Sir Ashley Bloomfield spent 300-odd consecutive days walking out to a lectern and telling New Zealand the status of the public health plan. As Director-General of Health through the COVID-19 pandemic, he became one of the most recognisable faces in the country's history. Calm, consistent, and quietly formidable/ a constant presence. Five years on, he's a professor at the University of Auckland, CEO of Public Health and Forensic Science, and, as of March this year, 60 years old.

In this kōrero, Petra sits down with Ashley for a broad conversation that moves from COVID reflections to growing up in Tawa, from his challenging leadership philosophy to the public health win he's most proud of, one that's adding nearly a year to the life expectancy of wāhine Māori and barely made the news.

Ashley talks honestly about what it was like to lead through the pandemic and why he hopes the inquiry findings will be used to strengthen Aotearoa's future response rather than score political points. He reflects on the stranger who stopped him on a Wellington street and how that moment helped Ashley frame the season.

Ashley outlines the four values he returns to again and again, kindness, courage, integrity, and humility, and why self-doubt is a feature not a bug.

There's also a meander down memory lane into Ashley's early years, the year off medical school hitchhiking around Europe, sailing a yacht back from Australia, and working on a dairy farm in the UK. The Territorial Army training that stress-tested him in ways that would matter decades later.

And there's the long game of public health, the slow, unsexy, generation-spanning work that doesn't get thanked, and why aging is, in Ashley's view, humankind's greatest achievement.

This is a deeply decent conversation about what good leadership looks like and what it feels like to dare to be hopeful.

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Song credit: Korimako, Performed by Aro, Written by Emily Looker and Charles Louker and published by Songbroker.

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