Smart Talk

Community health expert Dr Peter Saxton explores the balancing act of keeping New Zealand's blood supply safe from infectious diseases while ensuring we have enough donors and can uphold our values as a progressive, inclusive nation. (A highlight from the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar series)

Community health expert Dr Peter Saxton explores the balancing act of keeping New Zealand's blood supply safe from infectious diseases while ensuring we have enough donors and can uphold our values as a progressive, inclusive nation. (A highlight from the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar series)

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Aotearoa New Zealand has one of the safest blood supplies in the world but our recent shortage of A+ blood donors raises the question of whether our deferral policies are too conservative.

This talk focuses on New Zealand's controversial policy that excludes gay men from donating blood if they've had sex in the last three months. Many view this as discriminatory, unscientific and inconsistent with modern, safe-sex approaches.

Elsewhere, Canada is lifting some restrictions on gay men donating blood, and Australia recently removed 'mad cow disease' (vCJD) from its list of theoretical concerns, opening the door to people who lived in the UK during the 1980s/90s.

Peter discusses blood testing and deferral policies, trust in institutions, the framing of donating blood as a moral act, the harms of being excluded, what alternative policies could look like, the implications of change, and the potential increase in new donors.

More listening:

Winter illnesses and COVID causing blood donor problems

Making blood donations fairer for gay, bisexual, takatapui men

Assoc. Prof. Peter Saxton 

Peter Saxton is an Associate Professor in the School of Population Health, Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences. Peter's training spans epidemiology, sociology and public policy. He works closely with policymakers, non-government organisations, communities and the media to improve HIV prevention programmes. Peter's work on HIV behavioural surveillance is internationally recognised, and his current project, SPOTS: Sex and Prevention Of Transmission Study, aims to improve blood donation and reduce undiagnosed HIV among gay and bisexual men. He is the inaugural recipient of the NZ AIDS Foundation Fellowship and received the Australasian Sexual Health Association Interdisciplinary Achiever Award in 2016.

This session was broadcast in association with the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar night, held in August 2022

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What's with all the stockouts and empty shelves? Dr Tava Olsen from the University of Auckland Business School with a highlight of Raising the Bar 2022.

What's with all the stockouts and empty shelves?

Supply chain expert Dr Tava Olsen explores distribution logistics in this talk from Raising the Bar 2022.

Global disruptions mean we are talking about supply chains more than ever as we realise how important they are to our daily lives.

New Zealand is at the edge of the world when it comes to freight distribution, making us vulnerable to any glitches in the system. Are things going to get better, or is this the new normal for New Zealand? And can you have a resilient system that is also highly efficient (i.e. profitable)?

In this talk, Tava outlines the basics of supply chain management, explaining why supply chains matter so much.

She draws on decades of teaching, research and advising on supply chains to discuss what she thinks has changed for good, and what has not.

In addition, she addresses some of the unique situations global logistics create for New Zealand, such as why we export so many raw logs rather than creating value-added products such as construction materials and furniture.

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Related:

When there's a glitch in the supply chain

A fairer system for booking MIQ?

Dr Tava Olsen

Dr Tava Olsen is a Professor of Operations and Supply Chain Management, Director of the Centre for Supply Chain Management and Head of two departments at the University of Auckland Business School. Prior to joining the University, she was a Professor of Operations and Manufacturing Management at the Olin Business School at Washington University in St. Louis. Tava received her PhD from Stanford University and holds a BSc Hons from the University of Auckland. Her research interests include supply chain management and the stochastic and economic modelling of manufacturing, service, agricultural, and healthcare systems. She has been awarded the Auckland Business School's Research Excellence Award three times.

This session was broadcast in association with the University of Auckland's Raising the Bar night, held in August 2022

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Charlotte Yates explores the history of her series of musical collaborations between contemporary composers and the work of New Zealand's finest writers at the 2021 Going West Festival.

