Avsnitt
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I contacted Ricardo a couple of weeks ago when NZ First MP Shane Jones shouted in parliament “Send the Mexicans home!” after Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said Green Party migrant MPs should "show some gratitude" for being in New Zealand.
Why? Because I have never met Ricardo and I wondered what it is about him that so obviously riled these NZ First MP’s.
Now I think I know.
He is a highly intelligent man with a very carefully thought out economic and political philosophy, who can communicate his ideas clearly and succinctly.
I can see how that would frighten Peters and Jones,, especially given the latest polls which appears to show support for NZ First as falling, while support for the Greens is on the rise.
By becoming a paid subscriber for $9 a month (including GST) you can help me continue my public interest journalism- speaking truth to power and giving a voice to those who have none.Membership will also give you access to all my posts , allow you to comment and join our chat group for discussions. Please restack and share posts you think are worthwhile as it all helps to build readership.
And to my paid subscibers - Thank you again for your support.
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Look at this ! Vans equipped with washing machines so that homeless people and folks experiencing hardship can get access to free laundry and shower services, plus have the opportunity for regular connection with other people. Isn’t that a brilliantly simple idea?
You can find Orange Sky vans in a number of centres around the country.
I recently spoke with Kat Doughty who is the Senior Impact Manager for the Charity who told me how Orange Sky got started and how its services are open everyone regardless of circumstance and at no cost.
She said one important aspect of their work is the many hours having kōrero with their community because homelessness is not just about their living situation but also the absence of human connection and a sense of belonging.
You can find out more about Orange Sky and how to support them here.
https://orangesky.org.nz
Monday is Hope Day is a regular feature I run as a reminder there many good people in our part of the world who think beyond themselves to help others. Kia kaha!
By becoming a paid subscriber for $9 a month (including GST) you can help me continue my public interest journalism.Membership will also give you access to all my posts , allow you to comment and join our chat group for discussions. Please restack and share posts you think are worthwhile as it all helps to build readership.
And to my paid subscibers - Thank you again for your support.
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Saknas det avsnitt?
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In this episode of Head 2 Head I catch up with Paul Hunt who was New Zealand’s Chief Human Rights Commissioner between 2019 - 2024 and who is now Professor of Law at the Human Rights Centre, University of Essex.
Among the issues he raises is the need for human rights to be incorporated in our legislation and how proposed the Treaty Principles Bill is wrong in both its conception and process.
Paul studied law at Cambridge University and Waikato University. He has lived and undertaken human rights work in Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Aotearoa.
For more than a decade, he served as an independent human rights expert for the United Nations, reporting to the UN General Assembly and UN Human Rights Council. He wrote and presented some 30 UN reports, including on the World Trade Organisation, World Bank, IMF, Guantanamo Bay, the Israel-Lebanon conflict in 2006, and on numerous countries.
Paul’s focus was the human rights to healthcare and health protection. Between 2011 and 2013, he was senior human rights adviser to WHO Assistant Director-General Dr. Flavia Bustreo.
He has published extensively on human rights and has been awarded two Honorary Doctorates in recognition of his scholarship.
In 2021 he was awarded the Ann Dysart Distinguished Service Award by the civil society organisation, Multicultural New Zealand..
By becoming a paid subscriber for $9 a month (including GST) you can help me continue to do interviews like this one , to speak truth to power and give a voice to those who have none. Membership will also give you access to all my posts , allow you to comment and join our chat group for discussions. Please restack and share post you think are worthwhile as it all helps to build readership.
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Dr Tony Ellis is a leading New Zealand and International Human Rights lawyer whose work has covered public and criminal law and is well know for compensation cases including prisoner’s rights including abuses and deaths while in custody.
I met Tony some years ago when making an episode of The Investigator which looked at the case of a 15 year old girl who had wrongly been convicted of assault who tried to get her case heard on Appeal. The Appeal Court Judges refused her request without giving it proper court hearing and she became one a group of such cases which Tony took to the Privy Council in London, who declared that the Appeal Court Judges had acted illegally … but I’ll let him tell you about what happened next along with some of the other important cases he has argued.
