 hours later this month - because they say they have safe staffing concerns.

They say patients are at risk because of the short staffing, the nurses, midwives and healthcare assistants are stretched too thin and cannot give patients the care they need.

And I totally accept this, this is heartbreaking for our exhausted members who became healthcare workers because they want to help people.

So what's the story? We've had 2100 more nurses added to the ranks. Can there ever be enough nurses? Was there ever a time when you worked for Health New Zealand, that there were enough staff? That there were enough healthcare assistants and midwives and nurses?

Was there a time you can go back to and say, in 1998, - we had so many staff, it was fantastic. You could sit and chat with patients, spend some quality time with them you didn't have to do the administrative work, you didn't have to do the clean up work because there were people who were capable, who were employed, who did that work.

If 2100 nurses have been hired and you’re still stretched so thin, how on earth did you get through the previous 6-7 years?

It is a really tough job and there is so much more to the job than what the average patient sees. In the press release from the union, they say that burnt out nurses have left to go to Australia, where the pay and the working conditions are so much better, and they are. The pay and the working conditions have always been better in Australia.

But then in part, our New Zealand nurses going to to Australia are part of a global migration route of health staff. English, Irish, Filipino nurses come here looking to better their pay and their working conditions, looking for a better work life balance. So it's all part of that global migration route of health staff which seems to be particularly mobile.

But I'd really love to hear from health staff. You don't strike lightly, I know that.

What is it that you need to feel that you can do your job well? How many more staff do you need to feel that you can look after your patient safely?

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The Nurses Union claims the Government has lost control of health, as more than 36,000 workers prepare to strike.

Te Whatu Ora nurses, midwives, and health care assistants will walk off the job for 24 hours at the end of this month.

Nurses Organisation Chief Executive Paul Goulter says many members have voiced concerns over safety issues and staffing shortages - and change is needed.

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Ray Chung has surely scuppered his chances of becoming Wellington's next mayor, hasn't he?

Although, given the way voters in Wellington tend to cast their ballots given their previous form, perhaps not. Chung has sent an email to three of his fellow councillors with the heading ‘A sordid night on the town”, in which he proceeded to pass on a story he heard from a neighbour while out dog walking, trash talking Mayor Tory Whanau. It accused her of participating in an orgy with a couple of young men and taking drugs, and talked about the form of the woman involved, being Tory Whanau, having soft, pendulous breasts.

Whanau released the email to the New Zealand Herald as an example of the dehumanising personal attacks she's experienced during her term as Wellington mayor and part of the reason she's not running for the mayoralty again. She said this sort of behaviour (the sending of gossip to fellow councillors), is unbecoming for a public official, it's creepy, it's gross. If he's going to stay in the mayoral race, he needs to commit to a clean campaign. Whanau, who wants to be elected as a councillor but not mayor this election, provided the email to the Herald saying she wanted voters to see evidence of the abuse she and other female politicians endured.

This is the thing that stuns me: when questioned about the email, Chung said he had no idea if the contents were true. Absolutely none. He did no fact checking, he just found it interesting, thought his fellow councillors would agree. When pressed maybe three times, he thought perhaps he'd say sorry if it wasn't true, but didn't really see anything wrong with what he'd done. He said I passed on exactly what I was told, I'd call it gossip. And I suppose using the internet is just the modern form of whispering in someone's ear at the village fair.

Now the best form of gossip and lying is to feed a story with a grain of truth. Whanau has form in drunken carrying on, it's not a huge leap the way it would be with a teetotalley, happily married young female mayor. Whanau says she can prove she wasn't at this supposed orgy which Chung says took place on New Year's Eve. She was at a function for ambassadors in the city and then went on to a rainbow community party on New Year's Eve. She says she can show that the story is malicious gossip.

The scary thing about this is that people think they can say anything about anybody these days and get away with it. For all the faults of the mainstream media, we are accountable for the things we say and write. So if we get it wrong, we are censored. The records corrected and you know about it. We can certainly have opinions you disagree with, that's different, but if we had come out with a story like that, we could be sued for defamation. And in the past this radio station has been Most radio stations have been, because people take it one step too far, repeat something they've heard because they think it might be interesting. Wrong. It's false. It can be proved to be false, and they're censored, and they have to pay a fine, and they have to apologise and correct the record. I'd love to see how much faith people put in alternative media stories and sources, if they were held to the same level of accountability that we are. The internet is amazing, but it has always been an absolute cesspit of misinformation and lies as well.

You know for a fact that the story about Clarke Gayford and the nanny, Clarke Gayford and the Whangarei court appearance, Peter Davis, John Key, Tory Whanau, all of these public figures, you know, for a fact that it's true because your neighbour's niece went to school with the nanny, or your wife's brother's best friend was in the police force in Kerikeri, used to be and he knows for a fact that the court registrar... It's utter bullshit. Complete and utter BS, but you want to believe it. It feeds into how you perceive these people and what you want to believe about these people, whoever they may be. There's a grain of truth to it. It's not beyond the realm of possibility that it could have happened. And again, that's what makes it all so dangerous. I just don't believe anything until I am stepping over the writhing forms of the people allegedly involved and trying not to stand on their pendulous soft breasts.

I can't just put up a story because I think you might find it interesting, and I think you'll agree with the story, you'll agree with the narrative. You say where's your proof? Where's your evidence? And if I can't provide it, you can sue me for defamation. And that's a jolly good thing.

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