One of the questions we’ll be putting to Chris Hipkins, of course, is a question around the capital gains tax, because this is an issue that simply will not die. Labour Party members will vote on whether to formally endorse continuing work on a capital gains or wealth tax at their party conference in Christchurch this weekend. The party's been debating tax policy since losing the election last year, part of a broader truth and reconciliation soul searching. The people loved us so much and then they didn't. How did it all go so wrong? So that's there's been a lot of that.

Former Labour Party leader, David Cunliffe was on with Mike Hosking this morning and he says he has no insider knowledge, but thinks the conference members will be pushing hard for some sort of wealth tax.

“CGTs have actually polled really well, and one might, with a wry smile on your case, say that the CGT poll better than the Labour Party, so it's unlikely to be a net vote loser. Most middle ground National voters I know would also support CGT, no so a wealth tax. I mean a wealth tax has got a retrospective element sometimes, because it goes to accumulated wealth and high wealth individuals might vote with their feet, so I think that's a much riskier proposition. I think Labour should be moderate here and just do a sensible, relatively low-rate broad based CGT.”

Which is what David Parker and Grant Robertson last time wanted when they had a mandate. They had a mandate, they had the popular vote, they were governing alone – they could do pretty much what they wanted and what senior members of the party wanted, senior members of the government wanted was a capital gains tax. So I would argue with David Cunliffe that if there were votes in it, you can bet your bippy that Chris Hipkins would have been chucking it out there. He was desperate to stay in power. He was putting things on the bonfire and offering trinkets and displaying baubles, and you know if capital gains tax had had any votes in it, you can bet he would have put it out there.

Instead, he brassed off some really senior members of his government by saying it wouldn't happen. It'll be interesting to see where this goes. The text machine went wild after David Cunliffe's interview with Mike. And in news that will surprise no one, the Newstalk ZB audience appears to be overwhelmingly against the idea of a capital gains tax. I don't buy all the criticisms of a capital gains tax, but one of them rings true: I simply do not trust that the Labour government will spend my money wisely when they take it off me, if the last administration is anything to go by. There has to be some sort of understanding, some sort of relationship between the government and taxpayers, some level of trust.

If the government is coming to us to tax us, they have to say we're going to take money off you, and you might not like it but look at what we can deliver for the whole country for future generations with your contribution. Look at what you can do when we all contribute towards the country, this is what we can deliver. And you accept that. You say okay, I don't particularly like it, but I don't agree with everything you're doing but I can see results. I can see the country is improving, I can see that services are being delivered, that people who are working hard can get ahead, that kids can get an education, that my grandmother can get a hip replacement, I can see that it's moving in the right direction. But to take money off us and be left worse off as a country and as a people than when we started, yeah nah. She's a harder sell there.

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The Labour leader says New Zealand needs an honest conversation about paying for its future.

Our newsroom understands party delegates will vote on whether to support a capital gains or wealth tax at its annual conference this weekend.

Chris Hipkins says about 70% of government tax revenue comes from personal income taxes - while the OECD average is half as much.

He told Kerre Woodham that's because New Zealand doesn't have other forms of tax like capital gains, which is very common elsewhere.

Hipkins says it's treated as if it's a big radical idea, but we are one of the only countries in the world without some form of taxation in that area.

Labour leader Chris Hipkins has reflected on his ‘frenemy’ relationship with Nikki Kaye.

Reacting to news of her death while speaking to Kerre Woodham, Hipkins said the pair both had a passion for education and tended to agree more than they disagreed.

He said he hadn’t been in touch with her for a number of years and said her death was “a bit of a shock”.

“Really sad news. I just heard about Nikki Kaye as I was coming into the studio this morning. Nikki and I arrived at Parliament at the same time. We had a lot of common interests. I think you could say we were ‘frenemies’ for the time we were in Parliament. Opponents, but we actually got on well together.”

Kaye was Minister of Education in 2017 under Sir Bill English. Hipkins would succeed her as the minister when Labour took power after the 2017 election.

“I thought Nikki was a really passionate member of Parliament, very diligent, did her research, liked to know what she was talking about, didn’t rush to decisions until she had actually done the analysis of understanding the situation,” Hipkins said.