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And thank you again to my paid subscribers for your support. It is much appreciated.
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I talk vaccines, child mortality and the relationship between deprivation and life expectancy, with Dr Osman (Oz) Mansoor who is a public health medicine (PHM) specialist with national and international policy experience in immunization, programme design and implementation, and communicable disease control.
He has had clinical experience across medical specialties before establishing a general practice in Wellington. He continued to work in his practice while national policy lead on immunization for the New Zealand Ministry of Health. He then worked internationally, as New Vaccines Officer for the World Health Organization at the regional office and then at UNICEF headquarters. Since his return to Aotearoa (NZ), he has worked in local public health units in Wellington, Napier and Gisborne. He is currently Medical Officer of Health in Gisborne, NZ.
Please share and restack post you find worthwhile as it helps to build readership.
I know there are a lot of calls on subscription dollars and that times are tough for a lot of people . But if you can afford $9 a month ( including GST) I would appreciate it if you would consider becoming a Paid Subscriber and help me give a voice to those who have none. All subscription money, by the way, goes to meet the costs of production.
And thank you again to my paid subscribers for your support. It is much appreciated.
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One of our reader community recently sent me a link to The Dark Times Academy, so I looked it up.
https://darktimesacademy.co.nz
It is jointly owned by Mandy Henk and Byron Clark, and is a community education project that puts teachers and students of all ages together with courses designed to build, they say, “the kinds of communities that help us get through hard times.”
Well that sounded interesting, so I called Mandy and our chat not only covered why she and Byron started The Dark Times Academy, what it is and what it does, but, because Mandy is American, we wandered off into talking about how it was that Trump got elected for a second term and what that portends for the future of the USA and the World.
Thanks to the generosity of my paid supporters all Head2Head interviews are free to anyone to watch and/or listen to. Please consider supporting my public journalism work by subscribing $9 a month ( including GST) . Thanks.
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Blake Forbes has a disability. He has spastic cerebral palsy with mild autism and ADHD, but that hasn’t stopped him running a very effective interview podcast called BFG (short for Blake Forbes Gentle) which he produces with co-host Paul Barlow.
Paul has a media background and, in addition to working with Blake, runs his own podcast show wittily entitled Paul The Other One, for reasons I’ll let him explain.
Blake has become an effective advocate for people with disabilities and at the moment is rightly concerned about the loss of respite funding for care givers.
Kia kaha Blake and Paul .Thank you for a very enjoyable and informative conversation.
If you want to check out Blake’s Channel you can find it here:
https://www.youtube.com/@thebfgpodcast
Paul’s personal channel Paul The Other One is here:
https://www.youtube.com/@Paul...theotherone
He is a former political commentator with a background in media studies and pop culture, and has over 35000 followers of his content from across Aotearoa.
This content is also available in video formats on Tik Tok, YouTube, Facebook and Instagram as well as audio versions from wherever you get your Podcasts.
Thanks to the generosity of my paid subscribers who help fund my Head2Head interviews are free to access. Please consider supporting my public journalism work by becoming a paid subscriber for $9 a month (including GST) as only paid subscribers can comment in the chat room.
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I read a Tax Justice Network online report recently that stated New Zealand was one of 8 Countries that had refused to sign up to the United Nations Tax Convention . I thought, What’s that? Why haven’t I heard more about it through our mainstream media ? and Who are the Tax Justice Network anyway?
So I did a bit of research and late one night last week I ended up talking with Sergio Chaparro who is the international policy and advocacy lead for the Tax Justice Network and is based in Chile.
Our conversation ended up being quite detailed so let me give you what I took to be the key points.
The United Nations Tax Convention is largely an attempt to stop Multinational Corporations cheating on their taxes in the countries in which they operate.
The Tax Justice Network is a non- profit organisation that aims to make tax systems work of people and the planet. They believe that taxation is a social superpower that can create a fair and just society.
In its latest report The Tax Justice Network estimates that countries are losing US$492 billion in tax a year to multinational corporations and wealthy individuals who are using tax havens to underpay tax.
