The 105th New Zealand Golf Open has teed off at Millbrook. 

It’s a unique Pro-Am event, where 156 professionals compete alongside amateur partners, and is the only Open tournament in the world to be played in this format. 

Australian Ryan Peake won the title in 2025, and has returned to defend it in 2026. 

Chairman John Hart told Kerre Woodham the Pro-Am format is the reason the tournament is so successful, and that if it were solely professionals, they’d struggle to hold the funding. 

He says it’s established itself as one of the leading Pro-Am tournaments in the world, and has gotten fantastic recognition from tours they work with and professional players. 

LISTEN ABOVE  

The 105th New Zealand Golf Open has teed off at Millbrook.&nbsp;
It’s a unique Pro-Am event, where 156 professionals compete alongside amateur partners, and is the only Open tournament in the world to be played in this format.&nbsp;
Australian Ryan Peake won the title in 2025, and has returned to defend it in 2026.&nbsp;
Chairman John Hart told Kerre Woodham the Pro-Am format is the reason the tournament is so successful, and that if it were solely professionals, they’d struggle to hold the funding.&nbsp;
He says it’s established itself as one of the leading Pro-Am tournaments in the world, and has gotten fantastic recognition from tours they work with and professional players.&nbsp;
LISTEN ABOVE &nbsp;

Join Kerre Woodham one of New Zealand’s best loved personalities as she dishes up a bold, sharp and energetic show Monday to Friday 9am-12md on Newstalk ZB. News, opinion, analysis, lifestyle and entertainment – we’ve got your morning listening covered.

Kerre Woodham Mornings Podcast

John Hart: New Zealand Golf Open Chairman discusses the event, what it took to bring it together

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/3d1d5d3c-5408-4279-85a8-b3fe000954f0/transcript

Another way of keeping older folks safer on the roads. 

Aucklander Boyd Steel has started a business producing ‘S’ plates – a car sticker designed to let other drivers know there’s an older driver behind the wheel. 

The blue sticker is similar to the yellow ‘L’ plate for learner drivers, signalling that the driver may be slower or less confident and asking for patience.  

Steel told Kerre Woodham it was inspired by his nana, for who driving was an important part of her freedom, but had become slow driver towards the end of her life. 

“It wasn’t until sort of after she passed, and I sort of started seeing other senior drivers on the road, I just started thinking, God, I hope no one ever gave her a hard time.”  

LISTEN ABOVE  

Another way of keeping older folks safer on the roads.&nbsp;
Aucklander Boyd Steel has started a business producing ‘S’ plates – a car sticker designed to let other drivers know there’s an older driver behind the wheel.&nbsp;
The blue sticker is similar to the yellow ‘L’ plate for learner drivers, signalling that the driver may be slower or less confident and asking for patience. &nbsp;
Steel told Kerre Woodham it was inspired by his nana, for who driving was an important part of her freedom, but had become slow driver towards the end of her life.&nbsp;
“It wasn’t until sort of after she passed, and I sort of started seeing other senior drivers on the road, I just started thinking, God, I hope no one ever gave her a hard time.” &nbsp;
LISTEN ABOVE &nbsp;

Boyd Steel: S Sticker Founder on the plate that identifies cars driven by seniors

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/d6e57bb7-ece9-474e-839e-b3fe00049cc9/transcript

I can't even believe we're having to discuss this, but we are. It seems absolutely ludicrous that drunk drivers who say, kill their passengers, maim their passengers, smash their own selves up after crashing their vehicles —hopefully not into innocent victims, but sometimes it will be— are able to claim ACC, but the volunteer firefighters and the first responders who are volunteers who respond to the crash and have to deal with the horror of the aftermath, quite often they will know the people involved if it happens in a small community. If they're the ones that have to unwrap a kid from a drive shaft, they are not able to claim ACC for trauma counselling or PTSD. What they do is considered a leisure activity. 

Volunteers have been lobbying the Government to change the legislation for years. In 2025 a petition with 36,500 signatures was presented to Parliament but was ultimately unsuccessful. Now Land Search and Rescue are pushing the Government to reconsider, saying January's Mount Maunganui tragedy showed the level of trauma they're repeatedly exposed to with no long-term protection. So as it works at the moment, ACC can provide broad physical injury cover to volunteers, and that would be the same to you and me. Those of us who don't lift a finger to help others in our community, same sort of thing. The volunteers can access that. So if they got a physical injury and that resulted in a mental injury, that would be covered by ACC. But unlike employees, volunteers don't get any support for mental injury caused by what they see on the job. 