Musician Charlotte Yates explores turning poetry into music at Auckland's 2021 Going West Festival.

Yates has devoted albums to fine New Zealand writers such as James K Baxter, Hone Tuwhare, Witi Ihimaera and Katherine Mansfield.

The lineup of performers at the festival's Gala Opening Night included Yates, Show Pony, Sandy Mill and Julia Deans.

Hear Charlotte Yates and other performers at the 2021 Going West Literary Festival

More listening

The Mixtape: Charlotte Yates

William Dart on Charlotte Yates' Mansfield album

The Making of Tuwhare. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Charlotte Yates interviewed in 1998

About Charlotte Yates

Charlotte Yates is an independent singer/songwriter & recording artist. She has released seven of her own solo albums, alongside extensive collaborative and compilation work. Her first album Queen Charlotte Sounds was released in 1991 and the single Red Letter was an APRA Silver Scroll finalist.

Melbourne-based from 1993 to 1996, Charlotte directed the 1993 and 1994 Melbourne Fringe Arts Festivals. She studied Contemporary Music Technology and Composition at La Trobe University, Melbourne during 1995. Recorded in Sydney, Charlotte's second album The Desire and the Contempt won the Singer-Songwriter category at the 1997 Wellington Music Awards.

Thirty of Charlotte's lyrics were collated as One Lady Driver and published in 1999. Her lyrics also feature in How You Doing an anthology of NZ comic verse and Cafe Reader, Spring 2017. She wrote a songwriting column for NZ Musician and released her third album Dead Fish Beach in 2001.

Charlotte directed and produced Baxter, a compilation CD of James K Baxter's poetry set to music by twelve NZ recording artists. Performances of Baxter featured in the NZ Festival 2000, the Taranaki & Christchurch Arts Festivals in 2001 & Hamilton's FUEL Festival in 2002.

Charlotte was the artist-in-residence at the Christchurch Arts Centre during April/May 2002 where she concentrated on songwriting and guitar performance. She toured extensively with fellow singer/songwriter, the late Mahinaarangi Tocker. The live album of their concerts Touring was released in 2002. Her fourth solo album plainsong was released in 2003…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Tongan, Samoan and Palagi poet Karlo Mila reads from her book The Goddess Muscle and Fijian poet Daren Kamali performs his poetry and accompanies himself on traditional Fijian musical instruments.

Performance poets Karlo Mila and Daren Kamali trade lines onstage at Auckland's Glen Eden Playhouse. (A highlight from the 2021 Going West Writers Festival)

In a lively session from the gala night opening of the 2021 Going West literary festival, Karlo Mila and Daren Kamali take turns performing their poetry to an attentive audience.

Their work explores a variety of subjects, including life among Pasifika communities in Aotearoa New Zealand.

Listen to Karlo Mila read from her book The Goddess Muscle and Daren Kamali recite his poetry while playing traditional Fijian musical instruments

Related:

Pasifika voices heard on the main stage at COP21

Karlo Mila interview with Kathryn Ryan

Daren Kamali about to embark month-long Mad Doggerel Cabaret tour

Daren Kamali revitalising the Fijian tradition of ulumate

About the writers

Karlo Mila

Dr Karlo Mila (MNZM) is an award winning Pasifika poet of Tongan / Palangi descent. Her third poetry book The Goddess Muscle was released in 2020. Her first book won the First Best Book Award at the New Zealand literary awards in 2005. She is the Programme Director Mana Moana Experience at Leadership New Zealand and is the founder and creator of Mana Moana - aimed at elevating and harnessing indigenous Pacific knowledge for contemporary living and leadership.

Daren Kamali

Daren Kamali is a Pacific poet and the Senior Pacific Curator at Auckland Libraries. His poetry books include Tales, Poems and Songs from the Underwater World (2011), Squid Out of Water: The Evolution (2014), and What Becomes of the Flying Squid? (2016). He has also released two albums, Story (2000) and Keep it Real (2005). Kamali is internationally acknowledged, being the Fulbright Pacific Writer in Residence at the University of Hawai'i, Manoa 2012, and holding a residency at the International Writers Program in the USA in 2014.