Nearly half these losses (43%), they say, are enabled by the eight countries that remain opposed to a UN tax convention: Australia, Canada, Israel, Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, the UK and the USA.
Ironically the biggest enablers of global tax abuse are also some of the biggest losers: US$177 billion was lost last year by the 8 countries that recently voted against UN tax convention terms.
They estimate New Zealand lost US$1 billion in tax avoidance and evasion last year!
We are being told we have to pull our economic belt in, and cut back on this or that, while the wealthy hide their money .
Just imagine what we could do with $NZ1.75 Billion? A couple of years of collecting that amount of money from the tax cheats could pay for that new Dunedin Hospital or for those two large interisland ferries with all the associated infrastructure that Nicola Willis said we couldn’t afford and cancelled.
So why didn’t New Zealand sign up? Well the UN Tax Convention is being championed by African and poorer nations. The wealthier OECD countries, of which New Zealand is a member, have come up with what they call the Two Pillar solution to tax cheating.
It's a softer approach to the issue and it’s not working .The Trump administration doesn’t want a bar of it and the UK, who are the worst offenders, certainly don’t want us voting for the UN Tax Convention.
Given our current government’s right wing determination to pander to the wealthy, then I think you can understand why our government voted against what would deliver a fairer distribution of wealth both nationally and internationally.
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PS. Just as an aside I asked Sergio about Capital Gains Tax in Chile and Colombia. Chile has Capital Gains on house sales and Colombia, in addition, has a Wealth Tax.
If they can do it- so can we.
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Bryan Bruce and Emergency Doctor Gary Payinda talk about life and death issues- the challenges he faces in trying to preserve life in our hospital system plus his work in assisted day and why the law needs to modified because the current rules are not practical.
Thanks to the generosity of my paid subscribers this podcast is made possible for everyone to listen to. Please consider supporting my public journalism work by becoming a paid subscriber for $9 a month (including GST) to read a wide range of articles, watch some of my documents and join a chat group of intelligent New Zelanders deeply concerned about the economic and political
Dr Payinda’s substack is well worth following.
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Imagine an economy designed to serve people and planet rather than the other way around. Are there better, more sustainable, ways to run our economy? What kind of counrty do you want to live in? What’s an economy for anyway? These are kind of questions Dr Katherine Trebeck challenges us to ask if we are to have any hope of changing the entrenched neoliberal ideology that is exploiting both our people, our country and our planet in the name of greed.
The economy isn’t something that is fixed and unchangeable. It’s a human creation so we humans can change it if we want to.
That’s why Katherine, political economist,writer and advocate for economic change co-founded The Wellbeing Economy Alliance (WeALL for short) which you can find more about here:
https://weall.org
You can also find our more about Katherine, her work here:
https://katherinetrebeck.com
Her most recent book The Economics of Arrival: Ideas for a Grown Up Economy(co-authored with Jeremy Williams and published by Policy Press) was published in January 2019 and her major report Being Bold: Budgeting for Children’s Wellbeingwas launched in March 2021. Her two Tedx talks are about ‘Why the future economy has to be a wellbeing economy’ and ‘a new definition of wealth and prosperity’.
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This interview was made possible by the generosity of my paid subscribers without whom my public journalism work would be impossible . Please consider joining them.The subscription is $NZ9 a month .The more membership the more I can film stories that need to be told. Thanks
Please consider giving a subscription to a friend or someone in your whanau.
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In the wake of Treasury’s Half Year Economic and Fiscal Update, Associate Professor Susan St John gives her assessement of the government’s unnecessarily hard neoliberal economic austerity measures and how the Luxon/Willis administration has not learned the lessons of the 1990’s and the misery caused by the austerity measures of then National Finance Minister Ruth Richardson.
We discuss a wide range of consequences, including the way rising unemployment and increasing levels of poverty are causing our children to suffer from third world diseases, and the government’s complete lack of empathy in reducing support for foodbanks at the very time when people need it most.
So what can we do to have a fairer society?
Susan St John’s down- to -earth analysis is always enlightening.
