I've always understood the theory behind mainstreaming. We're all different, we all have different abilities, different attitudes, and a classroom of individuals with diverse personalities and levels of learning prepares young people for the real world. You're not among your own kind once you leave school and enter the workplace, enter the community. Mainstreaming means that kids who are different physically, intellectually, socially, aren't siloed or separated or marginalised. They're part of the wider school community and if they need extra time or attention, well in an ideal classroom, the teacher gladly offers it and the other students make space, accepting that some people need more resources than others.

That's the theory. In reality, for many families, mainstreaming is brutal for teachers, for students, both the normies and the diverse students, the families of the normies. It can work, but only if there are the resources and the goodwill to make it happen. In reality, overworked teachers simply do not have the time or indeed the training to be able to offer the sort of specialised education that children with diverse and complex needs need.

Now the Government has announced funding for two new specialist schools, catering to children with high needs and disabilities. They are the first schools for such kids to be built in 50 years, which is how long the prevailing ideology of mainstreaming clearly has been going on. Education Minister Erica Stanford and Finance Minister Nicola Willis made the announcement yesterday at Queen Elizabeth College in Palmerston North. That college's campus will host one of the schools, which will open in Term 2 of 2027. The other will open next to Ngākōroa School in Drury in South Auckland in Term 1 of 2028.

The announcement of the two special schools, together with the Autism New Zealand education hubs that opened in Term 3 of last year for neurodivergent secondary students struggling with traditional schooling, really will give some parents, some kids, some choices. The charter schools sponsored by Autism New Zealand are operating from campuses in Wellington and Auckland, 96 students to begin with, and utilises homeschooling, online learning and community-based learning as a way to transition students back into the classroom learning face-to-face.

Autism NZ has accepted that there are many young people with autism for whom mainstreaming simply does not work. It doesn't work for them, it doesn't work for the other students, it doesn't work for the teachers. And so to get the best out of young people, they have created a curriculum that best suits them. It makes sense. Of course there are naysayers. Some education academics believe more money should be put into mainstream schools to cater for those with diverse needs rather than building special schools for them.

But that won't work for every child. What do they say? If you've met one neurodiverse child... There are some children for whom mainstreaming absolutely works, but not every child is going to enjoy being a square peg trying to squeeze through a round hole. Some will, but surely the alternative education hubs that have opened and those that are being planned make sense for parents who recognise that their child's potential can only be realised with specialist teachers in a school that's built to accommodate complex needs. It's back to the future, and those who are not blinkered and blinded by ideology know that there are lessons to be learned from the past.

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The Government is building two new specialist schools for children with complex learning needs.

The schools in Palmerston North and South Auckland will open in 2027 and 2028 respectively.

Education Minister Erica Stanford says debate has raged on whether such children should be in mainstream or special schools.

She told Kerre Woodham that there’s an argument that every single child should be mainstream no matter the degree of need, but it was never going to happen.

Stanford says they’re the first government in a very long time to draw the line and say it’s about choice – if your children need highly specialised care, then that should be a choice that is available to you.

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Concerns that banning the use of boats and jet skis by fire stations is a box ticking exercise.

Fire and Emergency NZ banned the use of all powered watercrafts by local fire stations in May of 2025.

The decision means that Waikato’s volunteer fire stations are unable to use their jet skis and boat during emergency situations on the Waikato River.

Yesterday saw Fire and Emergency face tough questioning on the subject at the Governance and Administration Select Committee.

Waikato MP Tim van de Molen told Kerre Woodham it’s a classic case of bureaucracy and red tape stifling practical, common-sense solutions.

He says that every brigade needs to be able to operate to safe standards, but the brigades in question have undertaken significant effort to ensure they’re doing exactly that.

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I have said it before and I'll say it again. We can argue for hours, we can have online debates, we can write letters to the editor about whether extreme weather events are the result of anthropomorphic activity or whether we're just in the middle of a natural cycle that's occurred for millennia, but ultimately, what we think about climate change doesn't really matter. It's what banks and insurers and councils and the Government thinks that matters. And when they decide climate change is making some homes uninsurable, there's no arguing about it. Insurance companies just will not insure you, which means you won't be able to get a mortgage, which means you won't be able to buy a home in certain places unless you can buy it on your EFTPOS card, like Westport.

