NBR Radio Weekend Rumble: Unpaid interns, Auckland's housing market and the photo that shocked the world

NBR’s Chelsea Armitage, Emerson Howitt, Campbell Gibson, Nathan Smith and Jason Walls throw around some of the week’s most captivating, interesting and topical stories.

The “youth” of NBR make up the troop this week and used the opportunity to discuss a topic close to their hearts: unpaid student internships.

This comes following Ms Armitage’s story about gossip journalist Rachel Glucina being on the hunt for an unpaid intern to work for her joint venture with MediaWorks.

Ms Armitage told Rumble it’s not uncommon for students studying at university to go in search of internships, having done a few herself, and it’s also quite common for the internship to offer no money.

“But sometimes, you just have to take it on the chin,” Mr Gibson says.

But is that enough? Ms Armitage asks.

“Internships are for the privileged few, those who are able to give up their hours to media organisations, rather than employers who pay the bills,” she says.

Mr Walls agreed, adding at the end of his university degrees he was required to complete a nine-week internship.

He says students were required to find the firm to work at themselves and the university did not make it a requirement that the student was paid by the company while they interned. But the university still charged the student as if they were still studying.

Mr Howitt says it was a similar situation when he was studying.

The Rumble also talked about this week’s OCR cut and how it would impact the Auckland housing market.

Mr Howitt says the argument around Auckland housing is “all wrong.”

“The argument of intensification versus sprawl is inherently wrong because it ignores the fact that different people have different tastes in how to live while some people want to live in their quarter acre detached sections.”

He says there’s a growing number of people who want to enjoy interior living and it would be more beneficial if we build housing to support all of these sections, as opposed to one or the other.  

Finally, the group talked about the refugee crisis and the photo that “galvanised the world” – according to Mr Walls – of the boy who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea and washed up on the shore of Greece.     

Mr Walls was corrected by Mr Smith about the photo after he said the boy was from Syria. As Mr Smith informed The Rumble, the boy’s father was actually Turkish, not Syrian, and chose to leave when the people smugglers dropped the price from $10,000 to $2,000.

“He was an economic refugee,” Mr Smith says.

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