Latest news with #KathrynRyan
Scoop
14-07-2025
- Politics
- Scoop
Reporting International Migration: Less Than The Truth
Yesterday I listened to RNZ's political commentators. The principal topic was an aspect of the recently released May 2025 international migration. Kathryn Ryan starts by reminding us of the "old saying, would the last person to leave New Zealand please turn out the lights" (a saying which has been used in places other than Godzone). The latest figure for net immigration was an inflow of 14,800; a net gain. But you wouldn't have realised this. Ryan went on to say there's a big migration outflow underway right now. And she's correct if you only count New Zealand citizens. (Non-NZ citizens are people too; indeed, in that timeframe, 53,400 non-NZ citizens emigrated!) Kathryn Ryan said there was a net loss of 30,000. There was actually a (provisional) net loss of 46,300 NZ citizens. (Possibly she – or her producer – had subtracted the all-migrant net inflow from the net loss of New Zealand citizens, having interpreted the overall 14,800 net inflow as a net inflow of non-NZ citizens.) In fact, this 46,300 net loss of NZ citizens was offset by a net gain of 61,100 non-NZ citizens. (We should also note that total arrivals – not just people classified as 'immigrants' – in the year to May 2025 exceeded total departures by 3,797; less than the 14,800 ascribed to net international migration. The sum of total net arrivals in the six years to May 2025 was 244,000; an average of 40,000 per year.) The total number of people who featured (in the period from June 2024 to May 2025) as either immigrants or emigrants was 264,000; that is, a number of people equivalent to five percent of New Zealand's total population featured as either a permanent arrival or a permanent departure. This 264,000 includes 114,500 "migrant arrivals of non-NZ citizens". Half of the 114,500 estimated permanent arrivals of non-NZ citizens were citizens of either India, China, Philippines or Sri Lanka. In addition to getting the numbers wrong, a key problem with the framing of the RNZ migration discussion is that it rendered invisible these citizens of Asian countries; as people of Asian birth have been largely invisible in our intense discussions in recent years on binationalism. This gaze aversion by the political class is a kind of passive or casual racism. It is ethnicism to simply ignore the new New Zealanders who provide so much of our labour, and who generally perform their labour roles with professionalism and competence. An important aspect of this problem is to ignore the 'mammoth in the room', that there is in Aotearoa New Zealand a substantial substitution of New Zealand born residents for non-New Zealand born residents; white citizens are leaving, brown denizens are arriving. In these latest statistics, for the year to May, there were 61,100 more new New Zealanders and 46,300 fewer old New Zealanders; 61,100 minus -46,300 equals 107,400. 100,000 is two percent of five million. So, if 70% of New Zealand residents were NZ-born in May 2024, then about 68% of New Zealand residents will have been NZ-born in May 2025. (Just under 30 percent of New Zealanders were born overseas in March 2023, according to Statistics New Zealand.) The rate of 'replacement' is probably not quite that great, in that some of the citizens leaving permanently will have been naturalised rather than born in Aotearoa New Zealand. Another complicating factor is natural population growth – the excess of births over deaths – which was just over 20,000 in 2024. It would appear that about one-third of births in New Zealand (maybe more) are to mothers not themselves born in New Zealand. Population 'Replacement' is a sensitive subject. The 'far right' in much of the Eurocentric world indulges in 'replacement theory', a conspiracy theory that there is a liberal "elite" (sometimes "Jewish") agenda to replace 'whites' with 'non-whites'. (There used to be a comparable case on the 'far-left', whereby 'globalisation' was interpreted as an agenda rather than a description.) The descriptive reality of today's world is that there are disproportionately more – and substantially so – 'brown' and 'black' young people than their proportion among older age cohorts. White people are diminishing, and non-white people are increasing in numbers. That's not a problem. But it is perceived as a problem by many white people, especially disadvantaged white people in the economically polarised Euro world. If we tip-toe around this issue of changing global ethnic proportions, we leave the field to 'replacement theory' conspiracy theorists. We need to have adult conversations about the implications not just of aging populations, but also the re-culturation of our populations through demographic change. Applying this last matter to Aotearoa New Zealand, a nation state with rapid population turnover, the overall national 'personality' can be largely retained so long as immigrants come from a wide range of other countries. When I was in Sydney last year, I heard a story about the emergence of India's 'caste system' in Australia. This is the kind of cultural change that we do not want in New Zealand; such cultural colonisation can be averted by avoiding too much immigration from a single country. And through a process of cultural