July 16, 2025 • 11 mins
THE BEST BITS IN A SILLIER PACKAGE (from Thursday's Mike Hosking Breakfast) Who DOESN'T Want to Live in 1970s Russia?/Which Good Old Days Are We Going For Here?/Too Late to Un-Mush Our Brains
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to a podcast from News Talks dB. Follow
this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio Rewrap.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'll get there and welcome to the Rewrap for Thursday.
All the best bits from the Mic Husking Breakfast special
guest starring Hither, the Duper c Allen on News Talks
be in a sillier package. It's a very long sentence.
I've forgotten the start of it anyway, I am Glen Hart.
We're getting rid of open playing past classrooms and we'll
(00:48):
fix everything, mark my words. Heither thinks we can ban
social media for kids, and she'll explain that shortly. But
before any of that. With local body elections coming up,
we've got issues for local bodies, haven't we. They're just
a little bit too local votes.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Might be being hopelessly optimistic, but I have got some
hope that we may soon be able to turn around
our abysmal participation in local council elections. Local government is
releasing a report today on how to get us voting,
and their idea is pretty simple. Basically, ditch the postal vote,
switched to running council elections like we do central government elections.
It'll be much more expensive, but it will probably work
(01:30):
if we do it, because you are more likely to
be reminded to vote if you see the Orange man
on a booth in your supermarket than if you lose
your voting form in the pile of papers that's sitting
on your kitchen bench. Now I like that idea, and
I hope we do that idea, But actually I don't
think that this is the game changer. I reckon the
game changer costs us nothing. It's the fact that ACT
is standing candidates and council elections for the first time
(01:52):
this year. What I think really stops us from voting
is not how we vote. It's that we don't know
who the heck the people are who want us to
vote for them, and we do not have time to
research them. But if they say that their ACT, or
they say that they're Labor or the Greens, it gives
us a shortcut and we know roughly what they stand for.
And this, I think is why the Greens and Labor
do disproportionately well at council elections. It go somewhere to
(02:14):
explaining why they constantly take out Wellington council elections even
though they're hopeless at it because they are already doing this,
an act is now going to do it. And I
think that's a game changer because it starts to put
the pressure on National Their National has to do it.
If National National is the last big hold out here,
if they do it, it's on and that I think
will get us voting because then we know who these
(02:34):
people are and also we know who to hold accountable.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But I've never quite understood this whole party partisan politics
and local body politics like they have in the UK.
It's like you're having two elections in the same place
because you've already got a party candidate for the area
that you're in. Why do you need a mirror as well?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
This is too much.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
There's too many people wanting to be in charge of me.
I don't need that many people in charge with me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It's so rewrap.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Can I just Chris Bishop? He can be in charge
of me and I'll just do what he says.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Chris Bishop. So he turns up at the local Jeez,
that looked uncomfortable. I mean imagine going to somebody's conference
and then just standing on the stage and telling them
are crappy they are. But this is what the NATS
are not afraid of doing this at the moment. Second
year in a row, they've gone hard on these guys.
So Chris Bishop goes to the Council yesterday, to the
Council's conference yesterday, gave a speech. He says to them,
(03:31):
we are getting our house in order. It's time you
saw to jewels out. It's okay to build a local
road without spending hundreds of thousands on artworks. Not everything
you do has to be an architectural masterpiece. The only
awards that your project should be winning out for cost,
efficiency and effectiveness. The time for excuses is over. The
culture of yes starts now. They did not love it.
(03:53):
In fact, I think one of them might have piped
up and given him a bit of lip over that.
But we love it and that's what matters right where
the people paying their bills, paying the rates. And I
loved hearing that.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Ah, now that I've heard what he said, I don't
know that I do want him to be in charge
of that. It sounds like he wants everything to sort
of look like nineteen seventies industrial Russia, just blank gray
buildings infrastructure that just make you feel depressed all the time.