So somebody standing next to them, a paid police officer who was horrified by what they'd seen, would have access to ACC for counselling. They would not. Because what they're doing when they're saving lives and doing the most horrific clean up is a leisure activity as defined by law. ACC cannot under law right now help mentally unwell volunteer emergency responders. LandSAR Chief Executive Wendy Wright agrees the legislation falls far short when we look at the reliance we have as a country on volunteers across emergency services and search and rescue. 95% of the search and rescue workforce are volunteers. And look at the firefighters – as of 2024 there are approximately 11,800 to 12,000 volunteer firefighters in New Zealand. They make up around 80 to 85% of the country's total firefighting force. 

These volunteers who primarily serve the small towns, the rural areas, the outer suburbs, provide more than 820 million in annual value to the community if you want to put a dollar value on it. They basically keep communities together. They save lives within their communities. They deal with the trauma that accidents cause local communities. They are their local communities. Apparently, I've struggled to find any kind of rationale for denying them. Apparently it's going to open the floodgates for other volunteers in other in other fields. Apparently we can't afford it. Not every volunteer is going to need counselling. Not every volunteer wants to go to counselling. Not every paid employee wants it or needs it.  

There was a time when the UK tried to force their police officers to go to counselling. For some it was it was the last thing they needed. Their minds did not need to go over and over and over what they'd seen. They were able to compartmentalise and stay healthy. That was the way their minds worked. So they've scrapped that.  

You don't have to go now, but it should be an option, it should be a choice, it should be available for these incredible men and women who give up their time, give up their weekends, are willing to be roused in the middle of the night to go and try and save someone from themselves. The very least we can do when they finally get back to bed after working through the night is help them sleep soundly and not have to live with the recurring nightmares that come with PTSD that is left untreated. We owe it to them. 

I can't even believe we're having to discuss this, but we are. It seems absolutely ludicrous that drunk drivers who say, kill their passengers, maim their passengers, smash their own selves up after crashing their vehicles —hopefully not into innocent victims, but sometimes it will be— are able to claim ACC, but the volunteer firefighters and the first responders who are volunteers who respond to the crash and have to deal with the horror of the aftermath, quite often they will know the people involved if it happens in a small community. If they're the ones that have to unwrap a kid from a drive shaft, they are not able to claim ACC for trauma counselling or PTSD. What they do is considered a leisure activity.&nbsp;
Volunteers have been lobbying the Government to change the legislation for years. In 2025 a petition with 36,500 signatures was presented to Parliament but was ultimately unsuccessful. Now Land Search and Rescue are pushing the Government to reconsider, saying January's Mount Maunganui tragedy showed the level of trauma they're repeatedly exposed to with no long-term protection. So as it works at the moment, ACC can provide broad physical injury cover to volunteers, and that would be the same to you and me. Those of us who don't lift a finger to help others in our community, same sort of thing. The volunteers can access that. So if they got a physical injury and that resulted in a mental injury, that would be covered by ACC. But unlike employees, volunteers don't get any support for mental injury caused by what they see on the job.&nbsp;
So somebody standing next to them, a paid police officer who was horrified by what they'd seen, would have access to ACC for counselling. They would not. Because what they're doing when they're saving lives and doing the most horrific clean up is a leisure activity as defined by law. ACC cannot under law right now help mentally unwell volunteer emergency responders. LandSAR Chief Executive Wendy Wright agrees the legislation falls far short when we look at the reliance we have as a country on volunteers across emergency services and search and rescue. 95% of the search and rescue workforce are volunteers. And look at the firefighters – as of 2024 there are approximately 11,800 to 12,000 volunteer firefighters in New Zealand. They make up around 80 to 85% of the country's total firefighting force.&nbsp;
These volunteers who primarily serve the small towns, the rural areas, the outer suburbs, provide more than 820 million in annual value to the community if you want to put a dollar value on it. They basically keep communities together. They save lives within their communities. They deal with the trauma that accidents cause local communities. They are their local communities. Apparently, I've struggled to find any kind of rationale for denying them. Apparently it's going to open the floodgates for other volunteers in other in other fields. Apparently we can't afford it. Not every volunteer is going to need counselling. Not every volunteer wants to go to counselling. Not every paid employee wants it or needs it. &nbsp;
There was a time when the UK tried to force their police officers to go to counselling. For some it was it was the last thing they needed. Their minds did not need to go over and over and over what they'd seen. They were able to compartmentalise and stay healthy. That was the way their minds worked. So they've scrapped that. &nbsp;
You don't have to go now, but it should be an option, it should be a choice, it should be available for these incredible men and women who give up their time, give up their weekends, are willing to be roused in the middle of the night to go and try and save someone from themselves. The very least we can do when they finally get back to bed after working through the night is help them sleep soundly and not have to live with the recurring nightmares that come with PTSD that is left untreated. We owe it to them.&nbsp;