There's a story on Radio New Zealand's website today. A major insurance company has temporarily stopped offering new home insurance policies in Westport because of the fact that the town floods and floods again. AA Insurance, which has approximately half a million New Zealand customers, wrote to Buller District Mayor Chris Russell at the end of 2023 to tell him AA would halt new business home and landlord insurance policies for properties in the 7825 postcode, which covers Westport, Carters Beach and Cape Foulwind. The company said existing policies would stay in place and it had put a transfer policy in place for anyone looking to buy or sell a home that was currently insured with AA.

Tower Insurance is another one. People who own properties in locations where Tower deems the risk is too great are now being denied insurance cover outright. Beware signing up to a sale and purchase agreement before you can be sure you have insurance. A couple of legal firms are saying would-be buyers have found when they apply for a mortgage that they've signed up for a property on an insurer's red-lined list. Because they can't get insurance, they can't get the mortgage. But with no insurance condition in their sale and purchase agreement, they still have a contractual obligation to settle on the purchase.

Back to Westport. The West Coast Regional Council Chief Executive said the first stages of the Resilient Westport project involved building 17 kilometres of stopbanks. Most of that work's in the planning and design stages, but two sections have been built already and that will be protecting around 30 houses that hadn't had that protection before. And in the next few months, they'll be progressing more of the flood bank, which will result in more houses being protected. And the council plans to show that to insurers who'll be visiting the town at the end of next month as different stages of the flood protection scheme are completed.

So AA has said to Westport that if its flood exposure drops below the maximum exposure limit in the future, if they believe the flood banks will do the job of protecting the homes, then they'll reopen books to new customers. But they're not the first insurer to stop insuring where they deem the risk is too great, and they certainly won't be the last.

So as I say, we can argue all we like about climate change and who's responsible and whether anyone should be held responsible at all. It really doesn't matter because policies are being drafted, policies are being enacted that take climate change into account. And whatever we believe, we will be denied insurance, paying the increased premiums, reshaping our towns and communities as a result of what the banks, the insurers and the council believe.

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The arrival of Netflix and other film streaming services was the death knell for video rental stores. Five years after Netflix arrived in New Zealand in 2015, the majority of stores, once mainstays of our weekends —who didn't go in and spend an hour or so in the video rental store trying to decide what to choose for the weekend?— had closed across the country.

Yet despite 99% of New Zealanders saying they used email regularly in that same year, 2015, postal services have endured. Now sure, they've reduced as mail volumes have dropped off. 2015 was a big year because that's when postal deliveries went from six days a week to three as the mail volumes declined. But at least my toll payment notices and my cards from Aunt Barbara are still arriving in my letterbox three days a week.

The decline of video stores was relatively quick, if not painless. The decline of postal services is long and slow and may yet not be terminal. Take the announcement yesterday that New Zealand Post is to remove its services from 142 franchise partners. On the face of it, grim news. Yet in the same press release, New Zealand Post GM of Consumer announced that many of the remaining stores will be upgraded and new retail hubs featuring modern spaces designed for parcel sending, collection, and returns will be opening across the country. All well and good.

But for the franchises, those businesses that had New Zealand Post services in their stores, they say people do still send letters and parcels. They do still contribute significantly to their businesses. The owner of Marsden Books in Karori, Briony Hogg, told Ryan Bridge this morning that having the post office in store brings in a number of people.

BH: For us as a small bookshop in a suburban area, it's all about the people that it brings into the store. People would come in to do their posting and while they're in there, they'll buy a card and they'll buy a book and they'll have a chat and we build a relationship with these people and yeah, we're really, really disappointed that we've lost that.

RB: Do you know what sort of impact it might have on your bottom line?

BH: It's going to be pretty significant. It is a large portion of our revenue. So now we're going to have to think about ways that we pivot, ways that we change in the way we do business. And it's been a pretty exhausting couple of years to be a small business owner. I'm sure there's people out there that just don't have the energy to do that sort of pivot anymore. So yeah, it's going to be really, really significant, not just on me, but on all the other 141 outlets that got closed yesterday.

