Midday Report Essentials for Monday 7th July 2025

In today's episode, around 130,000 families were expected to take advantage of FamilyBoost, which reimburses a portion of early childcare fees, but only around 60,000 have benefitted, and only 250 received the full $75 a week credit, an academic says the rise of populism around the world has taken a different flavour in New Zealand, public hearings have begun in Auckland for the second phase of the Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Government's response to the Covid-19 pandemic, and "Project Vend" went awry when Anthropic let its artificial intelligence model, Claude, run a vending machine in its office.