Civil Defence has issued a national advisory warning of possible tsunami activity on New Zealand’s coastline following a 7.7 magnitude quake in the Pacific.

The earthquake struck at a depth of 38 kilometres, south east of the Loyalty Islands.

In a tweet, the National Emergency Management Agency said it expected “New Zealand coastal areas to experience strong and unusual currents and unpredictable surges at the shore”.

It added: “Strong currents and surges can injure and drown people. People in or near the sea in these areas should move out of the water, off beaches and shore areas and away from harbours, marinas, rivers and estuaries.”

More info can be found on the Civil Defence website here.

The prime minister will meet with Indian prime minister Narendra Modi during his short trip to Papua New Guinea over the weekend.

Chris Hipkins will depart for Port Moresby on Sunday night, meeting with Modi the following day. He’ll also get face-to-face time with Pacific leaders such as PNG prime minister James Marape and Cook Islands prime minister Mark Brown.

For Hipkins, it will be the first time he has met some of his Pacific counterparts since becoming prime minister.

US president Joe Biden was due to travel to the nation as well en route to Australia, but has since cancelled this trip altogether. Instead, secretary of state Antony Blinken will attend on behalf of Biden and it’s anticipated Hipkins will have the chance to meet with him instead.

“While this visit to Port Moresby will be relatively short, it is significant,” Hipkins said. “It includes several opportunities to talk with Pacific leaders, which is important given that I was unable to attend the Pacific Islands Forum earlier this year because of Cyclone Gabrielle.

“I am also pleased Secretary of State Blinken will be present. Regional unity is critical to the resilience of the Pacific. It’s excellent to see the United States engaging constructively with the Pacific Islands Forum members around issues of importance to our region, especially climate change.”

The Spinoff is set to travel with Hipkins to Port Moresby. We’ll have live updates and coverage on the ground next week.

It’s Friday, which means I can absolutely show you this excellent video of government minister Andrew Little. To be quite honest, I’d probably show you this on any other day of the week – it’s just really great content. And considering how much bad social media content is made by our MPs, that’s really saying something.

No other context is needed, just sit back and enjoy.

Promoters have pulled the plug on an Auckland show in July by British rapper Slowthai following an allegation of sexual assault in the UK. At the time of writing, a performance in New Plymouth appears to be going ahead.

Slowthai, real name Tyron Frampton, appeared in court on Tuesday to face charges of oral and vaginal penetration of a woman without her consent. The charges date back to September, 2021, The Guardian reported. He denies the charges, writing on social media: “I am innocent and I am confident my name will be cleared.”

The rapper was set to perform at Auckland’s Powerstation on July 14, but tickets were pulled from sale this afternoon and replaced with the message: “This event has been cancelled.” Promoters did not return The Spinoff’s request for comment. 

Tickets appear to still on sale for a second show in New Plymouth at the Nightlight festival in the Theatre Royal on July 15. The New Plymouth District Council, which operates Theatre Royal, told The Spinoff it wouldn’t comment until it had spoken to promoters.

In the wake of the allegations, Slowthai’s name was removed from line-ups for four major UK music festivals: Glastonbury, Reading, Leeds and Parklife. He was in New Zealand earlier this year for the Laneway festival, which was cancelled when Western Springs flooded. Instead, he played a flood relief show at Galatos on February 2. 

Immigration NZ said it would need until the end of the day to respond to a request about Frampton’s New Zealand Visa status.

Economists are predicting the Reserve Bank will hike the official cash rate again next week in the wake of yesterday’s budget.

While most are tipping a 0.25% jump, which would take the OCR to 5.5%, they are warning that another 0.5% hike is entirely possible.

“We expect the RBNZ will raise the official cash rate 25bp to 5.50%… next Wednesday,” said ANZ. “Clearly a pause is now a very unlikely scenario, and the odds of another 50 basis point hike have risen. We’d now put the chance of a 50bp lift as high as 40%. We’d also put greater odds on the May [monetary policy statement] showing a higher OCR forecast peak than our 5.7% expectation.”

That’s a similar stance to Kiwibank, whose economists said a 50 basis point jump couldn’t be ruled out, though agreed 0.25% rise was more likely. “And at this stage, the RBNZ will deliver a hawkish commentary, to ensure passthrough to retail rates. The relentless rise in retail rates will reverberate around and reinforce the retreat in residential property prices,” they said.

Auckland Transport has announced an eight week trial of allowing large dogs onboard the city’s bus network.

It follows a successful trial of allowing small dogs – potentially implemented after a plea from The Spinoff’s Stanley – that was launched last year.

Larger dogs that do not fit in carriers can start travelling on Auckland buses from Sunday, provided they are on leads and with approved muzzles fitted.

Councillor Josephine Bartley said it was exciting news. “Changes like this make catching public transport an option for more people,” she said. “I’d like to acknowledge the hard work of Dr Cathy Casey for pushing for changes like this over her many years as a councillor. I’m definitely looking forward to taking my dog Milo on the bus soon.”

* This is an excerpt from The Spinoff’s Friday TV newsletter Rec Room. Sign up for regular instalments here.

Netflix is going all-in on documentaries this week, starting with Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, a deep dive into the sordid details surrounding the model and socialite star’s life and untimely death. This one’s been labelled “depressing” by Variety. If that’s not enough, it also unveils McGregor Forever, about the MMA fighter Connor McGregor, and Working, Barack Obama’s series in which the former American president meets ordinary, everyday members of the working class.