fusion, rather than either assimilation or the emergence of cultural silos. Keith Rankin (keith at rankin dot nz), trained as an economic historian, is a retired lecturer in Economics and Statistics. He lives in Auckland, New Zealand. Keith Rankin Political Economist, Scoop Columnist Keith Rankin taught economics at Unitec in Mt Albert since 1999. An economic historian by training, his research has included an analysis of labour supply in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and has included estimates of New Zealand's GNP going back to the 1850s. Keith believes that many of the economic issues that beguile us cannot be understood by relying on the orthodox interpretations of our social science disciplines. Keith favours a critical approach that emphasises new perspectives rather than simply opposing those practices and policies that we don't like. Keith retired in 2020 and lives with his family in Glen Eden, Auckland.
RNZ News
28-06-2025
- RNZ News
'Pretty damn average': Google's AI Overviews underwhelm
Photo: JAAP ARRIENS Most searches online are done using Google. Traditionally, they've returned long lists of links to websites carrying relevant information. Depending on the topic, there can be thousands of entries to pick from or scroll through. Last year Google started incorporating its Gemini AI tech into its searches . Google's Overviews now inserts Google's own summary of what it's scraped from the internet ahead of the usual list of links to sources in many searches. Some sources say Google's now working towards replacing the lists of links with its own AI-driven search summaries. RNZ's Kathryn Ryan's not a fan. "Pretty damn average I have to say, for the most part," she said on Nine to Noon last Monday during a chat about AI upending the business of digital marketing. But Kathryn Ryan is not the only one underwhelmed by Google's Overviews. Recently, online tech writers discovered you can trick it into thinking that made up sayings are actually idioms in common usage that are meaningful. The Sydney Morning Herald 's puzzle compiler David Astle - under the headline 'Idiom or Idiot?' reckoned Google's AI wasn't about to take his job making cryptic crosswords anytime soon. "There is a strange bit of human psychology which says that we expect a very high bar from machines in a way that we don't from humans," the BBC's head of technology forecasting Laura Ellis told Mediawatch last month. "But if you've got a machine making a mistake, where does that accountability fall? We've just not tested this out yet." UK Sky News deputy political editor Sam Coates tried to make ChatGPT accountable after it made up an entire episode of his own politics podcast when he used it to help archive transcripts of it recently. "AI had told a lie that it had got the transcript. And rather than back down it invented an entire fake episode without flagging that it's fake." When challenged on this, the technology insisted Coates had created the episode himself. When ChatGPT can't find an answer or the right data to draw on, it can 'hallucinate' or just make up a misleading response. "Chat GTP is gaslighting me. No such thing exists. It's all a complete fake," Coates spluttered. After turning ChatGPT off and on again in 'conversation mode', it did eventually own up. "It said; 'Look, you're absolutely right to challenge that. I can't remember the exact time that you uploaded.' And then: 'What I can confirm is that I did it and you're holding me to account,'" Coates told viewers. He went on to challenge ChatGPT about its hallucinations getting worse. "The technology is always improving, and newer versions tend to do a better job at staying accurate," ChatGPT replied. But Coates - armed with data that suggested the opposite - asked ChatGPT for specific stats. The response: "According to recent internal tests from OpenAI, the newer models have shown higher hallucination rates. For instance, the model known as o3 had about a 33 percent hallucination rate, while the 04 mini model had around 48 percent." "I get where you're coming from, and I'm sorry for the mixed messages. The performance of these models can vary." When Coates aired his experience as a warning for journalists, some reacted with alarm. "The hallucination rate of advanced models... is increasing. As journos, we really should avoid it," said Sunday Times writer and former BBC diplomatic editor Mark Urban. But some tech experts accused Coates of misunderstanding and misusing the technology. "The issues Sam runs into here will be familiar to experienced users, but it illustrates how weird and alien Large Language Model (LLM) behaviour can seem for the wider public," said Cambridge University AI ethicist Henry Shevlin. "We need to communicate that these are generative simulators rather than conventional programmes," he added. Others were less accommodating on social media. "All I am seeing here is somebody working in the media who believes they understand how technology works - but [he] doesn't - and highlighting the dangers of someone insufficiently trained in technology trying to use it." "It's like Joey from Friends using the thesaurus function on Word." Mark Honeychurch is a programmer and long serving stalwart of the NZ Skeptics, a non profit body promoting critical thinking and calling out pseudoscience. The