I don't know if I'm a fan of that rewrap,
(04:23):
I think I'm definitely not a fan of this whole
general move to wanting things to be like they were
in the old days, and now that we're going out
to open plane cast classrooms and school.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Government's decided, thank the Good Lord for that, to kill
the open, open plan classroom thing that we've been doing
for unknown reasons. We have been persisting with this ridiculous
idea and they've decided we're going to go back to
the single classrooms like the old days. Shirley Boys High
has already done this. Now Shirley Boy's High. Was am
(04:55):
I overstating it to say they're wanted the poster child
children of this? But I feel like they were back
in twenty nineteen been damaged by the earth quake and
they've got the rebuild going in twenty nineteen, and the
Ministry of Education said, if we're going to do it,
let's do the open planet with it. Because the Ministry
of Education was shoving it down everybody's throat, did it
for six years and then we're like, hmm, this is
(05:15):
not working. They asked, They asked the kids. They did
like a bit of a survey of kids and teachers
and parents, and everybody hated it so overwhelmingly that they
decided to put the walls back up, and it cost
them a small fortune for a school. Eight hundred thousand
dollars is a lot of money. Immediate results, hugely positive feedback,
said the principal staff on the first day, absolutely thrilled.
One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her
(05:37):
classroom because she was so thrilled to have wolves. The
boys are just much happier going to speak to that
principle after seven o'clock. I mean, who would have thought
that silence promotes concentration to hang on?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
When I was in Space five at Fenerlton Primary in
the seventies when Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister. Yes, whose
fault was that that I was at an open playing classroom?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Then, well, the Ministry of Education, because everything is the
Ministry of Education's fault, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So I'm just trying to figure out which bit of
the past we're going back to. Obviously you wonder.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
How old school this is. Oh, this is pre Glenn
Old School. This is nineteen fifties, this is this is
the good days, the healthier days of Winston Peters type.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
You know. So we're going to be giving people the
strap again and we're going to.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Make make New Zealand education system great again.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yes, I think my mad math feeling is pretty clear there.
See the problem with me in my open planning class
was that, and then they couldn't kick me out of
the class because they were just kicking me into another space.
I was in space five. That kicked me out into
space four or space six. In space four on space
(06:46):
six certainly want me so rewrapped. No, it sounds like
Heather's all over it. She's a massive, massive fan of
closing the classes.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Now I've said it before, I'm going to say it again.
Erica Stanford is this government's MVP most valuable player for
once again taking an inexplicably stupid thing that we were
doing in schools, ditching it and going back to common sense. Now,
this is something very close to my heart at the
moment because I have to make a decision in kinda
roughly the next six months or so about which school
we send our son to. But it really isn't a
(07:16):
decision at all, because it's going to be the one
school in the area that has single classes instead of
open plan modern learning spaces. It is the school that
his best friend from KINDI is going to. It is
also the school that another parent I know has just
sent their child to. And all of us are doing
it for exactly the same reason, which is we want
to avoid those open planned learning spaces because we know,
(07:37):
like most parents do. I would say that if you
stick one hundred kids in a big room and tell
them to pay attention to the teacher in front of them,
they can't. They get distracted by the loud noises coming
from the other kids over there, or the TV over there,
or what the teacher is saying over there, or why
someone's laughing over there. There's just a hundred distractions all
the time. Why the Ministry of Education forced this on
schools will probably baffle me for the rest of my
(07:58):
life because there's no logic to it. No one who
has kids, will spends time with kids, can really believe
that kids can concentrate and learn when there are one
hundred voices chirping around them. Which idiot came up with this,
I'd actually love to know. Just to settle me, I'll
tell you what the legacy of this government could well
be that it finally turns around. Are up to now
(08:18):
decades long decline in education stats with that ban on
phones in schools, with the hour a day of reading,
writing and maths, with the expectation that kids must pass
existing standards, and actually gives our kids a chance to
learn as well as other kids in any other developed
country like we used to. And if that happens, then
Erica Stanford, given how crucial education is to a country success,
Erica Stanford will remain, as I see her, the MVP
(08:40):
of this government, if not of the decade, if not
of her generation.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
If not of bassoon players everywhere. And it's funny a
how it's just this general I sort of think of
Erica Stanford as being part of a younger generation, certainly
in a younger generation than me. And it's the same
worrying trend we've seen, this sort of lurch to the right.
(09:05):
It makes the younger people in the US ward's country
music amongst younger people across the world. I'm sick of
all these lurching young people. I want them to stop lurching.
I don't think lurching. Nobody's a fan of lurching, are they?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Three? Wrap.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Now we've been focused on young people in the podcast
today and Heather is kept focusing on them and she
wants them to focus on anything other than social media.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I am pretty hot on having the social media band
for kids under the age of sixteen because it's rotting
their brains and I think it is one of the
worst things that we're doing to them at the moment.
