The finance minister does not believe that money spent on the scrapped TVNZ-RNZ merger was a waste.

Yesterday saw the cancellation or indefinite postponement of several major government proposals. Along with the media merger, hate speech laws were bumped down the line and the income insurance scheme was deferred until at least after the election.

Grant Robertson told RNZ that while the merger’s planning did cost millions, it wasn’t wasted cash. “There’s an argument about whether money is wasted or money is spent… If the question you’re asking is how much have we actually spent, allocated in the Budget last year was around $23 million,” he said. “Not all of that has actually been spent. We’ll go through the wash-up of that with the minister of broadcasting in the next little while.”

At yesterday’s post-cabinet press conference, the prime minister Chris Hipkins said he would rather not look back on the now failed policy proposals, but was instead dedicated to the future and his focus on the cost of living.

Despite the backlash in the United States prompting a temporary pause, Netflix has confirmed it will push ahead with its plan to stop password sharing. New Zealand is one of just a handful of countries that will have to endure the truly outrageous new policy in the coming months, before a wider roll out.

We’ve published an explainer on the new rules here – and below is what Netflix shared to its website earlier today.

According to the streamer, the new features will give users “more control over your account”, which seems ironic considering it’s exactly the opposite.

As of today, children as young as six months old can be vaccinated against Covid-19.

The government announced late last year that the vaccine had been approved for children under five, with the rollout beginning this week. Only those who are at greater risk from the virus are able to be vaccinated, however, and booster shots have not been approved.

In comments via the Science Media Centre, Otago University epidemiologist Dr Amanda Kvalsvig said it was welcome news. “This decision will mean better protection for children with underlying conditions, who are known to be at risk of more severe infection,” she said.

However, Kvalsvig queried why not all children could access the vaccine. “Data from the WellKiwis cohort, an ongoing study of respiratory infections in NZ families, show that during the omicron waves of 2022, one to four year-olds were the highest infected age group of all,” she said.  “Between February and October 2022, three in four children (75.4%) aged one to four years tested positive for Covid-19.”

While Covid often did not cause a serious reaction in very children, it was still the seventh highest cause of death in the United States, “ahead of many other conditions that children are vaccinated against as a matter of routine”.

More wild weather is predicted to slam the top of the North Island this weekend, in what one forecaster has labelled “one of the most serious storms forecast for New Zealand so far this century”.

Cyclone Gabrielle is on track to hit the country from Sunday, though windy weather is predicted to arrive earlier.

Weather Watch tweeted to say the seriousness was not because the cyclone was arriving after the recent flooding in Auckland. The storm was just expected to severe in its own right. “It reminds us of a cross between Cyclone Drena and Cyclone Fergus,” the forecaster said, saying it “may well be” the storm of the century.

Metservice said it was closely monitoring the storm, and forecasts were still slightly unpredictable. “Easterly winds are expected to pick up about northern parts of the North Island during the weekend, and there is moderate confidence of severe gales for Northland on Sunday, along with low confidence of warning amounts of rain,” they said.

Niwa has also released a warning, saying current predictions suggest Gabrielle will be “very heavy rain, damaging winds and dangerous seas”.

The institute added: “The cyclone’s exact track will play a very important role as to which regions experience the worst weather. As you might notice, there is still some uncertainty, but most members show an impact!”

This didn’t get buried yesterday, especially with the quantification of exactly how much cocaine was found, but it did perhaps lose some oxygen to the policy announcements. Police commissioner Andrew Coster announced yesterday that, in a joint operation between New Zealand’s police, customs and the defence force, 3.2 tonnes of cocaine ($500m in street value) was found dropped at a transit point in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. “We believe there was enough cocaine to service the Australian market for about one year and this would be more than New Zealand would use in 30 years,” said Coster.

Cocaine use has doubled in New Zealand in recent times, with Latin American cartels exporting methamphetamine and cocaine into New Zealand because of the high prices. The last record-breaking seizure of cocaine was in Tauranga in March 2022, where a 700kg shipment was intercepted by customs.

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We can tick it off our list of concert predictions – pop star P!NK has announced her return to New Zealand in early 2024.

The American singer will play stadium shows in Dunedin and Auckland as part of her Summer Carnival show, with “special guests” yet to be announced.

“I am so excited to finally get a chance to tour Australia and New Zealand in the summer!! I can’t wait to bring the Summer Carnival Tour to my home away from home, and smile and sing together until our cheeks hurt,” P!NK said. “Summer 2024 can’t come soon enough!”

The shows will take place at Dunedin’s Forsyth Barr Stadium on March 5 next year and Eden Park in Auckland on March 8.

The last time P!NK toured our shows she played a six-night run at Spark Arena, so while stadiums are a bit of a step up, you can expect massive demand (especially after the Covid-induced dearth of live events).

Pre-sales start next week and general tickets are on sale February 17 – the same day P!NK’s new album Trustfall is released.

The opposition has been banging on about the government’s unwieldy policy agenda for months – and now it’s been given the chance to criticise it for coming too late and being too costly.

Speaking to Newstalk ZB this morning, Christopher Luxon said these policies should never have been announced in the first place. “What a stupendous waste of money, time and resources – it’s sort of like ‘let’s do this’ but ‘let’s not do this’,” the National Party leader said.

“It’s getting rid of dumb stuff that shouldn’t have happened in the first place.”

Luxon said the change in Labour leadership didn’t change the fact you can’t trust the government. “Chris Hipkins supported this whole agenda to the hilt, he’s going to do and say anything he thinks voters want to hear,” said Luxon. “This agenda is going to come back, you can’t trust them.”

It’s true that Hipkins didn’t rule out resuscitating some of the newly dumped policies in the future. Things like the social insurance scheme and hate speech legislation could be back in the future, once there is either public appetite for it or, considering the “bread and butter” of it all, a better economic situation. But Luxon said this was simply “cynical politics”.

On the decsion to raise the minimum wage, Luxon said he understood why it was important – but he didn’t support the amount it was being raised by. “I was in Christchurch and a young woman came up to me, 18 employees, and just burst into tears and said ‘Chris, I can’t stomach all these extra costs, extra increases’… The core issue is this government has not dealt with the underlying issues around inflation.”