A Wellington firetruck has been taken off the road, after its engine caught fire, prompting a response from a fellow crew.

The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union said the truck was only one of two high-reach heavy aerial-ladder trucks in the capital.

No-one was hurt in the blaze and the fire was extinguished.

Labour has promised to ban big companies from charging excessive prices, if elected.

Leader Chris Hipkins said a handful of big businesses were guilty of price gouging - that is, charging more than necessary for essential items.

The full policy includes:

• making it illegal for big companies with substantial market power to charge excessive prices for essential goods and services, or to pay unfairly low prices to suppliers
• setting a legal test for price gouging: holding prices "well above what they would otherwise be in a competitive market, sustained over time"
• requiring companies that gouge to pay penalties and hand back every dollar of excess profit
• giving the Commerce Commission power to investigate price gouging and supporting consumer groups and suppliers to do the same.

Williams said similar rules were already in place in the United Kingdom, Europe, Canada, and Australia.

National has made a supermarket break-up a key part of its election pitch, proposing to sever Pak'nSave from New World in a bid to drive down grocery prices.

National's plan would turn the company into supermarket chains: Pak'nSave, New World/Four Square and Woolworths.

The breakup, however, would be contingent on a six-month review by the Commerce Commission into whether the split would leave shoppers better off.

Hi all, this is just a quick update to let you know I've set up a Discord channel that is bridged to our Matrix chat.

For a long time we've had a Matrix chat room, many people joined in the early days but over time that fell off and became just a handful of regulars. Matrix isn't exactly common, and many users are only using Matrix for Lemmy and they have Discord for their other groups. So I've now set up a bridge so you can message to the Discord channel and it will appear in the Matrix room, and vice versa.

Check out our help page on the chatroom, or click these direct links to join:

Join on Matrix by clicking here

Join on Discord by clicking here

Two New Zealand psychiatrists have been approved by MedSafe to prescribe and administer MDMA for the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder.

MDMA is a synthetic psychoactive drug used recreationally, often called 'ecstasy', 'E' or 'molly'.

It is the first time Medsafe has granted approvals for this type of therapy.

Until now, MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD has not been available as a treatment option in New Zealand. Australia became the first country to allow authorised psychiatrists to prescribe MDMA for PTSD in July 2023.

The two psychiatrists with approval are Wellington's Dr Gary Wynn and Auckland's Dr Tom Paterson. The pair spent more than a year working through the regulatory process, they said in a statement.

Wynn specialises in PTSD and trauma, and Paterson in addiction.

Each round of treatment was expected to cost about $15,000. A standard course would be three rounds, totalling 54 hours of therapy.

No public funding has yet been allocated.

...

More info in the article.

TL;DR, moving to a dedicated server. Also some updates later in this post.

Since we moved to a VPS in February, I've been closely monitoring the resources of the server. I've kept just ahead of it, with our disk usage around 90%, RAM usage around 90%, and using 90% or more of our monthly bandwidth allocation. This was deliberate, we don't want to pay more than we need to.

I've added a little RAM or disk space occasionally, and this time when I opened a ticket to request some more, they said "hey, so we have this deal at the moment". One thing led to another, and now we'll have a dedicated server for $45 USD a month, still in the Auckland data centre.

The specs are as follows:

CPU: E3-1270v5
Ram: 64GB
Disk: 2 x 1TB SSD
Traffic: 10TB

It's much more powerful than what we have currently:

4 vCPU
9GB RAM
160GB SSD
Traffic: 1TB

I have already transferred over everything except Lemmy itself. So all the alternative frontends, our help pages, and the survey software now run off the new server.

Also, currently we have almost entirely moved off of Cloudflare. Currently they are still providing the DNS nameservers but there is no proxying or caching happening anymore, and we seem to be doing ok. I'll be looking at that last step at some point, but it's awfully convenient having a Cloudflare API to automatically set up TLS for any new subdomains so I have some investigation to do there. Anubis appears to be able to stop some 90% of bot scraping traffic, which I'm pretty happy with since we don't have the Cloudflare blocking rules anymore.