One of the strongest arguments against that is that it
is impossible to ban kids from You cannot ban people
from stuff on the Internet because you cannot verify ages. Well,
(09:52):
actually you can, and this has been around for a
long time. Reddit is now doing it in the UK
because what's happened in the UK is they have passed
the law. They now require websites showing mature content like
porn or whatever to verify ages of people before people
can look at it. So Reddit has employed a third party.
This group is called Persona, and Persona is going to
(10:15):
do the age checking for them. Basically, if you want
to use Reddit in the UK, you go online, it
sends you to Persona. You then show Persona your selfie
or a photo of your government ID like passport or
driver's license or whatever, and Persona then goes yep, absolutely,
Glenn is over the age of eighteen. Glenn can look
at the stuff Bengo. Then you go back to Reddit.
You've got the token verifying you as being an adult,
(10:38):
and you can use Reddit. Reddit never gets to see
your photo. They never get to hold it because obviously
there are security concerns around like Bozo's around Bozos, like
Facebook having your details and then getting hacked by somebody.
Persona the third party only keeps it for about seven
days and then they get rid of it. But you
are verified, your on recorders having been verified, and that
(10:58):
is how you do it. It is totally plausible, it
is possible, and we can do it in this country if.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
We want to, or even easier, just ban it completely
so nobody has it.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
That's why he doesn't write the laws.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
But why do we only care about kids brains being
tuned to mush and not all of our brains being
turned to mush. You know, if we end up being
the only mush brain people around and the kids' brains
are working properly, we'll be you know, at their mercy.
They'll be our youthful overlords and we'll have to do
(11:33):
whatever they say they'll be the ones with all the
ideas and we'll just be the mush brains doing whatever
they say. You can't have that. I am no brain's
gone to mush. I'll see you back here again tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
For more from News Talk st B, listen live on
air or online, and keep our shows with you wherever
you go with our podcasts on IAR Radio
You're listening to a podcast from News Talks dB. Follow
this and our wide range of podcasts now on iHeartRadio Rewrap.
Speaker 2 (00:25):
I'll get there and welcome to the Rewrap for Thursday.
All the best bits from the Mic Husking Breakfast special
guest starring Hither, the Duper c Allen on News Talks
be in a sillier package. It's a very long sentence.
I've forgotten the start of it anyway, I am Glen Hart.
We're getting rid of open playing past classrooms and we'll
(00:48):
fix everything, mark my words. Heither thinks we can ban
social media for kids, and she'll explain that shortly. But
before any of that. With local body elections coming up,
we've got issues for local bodies, haven't we. They're just
a little bit too local votes.
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Might be being hopelessly optimistic, but I have got some
hope that we may soon be able to turn around
our abysmal participation in local council elections. Local government is
releasing a report today on how to get us voting,
and their idea is pretty simple. Basically, ditch the postal vote,
switched to running council elections like we do central government elections.
It'll be much more expensive, but it will probably work
(01:30):
if we do it, because you are more likely to
be reminded to vote if you see the Orange man
on a booth in your supermarket than if you lose
your voting form in the pile of papers that's sitting
on your kitchen bench. Now I like that idea, and
I hope we do that idea, But actually I don't
think that this is the game changer. I reckon the
game changer costs us nothing. It's the fact that ACT
is standing candidates and council elections for the first time
(01:52):
this year. What I think really stops us from voting
is not how we vote. It's that we don't know
who the heck the people are who want us to
vote for them, and we do not have time to
research them. But if they say that their ACT, or
they say that they're Labor or the Greens, it gives
us a shortcut and we know roughly what they stand for.
And this, I think is why the Greens and Labor
do disproportionately well at council elections. It go somewhere to
(02:14):
explaining why they constantly take out Wellington council elections even
though they're hopeless at it because they are already doing this,
an act is now going to do it. And I
think that's a game changer because it starts to put
the pressure on National Their National has to do it.
If National National is the last big hold out here,
if they do it, it's on and that I think
will get us voting because then we know who these
(02:34):
people are and also we know who to hold accountable.
Speaker 2 (02:37):
But I've never quite understood this whole party partisan politics
and local body politics like they have in the UK.
It's like you're having two elections in the same place
because you've already got a party candidate for the area
that you're in. Why do you need a mirror as well?
Speaker 1 (03:00):
This is too much.
