Stories by Phil Pennington

Police did not brief the Police Minister or seek his approval for their move to set up a powerful new facial recognition and image handling system, the minister's office says.

Huge plastic bladders, each weighing as much as 20,000 plastic bags, are being dumped in landfills with no controls and no record-keeping.

Auckland Council admits it was at fault for not telling North Shore residents about contamination arising in part from maintenance of the Harbour Bridge.

The Department of Internal Affairs has signed a master agreement with a global biometrics tech supplier that just about any public or private organisation can be allowed to join.

Officials are promising that the country's war memorial Carillon instrument in Wellington will not need to be disassembled for major repairs again.

A huge Auckland quarry's attempt to expand has been knocked back under new wetland rules that both industry and conservationists describe as a threat.

Auckland Harbour Bridge maintenance work and operations contaminated land next to houses with heavy metals above permitted levels, but the Transport Agency opted not to tell locals.

Vehicle warrant of fitness inspectors alarmed at illegal repairs of seatbelts have forced action from authorities.

A $7.7m hunt is on for a deadly mineral beneath Auckland, but has already run into objections from city rail tunnellers.

A company the US says is owned or controlled by China's military made a bid to run the New Zealand police's new facial recognition and image handling system.

Serious safety concerns have been highlighted in the design of two highway viaducts being built north of Auckland.

The Transport Agency has changed tack on what has gone wrong at a $140m highway project in Tauranga.

One of the country's most expensive stretches of new highway just got more costly - and further delayed - by buried pumice engineers failed to spot.

The head of intensive care at Christchurch Hospital is warning some surgery for children and adults will have to be put off because of funding woes.

Truckers are finding shock absorbers torn from trailers and steering joints failing more often and blame the worsening state of highways.

The safety regulator is promising to get better legal advice about whether to prosecute in future, after it failed to act over a crash that killed two boys in 2018.

Christchurch City Council has taken no action against the engineers of an office block in a city-centre mall constructed with multiple earthquake design defects.

Auckland Council has pulled out of a plan to expand the city's network of CCTV cameras because it would have cost too much.

A Canterbury Māori health leader is outraged the region's deficit-laden DHB has built a new emergency care unit for children but cannot afford to staff it.

New services to improve emergency and acute care of children at Christchurch Hospital will not open because there is no money to staff them.

A scathing report into Transport Agency contracts is causing ructions among construction industry leaders.

Police have been quietly setting up a $9 million facial recognition system that can take a live feed from CCTV cameras and identify people from it. Video

Tauranga ratepayers face a $7m-plus bill to demolish a defect-riddled central city carpark building, but dodged a catastrophic failure.

Firefighters are warning a Fire and Emergency restructure might put less experienced staff in charge at blazes, but FENZ rejects that.

A major company at the centre of controversies over facial recognition technology in the US and UK is working closely with the New Zealand government.