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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Worried about the calls to privatise our public health system?

Concerned about falling numbers of doctors and nurses and the increasing difficulty of getting access to medical care when you need it?

Dr Gary Payinda MD MA DDU FACEP FACEM is an Emergency Medical Doctor in Te Tai Tokerau Northland. He is at the frontline of our health care system and he spoke to me frankly about what has gone wrong with our hospitals, what we need to to do to fix them, and why we need to do it .

While the mainstream media tend to uncritically carry the government’s message that cuts to our health system are necessary because the budget is “blowing out”, the fact of the matter is that we have been seriously underfunding the public health service for the last 30 years.

A case in point - “In the 1970’s” Gary told me” there were 12 hospital beds for every 1000 New Zealanders. Today there are 2.5.”

Instead of calls for privatising our hospitals we need to expand our taxation base by making the wealthy top 1% pay their fair share, so that we we can all have free medical care when we need it.

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There’s avery good chance you have heard of Ruud, the Dutch-New Zealand naturalist whose passion for insects saw him start a talkback radio show (Ruud's Awakening) in in 1987 in which which he offered environmentally friendly tips to gardeners.

It earned him the name of “the bugman” which he carried to the NZTV series Maggie’s Garden Show from 1992 until December 2003.

This led to successful international series for Animal Planet called Buggin with Ruud.

For services to entomology, conservation and entertainment Ruud was appointed an honorary Member of the NZ Order of Merit in 2018.

In this episode I catch up with Ruud and find he is as passionate about communicating the importance of respecting nature as when I met and worked with him on a documentary I directed back called The Bug House in 2001 about the insects that live in our houses which is available under the documentaries tab on my Substack byanbruce.substack.com

Today Ruud is working with teachers and school children as part of his ongoing work to educating us about the importance of nature and why , in his words, we “need to be gentle with it”.

If you are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a $5 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts, documentaries and podcasts plus the comment and chat facility. It’s a good idea not get in now because the cost of subscription will be going up to $9 at the end of this month to meet rising costs.

To those of you who are already paid subscribers - thank you for helping me to keep going. Your support is much appreciated.

Michael Belgrave is Professor Emeritus of History at Massey University. He was research manager of the Waitangi Tribunal and has continued to work on Treaty of Waitangi research and settlements. published widely on Treaty and Māori history. His 2017 Dancing with the King, an exploration of diplomacy and peace-making in the decades between the Waikato War and the opening of the King Country, was shortlisted for the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and won the Ernest Scott Prize. He has worked in advisory groups supporting the implementation of the new national history curriculum.

In this interview we discuss his new, and very readable book, Becoming Aotearoa- A New History of New Zealand.

If you are a free subscriber, please consider becoming a $5 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts, documentaries and podcasts plus the comment and chat facility. It’s a good idea not get in now because the cost of subscription will be going up to $9 at the end of this month to meet rising costs.

To those of you who are already paid subscribers - thank you for helping me to keep going.Your support is much appreciated.

Yesterday I decided to interview the Chat Bot Chat GPT (the GPT part is an abbreviation of Generative Pre-trained Transformer - I’ll let you look that up :).

First of all,let me admit that I have come very late to this particular party which hundreds of millions of users have already been enjoying, because…well, to be honest, I saw it as a gimmicky young person’s thing and not for oldies like me.

I couldn’t have been more wrong!

Frankly I was stunned by ChatGPT’s speed of response to my questiions and the human- like quality of them, and while I’ll admit to trying it out as a bit of fun, the implications of this new technology are as serious as they are scary.

By the end of our brief chat, during which I raised some very light ethical questions, I found the ChatGPT’s constant response that it was there to serve me and I had nothing to fear from it, less assuring each time we touched on an ethical issue.

Now there’s a lot I don’t understand about AI, but I do understand a bit about human behaviour, and I know that whatever we create reflects our unspoken (and often unconscious) personal biases.

So, I wondered, “Who owns and controls Chat GPT?” and no, I didn’t ask the Bot, but resorted instead to old fashioned deep dive research.

And what a frightening rabbit hole that simple question has led me down.

But I’ll save what I have been discovering for another day, because the ethical and moral issues are so complex I’ll need to unpack them over a series of posts from time to time.

For the moment please have a listen to my 9 minute chat with Chat GPT and tell me what you think.

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 $5 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts, documentaries and podcasts plus the comment and chat facility. To those of you who are already paid subscribers - thank you for helping me to keep going.

Susan St John Bsc, MA, PhD, QSO, CNZM, is an honorary Associate Professor of Economics at the University of Auckland . With Auckland accounting tax expert Terry Baucher she has been publishing papers on what they term a Fair Economic Return Tax (FER)as a much better solution than either Capital Gains Tax or Land Tax as a way of getting the wealthy to pay their fair share towards the upkeep and future of the society we all share.

What is it? How would it work? These are the question I was keen to ask Susan .

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 $5 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts, documentaries and podcasts plus the comment and chat facility. To those of you who are already paid subscribers - thank you for helping me to keep going.

Aotearoa New Zealand does not have a written constitution, rather a collection of fundamental laws, conventions, and documents, including The Treaty Of Waitangi, the Māori text of which ,Te Tiriti, was the one signed by most rangatira Māori (540, compared to 39 who signed the English version), and it is that text which is recognised in international law (contra preferentem).

David Seymour’s Treaty Principles Bill is, for many reasons, deeply flawed; not the least of which is that his proposal is based on a mistranslation of Te Tiriti o Waitangi.

In this interview Dame Anne Salmond, who is a Distinguished Professor of Māori Studies and Anthropology at the University of Auckland, takes us back to 1840 to supply the context in which the treaty was signed, before describing, in detail, what each of the articles in the Māori text, Te Tiriti, actually says.

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 $5 per month paid subscriber which will also give you access to premium posts, documentaries and podcasts plus the comment and chat facility. To those of you who are already paid subscribers - thank you for helping me to keep going.