This session was broadcast in association with the Going West Literary Festival

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand introduces three new literary voices exploring Asian experiences and identities in Aotearoa. A highlight of Verb Wellington 2021.

Writers Rupa Maitra, Mikee Sto Domingo and Rose Lu join Chris Tse for a lively discussion at the Verb Wellington 2021 Festival.

They discuss stereotypes, Shortland Street, identity, going to Mandarin school on Saturdays, suddenly feeling at home in Newtown, and how to tell their parents about career dreams that aren't quite traditional.

As well as sharing their own experiences, each writer reads from the 2021 anthology A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Hear Rupa Maitra, Mikee Sto Domingo and Rose Lu talking with Chris Tse at the 2021 Verb Wellington Festival

Related listening:

Rupa Maitra on Nine to Noon

Chris Tse on Standing Room Only

Rose Lu on Afternoons

About the writers

Rupa Maitra

Rupa Maitra, born in Dunedin, completed a degree in violin performance, then studied medicine. She continued to play violin in orchestras when she moved to Wellington and specialised in pathology, taking a break to have children. In 2014 Rupa completed a master's degree in creative writing at Victoria University.

Chris Tse

Chris Tse is the author of two poetry collections published by Auckland University Press: How to be Dead in a Year of Snakes and HE'S SO MASC. His third collection, Super Model Minority, will be published in early 2022. He and Emma Barnes are the co-editors of Out Here: An anthology of Takatāpui and LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa. Chris is The Spinoff's Poetry Editor.

Mikee Sto Domingo

Mikee Sto Domingo is a Filipino-New Zealander currently living and working in Te-Whanganui-a-tara. She has a BA in English Literature from Victoria University and an MA from the IIML. Her work has been published in Turbine, Salient, and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.

Rose Lu

Rose Lu is a writer based in Wellington, New Zealand. She gained her Masters in Creative Writing at the International Institute of Modern Letters in 2018 and was awarded the Modern Letters Prize for Creative Nonfiction. Her first essay collection All Who Live on Islands was published to critical acclaim in 2019. Her undergraduate degree was in Mechatronics Engineering and she has worked as a software developer since 2012.

This session was broadcast in association with Verb Wellington

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Well-known children's author Kyle Mewburn talks with Jane Arthur about her life, which has recently changed radically. (A highlight from the 2021 Verb Readers and Writers Festival in Wellington)

The experience of a particular trans life is vividly communicated in this highlight from the 2021 Verb Readers and Writers Festival in Wellington.

Well-known children's author Kyle Mewburn talks with Jane Arthur about her life, which has recently changed radically.

Hear Kyle Mewburn talking to Jane Arthur about her memoir Faking It at the 2021 Verb Wellington Festival

Kyle Mewburn's memoir is one of transformation.

In Faking It, she takes us back to her childhood in Australia where growing up as a young boy she had to hide her true identity.

From Australia to the world, to Aotearoa, this is a story of finally becoming who you are. Kyle speaks to Jane Arthur about her life story so far.

Kiran Dass writes: "For anyone wanting an insight into the trans experience, Faking It is an invaluable personal account. Spirited and triumphant, Mewburn is an inspiration to embrace living an authentic life, free from going through the motions." (Newsroom)

More listening:

Kyle's 2019 interview with Kathryn Ryan, focuses on her continuing relationship with her wife Marion.

