Just as homeowners are heading outside to prepare their gardens for the warmer months, a new regulation is demanding their attention. From March 30, 2026, any hedge exceeding 2 meters in height and sitting within 50 centimeters of a neighbour’s property line must be trimmed — or the owner faces financial penalties that could run…
It is not every day that an island goes on the market. But Slipper Island — a 210-hectare private island sitting off the Coromandel Peninsula in the Hauraki Gulf — has been listed for sale, and the price guide has been set at more than ten million dollars. It is, real estate agents have confirmed, one of…
Most sporting teams have one captain. The Waikato Bay of Plenty Magic, heading into a new netball season with an unusually young squad and a point to prove, have decided two is better. Erena Mikaere and Georgie Edgecombe were named co-captains at the start of the season in an arrangement that, by most accounts, has already begun…
The Cleavedale homestead has stood on its Waikato hillside long enough to have seen everything the New Zealand dairy industry has thrown at farming families — the boom years, the crashes, the long debates about intensification, the shifting conversation about the environment. Through all of it, the family that owns Cleavedale has made one consistent…
There’s a particular kind of tension that builds in a concert venue when the performer on stage is someone who has been gone a long time. Not absent in the way artists sometimes are — the occasional quiet year, a pandemic pause — but genuinely, inexplicably absent for fifteen years. That was the atmosphere in Hamilton…
On paper, it sounds like an easy win. The government has announced a $52.7 million loan programme aimed at more than doubling the number of public electric vehicle charging points across New Zealand — from roughly 1,200 today to nearly 3,800 — and the target is ambitious enough to have drawn headlines nationwide. But in Waikato, where…
A Hamilton court heard this week that the violence Jordan Crawford inflicted on his partner was not a momentary lapse or an act of passion — it was repeated, deliberate, and cowardly. The judge sentencing him made sure those words were on the record. “I’m sick of men who hit women,” the judge told Crawford…
Hamilton Zoo is getting bigger — though its animal list, at least for now, is staying the same. The zoo has purchased a significant block of neighbouring land for $17 million, in a move that its director says is not about adding new exotic species but about giving existing animals far more room to roam. Zoo…
Thirty years is a long time to wait. But for Ngāti Rangi, the return of kiwi to their ancestral whenua in the Ruapehu district has been worth every year of effort, every predator trap set, and every planning hui held in community halls across the rohe. The first ten of an eventual forty western brown…
There were tears, laughter, and more than a few gasps from the crowd when the first balloon lit up against the darkened sky above the University of Waikato campus on Saturday evening. For one Hamilton mother, standing in that crowd meant more than most people around her could have known. Just months ago, she was…