Papa Mike

Great to be here again.

I was working on a big story last week and I wanted to go through it with you.

So this is the illegal export of pounamu.

Yes, greenstone, jade, but it's ours.

You can only get pounamu here in New Zealand.

And there are different types of greenstone or jade, but pounamu has its origins here, of course.

It's a finite resource, which we always forget about.

You know, there's only so much of it.

But so this story kind of landed with me a couple of months ago, and it played out in the Manukau District Court.

Actually, I've got to give a quick shout out to the security boys.

at the Manukau District Court.

I walked in there the other day.

They were like, oh, it's Papa Mike with the news.

I said, yeah, that's right.

Kia ora.

So what happened was this is the first prosecution taken by custom.

So it was a little bit different from...

from a normal seizure at the airport, right?

So this was a prosecution taking by customs, and it was a Chinese national.

It was a mother and her son, adults, were trying to export around 18 kilograms of raw panamu.