The country’s unemployment rate has nudged up to 3.9% in the September quarter, new figures from Stats NZ show.

It compared with 3.6% over the previous quarter, and up from 3.2% this time last year.

The underutilisation rate – a broader measure of spare labour market capacity than unemployment alone – was 10.4% over the last quarter, up from 8.8% a year ago.

“Increases in unemployment and underutilisation over the year indicate increasing spare capacity in the labour market following competitive labour market conditions in 2021 and 2022,” said Stats NZ’s work and wellbeing senior manager Victoria Treliving.

“The fall in the employment rate over the quarter reflects two factors – growth in the working-age population and a decrease in the number of employed people.”

Meanwhile, wage cost inflation, driven by an increase to public sector salary and wages, remained unchanged at 4.3% in the September quarter.

“This has been influenced by collective agreements for teachers, nurses, and the NZ Defence Force over the past year,” said Stats NZ’s Bryan Downes.

The AA has announced membership price increases, blaming the current “economic climate”.

In an email to subscribers, the association said it was the first time prices had been hiked since 2004.

“Due to today’s economic climate, including increases in our operating costs, it is necessary to implement a price increase of $10 to standard AA Memberships. For those Members with Membership upgrades such as AA Plus and AA Motorhome Plus, these are increasing in price by $5 respectively,” AA said.

“This increase – our first in 19 years – will allow us to maintain the quality and service you’ve come to expect from the AA, and enable us to continue improving your Membership experience in the future.”

Christopher Luxon has called the language used in an email sent by one of his senior MPs “strong” and says he has spoken with him.

The email from Chris Bishop has been circulating on social media in recent days. In it, he compares the “barbarity” of Hamas’s attacks on Israel to the holocaust. “After 1945 the world said ‘never again’, well – now it is happening again,” wrote Bishop.

Speaking to RNZ, Luxon said the email reflected the emotion related to the ongoing conflict but said he had spoken to Bishop about it.

“I thought it was strong language, it’s also representative of the strong emotions on all sides of this debate,” said Luxon.

On Newshub, Luxon added: “He’s responding to a private email. My conversation with him was like, ‘I think you’ve got to be a bit more careful about that language’.”

The Herald’s Thomas Coughlan reports that a paper taken to cabinet by James Shaw in July said the government was no longer on track to meet its first emissions budget in 2025. According to the paper, proactively released on October 19, significant and costly action offshore will be required to hit its first Paris Agreement target in 2030. The paper kicked off the process of reviewing New Zealand’s Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC). An NDC is a climate action plan and every country signed up to the Paris agreement is required to have one and to update it every five years. In 2021, New Zealand committed to up its NDC to reduce net greenhouse gas emissions to 50% below 2005 levels by 2030. To meet the NDC, the government is relying on offshore deals that will offset emissions New Zealand does not get rid of domestically. In 2021, the estimated cost of that was between $7.5b-$13.2b. A new analysis of the cost of hitting a 50% reduction target by 2030 now has an upper limit of $23.7b.

In new international research released this week, scientists have found that emissions would have to plunge to net zero globally by 2034 to retain a 50% chance of limiting global temperature rise to the 1.5C target laid out in the Paris agreement. For a 90% chance of keeping below 2C (the upper limit of the Paris agreement), emissions would have to hit net zero in about 2035, the study found.

Want to read The Bulletin in full? Click here to subscribe and join over 39,000 New Zealanders who start each weekday with the biggest stories in politics, business, media and culture. 

The incoming prime minister says he’ll be working “as quickly as possible” to form a government once the special votes have been tallied. But, he told Newstalk ZB this morning, what exactly those votes would show did create some uncertainty. “I can’t really give you a timeframe, I need to see those special votes counted,” Christopher Luxon told Mike Hosking.

He added that he wouldn’t be able to do it “exactly on Friday” – which is when the votes are revealed – but would move “as quickly as we can in the coming week”.

Asked whether negotiations had progressed significantly over the past week, Luxon said he believed they have. “We’ve still got negotiations to have, issues we’re working our way through… but we’ve been working really diligently,” he said. “We’ve used the time smartly, in a difficult time where there’s uncertainty… We’ve made tremendous progress… we all understand the urgency.”

Luxon reiterated his view that three weeks was too long for the special vote count and signalled he would look to update the law once he was in government.

Over on RNZ, Luxon was pressed for his views on the ongoing conflict in Gaza. He backed the New Zealand stance issued by the outgoing government which called for a humanitarian truce and wouldn’t specifically call for a ceasefire. “We expect all parties to be acting in accordance with international law and to demonstrate basic humanity, we also do support Israel’s right to defend itself. Hamas’s attacks were unacceptable, barbaric terrorist attacks on Israel,” he said.

“We know there is a major need to protect civilians and to get humanitarian assistance into Gaza.”

The parties on the ground “don’t want a ceasefire”, said Luxon, and New Zealand was first and foremost calling for a humanitarian truce in the region.