Kerre Woodham: Volunteers deserve trauma counselling cover

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/3b545a94-2fbf-414e-8a37-b3fc018434e5/transcript

There's been a second major medical platform hack, leaving live patients labelled as dead and people's names changed to Charlie Kirk, the American activist who was shot dead last year – assassinated really. MediMap is widely used across New Zealand. It's often used by the aged care, disability, hospice and community health sectors. It's the second major cyber-attack on medical files and records in recent weeks after Manage My Health was hit at the end of last year, start of this year. Manage My Health's portal systems were compromised over the New Year holiday, putting the data of more than 120,000 users at risk. But it seems the two breaches are vastly different.  

Manage My Health was a ransomware attack conducted by a professional hacker, Kazu, not their real name, said they were motivated by notoriety and by profit. And there are thousands like Kazu. Think Roddy Ho in Slow Horses – annoying little geniuses who are completely removed from the rest of the world, who think along a different code, who live a different life. They do it because they can, because they think they're so clever and they want to prove it to their peers. They love showing off their hacking abilities. In some cases, they demand a ransom, in some cases they're motivated by profit, in other cases not. And generally, when the ransom is paid, they're terribly professional, you never hear another word from them. They take the money, they go and hit somebody else. In the case of MediMap, it seems there was a different motivation as Geoffrey Sayer from MediMap told Mike Hosking this morning. 

“What people would imagine a cyber hack is, is you've come in and brute forced and you've gone through a vulnerability in the software or the platform. This has not been the case. They've used credentials to come in, for all intents and purposes they look like a regular user, but what they started to do was not what a regular user does, which is why we shut the system down and contained it and are now working with forensic experts and government agencies to understand what's happened and then how do we bring this back online for people. We can trace it to a profile, I suppose is the best way to describe it, but we've subsequently become aware that that profile quite possibly had been compromised with their credentials.” 

So it could have been a staff member's kid or partner or just somebody who had access to that code. And we actually were having a discussion before we came on air, I said to the boss because I'd been broadcasting from home for the first two weeks, I said if one of the grandkids was tinkering around on the computer, would they be able to get into the radio station basically and move things around? And he said no, there's about three or four different passwords, but I don't have access to the inner workings. I need to be guided through it anyway and given different passwords at different points. So there could be no accidental hacking of this radio station by anybody at my house.  

These are not the first hacks, and they won't be the last. We have to accept that if we want the convenience of living in an online world, we're vulnerable, especially when we are complete tits when it comes to our security. Guess what the most common password is and has been for years? Yep, ‘123456’. Second most common, this is worldwide, not just New Zealand, second most common is ‘password’, third is ‘admin’, fourth is ‘qwerty’, and the fifth is ‘12345678’ – that'll fool them, adding the seven and the eight at the end, hey? I mean you don't even have to be a particularly good hacker to get into most people's computers.  

But what if you're scrupulous about your privacy? Sure, there should be tougher penalties for the hackers, but what about those who store our information, who demand it? How many places do we go where even the retail assistants, their KPI is to harvest our email addresses, to get them from us and the more they get, the more they're rewarded. Those who store our information should understand that it's a privilege. They use it. They can make money from it, they can profit from it.  

So should companies be held accountable if their security is breached? Should they have to pay some really serious fines so they get really serious about their security? In the case of MediMap, they handled that vastly differently. Different circumstances, but they handled it so much better than Manage My Health. They realised that somebody had access who legitimately got into the computer, to all intents and purposes the computer thought, yep, that's fine, come on in, you're welcome. Then once they started fiddling around, the computer recognised that something was going on that shouldn't be occurring and shut itself down. So different circumstances. But how much onus should be on the companies to protect our data and our information? There are millions of Roddy Hos out there, all wanting to show they're the cleverest thing in the whole wide world. How much should be on us to change our password and put in basic security protocols? And how can we stay or limit our presence online? Is there any way of having our cake and eating it too, to have the convenience of an online world without basically being laid bare and naked before the whole wide world. 