So anyway, the plan is about 8:30pm this Friday I'll take down Lemmy, back up the database, transfer it across and load it into the new server. This can take some time, expect an hour or two of downtime if everything goes well. If you want to follow along, join the LemmyNZ Matrix chat room.

Feel free to ask any questions about anything and I'll do my best to answer!

The 2026 kākāpō breeding season, the biggest on record, has come to an end with a bumper number of kākāpō chicks produced. The youngest chick has just passed 150 days old, a milestone that marks its independence.

"We had 90 chicks reach that milestone," reports Deidre Vercoe, operations manager for the Department of Conservation's Kākāpō Recovery Programme, who is delighted with the success.

Those 90 chicks are officially added to the kākāpō population on Monday, taking the critically endangered night parrot from 235 birds to 325.

Vercoe told RNZ's Kākāpō Files podcast that "to blow through that 300 population mark just knocks my socks off. Even as I say it now I think 'really? 325 - has that actually happened?' But it is true, it is fantastic."

When the Kākāpō Recovery Programme began in 1995 there were just 51 living kākāpō. Kākāpō only breed every two to four years, so it's taken a while to get to the point where the population can increase by a third in just a single breeding season.

The National Party is promising to reduce the compulsory student loan repayment rate if re-elected, while cracking down on overseas-based borrowers.

It said it would reduce the repayment rate from 12 percent to 10 percent from April 2027.

The party's finance spokesperson Nicola Willis said compulsory student loan repayments were paid at 12 cents on every dollar earned above $24,128.

"It is often one of the biggest weekly expenses for a young graduate," she said.

''Reducing this to 10 cents means an accountant starting out in their career and earning $75,000 per year would keep an extra $39 a fortnight, or around $1000 a year.''

Dried cured beef, ube cream cheese, sinamak balsamic reduction and a calamansi honey aioli smashed into a bun - Lazy Juan’s winning combo.

TL;DR if you haven’t already, please fill in the Lemmy.nz Census (even if your account is on another instance). Open to all. Skip any questions you aren’t comfortable answering!

This is a reminder post to please fill in the 2026 LemmyNZ census survey if you haven’t already.

You can see the previous post here and reminder here.

None of the questions are mandatory. They cover questions about where you’re from in the country/world, who you are (demographic info), how you use Lemmy and the fediverse, and some extras at the end. Skip anything you’re not comfortable answering.

Everyone is welcome! If a question doesn’t apply to you then just skip it.

Let me know if you have any questions!

Answer the Lemmy.nz 2026 Census

Last thread here

Welcome to this week’s casual kōrero thread!

This post will be pinned in this community so you can always find it, and will stay for about a week until replaced by the next one.

It’s for talking about anything that might not justify a full post. For example:

• Something interesting that happened to you
• Something humourous that happened to you
• Something frustrating that happened to you
• A quick question
• A request for recommendations
• Pictures of your pet
• A picture of a cloud that kind of looks like an elephant
• Anything else, there are no rules (except the rule)

So how’s it going?

The prime minister and social development minister have offered an apology to thousands of pensioners who did not receive their Winter Energy Payment this year, after an error in a law change meant people who were supposed to get the payment missed out.

The law change, passed under urgency last year, has meant beneficiaries receiving certain payments like the Supported Living Payment, Accommodation Supplement, and Disability Allowance have had to re-confirm their circumstances at least once every 52 weeks, to confirm whether they are still eligible.

However, the Winter Energy Payment, which is supposed to be automatic for superannuitants, veterans, and people receiving a main benefit, were not excluded from the legislation, meaning some people who would have expected to receive the payment did not.

Labour said it is the consequence of rushed legislation, but Social Development Minister Louise Upston is blaming it on a policy omission.

The Post has reported the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) had started to receive complaints, with the ministry working around the clock to correct the error and ensure the correct amounts were backpaid.

The Ministry of Social Development said between 1 May and 7 August, 14,862 superannuitants and veterans had their Winter Energy Payments affected.