Elsewhere, Apple TV+ keeps its impressive run of releases going with the second season of Prehistoric Planet, the David Attenborough-narrated dinosaur doco (my kids love this one), and High Desert, which is earning Patricia Arquette plenty of praise for her role as a recovering addict turned private investigator. “A tour-de-force of mad, messy, brazen desperation and determination,” declared The Daily Beast.

If you’re still watching zombie spinoff Fear The Walking Dead after seven seasons, congratulations, you made it: season eight begins on Neon this week. While you’re there, you can find all episodes of homegrown comedy Bouncers – we called it a “good show that could be great”. TVNZ+ has Bad Behaviour, another entry in the teenage boarding school drama category, this time from Australia.

If you’re after a movie at home, you can rent The Drop, a comedy from the Duplass brothers that has a really great trailer, and Linoleum, in which a children’s TV host tries to build a rocket ship in his garage, from Neon. Meanwhile, Amazon Prime debuts the incredibly titled Gerard Butler movie Plane. Otherwise, if you’re heading to theatres, Zach Braff’s A Good Person is finally getting a local release, but who are we kidding, you’re going to go and see Fast X, the tenth instalment of the Fast & Furious franchise, just like everyone else. Vroom.

New Zealand poet Kevin Ireland has died at the age of 89, reports Stuff.

The celebrated writer’s had been deteriorating for several weeks due to an aggressive form of cancer. He was taken into hospice care on Thursday night and died overnight.

Ireland’s niece, Karen, told Stuff that for her uncle to pass during stormy weather was a “fitting end for a poet, going gently into the wild night”.

Read more on Ireland’s life and career here.

Striking a pose – Kevin Ireland (1979)

we’ll stock up books
and wine and pie
then stop the clocks
and never die

we’ll nail the windows
brick up the door
and live on a mattress
on the floor

if death still comes
we’ll strike a pose
and hold our breath
until he goes

Bread and circuses (but mostly bread)

The award for funniest take on Budget 2023 goes to up-and-coming political sketch writer Toby Manhire, whose depiction of the post-budget parliamentary debate begins on a high note – the traditional budget-day cheese rolls had been “impaled with sausages, to create what Robertson called, monstrously, ‘meat cheese rolls’” – and includes a wonderful line on the repeated references to Hipkins’ “addiction” to spending in Luxon’s speech to parliament. “It was like Cocaine Bear,” writes Manhire, “but everyone had been snorting bread and butter.”

A ‘kludgeocratic’ budget

Danyl Mclauchlan also delivers a beautifully written budget response, while introducing me to a new word: “kludgeocracy”, meaning “a clumsy but temporarily effective solution to a particular fault or problem”. This was a kludgeocratic budget in an era where such budgets are now the norm, Mclauchlan writes. “They deliver payouts to cohorts of swing voters and politically connected industry sectors, because these are in the immediate interests of the politicians, pollsters and strategists who design our budgets. It’s a bad way to run a country but an excellent way to win elections.”

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With the political and economic gravities pulling in various directions, the finance minister was tasked with providing support for the hardest hit by the cost-of-living crisis without heaping sugar in an already high-inflation sauce. And on top of that, it’s an election year. To assess whether Grant Robertson managed to thread that needle, Gone By Lunchtime’s Toby Manhire sits down with When the Facts Change’s Bernard Hickey, to discuss their Budget 2023 reactions.

Listen below or wherever you get your pods

National has pledged to reverse one of the headline policies of yesterday’s budget: the removal of the $5 prescription fee.

The party’s deputy leader Nicola Willis first floated the reversal during an interview with Stuff last night, saying it was simply a “nice to have” and a subsidy for “higher-income people”. You can never trust Twitter for presenting an accurate view of domestic politics, but my feed last night was almost entirely screenshots of that article.

By this morning, leader Christopher Luxon had softened that position from a pure backtrack into a more specific position. He told Newstalk ZB’s Mike Hosking that he was against “universal” free prescriptions, but believed a more targeted approach would work. “I don’t think it makes sense to subsidise big retailers… I do think there is a need for a targeted approach but you could implement a very targeted approach by just targeting community service card holders or super gold card holders,” he said. (The super gold card is universally available to pensioners, including very wealthy ones).

Luxon also said his party objected to free bus rides for under 13 year olds, saying it wasn’t a good use of money. “We were told we were going to get a very prudent budget but actually we got a reckless one,” he said. “This is a finance minister that’s missed his numbers six years in a row, we’ve got massive addiction to spending, we’ve got more debt, we’ve got massive deficits and all that does is lead to higher interest rates. And there’s no tax relief for just working, regular Kiwis.”

Pushed by Hosking over whether the fact New Zealand was set to avoid a recession was politically bad for National, Luxon said the country would still be feeling the pinch with high inflation set to hang around. Middle New Zealanders should have been offered some sort of tax relief in the budget, Luxon added.

Wellington Police have arrested a man in relation to the devastating fire at a Newtown hostel earlier in the week.

Few details are known, due to the matter now being before the court, but a police statement confirmed the man was facing two counts arson and will appear in the district court today.

The scene investigation at the Loafers Lodge is ongoing and police haven’t ruled out further and more serious charges in relation to the confirmed deaths. At least six people were killed in the blaze, but a number of people remain unaccounted for. So far, two bodies have been recovered by police.

Acting Wellington district commander inspector Dion Bennett was confident that police were not seeking anyone else in relation to the fire.