What will I be today? - Jureggsic Park, by Kyle Mewburn

What will I be today? - Sheep and Rescue, by Kyle Mewburn

What will I be today? - Washing Lions, by Kyle Mewburn

What will I be today? - Soap Serpent, by Kyle Mewburn

Kyle Mewburn

Kyle Mewburn is one of New Zealand's most eclectic and prolific writers. From multi-layered picture books (Old-Hu-hu; Hill & Hole) to laugh-out-loud junior fiction series (Dinosaur Rescue; Dragon Knight), her titles have been translated into eighteen languages and won numerous awards including Children's Book of the Year. She was Children's Writer-in-Residence at Otago University in 2011 and President of the New Zealand Society of Authors from 2013-2017. Mewburn won the Joy Cowley Award in 2005 (presented by Storylines Children's Literature Foundation of New Zealand in recognition of the development of a picture book text), and has won in both the Picture Book Category and the Children's Choice Category at the 2007 New Zealand Post Book Awards for Children and Young Adults. Her memoir Faking it: My life in transition is published by Penguin (2021).

This session was broadcast in association with Verb Wellington

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Unsheltered is the riveting story of one mother's search for her child across a climate-ravaged continent in a dystopian future. Clare Moleta talks with Pip Adam about her inspirations.

Unsheltered is the riveting story of one mother's search for her child across a climate-ravaged continent in a dystopian future.

Clare Moleta talks with Pip Adam about her inspirations, the impact of climate change on her world-building, and how parenting can make for good fiction.

Clare Moleta

Listen to Clare Moleta speaking at the 2021 Verb Wellington festival

Unsheltered has been hailed as a remarkable debut, thrusting readers into a dystopian world consisting of a society divided into two classes - the sheltered and the unsheltered.

Set in a non-existent place that has echoes of the Australian landscape, the story is told from the point of view of Li, a resourceful woman whose eight-year-old daughter Matty goes missing after fire engulfs their camp.

Listen: Clare Moleta reads her short story Safer

Listen: Luke Finnegan reviews Unsheltered

Clare Moleta

Clare Moleta

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Clare Moleta was born in Aotearoa, grew up in Whadjuk Noongar Country in Western Australia and has lived in Pōneke since 2005. Her fiction has been published in literary journals and broadcast on RNZ. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Victoria University of Wellington. Unsheltered is her first novel.

This session was broadcast in association with Verb Wellington

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

In a personal address tracing a lifetime of reading, the renowned playwright Renée explores the power of literature, and its role in shaping her own professional and imaginative worlds.

Although she grew up poor with a solo mother, the career of New Zealand playwright and author Renée seems, in retrospect, to have been pre-determined.

Why? Because of the love of reading which filled her childhood years.

In this lecture, Renée, aka Renée Gertrude Taylor, looks back over a life enthralled by words.

Listen to Renée deliver the 2021 Read NZ Te Pou Muramura Pānui

Edited highlights from the lecture

I was born in 1929, the year Jean Devanny left Aotearoa New Zealand for good because her novel The Butcher Shop had been widely condemned, and the year Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own was published. New Zealand readers were horrified and repelled by Devanny's novel. It was heresy.

This beautiful, idyllic, green and pleasant place, dotted with little white woolly clumps that baa-ed or larger brown clumps that moo-ed? Where the sun always shone? And this woman portrayed it as a violent and murderous place for both women and cattle? Oh, dear me, no. We can't have that.

It didn't help that Jean was a communist. Woolf, from an illustrious British upper-middle-class family, well-educated, married to Leonard, large house, servants, wrote about the necessity for a woman to have a room of her own.

At the time, I imagine I was only interested in sucking milk and sleeping, but I'd place a bet that my mother Rose read The Butcher Shop, and I wonder about her perspective as a farm worker's wife. As for Virginia's idea, a room of her own would never have occurred to Rose as a possibility - when she was growing up, she might perhaps have dreamed of a bed of her own...

My father shot himself in 1934, the year Ngaio Marsh's first crime novel A Man Lay Dead was published, and the year the Reform Party in New Zealand put off the election because they thought they'd lose.

There were no great thinkers in the Reform Party, but they got this one right. Gordon Coates, their finance minister, completely unable to explain his financial management even to his colleagues, or indeed anyone else, was said to have told out-of-job workers, who complained about a lack of money to feed their families, that they could eat grass…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

Marketing expert Assoc. Prof. Bodo Lang explains what word of mouth is, why it works, and how much it can be trusted. And he reveals that whether it's online or face to face really matters.

