“I appreciate police will have an investigation up how it’s happened but the thing right now is everybody needs to be safe.
“Please, please, please, check, check, check what you’re feeding your children is safe and make sure you are aware of what these lollies are, and what they look like so you can actually remove them.”
Bipartisan infrastructure plans
Luxon is set to hold a press conference from Sydney, where he has spent the morning rubbing shoulders with city’s infrastructure elite, including the top brass at Beca as well as top officials in the Office of New South Wales’ State Government.
Luxon - as well as Ministers Shane Jones (regional development), Simeon Brown (transport), and Chris Bishop (infrastructure) - met with New South Wales Premier Christopher Minns.
Speaking to media, Luxon said New Zealand had an infrastructure “deficit” and part of the reason why the ministers were in Sydney was to get a sense of “what’s possible”.
Luxon said New Zealand could not fund this deficit with its current balance sheet and needed to open up to private investment.
“We have talked a lot around how do we build a master plan of projects for the next 30 years.”
Luxon said there were some “really good mechanisms behind the scenes” of the New South Wales’ infrastructure system.
On the new infrastructure agency, Bishop said one of the things being done, as part of a 30-year plan, was to create an infrastructure priority list.
Part of that would include a bipartisan list of projects that parties would support whether they were in power or in opposition. Luxon said he wanted to “take the politics out of infrastructure”.
Luxon earlier spoke of the reasons for his trip to Australia.
“We want to make this relationship work, and take it to the next level because we have so much in common with New Zealand,” Minns said ahead of his meeting with Luxon and his ministerial team.
Luxon said he also wanted to learn from New South Wales.
“We have a really big desire to build and deepen the relationship on a leader to leader level – and on a government to government level.”
Ahead of another meeting with New South Wales Treasurer Daniel Mookhey, Luxon spoke about both countries’ great Olympics medal haul.
But he gave a special shout out to the now infamous Aussie breakdancer Rachel Gunn.
“We loved the iconic introduction of Raygun,” Luxon said.
The meeting with Mookhey and Luxon involved half a dozen officials on either side. Although everyone else had a tall glass of water waiting for them at their allocated spot at the table, Luxon had a Pepsi Max.
These three ministers accompanying the Prime Minister - Jones, Brown and Bishop - are heavily involved in the Government’s “ambitious” pipeline of infrastructure projects, and the contentious RMA fast-track process.
Luxon said when it comes to New Zealand’s infrastructure pipeline, the Government needed to be able to attract foreign capital from private investors.
And he said Australia is the perfect place for the Government to go looking for that capital.
“We will not be able [to provide modern, reliable infrastructure] alone, just with the Government’s balance sheet, so we’re open to getting more investment in to do more PPPs to get infrastructure built quicker.”
Jason Walls is Newstalk ZB’s political editor and has years of experience working across print and radio
