Nine To Noon for Wednesday 19 November 2025

09:05  Police move to next phase of mental health pull-back 

Police attended 7,370 fewer mental health-related requests in the year to June, as a result of the deliberate plan to wind back on responding to calls for help.  And the department expects to respond to even fewer calls this year - as it enters phase three of that plan - which includes pulling back on searching for people missing from mental health facilities and emergency departments. The phased approach began a year ago Nov 4 and has so-far involved police limiting the time spent with someone in an emergency department, raising the threshold for transport of someone with a mental illness, and tightening rules around where mental health assessments can take place. Police maintain they will attend calls if there has been an offence committed or if there is a risk to life or safety. The fourth and final phase will see 15-minute ED handovers, and police lifting to threshold for welfare checks where there is not believed to be a risk of criminality or safety. Police Assistant Commissioner Mike Johnson and Health NZ Director of Specialist Mental Health and Addiction Karla Bergquist join Kathryn.

09:20 Report warns gas mismanagement could cost $7.3 billion

New Zealand needs to better manage the decline of domestic gas, to avoid further costly closures of commercial and industrial businesses, according to a new report by a global consulting firm. The four big power generator-retailers commissioned the Boston Consulting Group report. Commercial and domestic gas customers are experiencing significant price rises, as the country’s pipeline of natural gas dwindles. Last year several large industrial plants shut down, partly as a result of this, with the loss of hundreds of jobs. The BCG report urges the sector to accelerate further drilling of all existing gas fields and for the government to bring back a fund to support businesses to transition to biomass or electricity by 2030. It says not properly managing the gas decline could cost the economy 7.3 billion dollars per year. Richard Hobbs is partner at BCG and lead author of both this report. 

09:35  Push to help employers be more inclusive to solve worker shortages

The government is aiming to get more disabled and neurodiverse people employed in manufacturing, engineering and logistics by boosting the information available to help employers. Despite unemployment rates of over 5%,  this sector is predicted to have a shortfall of over 150,000 workers in 5 years time as infrastructure projects get underway. There has also been an exodus of skilled workers to Australia. But at the same time, there is an estimated available workforce in the disabled community of nearly 270,000. Now a new Government multimedia platform has been launched that aims to give employers the confidence to  interact with, support and hire more disabled workers. It's been development by the Workforce Development Council or Hanga-Aro-Rau, which has described the inclusion of disabled and neurodiverse workers as an economic necessity to rebuild workforce capability. Kathryn speaks to Grace Stratton the Chief Executive of All is for All, a consultancy that assists organisations to be inclusive and accessible for disabled people. lt co-designed the resources for the new platform - Lets Level Up. Kathryn also speaks to Richard Templer, Chief Executive of Engineering New Zealand. 

09:45 Australia: Toxic sand, Liberal chaos, Pacific COP quest

Australia correspondent Karen Middleton joins Kathryn to discuss how the toxic sand discovery is being handled by different states and ACT - which has particularly strict rules based on a previous asbestos scare. She'll detail how Sussan Ley's leadership of the Liberals is going in the final sitting week of the year, and why the Australian government is refusing to concede defeat in its bid to host next year's COP UN global climate change conference. 

Karen Middleton is a political journalist based in Canberra

10:05 Map Men Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman on cartography quirks and catastrophes

Many of us will have stumbled across a map that has a gap where New Zealand ought to be. There's some famous examples - like Florida's Universal Studios globe, the 2019 IKEA wall map and the Kiwi traveller detained in Kazakhstan amid a visa mix up that wasn't helped by the world map at Customs failing to include a New Zealand she could point to, as proof of where she was from. But why does it keep happening? It's just one of many map mysteries my next guests have sought to survey. Mark Cooper-Jones and Jay Foreman are the creators of a YouTube series called Map Men - which presents combines geographical questions and quirks with comedy. They've now written a book called This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (and why it matters). It covers cartographical conundrums like paper towns, disappeared Soviet cities, impossible borders and whether Google Maps has completely ruined our ability to navigate.

10:35 Book review: An Eccentric History in Batik by Dinah Priestley 

Elisabeth Easther reviews An Eccentric History in Batik by Dinah Priestley, published by Mary Egan Publishing.

10:45 Around the motu: Libby Kirkby-McLeod in Hamilton

Libby discuses the local impact of a decision by Fire and Emergency to pull back from responding to water emergencies, wire thefts leaving life threatening hazard and the Japanese textile collection on display at a gallery in Morrinsville. 

11:05 Music with Dave Wilson: Romani songs

Music correspondent Dave Wilson talks about Romani music, which is widely celebrated around the world - even as they're among the most oppressed minority populations in the world. Most live in Europe, although there are diasporic communities all over the world. While many reject the term 'gypsy' as an ethnic slur, others use it to promote their work - including Roma musicians.

Dave Wilson is a saxophonist, clarinetist, composer, and interdisciplinary scholar, a Senior Lecturer in Music at the New Zealand School of Music-Te Kōkī.

11:20 The MacLeods epic overland journey 

In 1962, Dunedin farmer Alan MacLeod said to his wife Joan and six kids, 'how about going for a drive'?’  Little did they know the 'harebrained scheme' Alan had cooked up would see them travelling the world in a homemade house truck a year later. Alan's wanted to reconnect the family with their MacLeod ancestry on the Island of Skye in Scotland, and visit friends he had made fighting in the Italian campaign in World War II. With a few boat crossings, they did it all in their house truck 'Holdfast' built from a Ford tractor engine, a city bus cab and the chassis of an armoured scout car. The extraordinary story is told by Hannah Bulloch whose mother Marilyn was one of the six kids on board. Hannah interviewed her aunts and uncles, and trawled through diaries and old newspaper clippings to recreate the story in her recently published book Overland to the Island. 

11:45 Science: Language learning + ageing, fuel CO2 levels hit record high

Science commentator Laurie Winkless joins Kathryn with a new study that looked at 86,000 people in 27 European countries to understand how multilingualism may influence their brain health as they age. The results might just have you reaching for the Duolingo app. This year's Global Carbon Project has found emissions from fossil fuels have risen by 1.1% to reach their highest level yet. And there's new hope for people suffering from anaemia; researchers in Switzerland have developed a new iron supplement for food that's tasteless and more quickly absorbed than iron sulfate.

Laurie Winkless is a physicist and science writer.