Speaker 2 (03:02):
There's too many people wanting to be in charge of me.
I don't need that many people in charge with me.
Speaker 1 (03:06):
It's so rewrap.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Can I just Chris Bishop? He can be in charge
of me and I'll just do what he says.
Speaker 3 (03:11):
Chris Bishop. So he turns up at the local Jeez,
that looked uncomfortable. I mean imagine going to somebody's conference
and then just standing on the stage and telling them
are crappy they are. But this is what the NATS
are not afraid of doing this at the moment. Second
year in a row, they've gone hard on these guys.
So Chris Bishop goes to the Council yesterday, to the
Council's conference yesterday, gave a speech. He says to them,
(03:31):
we are getting our house in order. It's time you
saw to jewels out. It's okay to build a local
road without spending hundreds of thousands on artworks. Not everything
you do has to be an architectural masterpiece. The only
awards that your project should be winning out for cost,
efficiency and effectiveness. The time for excuses is over. The
culture of yes starts now. They did not love it.
(03:53):
In fact, I think one of them might have piped
up and given him a bit of lip over that.
But we love it and that's what matters right where
the people paying their bills, paying the rates. And I
loved hearing that.
Speaker 2 (04:02):
Ah, now that I've heard what he said, I don't
know that I do want him to be in charge
of that. It sounds like he wants everything to sort
of look like nineteen seventies industrial Russia, just blank gray
buildings infrastructure that just make you feel depressed all the time.
I don't know if I'm a fan of that rewrap,
(04:23):
I think I'm definitely not a fan of this whole
general move to wanting things to be like they were
in the old days, and now that we're going out
to open plane cast classrooms and school.
Speaker 3 (04:33):
Government's decided, thank the Good Lord for that, to kill
the open, open plan classroom thing that we've been doing
for unknown reasons. We have been persisting with this ridiculous
idea and they've decided we're going to go back to
the single classrooms like the old days. Shirley Boys High
has already done this. Now Shirley Boy's High. Was am
(04:55):
I overstating it to say they're wanted the poster child
children of this? But I feel like they were back
in twenty nineteen been damaged by the earth quake and
they've got the rebuild going in twenty nineteen, and the
Ministry of Education said, if we're going to do it,
let's do the open planet with it. Because the Ministry
of Education was shoving it down everybody's throat, did it
for six years and then we're like, hmm, this is
(05:15):
not working. They asked, They asked the kids. They did
like a bit of a survey of kids and teachers
and parents, and everybody hated it so overwhelmingly that they
decided to put the walls back up, and it cost
them a small fortune for a school. Eight hundred thousand
dollars is a lot of money. Immediate results, hugely positive feedback,
said the principal staff on the first day, absolutely thrilled.
One of our teachers was hugging the walls in her
(05:37):
classroom because she was so thrilled to have wolves. The
boys are just much happier going to speak to that
principle after seven o'clock. I mean, who would have thought
that silence promotes concentration to hang on?
Speaker 2 (05:48):
When I was in Space five at Fenerlton Primary in
the seventies when Robert Muldoon was Prime Minister. Yes, whose
fault was that that I was at an open playing classroom?
Speaker 3 (06:00):
Then, well, the Ministry of Education, because everything is the
Ministry of Education's fault, isn't it.
Speaker 2 (06:05):
So I'm just trying to figure out which bit of
the past we're going back to. Obviously you wonder.
Speaker 3 (06:10):
How old school this is. Oh, this is pre Glenn
Old School. This is nineteen fifties, this is this is
the good days, the healthier days of Winston Peters type.
Speaker 2 (06:19):
You know. So we're going to be giving people the
strap again and we're going to.
Speaker 3 (06:22):
Make make New Zealand education system great again.
Speaker 2 (06:25):
Yes, I think my mad math feeling is pretty clear there.
See the problem with me in my open planning class
was that, and then they couldn't kick me out of
the class because they were just kicking me into another space.
I was in space five. That kicked me out into
space four or space six. In space four on space
(06:46):
six certainly want me so rewrapped. No, it sounds like
Heather's all over it. She's a massive, massive fan of
closing the classes.
Speaker 3 (06:54):
Now I've said it before, I'm going to say it again.