Skeptics' website said they confront practices that exploit a lack of specialist knowledge among people. That's what many people use Google for - answers to things they don't know or things they don't understand. Mark Honeychurch described putting overviews to the test in a recent edition of the Skeptics' podcast Yeah, Nah . "The AI looked like it was bending over backwards to please people. It's trying to give an answer that it knows that the customer wants," Honeychurch told Mediawatch . Honeychurch asked Google for the meaning of: 'Better a skeptic than two geese.' "It's trying to do pattern-matching and come out with something plausible. It does this so much that when it sees something that looks like an idiom that it's never heard before, it sees a bunch of idioms that have been explained and it just follows that pattern." "It told me a skeptic is handy to have around because they're always questioning - but two geese could be a handful and it's quite hard to deal with two geese." "With some of them, it did give me a caveat that this doesn't appear to be a popular saying. Then it would launch straight into explaining it. Even if it doesn't make sense, it still gives it its best go because that's what it's meant to do." In time, would AI and Google detect the recent articles pointing out this flaw - and learn from them? "There's a whole bunch of base training where (AI) just gets fed data from the Internet as base material. But on top of that, there's human feedback. "They run it through a battery of tests and humans can basically mark the quality of answers. So you end up refining the model and making it better. "By the time I tested this, it was warning me that a few of my fake idioms don't appear to be popular phrases. But then it would still launch into trying to explain it to me anyway, even though it wasn't real." Things got more interesting - and alarming - when Honeychurch tested Google Overviews with real questions about religion, alternative medicine and skepticism. "I asked why you shouldn't be a skeptic. I got a whole bunch of reasons that sounded plausible about losing all your friends and being the boring person at the party that's always ruining stories." "When I asked it why you should be a skeptic, all I got was a message saying it cannot answer my question." He also asked why one should be religious - and why not. And what reasons we should trust alternative medicines - and why we shouldn't. "The skeptical, the rational, the scientific answer was the answer that Google's AI just refused to give." "For the flip side of why I should be religious, I got a whole bunch of answers about community and a feeling of warmth and connecting to my spiritual dimension. "I also got a whole bunch about how sometimes alternative medicine may have turned out to be true and so you can't just dismiss it." "But we know why we shouldn't trust alternative medicine. It's alternative so it's not been proven to work. There's a very easy answer." But not one Overview was willing or able to give, it seems. Google does answer the neutral question 'Should I trust alternative medicine?' by saying there is "no simple answer" and "it's crucial to approach alternative medicine with caution and prioritise evidence-based conventional treatments." So is Google trying not to upset people with answers that might concern them? "I don't want to guess too much about that. It's not just Google but also OpenAI and other companies doing human feedback to try and make sure that it doesn't give horrific answers or say things that are objectionable." "But it's always conflicting with the fact that this AI is just trained to give you that plausible answer. It's trying to match the pattern that you've given in the question." Journalists use Google, just like anyone who's in a hurry and needs information quickly. Do journalists need to ensure they don't rely on the Overviews summary right at the top of the search page? "Absolutely. This is AI use 101. If you're asking something of a technical question, you really need to be well enough versed in what you're asking that you can judge whether the answer is good or not." Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
Scoop
11-06-2025
- Health
- Scoop
The Disgrace Of The Hospice Care Funding Scandal
Ian Powell discusses the tipping point of the funding crisis facing hospice care in New Zealand. In the referendum on assisted dying in which it was voted in by a decisive majority (65%) in 2020, I voted against it. This was primarily because much of the argument in support seemed to me to centre on difficulties in accessing palliative care, including in hospices. My view was that the priority was to improve accessibility to palliative care. I would have felt better if palliative care access had been improved but sadly it has further deteriorated to the point of crisis and tipping point. Understanding palliative care and hospices Palliative care is a branch of medicine regulated by the Medical Council. It improves the quality of life of patients and that of their families who are facing challenges associated with life-threatening, including terminal, illness. When a person receives a terminal diagnosis, they can choose to receive hospice care. Annually hospice services in New Zealand provide palliative and holistic wrap around