It’s thanks to my Paid Subscribers that I can continue to do my public journalism work, speaking truth to power and giving a voice to those who have none . For just $9 a month you can join (and chat with ) this great group of supportive people , plus get access to my podcasts and documentaries… and me :)
And just a thought- with the Christmas soon upon us, you may also wish to consider giving a year’s access to Bryan Bruce Investigates as a present to a friend or whanau. Thank you
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A couple of days ago I read a very interesting Substack article about a piece of trojan horse, David Seymour, legislation currently before parliament that had managed to slip completely under my radar and perhaps yours too.
It was about the Regulatory Standards Bill and written by Melanie Nelson who laid out the far- reaching powers this Bill would give to the right-wing in our country.
You can find her excellent article here:
So I contacted Melanie and I am delighted she agreed to be interviewed for Head 2 Head because I learned a lot about how this mundane sounding Bill could undermine what a many of us still think Aotearoa New Zealand should still be about - a fair go for everyone and protecting our communities and environment from the self-serving agendas of wealthy individuals and overseas companies.
You can provide a submission:
• through the engagement hub on the Ministryʼs website https://www.regulation.govt.nz/our-work/regulatory-standards-bill/
• emailing your submission to [email protected], or
• mailing your submission to Ministry for Regulation, P O Box 577, Wellington 6140
Make no mistake, this Bill is a device designed to enhance the ME and undermine what is left of the WE society that once characterised life in Aotearoa New Zealand. Please don’t miss the chance to have your say. RSB consultation ending on 13 January
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Dr Melody Nixon is a writer, editor, academic and artist living between the Bay Area, California, and Aotearoa New Zealand. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD, with emphases in Literature and Critical Race and Ethnicity Studies, from the History of Consciousness department at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
Having spent over a decade in the USA she has a keen understanding of the the social and political undercurrents that saw Donald Trump re-elected and warns against the similar disturbing trends she sees developing here in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Funding for independent public journalism has been cut off by the current government. To support my work in speaking truth to power, please share posts on your social media sites. If you are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a $9 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts,
To my paid subscribers, please know your support is much appreciated. Please restack posts you like and share the links to friends and whanau as it all helps to build readership. With the Christmas soon upon us,you may also wish to consider giving a year’s access to Bryan Bruce Investigates as a present to someone . Thank you.
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Last week a group of economists wrote to Prime Minister Luxon and Minister of Finance Willis to express their concern at the Government’s approach to fiscal policy, and their alarm at the consequences for the people and communities of New Zealand.
In this episode of Head2Head I talk with the group’s lead spokesperson Dr Ganesh Nana.
Here is the letter in full.
Tēnā koe e Pirimia,
re: Your Government’s fiscal policy
We write to express our heightening concern at your Government’s approach to fiscal policy, and our alarm at the consequences for the people and communities of New Zealand.
We would welcome the opportunity to discuss in more detail, more directly with you as soon as possible, the immediate and long-lasting harm that your Government’s approach to fiscal policy is creating.
We summarise our concerns below under four headings.
* Reduced current and projected spending is needlessly exacerbating the current recession
* A focus on government debt is far too narrow, as it ignores the impacts on private sector debt and external debt
* The accumulating harm risks a long-lasting hollowing-out of business capacity and capability
* Fiscal policy is in direct conflict with the Government’s stated export target
Fiscal policy is needlessly exacerbating the current recession
Current and projected reductions in government spending appear to be central to the Government’s fiscal policy. The economic rationale for this approach is unclear. Rather, there appear to be few considerations outside the short-term impacts. For example, your Government’s cancellation of key infrastructure projects and sinking-lid cuts to the public service are powerful contributors to the current severe and prolonged recession. This is substantially worsening the contractionary effects on the economy of the Reserve Bank’s use of the Official Cash Rate to contain inflation.
It is important to recognise that even prior to cutting back expenditure, government consumption spending was close to 20% of GDP. This covered spending on health, education, defence, administration, justice, transport, and culture. In addition, deferrals and reductions in projected infrastructure spending has further reduced employment and intensified the economic recession.