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The health system, well, we're not really talking about the health system, but how not to get into the health system because every time we talk about the health system, we talk about the need to stop people getting into the health system in the first place, the need to focus on prevention rather than cure.

And the Helen Clark Foundation has come up with a new report calling on politicians to take a new direction when it comes to problems with obesity and the health problems related to obesity.

A third of New Zealand adults are obese and even if we want to split hairs and play fast and loose with the BMI - All Black front rowers are technically obese! Everybody knows you can be skinny fat! You know you can all protest as much as you like, but the fact is too many of us are unhealthy because we're fat and that leads to a long, miserable and expensive relationship with the country's health system.

Obesity is now the leading risk factor for death and disability in this country. The Helen Clark Foundation Report, ‘Junk Food and Poor Policy’ says successive governments have primarily approached obesity as a matter of individual responsibility.

And I would add to that, that society also sees obesity as a moral failing, which complicates matters. So if you're fat, you've got poor self-control, haven't you? Oh dear, you're not trying hard enough. Oh dear, you're clearly a person with lax morals, all that kind of judginess goes on as well.

The foundation argues that successive governments have done far too little to address the underlying issues of what causes obesity. Only a fraction of school canteens meet the nutritional guidelines. The concentration of takeaways is highest in the most deprived suburbs in New Zealand, so the people who have the least amount of time to prepare nutritional meals, find themselves bombarded with takeaway stores just around the corner.

The Helen Clark Foundation wants to see a healthier food environment, stricter rules for advertising junk food, giving local government the power to control new unhealthy food outlets (similar to bottle stores and how they're allowed to operate), and making the health star rating on food packaging mandatory.

Regulation can work – soft drinks levy introduced in the UK in 2016, has led to a 35 percent reduction in the total sugar sold over four years and lowered hospital admissions for dental treatment. So that has got to be good news.

The Foundation’s also calling for embedding healthier food across hospitals, schools, daycares and the like, and adopting and expanding new treatments like weight loss drugs.

For a while, it was the bariatric surgery. I know so many people who've had it. And it's worked for the most part, for them, like overwhelmingly, it's worked for them. Now it’s Ozempic and the other related type injectables are said to be an absolute game changer when it comes to obesity.

Basically, and putting into really fundamental terms, the makers of Ozempic have said people can not know when they're full – not all people, but there are a lot of people who don't know when they're full. Their bodies have no trigger switch that says, oh, that's enough, stop. With the injection, they take the injection and they have something to eat and their body says that's enough, we've got enough nutrition to get us through, and so you know when to stop. Which sounds amazingly easy.

And if that is all it is, yay, it will make a huge difference. I mean, obviously following the the logic that David Seymour applied to Pharmac, if you can get people onto Ozempic or similar, a weight drug that regulates metabolism and regulates appetite that has got to be better in the long run than paying all of the health bills further down the track.

I would love to hear from those of you who have thought about weight, struggled with weight, done something about weight. It occupies far too much of our time, but it is a very, very real problem.

I mean, look at the figures. Obesity has overtaken smoking as the leading cause of death and disability in this country. We need to do something about it. What do we do?

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The Helen Clark Foundation wants widespread change to address New Zealand's high obesity rate.

Its report recommends government policy interventions to improve the proportion of healthy food available.

It also suggests restricting the marketing of unhealthy food to children and adopting new technologies for obesity treatment.

Executive Director Murray Bruges joined Kerre Woodham.

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Pros and cons in the latest NZ Health Survey.

Hazardous drinking rates have fallen from 20.4% in 2019 to 16.6% this year, and daily smoking rates have remained steady.

However, the number of daily vapers has increased from 33,000 to 480,000 over the past eight years.

Daily vaping has also increased more quickly in younger age groups, especially those aged 15-17 and 18-24 years.

Asthma and Respiratory Foundation Chief Executive Letitia Harding told Kerre Woodham that the data they’re seeing correlates to when regulations were introduced.

She says that the regulations rolled out quite slowly, and the Ministry of Health went about it wrong.

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