care to over 10,000 people who die, as well as another 9,000 living with terminal illness, and their whānau. Although hospices are not statutory health authorities, everything they provide is free of charge. Roughly there is a 50:50 split between government funding and hospice fundraising. Hospice New Zealand is the national representative organisation of these 32 hospices. Hospice health professionals include doctors, nurses, therapists (physical, occupational and speech) and social workers. Consequently, even more so than hospitals, they are labour intensive. Hospices provide medical care designed for the end of a person's life. The purpose of this care is to improve the quality of the life that these patients have left. It includes pain and other symptom relief, along with emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual help for both patients and their families. Hospice care operates at four levels depending on circumstances – routine home care, continuous home care, general inpatient care, and respite care. Most patients under hospice care are able to stay in their own homes, with brief admissions to hospice for respite or to adjust pain medication. Hospice funding crisis reaches tipping point Unfortunately, despite the invaluable work for the terminally ill that only they as institutions can provide, the funding crisis that hospices face has reached a tipping point. This was brought to the fore by Kathryn Ryan's Radio New Zealand Nine to Noon programme (6 June): Hospice funding crisis. The focus was on one of the largest hospices, Tōtara Hospice, which services the communities of South and South-East Auckland. It has had to formally advise Health Minister Simeon Brown that it is planning to reduce services next month. This action comes after years of warnings from hospices that their funding was unsustainable. This was reinforced by a recent report by the MartinJenkins consultancy which concluded that for the first time the hospice sector won't be able to raise enough money to break even. Expanding the tipping point Radio New Zealand's coverage of the funding tipping point continued three days later on Morning Report in a thorough piece by health journalist Ruth Hill: Collapse of hospices could cost taxpayers millions. Hill reported the hospices warning that funding shortfalls were putting their critical services at risk. Already they were only available to one out of three New Zealanders who were dying. She provided individual examples of this sorry state of affairs. The Government's scuttling of the pay equity claim for hospice nurses also had a negative impact. Hospice New Zealand chief executive Wayne Naylor noted that hospice nurses were currently paid up to 35% less than Health New Zealand nurses. He said: That was a real out-of-the-blue sideswipe for hospices and hospice nurses in particular, to have our pay equity claim, which was almost completed, just stop. Hospices were being forced to consider two unpalatable alternatives. Naylor described it this way: That then falls back on community to provide more money to support their local hospice. The alternative is that hospices have to make some staff redundant so that they can increase the salaries of other staff, and that leads to a reduction in services. Minister Brown has said that Health New Zealand had enough funding for hospice care. However, Naylor reported that the organisation had told Hospice New Zealand something quite opposite to the Minister: They told us they had no more funding, that they have no contingency that they can call upon, and the people with whom we met said they had no authority to allocate funding from anywhere else. So essentially it's a no to funding from Health NZ right now. Ruth Hill also tellingly cites the MartinJenkins report which that the 28 partially publicly-funded hospices are returning at least $1.59 in health benefits for every dollar of taxpayer money received, including fewer emergency departments and hospital admissions or rest home stays. What is to be done Simeon Brown maintains that he and his government value the services hospices provide. What they provide is as core to the public health system as the services provided in our general practices and public hospitals. Further, many (probably most) of the terminally ill are people who have invested in the public health system for much longer than those who sit around the cabinet table. They have done their bit to ensure their health system has been funded for the benefit not just for themselves and their families. It has also for hugely many more others that are unknown to them. It is only reasonable that hospice care should be available for them in their final weeks or months. It is not just a question of the hospice service being sufficiently funded. It should not have to be financially dependent on charity to survive, let alone function. This is fundamentally wrong. Being dependent on charity only makes sense if governments are so cynical to factor into their calculations that the terminally ill don't amount to many votes and not for very long! It also makes sense if governments are so short-sighted that they can't see the financial return of investing in hospice care! If hospice care being dependent on charity does make sense, then the words 'disgrace' and 'scandal' have no meaning.