In an environment dominated by paid advertising, advertorial and social media influencers, true word of mouth recommendations remain powerful.

Marketing expert Bodo Lang explains word of mouth (WOM), why it works, and how much it can be trusted in this highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Series.

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Edited highlights from the discussion

Word of mouth is informal communication about a product or a service that can occur between two or more consumers. And it's everywhere. 20% of all tweets contain the mention of a brand name. A study found that in one week, the average American consumer engages in 121 word of mouth episodes in which 76% contain a specific brand name.

And what positive word of mouth does is to induce enthusiasm, confidence and optimism in the receiver. If you've talked to anybody and they've given really positive word of mouth about something that they've experienced recently, it picks you up a little bit and it influences your emotional state even though you weren't part of that consumption experience at all.

Word of mouth also has an impact on what we think and how we think. It has been shown to be really effective in increasing brand awareness, for example. It can also increase your expectations about a brand or service. If somebody speaks very highly to you about a particular motorbike, say, immediately your expectations of that motorbike will be much higher.

You will also have much better retrieval from memory about the brand. Hearing somebody speak with great enthusiasm about a particular restaurant, makes it really easy for you to recall that brand. The technical term for that is diagnosticity. That type of knowledge is very accessible, and helps you make your own decisions.

Word of mouth affects feelings, and what you think, but it also affects what you do. If a new brand launches in the market at day zero, without any advertising, nobody will know that brand.

What marketers typically do is advertise to increase brand awareness so that people say, "Oh there is that new business out there, you know, a new type of product in the supermarket, perhaps, or a new car Tesla. Never heard of it before. I wonder what it's like?"

Word of mouth also starts filtering through only once people have actually had an experience with the car or product. So it encourages product trials, particularly for products where there's quite a bit of risk…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details

How could DNA improve our health? Prof. Justin O'Connor advocates sequencing the genomes of all the 60,000 children born in NZ each year. A highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar series.

How do we use DNA information to be healthier and live longer?

The answer is simple, according to Professor Justin M. O'Sullivan from the Liggins Institute - sequence the genomes of all children in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

Professor O'Sullivan explains the benefits of his proposal in this highlight of Auckland University's Raising the Bar Home Series.

Listen to the talk

(Webinar available soon on the RTBHE website)

Edited highlights from the discussion

How do we tap the untapped potential of our DNA to personalise your health care and extend your life? The answer is actually relatively simple, and that is that we need to change the way we think about health care. What we need to do is move from a system that tries to correct or cure a disease to a system that focused on prevention using full patient participation. How do we do that?

For many of us, it's a bit late to make a huge difference because the diseases that are going to kill you have already started developing. You just can't see the symptoms yet.

The answer to what we should do is sequence the genomes of all of our children. Not a representative few, not most, but all. It's not going to help you, but it is going to help them, and I'll explain why.

There are 60,000 children born a year in New Zealand, and 24 machines running analysis for 24 hours a day for seven days a week would do this. As a result, we'd get DNA sequences, we'd get epigenetic marks (which are the signals from the environment) from all of those individuals in one run. All 60,000 born in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

The materials to sequence these genomes would cost $60 million. By comparison, the human genome project took thirteen years and cost US$3 billion dollars to do just one individual. So we've moved on. Things are faster, and we can do this.

I'm not saying this is simple. There'll be hiccups that come along the way but eventually, over the course of a couple of years, it would become business as usual. It would impact lives in ways that we have very little understanding of now. They would be very positive impacts.

Now before you say, "We can't do that - it's not ethical," we've already run very exhaustive tests on children, such as the Guthrie test. This looks at metabolites in their blood, it's done on all children and it helps saves thousands of kids…

Go to this episode on rnz.co.nz for more details