There is ample evidence that government spending, including the necessary infrastructure and allied networks, has for many years fallen well short of that required for population growth and demographic changes. The Infrastructure Commission has stated that New Zealand has a $104 billion infrastructure gap at present – and that this picture will significantly worsen given current spending projections.
These accumulating shortfalls put the nation in a poor position to improve its long-run economic resilience and to prepare for future challenges. If nothing is changed now, this under-funding simply passes the burden of adjustments, and investment spending, to future generations.
Failure to correct this course will lead to higher economic scarring, with the costs borne by those with the least ability to pay, as has been demonstrated repeatedly in New Zealand’s history. It will also undermine the resilience of the private sector – particularly exporters – and will continue to constrain the capability of firms to scale up.
A focus on government debt ignores impacts on private sector debt and external debt
Similarly, the fiscal policy focus on reducing government debt lacks a clear economic rationale. Irrespective of the debt measure adopted, international comparisons of government debt in comparison to GDP remain in New Zealand’s favour. Credit rating agencies continue to view the government’s debt situation without concern.
Bluntly, there is no government (or public) debt crisis in New Zealand.
The New Zealand economy’s ongoing problem is private sector debt. Importantly, private sector debt is being driven upwards by your Government’s fiscal policy in pursuit of surpluses for itself and its aim of rapidly reducing public debt.
Standard economics shows the relationship between public and private sector financial balances. When total domestic saving (both public and private) is insufficient for domestic investment (both private and public), the gap needs to be filled by drawing on foreign funds. The overall current account (or external) deficit is a measure of this gap and requires overseas borrowing or asset sales to foreigners to finance such a deficit. With the banks acting as intermediaries, the resulting increase in liabilities is reflected on both the private and public sectors’ balance sheets.
These connections – in particular, between the Government’s fiscal stance, the size of the current account deficit, and the consequent size of the nation’s external debt – are glaringly missing in documents describing the economic impact of fiscal policy. There is little explanation of how fiscal policy focussed on reducing government spending would reduce New Zealand’s external deficit and total external debt. Consequently, fiscal policy is adding to the vulnerability of economic activity and exposing New Zealand to inevitable global shocks.
The accumulating harm risks a long-lasting hollowing-out of business capacity and capability
There appear to be further spending reductions accelerating at this stage of the economic cycle. The negative impact risks undermining retail, hospitality, home improvement sectors, and challenges the heart of rural economies and communities across the nation. Prolonging the current cyclical downturn in this manner means that these costs result from a policy choice, rather than being an economic outcome.
In addition, increasingly worrying is the harm imposed on those households on low or casual wage income or dependent on benefits. The erosion of the already low psychological and financial reserves of the poorest will be hard – and socially and fiscally costly – to repair. We note that the consequent erosion of the tax base will also impair the government’s balance sheet.
This long-lasting harm is further evident in the increasing numbers of trained and skilled New Zealanders migrating abroad in search of hope. This is creating skills shortages across the country, particularly in health and education.
The loss of this capacity and capability – in terms of workforce skills, knowledge and expertise alongside investor/owner appetite for equipment, machinery, technology upgrades and expansions – becomes increasingly permanent the longer the downturn is prolonged.
This form of hollowing-out is currently clearly visible in the construction sector, where once again the boom-bust cycle is seeing harm that will impact on the development of the sector for years to come and further undermine critical efforts to expand the housing stock. This will (again) be likely reflected with future infrastructure and housing developments experiencing difficulties in attracting sub-contractors back to the building and construction sector.
The hollowing-out of business capacity and capability includes small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs) across the economy. Many SMEs across regional and metropolitan New Zealand continue to be financed through mortgages on family homes and other informal community networks. The accumulating impact on household sector balance sheets will add unnecessary stress on an already stressed sector of the nation.
Arising from this situation is the long-lasting scar of the loss of entrepreneurial aspiration in our communities as the cyclical downturn is unnecessarily prolonged.
Fiscal policy is in direct conflict with the Government’s stated export target
A successful fiscal policy is one that has an economic justification consistent with a clear aspiration. Such aspiration would set the direction to an improvement in New Zealand’s external position, and so underpin its ability to confront the climatic, social, and demographic challenges, as well as increasing our ability to withstand global economic shocks.
