The UK’s Tory party is accusing Labour of stealing their ideas around unemployment resolution.

Labour MP Liz Kendall says that her party intends on generating new jobs and an employment scheme, while her counterpart Helen Whately said that is her party’s idea repackaged.

This comes as youth unemployment is at 14.8%, up 12% from last year.

UK Correspondent Kay Oliver told Ryan Bridge that Kendallsaid the scheme her party is designing intends on getting people off benefits, getting them employed and making it easier to find work.

She says the Tories are complaining that Labour has had 14 years to come up with their own plans and they think it is quite rich for them to steal what they see as their own unique ideas.

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Nikki Kaye is being remembered as a strong voice for the Auckland Central electorate.

She died on Saturday aged 44 from cancer.

Kaye served as Auckland Central MP from 2008 until 2020.

She was also a cabinet minister and briefly deputy leader of the National Party.

Former Auckland Business Chamber Chief Executive Michael Barnett told Ryan Bridge she took the seat as a young liberal.

He says she was quite happy to have a different opinion around transport, where a port should go, or the LGBT community and same sex marriage.

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The Reserve Bank is widely expected to cut the Official Cash Rate today from 4.75% to 4.25%.

It was cut by the same margin in October.

ANZ's already cutting most of its home loan rates ahead of this afternoon's decision.

BNZ Chief Economist Mike Jones told Ryan Bridge he can see some of the logic for a 75 basis point move.

But he says those big moves tend to be reserved for crisis situations, and we're not in one of those.

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I paid 40 cents for a paper bag while shopping at my local supermarket the other week.

40 cents.

Remember when they used to cost 10 cents? Back in the day when they swapped them out for plastic bags when they banned those – which used to be free.

40 cents.

And guess what they had printed on the side of this paper bag that you buy to put your groceries in.

They had printed little Christmas trees for goodness sake.

So you chop down trees, you make paper bags and then you print more trees on them – we're supposed to be saving the planet.

This is stupid, it's dumb and it's 40 cents.

It's a lot of money.

It's a lot more than free, which is what we used to get the plastic bags for.

And they're not reusable. You put a 2-litre milk in there, it's wet, it's soggy and it just falls straight through.

It's not a reusable thing.

People are probably over the paper bag thing and used to it by now. Take your own bags is the other thing, but I forgot, so what are you going to do?

But here's the thing with costly environmental policies.

This is stuff like your emissions trading scheme charged on the petrol that you put in your tank, or on farmers, or the ute tax, or the cycleway bills that we are paying for.

The issue with all of this is getting us on board with paying to fix the planet when we're such a small part of it.

Are we really saving all the dolphins, and whales, and turtles in the ocean by paying 40 cents for a paper bag at Countdown?

No, because the oceans still filled with plastic. So what's the point?

Is Xi Jinping still opening coal fired power plants? Yes.

Is Donald Trump about to start drilling hell for leather, for more oil? Yes.

So what are we doing? What difference are we making?

Why should we bother?

They just had the climate change conference in Azerbaijan, the Petro State for goodness sakes, and everyone flew there on an airplane, and I'm paying 40 cents for a paper bag.

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Businesses say the new Central Auckland Police base is a positive step towards improving the city's safety.

The new Federal Street station will be close to Aotea Square, making it easier to deploy officers right across the central city.

Police plan to have it open to the public 24/7 by the middle of next year.

Heart of the City's Viv Beck told Ryan Bridge that businesses have been after more police - especially with the City Rail Link opening soon.

She says we want a vibrant, safe, international city, so there needs to be enough police.

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Some patients in need of hospital treatment aren't even making it to the waitlist.

A letter obtained by RNZ reveals some referrals from an orthopaedic clinic are being knocked back.

It says it lacks the resources to see all patients within the Ministry of Health waiting time targets.

Royal College of GPs Medical Director Dr Luke Bradford told Ryan Bridge the acceptance level fluctuates normally, but the threshold rises as more pressure's applied to the health system.

He says the health targets have people being seen within four months and being operated on quickly, and one way to manage that is by not taking patients onto lists in the first place.

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The Education Review Office is recommending NCEA Level 1 be reformed.

Its review found it's not a fair or reliable measure of knowledge and skills, and around a quarter of schools don't plan on offering it next year.

Last year, students were almost twice as likely to achieve an excellence on an internal assessment than an external.

Auckland's Rangitoto College Principal Patrick Gale told Ryan Bridge that within the existing framework, teachers can target standards they perceive to be easier.

He says with internal assessment they can also offer more time, meaning they may not enter students into all externals, causing further issues as they're not learning the whole curriculum.

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