Phil Pennington

Mistakes by contractors compromised fire sprinklers and alarms at Cashmere High School, one of the country's largest secondary schools.

More than 100,000 health workers are owed about half a billion dollars for payroll breaches, with the country's DHBs facing a billion-dollar deficit.

Councils are spending a lot more on public relations at the same time as they are beset by escalating demands for essential services like water and roads.

Texts about a retirement complex's unsafe plumbing, which Hutt City Council said did not exist, were in fact sent to Ray Wallace who later deleted them.

Pressure on the country's quarries has sparked a warning that road workers and building makers may be forced to import heaps of aggregate.

Eels in two Taranaki streams are expected to be contaminated with firefighting foam chemicals for many years.

Several district health boards have come up with multi-million-dollar estimates of what it will cost to fix years of payroll breaches.

A plastic surgeon says public hospital payroll systems are full of errors that are costing staff dearly and fostering resentment.

In groundwater under the Ohakea air base there are contaminants - that can come from firefighting foam - which will keep spreading for up to 125 years.

Builders are setting up a new scheme to lessen the chances that companies close to collapse can win major contracts.

Several government agencies met with an American video game maker proposing to create a huge data channel for New Zealand.

A Lower Hutt mayoral candidate is calling for a full investigation into a retirement complex with substandard plumbing. Video

Emails show Lower Hutt Mayor Ray Wallace was told in February that bad plumbing in 96 apartments - worth up to $700,000 each - in a retirement complex was life-threatening.

A Lower Hutt retirement complex is in damage control after bad plumbing left elderly residents exposed to noxious sewer gases and bacteria build-up in all the showers. Video

A fire drill at Waikato Hospital has exposed issues similar to those the hospital knew about eight years ago, described then as "significant systematic weakness" in the alarm system.

The New Zealand Transport Agency has admitted to a technology botch up leaving what was meant to be a highly secure data key wide open.

An overhaul of the Holidays Act to stop thousands of people being underpaid is being called unfair and negligent.

Counties Manukau District Health Board is looking into how to strengthen the Esme Green building at Middlemore Hospital to above the quake-prone threshold.

Before e-scooters were released on the footpaths of New Zealand, one company was already asking authorities if it could double the power of its scooters.

A blowout in waiting times at the Transport Agency is jeopardising garages' business and commercial drivers' livelihoods.

A tightening of a rule governing microlight engine replacement will ground hundreds of planes, some pilots say - but CAA defended the move.

A US video game maker with plans for processing data from New Zealand trialled CCTV cameras on an Auckland road.

The builders of a high-rise block of apartments in central Wellington resisted getting translations done of important Chinese quality control documents.

Three suspended truck engineers issued between them on average 150 certificates a month each since 2013. That's twice the rate of other engineers.

The city council has voted to activate a district plan change to address flood hazards caused by new subdivisions and rule out big developments in high hazard areas.