The Government’s stated objective to double the value of exports over the next decade potentially provides direction. However, a focus on lifting export quality and unit values – making clear the target is not simply about increasing quantities – is required. Further, a goal directly targeting net exports (i.e. exports minus imports) would be more consistent with this aspiration, placing value on import competing activities as well as on export expansion.
Importantly though, there is a direct conflict between the current fiscal policy stance and the aspirational export goal. New Zealand’s historical reliance on volume-driven commodity growth and mainly low-value exports requires significant structural shifts for the returns from exports to be doubled. Without investment in key infrastructure, resilience building, business capacity and capability, human capital, and entrepreneurial endeavour, the necessary structural shifts will not occur. The current fiscal policy settings undermine the required investments to facilitate such shifts.
Consequently, your Government’s aspiration for the export sector will itself continue to be an aspiration due to a short-sighted fiscal policy stance, rather than the attainable goal it could become.
Our request
To reiterate, given the concerns set out above, we would like the opportunity to urgently discuss these matters directly with you.
In the interim, given the urgency of the situation, we request that
* your Government immediately suspend all directions for further reductions to departmental and agency spending and/or further delays in infrastructure spending.
* your Government request further advice from officials, including convening private and community sector advisors, to ensure that Budget 2025 provides a clear economic rationale for fiscal policy that will assist
* growth in the scale and resilience of the business sector
* reductions in private sector debt
* investing in infrastructure
* strong employment growth in good jobs
so that the New Zealand economy can be fit for the future needs of the people and communities of New Zealand.
We look forward to hearing from you in due course.
Ngā mihi nui
Signed:
This interview is feely available thanks to the generosity of my paid supporters.Thank you for your continued support for my public journalism work . It is much appreciated.
If you are a Free Subscriber please consider upgrading to Paid. The current government has cut all funding for public interest journalism and the broadscasters are showing little interest in supporting independent investigative documentaries which is why I started this Substack.
Your $9 per month subscription will help me keep working as public interest writer, podcaster and film maker- to speak truth to power and give a public voice to those who have none.
And thank you to my Paid Subscribers. Your support for my public journalism work is much appreciated and has allowed this podcast to now become freely available. Please restack the item if you like it and recommend bryanbruce.substack.com to your friends and whanau.
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Why is borrowing to give tax breaks stupid? How could we use some of our superannuation fund to build housing? What’s an economy for anyway?
Shamubeel Eaqub has the gift of making economics understandable and often gives voice to common sense solutions for some of the problems that beset us today.
He has worked as an economist in leading international banks and consultancy in Wellington, Melbourne and Auckland and he is now the Chief Economist at Simplicity KiwiSaver.
He is a columnist, media commentator and a thought leading public speaker and author who has published three books: Generation Rent (2015), co-authored with Selena Eaqub; Growing Apart: Regional Prosperity in NZ (2014); and The NZ Economy: An Introduction (2011), co-authored with Dr Ralph Lattimore.
If you are a Free Subscriber please consider upgrading to Paid. The current government has cut all funding for public interest journalism and the broadscasters are showing little interest in supporting independent investigative documentaries which is why I started this Substack.
Your $9 per month subscription will help me keep working as public interest writer, podcaster and film maker- to speak truth to power and give a public voice to those who have none.
And thank you to my Paid Subscribers. Your support for my public journalism work is much appreciated and has allowed this podcast to now become freely available. Please restack the item if you like it and recommend bryanbruce.substack.com to your friends and whanau.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bryanbruce.substack.com/subscribe -
Gareth was a Green MP for 10 years and is now the Director of The Well Being Economy Alliance of Aotearoa which not only examines the neoliberal status quo that drives our current economy but looks a the many alternative economic models we could adopt to have a fairer society.
WeAll have an upcoming conference : Economics in the Public Good ( see details below)
He is is the author of A Gentle Radical, a biography of the late Greens leader Jeanette Fitzsimons which was published two years after her death in 2022.
If you are a Paid subscriber please know that your support for my public journalism work is much appreciated. If today’s post reaches 50 likes from you, I will make it free for everyone to read.
