Police are investigating whether alcohol played a part in last night's two-vehicle crash on one of NZ's most notorious stretches of highway.

Three people are dead following a collision between a car and a ute in the Waikato tonight.

The identity of a woman at the centre of an alleged $1.4 million Waikato bank fraud has been revealed.

There have been more than 1000 submissions against plans to build houses on an unspoilt Coromandel beach.

Police are believed to have tracked the movements in Waikato of two men who knew Carmen Thomas - at the time that her car was abandoned in Hamilton.

Vulnerable health workers are being suspended without pay to intimidate them into ending their industrial action, the lab workers' union says.