Phil Pennington

After three years of pressure over warrants of fitness, vehicle inspectors can expect a softer approach, the Motor Trade Association says.

A new way of measuring what contractors are charging the government will set out the range of what is paid for each type of job.

Police drones are at risk of the data they gather ending up in cloud servers the Chinese government can access, but this can be managed, and the benefits outweigh the risks.

The police pushed for an urgent ban on a type of handbrake after a runaway truck killed a man, but transport officials took 18 months to do it.

The government does not have figures on how steeply contractor and consultants' pay rates have been going up.

The Security Intelligence Service says it has been "quite open" about the importance of data to detect and mitigate threats.

Public servants' pay is being frozen for three years, but not the rates the sector pays to thousands of contractors and consultants.

Hutt Valley High School has failed to secure a binding commitment from the Education Minister to quickly rebuild a mould-riddled teaching block.

An Australian billionaire is looking at using the aluminium smelter site at Tiwai Point near Bluff for environmentally friendly hydrogen production.

KiwiRail is cautious about offering a solution to a rickety bridge that carries a large proportion of the country's potatoes and carrots off the slopes below Mt Ruapehu.

A century-old wooden bridge full of holes that carries masses of the country's potatoes and carrots is jeopardising truckers' safety and farmers' livelihoods.

Police were lauding their counterterrorism intelligence system shortly after the mosque attacks, even though they knew parts of it were in a woeful state.

It took seven months for police to set up their first team for scanning the internet after the mosque attacks - but it was almost immediately in danger of being shut down.

The NZ Security Intelligence Service took two years to implement a major shift in how it targeted threats, but once it did, the rewards were almost immediate.

Environmental experts checking on contamination at Tiwai Point aluminium smelter are looking at 400 samples from 200 sites.

The Transport Agency is continuing to work on what to do about truck handbrake failures that have caused deaths and injuries.

A US watchdog of state surveillance says the advisers that New Zealand police are bringing in have a lot to watch out for.

An ex-truckie from Mosgiel whose friend parked a truck that rolled away, killing a pedestrian, says a handbrake hazard should have been acted on before the incident happened.

Tests on truck handbrakes have found high rates of failure, and concluded the way the brakes are routinely checked is ineffective.

A half-a-billion-dollar pothole in road funding has been patched over but key projects remain in jeopardy.

Private contractors and consultants are doing well out of government spending propelled by the pandemic and big IT projects.

The earthquake-prone Carillon bell tower in Wellington may take more time to fix than deadlines allow.

A complaint about the safety of a common earthquake bracing system has been rejected by officials, but has exposed weaknesses in the engineering system.

The SIS has adopted new terminology to describe threats and says the concern should be with violent extremists of varying ideologies, not be conflated with communities.

The Ministry of Health wants to change the way people's medical records are shared nationwide, with IT health experts growing frustrated in the meantime.