Head2Head

Dr Gary Payinda is an outspoken Emergency Medical Specialist based in Northland In this Head2Head interview he spells out why patients are waiting so long to see a doctor in our overcrowded hospitals, and hundreds of thousands of us are on waiting lists for surgery. And what is the root cause of the problem? Answer - a political ideology that panders to the wealthy few at the expense of the many,...

Melanie Nelson has been deep diving into David Seymour’s very dangerous Regulatory Standards Bill and reveals how its real aim is to embed ACT’s libertarian agenda into our legislative process to the detriment of the public good. You can find out more about Melanie and her highly researched writing here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access t...

I attended The Child Poverty Post Budget Hui yesterday and managed to catch up with economist Bernard Hickey for his take on the 2025 Willis budget. He is so informed and such a good communicator. If you don’t read or listen to any other analysis make sure you listen to his one. Please take 20 minutes to understand that we don’t have a debt problem. What we have is an ideology problem. The quote o...

We live in a world where social media is expanding exponentially and dominated by tech giants such as Facebook, Google or X, who collect your data in order to exploit it. Which is why New Zealand developer Selwyn Manning has created PodTalk.live a community platform for Kiwis, like you and I, to allow us to talk with each other in a safe internet environment. I recently spoke with Selwyn about his...

THE SUNDAY LONG READ (OR LISTEN ). It’s time to face the fact that our superannuation scheme is unsustainable. So what could we do to fix it? Associate Professor Susan St John has a viable answer. Listen to the podcast or read the transcription below. Bryan: Hello I’m Bryan Bruce, welcome to Head2Head. Today I’m catching up with economist Susan St John who is an Associate Professor at Auckland Uni...

In this episode of Head2Head I talk with two remarkable political economists who are passionate and informed advocates of the “compassionate economy “ - the idea that economy should serve the people and not the other way around and is kinder to our life sustaining planet. Professor Liz Grant holds a chair in Global Health and Development at the University of Edinburgh and is responsible for develo...

On the eve of Trump imposing tariffs that will upend the world economy I interview renowned world political economist, and New York based, Prof Richard Wolff. He is a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachuesetts Amherst and a visiting professor in the graduate program in international affairs of the New School. He has also taught economics at Yale University, City University...

Grace Blakeley is a British political economist, writer and commentator. She is a staff writer for Tribune Magazine and the author several books, the latest of which is Vulture Capitalism : Corporate Crimes, Backdoor Bailouts and the Death of Freedom. It is a highly readable critique of modern capitalism which has made the Sunday Times best seller list and is a great book to read if you want to un...

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...

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 Mana...

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...

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...

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 pra...

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 intere...

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 hi...

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 i...

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 pu...

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 peo...

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 ran...

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 fi...

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 Governme...

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...

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 Radi...

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 d...

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...