There's been a second major medical platform hack, leaving live patients labelled as dead and people's names changed to Charlie Kirk, the American activist who was shot dead last year – assassinated really. MediMap is widely used across New Zealand. It's often used by the aged care, disability, hospice and community health sectors. It's the second major cyber-attack on medical files and records in recent weeks after Manage My Health was hit at the end of last year, start of this year. Manage My Health's portal systems were compromised over the New Year holiday, putting the data of more than 120,000 users at risk. But it seems the two breaches are vastly different. &nbsp;
Manage My Health was a ransomware attack conducted by a professional hacker, Kazu, not their real name, said they were motivated by notoriety and by profit. And there are thousands like Kazu. Think Roddy Ho in Slow Horses – annoying little geniuses who are completely removed from the rest of the world, who think along a different code, who live a different life. They do it because they can, because they think they're so clever and they want to prove it to their peers. They love showing off their hacking abilities. In some cases, they demand a ransom, in some cases they're motivated by profit, in other cases not. And generally, when the ransom is paid, they're terribly professional, you never hear another word from them. They take the money, they go and hit somebody else. In the case of MediMap, it seems there was a different motivation as Geoffrey Sayer from MediMap told Mike Hosking this morning.&nbsp;
“What people would imagine a cyber hack is, is you've come in and brute forced and you've gone through a vulnerability in the software or the platform. This has not been the case. They've used credentials to come in, for all intents and purposes they look like a regular user, but what they started to do was not what a regular user does, which is why we shut the system down and contained it and are now working with forensic experts and government agencies to understand what's happened and then how do we bring this back online for people. We can trace it to a profile, I suppose is the best way to describe it, but we've subsequently become aware that that profile quite possibly had been compromised with their credentials.”&nbsp;
So it could have been a staff member's kid or partner or just somebody who had access to that code. And we actually were having a discussion before we came on air, I said to the boss because I'd been broadcasting from home for the first two weeks, I said if one of the grandkids was tinkering around on the computer, would they be able to get into the radio station basically and move things around? And he said no, there's about three or four different passwords, but I don't have access to the inner workings. I need to be guided through it anyway and given different passwords at different points. So there could be no accidental hacking of this radio station by anybody at my house. &nbsp;
These are not the first hacks, and they won't be the last. We have to accept that if we want the convenience of living in an online world, we're vulnerable, especially when we are complete tits when it comes to our security. Guess what the most common password is and has been for years? Yep, ‘123456’. Second most common, this is worldwide, not just New Zealand, second most common is ‘password’, third is ‘admin’, fourth is ‘qwerty’, and the fifth is ‘12345678’ – that'll fool them, adding the seven and the eight at the end, hey? I mean you don't even have to be a particularly good hacker to get into most people's computers. &nbsp;
But what if you're scrupulous about your privacy? Sure, there should be tougher penalties for the hackers, but what about those who store our information, who demand it? How many places do we go where even the retail assistants, their KPI is to harvest our email addresses, to get them from us and the more they get, the more they're rewarded. Those who store our information should understand that it's a privilege. They use it. They can make money from it, they can profit from it. &nbsp;
So should companies be held accountable if their security is breached? Should they have to pay some really serious fines so they get really serious about their security? In the case of MediMap, they handled that vastly differently. Different circumstances, but they handled it so much better than Manage My Health. They realised that somebody had access who legitimately got into the computer, to all intents and purposes the computer thought, yep, that's fine, come on in, you're welcome. Then once they started fiddling around, the computer recognised that something was going on that shouldn't be occurring and shut itself down. So different circumstances. But how much onus should be on the companies to protect our data and our information? There are millions of Roddy Hos out there, all wanting to show they're the cleverest thing in the whole wide world. How much should be on us to change our password and put in basic security protocols? And how can we stay or limit our presence online? Is there any way of having our cake and eating it too, to have the convenience of an online world without basically being laid bare and naked before the whole wide world.&nbsp;

Kerre Woodham: Privacy - can we have our cake and eat it too?

https://api.omny.fm/orgs/7784f840-c291-422a-924b-ad9000bbad71/clips/3f49642b-8615-4cb9-b1d4-b3fb01846f55/transcript

John Hart: New Zealand Golf Open Chairman discusses the event, what it took to bring it together

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