Scoop
11-06-2025
- Health
- Scoop
The Disgrace Of The Hospice Care Funding Scandal
In the referendum on assisted dying in which it was voted in by a decisive majority (65%) in 2020, I voted against it. This was primarily because much of the argument in support seemed to me to centre on difficulties in accessing palliative care, including in hospices. My view was that the priority was to improve accessibility to palliative care. I would have felt better if palliative care access had been improved but sadly it has further deteriorated to the point of crisis and tipping point. Understanding palliative care and hospices Palliative care is a branch of medicine regulated by the Medical Council. It improves the quality of life of patients and that of their families who are facing challenges associated with life-threatening, including terminal, illness. When a person receives a terminal diagnosis, they can choose to receive hospice care. Annually hospice services in New Zealand provide palliative and holistic wrap around care to over 10,000 people who die, as well as another 9,000 living with terminal illness, and their whānau. Although hospices are not statutory health authorities, everything they provide is free of charge. Roughly there is a 50:50 split between government funding and hospice fundraising. Hospice New Zealand is the national representative organisation of these 32 hospices. Hospice health professionals include doctors, nurses, therapists (physical, occupational and speech) and social workers. Consequently, even more so than hospitals, they are labour intensive. Hospices provide medical care designed for the end of a person's life. The purpose of this care is to improve the quality of the life that these patients have left. It includes pain and other symptom relief, along with emotional, psychosocial, and spiritual help for both patients and their families. Hospice care operates at four levels depending on circumstances – routine home care, continuous home care, general inpatient care, and respite care. Most patients under hospice care are able to stay in their own homes, with brief admissions to hospice for respite or to adjust pain medication. Hospice funding crisis reaches tipping point Unfortunately, despite the invaluable work for the terminally ill that only they as institutions can provide, the funding crisis that hospices face has reached a tipping point. This was brought to the fore by Kathryn Ryan's Radio New Zealand Nine to Noon programme (6 June): Hospice funding crisis. The focus was on one of the largest hospices, Tōtara Hospice, which services the communities of South and South-East Auckland. It has had to formally advise Health Minister Simeon Brown that it is planning to reduce services next month. This action comes after years of warnings from hospices that their funding was unsustainable. This was reinforced by a recent report by the MartinJenkins consultancy which concluded that for the first time the hospice sector won't be able to raise enough money to break even. Expanding the tipping point Radio New Zealand's coverage of the funding tipping point continued three days later on Morning Report in a thorough piece by health journalist Ruth Hill: Collapse of hospices could cost taxpayers millions. Hill reported the hospices warning that funding shortfalls were putting their critical services at risk. Already they were only available to one out of three New Zealanders who were dying. She provided individual examples of this sorry state of affairs. The Government's scuttling of the pay equity claim for hospice nurses also had a negative impact. Hospice New Zealand chief executive Wayne Naylor noted that hospice nurses were currently paid up to 35% less than Health New Zealand nurses. He said: That was a real out-of-the-blue sideswipe for hospices and hospice nurses in particular, to have our pay equity claim, which was almost completed, just stop. Hospices were being forced to consider two unpalatable alternatives. Naylor described it this way: That then falls back on community to provide more money to support their local hospice. The alternative is that hospices have to make some staff redundant so that they can increase the salaries of other staff, and that leads to a reduction in services. Minister Brown has said that Health New Zealand had enough funding for hospice care. However, Naylor reported that the organisation had told Hospice New Zealand something quite opposite to the Minister: They told us