If you are a Free Subscribers please consder upgrading to Paid. The current government has cut all funding for public interest journalism and the broadscasters are showing little interest in supporting independent investigative documentaries which is why I started this Substack.
Your $9 per month subscription will help me keep working as public interest writer, podcaster and film maker- to speak truth to power and give a public voice to those who have none. Thank you.
It’s time to redesign our economy to deliver wellbeing for nature and all our people.Join us at the Economy for Public Good Conference in Pōneke Wellington, we’ll weave a shared purpose for moving beyond a broken ‘business as usual’ economy.If you’d like to build bonds and share ideas with people inspired to create an economy where people and nature thrive, this one day hui is for you.The conference will feature Dr Katherine Trebeck as international keynote speaker, thought leaders discussing the big ideas for Aotearoa 2040, practitioners sharing stories of the new economy in action, and in-depth interactive training and breakout sessions.Tickets for this in person conference are set at only $100 and numbers are limited.https://www.weall.org.nz/economyforpublicgood#EconomyForPublicGood#TimeToRedesign
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Peter Newport has had a long and distinguished journalistic career including becoming European Correspondent and Bureau Chief for Channel 9 , Deputy News Editor BBC TV News and a documentary producer with the Discovery Channel before returning to work in NZ with Mediaworks as a producer on their current affairs programme 3rd Degree.
When he moved to Queenstown he decided to start Crux, a local digital media outlet featuring stories and events in the Southern Lakes and Dunedin districts where he applied his talent for public interest journalism.
His channel got a significant following reaching almost 2/3rds of the population. However after almost 7 years of first rate journalism the funding for Crux has fallen because local business and councils had largely pulled their support and the government’s public journalism fund has been axed.
In this interview I talk with Peter about his new approach which is to publish via Substack as I also have been forced to do because neither of us intend to be silenced.
Thank you to my Paid Subscribers. Your support for my public journalism work is much appreciated. Please share and restack this article if you like it and recommend bryanbruce.substack.com to your friends and whanau.
If you are a Free Subscriber please consider upgrading to Paid. The current government has cut all funding for public interest journalism and the broadscasters are showing little interest in supporting independent investigative documentaries which is why I started this Substack.
Your $9 per month subscription will help me keep working as public interest writer, podcaster and film maker- to speak truth to power and give a public voice to those who have none.
This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit bryanbruce.substack.com/subscribe -
John Quiggin is a professor of Economics at The University of Queensland, Australia and I first met him 10 years ago when I was making my documentary Mind The Gap . He had not long published his book Zombie Economics about how the dead economic ideas of neoliberalism such as “the market knows best”, deregulation, privatisation and “trickle down” theory, still manage to haunt the corridors of power in our country.
In this interview we discuss how Australian political parties on both left and right have managed to kill off some of these zombie ideas (such as how public hospitals would be run more cost effectively if they were privatised) yet in the New Zealand graveyard of economics such dangerous ideas still walk among us.
And in the wake of Trump’s victory in the American Presidential race last week, John gives his take on what impact it might have on the economies of both Australia and New Zealand and on the geopolitics of the Pacific.
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Rebecca is an extraordinary person.
Back in 2011 she saw two problems in her Palmerston North community. A lot of food waste going to tghe dump or feed pigs and a lot of hungry people. So she decided to do something about it - rescue the food and feed those who need it
So she created Just Zilch in a free store, and today she had a full time team of 5 and 100 volunteers who distribute surplus food, and fresh, locally grown produce to people in need - without conditions.
Everyday the Just Ziltch team feed give food to around 350 people a day≥
In this interview Rebecca talks about how the demand is growing and why it is getting harder to meet it..
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What must you believe to be a Christian? In 1967 New Zealand Presbyterian Minister and Theologican Sir Lloyd Geering faced charges of heresy for teaching that the Biblical record of Jesus' death and resurrection is not true.
For the making of my of my documentary Jesus The Cold Case - Who Killed Jesus And Why? - I interviewed Sir Lloyd who was then aged 90 . (At the time of posting 30/6/24 he is 106).
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