For poultry farmers watching bird flu arrive on New Zealand’s shores, officials have a blunt message: prevention is the priority, not compensation for what happens after. H5 bird flu was confirmed this week in a single brown skua seabird found at Petone Beach, New Zealand’s first detection of the virus. Biosecurity Minister Andrew Hoggard says […]

Kiwi teens are looking into trades as AI eats into entry-level office work. Budget 2026 leant in, doubling secondary school Trades Academy places to 20,000 over four years. But the apprenticeships they’re signing up for look little like the ones their parents did. Automation has already reached the workshop floor. Take training itself. Apprentices now […]

Jo Verry is a Senior Key Account Manager at industry training organisation, Competenz You lock up your warehouse at night, switch off the lights and press play on an autonomous drone. By morning, it has flown the aisles, scanned barcodes, completed stocktakes and delivered real-time inventory data before the first staff member arrives. For some […]

New home consent figures out from Stats NZ show the building sector clawing back some ground, with 39,737 new homes consented in the year ended May 2026, up 19% on the previous year. It’s the first annual increase after three consecutive years of May declines, though volumes remain below the 2022 peak. Multi-unit builds accounted […]

Open up a roof or strip a cladding and you have made a deliberate decision to expose the structure and everything inside it to the weather. The question is what you put back over it while the work runs. Temporary encapsulation — heat-shrunk reinforced polyethylene tensioned over a scaffold — has moved from a specialist […]

The 2degrees Shaping Business 2026 Report finds construction among the most upbeat sectors in the country — but the firms doing well are the ones lifting productivity, not waiting for a rebound After a bruising few years marked by project delays, rising costs and broader economic uncertainty, the construction sector is showing more confidence than […]