they had no more funding, that they have no contingency that they can call upon, and the people with whom we met said they had no authority to allocate funding from anywhere else. So essentially it's a no to funding from Health NZ right now. Ruth Hill also tellingly cites the MartinJenkins report which that the 28 partially publicly-funded hospices are returning at least $1.59 in health benefits for every dollar of taxpayer money received, including fewer emergency departments and hospital admissions or rest home stays. What is to be done Simeon Brown maintains that he and his government value the services hospices provide. What they provide is as core to the public health system as the services provided in our general practices and public hospitals. Further, many (probably most) of the terminally ill are people who have invested in the public health system for much longer than those who sit around the cabinet table. They have done their bit to ensure their health system has been funded for the benefit not just for themselves and their families. It has also for hugely many more others that are unknown to them. It is only reasonable that hospice care should be available for them in their final weeks or months. It is not just a question of the hospice service being sufficiently funded. It should not have to be financially dependent on charity to survive, let alone function. This is fundamentally wrong. Being dependent on charity only makes sense if governments are so cynical to factor into their calculations that the terminally ill don't amount to many votes and not for very long! It also makes sense if governments are so short-sighted that they can't see the financial return of investing in hospice care! If hospice care being dependent on charity does make sense, then the words 'disgrace' and 'scandal' have no meaning. Ian Powell Otaihanga Second Opinion is a regular health systems blog in New Zealand. Ian Powell is the editor of the health systems blog 'Otaihanga Second Opinion.' He is also a columnist for New Zealand Doctor, occasional columnist for the Sunday Star Times, and contributor to the Victoria University hosted Democracy Project. For over 30 years , until December 2019, he was the Executive Director of Association of Salaried Medical Specialists, the union representing senior doctors and dentists in New Zealand.
RNZ News
04-05-2025
- Politics
- RNZ News
Two complaints against RNZ broadcasts not upheld
Photo: RNZ / Cole Eastham-Farrelly The Broadcasting Standards Authority has not upheld two complaints about broadcasts on RNZ National. The first, on Nine to Noon on 8 October, 2024, marking one year since the 7 October 2023 Hamas-led attack on Israel, included two interviews conducted by host Kathryn Ryan - one with BBC Middle East editor Sebastian Usher, and the other with Sally Stevenson, an emergency coordinator with Médecins Sans Frontières. The BSA found that listeners were alerted to alternative significant viewpoints during Usher's interview, and Stevenson's interview was clearly signalled as being from her perspective. In addition, the audience could reasonably be expected to be aware of significant context and viewpoints from other media coverage. The BSA did not uphold complaints against Balance, Accuracy and Fairness. The decision can be found here . The BSA also considered a complaint against National's Saturday Morning broadcast, on 12 October, 2024. This was an interview of a UNICEF spokesperson and humanitarian worker about her experience living and working in Lebanon amid the ongoing Israel-Hamas- Hezbollah conflict. The BSA found the broadcast was clearly signalled as being from the interviewee's perspective and was not claiming nor intending to be a balanced examination of perspectives on the conflict. Again, the BSA said RNZ's audience could reasonably be expected to be aware of significant context and viewpoints from other media coverage. It did not uphold the complaints against Balance, Accuracy and Fairness. The decision can be found here RNZ has initiated independent assessments of its editorial coverage, and the first looked at coverage of the Middle East since the 7 October attack. Its conclusion was that the decisions of the Media Council and Broadcasting Standards Authority gave no reason for concern that RNZ was acting outside its own policy, the Media Council Principles or the standards administered by the Broadcasting Standards Authority. The report can be found here : RNZ : Editorial Reviews