Erica Stanford is this government's MVP most valuable player for
once again taking an inexplicably stupid thing that we were
doing in schools, ditching it and going back to common sense. Now,
this is something very close to my heart at the
moment because I have to make a decision in kinda
roughly the next six months or so about which school
we send our son to. But it really isn't a
(07:16):
decision at all, because it's going to be the one
school in the area that has single classes instead of
open plan modern learning spaces. It is the school that
his best friend from KINDI is going to. It is
also the school that another parent I know has just
sent their child to. And all of us are doing
it for exactly the same reason, which is we want
to avoid those open planned learning spaces because we know,
(07:37):
like most parents do. I would say that if you
stick one hundred kids in a big room and tell
them to pay attention to the teacher in front of them,
they can't. They get distracted by the loud noises coming
from the other kids over there, or the TV over there,
or what the teacher is saying over there, or why
someone's laughing over there. There's just a hundred distractions all
the time. Why the Ministry of Education forced this on
schools will probably baffle me for the rest of my
(07:58):
life because there's no logic to it. No one who
has kids, will spends time with kids, can really believe
that kids can concentrate and learn when there are one
hundred voices chirping around them. Which idiot came up with this,
I'd actually love to know. Just to settle me, I'll
tell you what the legacy of this government could well
be that it finally turns around. Are up to now
(08:18):
decades long decline in education stats with that ban on
phones in schools, with the hour a day of reading,
writing and maths, with the expectation that kids must pass
existing standards, and actually gives our kids a chance to
learn as well as other kids in any other developed
country like we used to. And if that happens, then
Erica Stanford, given how crucial education is to a country success,
Erica Stanford will remain, as I see her, the MVP
(08:40):
of this government, if not of the decade, if not
of her generation.
Speaker 2 (08:44):
If not of bassoon players everywhere. And it's funny a
how it's just this general I sort of think of
Erica Stanford as being part of a younger generation, certainly
in a younger generation than me. And it's the same
worrying trend we've seen, this sort of lurch to the right.
(09:05):
It makes the younger people in the US ward's country
music amongst younger people across the world. I'm sick of
all these lurching young people. I want them to stop lurching.
I don't think lurching. Nobody's a fan of lurching, are they?
Speaker 1 (09:20):
Three? Wrap.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
Now we've been focused on young people in the podcast
today and Heather is kept focusing on them and she
wants them to focus on anything other than social media.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
I am pretty hot on having the social media band
for kids under the age of sixteen because it's rotting
their brains and I think it is one of the
worst things that we're doing to them at the moment.
One of the strongest arguments against that is that it
is impossible to ban kids from You cannot ban people
from stuff on the Internet because you cannot verify ages. Well,
(09:52):
actually you can, and this has been around for a
long time. Reddit is now doing it in the UK
because what's happened in the UK is they have passed
the law. They now require websites showing mature content like
porn or whatever to verify ages of people before people
can look at it. So Reddit has employed a third party.
This group is called Persona, and Persona is going to
(10:15):
do the age checking for them. Basically, if you want
to use Reddit in the UK, you go online, it
sends you to Persona. You then show Persona your selfie
or a photo of your government ID like passport or
driver's license or whatever, and Persona then goes yep, absolutely,
Glenn is over the age of eighteen. Glenn can look
at the stuff Bengo. Then you go back to Reddit.
You've got the token verifying you as being an adult,
(10:38):
and you can use Reddit. Reddit never gets to see
your photo. They never get to hold it because obviously
there are security concerns around like Bozo's around Bozos, like
Facebook having your details and then getting hacked by somebody.
Persona the third party only keeps it for about seven
days and then they get rid of it. But you
are verified, your on recorders having been verified, and that
(10:58):
is how you do it. It is totally plausible, it
is possible, and we can do it in this country if.
Speaker 2 (11:03):
We want to, or even easier, just ban it completely
so nobody has it.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
That's why he doesn't write the laws.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
But why do we only care about kids brains being
tuned to mush and not all of our brains being
turned to mush. You know, if we end up being
the only mush brain people around and the kids' brains
are working properly, we'll be you know, at their mercy.
They'll be our youthful overlords and we'll have to do
(11:33):
whatever they say they'll be the ones with all the
ideas and we'll just be the mush brains doing whatever
they say. You can't have that. I am no brain's
gone to mush. I'll see you back here again tomorrow.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
For more from News Talk st B, listen live on
air or online, and keep our shows with you wherever
you go with our podcasts on IAR Radio
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