Yes, it's interesting too the choice of franchise owners that NZ Post has chosen to keep. I am no NZ Post GM Consumer, but a bookstore seems to make more sense for a New Zealand Post franchise than a service station, but there we go.

The fact remains it's a government-owned company and if it's making a loss, that's a loss the taxpayer has to wear. In the 2024 financial year, the state-owned enterprise reported a loss of $14 million. Chump change if you're a former Labour government, but nonetheless $14 million. The moves announced yesterday are part of the plan to return to profitability.

In a way, it would be quite freeing to not have postal services anymore. I'm still hung up on sending cards to denote formal occasions, but I faff around. I still owe a thank you card to generous hosts from Christmas. A month has now gone by. Their generosity was such that I need to acknowledge it, and an email just doesn't do it. Yet I would have sent an email within days of Christmas. But because I'm still trying to find the right card and get an actual physical voucher, it'll probably be Easter before I post my thank you. And a thank you delayed is an ill-mannered ingrate. So if there was no postal service, I could use that as an excuse rather than just faffing around. But I still love sending cards and maybe that's just a generational thing. There may be those of you 30 and under who are thinking, "What? I only get my speeding tickets in the mail and that is that and I could easily do that online." But some occasions just seem to require a formal thank you, a formal handwritten "I've taken the time to acknowledge what you've done for me and I appreciate it." And I would be really, really, really sorry to see that go.

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And here we all are, another summer, and while for many people it was fun in the sun and family catchups, for others it was dealing with floods and landslides. Specialised crews are still working, and will be working for some time yet, on recovering the bodies of the missing Mount Maunganui campers. Families are mourning the loss of a Welcome Bay grandmother and grandson killed in another Bay of Plenty landslip, and around the country communities are dealing with being cut off from main thoroughfares and facing lengthy drives to access any kind of amenities, probably counting their lucky stars that their family members are not among the dead and injured from this year's summer storms.

It's horrifying, but it's not unexpected, is it? Ever since humans have attempted to tame the environment around them, they've had to deal with the fact that often they will come off second best. So, do we need to rethink how and where we build our communities? It's the definition of madness to do the same thing over and over again and expect different results, and yet that is what we do.

Cabinet's meeting this morning and Prime Minister Christopher Luxon told Mike Hosking they'd be discussing the hundreds of millions of dollars needed to fix major roading damage from this year's summer storms. Last year they met to discuss the hundreds of millions of dollars that would be needed to fix roads, the year before that they needed to fix kilometres of roads around the country, and that too would cost hundreds of millions of dollars. A large part of the Waioeka Gorge, which connects Gisborne and Bay of Plenty, will be closed for several weeks to clear slips from the roads. Farmers in the region are calling for a plan B and a more resilient road network because they say they can't handle being cut off from the rest of the country every 18 to 36 months.

There are some communities that are looking at other options, rather than rebuilding every time there are floods and doing that every 18 to 36 months. You've got the town of Westport that's looking at a long-term managed retreat strategy, where they're not going to build a new town per se, but gradually any new projects will be built on higher, safer ground away from the severe flood risk, and there'll be plans for a new hub and infrastructure to encourage gradual relocation over generations.

There's also a proposal to shift Kumeū's town centre over a number of years. That was tabled by the Auckland Council around about this time last year. A proposal to shift Kumeū and Huapai area because it has a repeated history of flooding, and yes, you can pay the higher insurance rates and you can rebuild and do it again and again, but why would you if there is an alternative? Infrastructure proposals are also being put forward, but a number of community leaders are saying it's pointless, it's putting your finger in the dyke. The better option is to concede defeat and build somewhere else.

Certainly there are ways to mitigate damage from flooding and landslips, there are ways of predicting which areas are more prone to flooding and landslips, technology's improving all the time. In some instances though, do we just need to acknowledge that we are no match for the power of nature, concede defeat and step away?

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Inflation's officially higher than it's supposed to be.

Latest Stats NZ data shows inflation's reached 3.1% – up from 3% at the last update three months ago.

That's above the Reserve Bank's target range of 1 to 3%.

The Herald's Liam Dann told John MacDonald it's also well above the Reserve Bank's forecast of 2.7%.

He says there were hopes inflation was starting to fall again, so to see a rise like this isn't good at face value.

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