Category: Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Warning: this story discusses sensitive topics relating to mental health and suicide.

A new youth mental health respite service is set to open in Northland later this year in response to a damning coroner’s report into a youth suicide cluster.

Announcing the new service in Whangārei on Wednesday morning, Mental Health Minister Matt Doocey said the new service would help de-escalate mental health crises, give young people support earlier and provide an alternative to hospital admission.

He said the government would also fund three extra youth suicide prevention coordinator roles across the mid and Far North.

Doocey said last year’s coroner’s report into the deaths of six young Northlanders – one of whom was just 12 years old – was “heartbreaking and damning”.

He said he disagreed with Health New Zealand’s initial response to the report, and it was clear too many young Northlanders were “falling through the cracks”.

“Losing a child is every parent’s worst nightmare,” he said.

The report, by Coroner Tania Tetitaha, found a multitude of barriers were stopping young people and their whānau accessing suicide prevention services in Northland.

They included the large number of different agencies involved in suicide prevention, which created difficulties with information sharing and confusion for families trying to navigate between them.

The result was that young people at risk were getting lost in the system.

Coroner Tetitaha also found funding for front-line youth suicide prevention was inadequate, and the region’s child and adolescent mental health service was overwhelmed by a massive workload.

Doocey said the new service and extra roles would create a “more connected and less fragmented system”, increase the workforce, and “help guide young people to right support at the right time”.

The aim was to have the new service in place in October, and certainly by the end of the year.

No decision had been made as yet where in Northland the new acute youth respite service would be based.

The total cost would be $1.7 million per year, which would come out of the existing mental health and addiction budget.

The suicide cluster at the centre of Coroner Tetitaha’s report occurred in 2018-20. The month-long inquest was held in November 2024 and her report was released in December last year.

At the time of the inquest, Te Roopu Kimiora, the region’s child and adolescent mental health service, was treating 700 young people with moderate to high risk of self-harm, and receiving three to four new patients a week.

Each of its clinicians had about 40 patients, which was “well above” the average caseload for New Zealand. That meant schools were increasingly carrying the burden of supporting rangatahi at risk of suicide, but they were not sufficiently funded to employ counsellors and social workers.

As a result, schools were having to dig into their operational budgets.

When the coroner’s report came out in December, Paula Mills – mother of Summer Metcalfe, who died aged 15 – told RNZ she hoped the recommendations would be acted on.

She said that would not bring any children back, but could help families desperately trying to get help for their children in future.

“It’s tragic, absolutely tragic, so if we can do anything to help these rangatahi and their whānau, let’s do it. The coroner’s made some really good recommendations, let’s get them implemented.”

Where to get help:

• Need to Talk? Free call or text 1737 any time to speak to a trained counsellor, for any reason.
• Lifeline: 0800 543 354 or text HELP to 4357
• Suicide Crisis Helpline: 0508 828 865 / 0508 TAUTOKO (24/7). This is a service for people who may be thinking about suicide, or those who are concerned about family or friends.
• Depression Helpline: 0800 111 757 (24/7) or text 4202
• Samaritans: 0800 726 666 (24/7)
• Youthline: 0800 376 633 (24/7) or free text 234 (8am-12am), or email talk@youthline.co.nz|
• What’s Up: free counselling for 5 to 19 years old, online chat 11am-10.30pm 7 days/week or free phone 0800 WHATSUP / 0800 9428 787 11am-11pm
• Asian Family Services: 0800 862 342 Monday to Friday 9am to 8pm or text 832 Monday to Friday 9am – 5pm. Languages spoken: Mandarin, Cantonese, Korean, Vietnamese, Thai, Japanese, Hindi, Gujarati, Marathi and English.
• Rural Support Trust Helpline: 0800 787 254
• Healthline: 0800 611 116
• Rainbow Youth: (09) 376 4155
• OUTLine: 0800 688 5463 (6pm-9pm)

If it is an emergency and you feel like you or someone else is at risk, call 111.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A front will bring heavy rain to parts of the South Island from later today with up to 400 millimetres predicted in some areas.

️Severe Weather Update️

1️⃣️The first of two weather systems in the next few days is tracking onto the bottom of the South Island today. The heaviest rain is set to fall about the ranges.

2️⃣️A brief reprieve for the west coast before the next system starting Friday.… pic.twitter.com/T5AFsyHd2x

— MetService NZ (@MetService) May 5, 2026

MetService has issued orange heavy rain warnings for Tasman District northwest of Motueka, Buller, Westland and Fiordland north of Doubtful Sound.

Up to 400 millimetres of rain could fall on the ranges in the Tasman District with peak rates of between 20 to 30 millimetres an hour.

Buller and Westland could also expect between 200 and 300mm of rain, with chances of thunderstorms.

MetService said the warnings meant streams and rivers might rise rapidly, and there could be surface flooding, slips and difficult driving conditions.

Heavy rain watches were also issued for the Richmond and Bryant ranges, Grey District, and the Canterbury and Otago headwaters.

There was a high change of Richmond and Bryant ranges upgrading to a warning, while a moderate chance for other areas.

MetService warned that more heavy rain and possible gales were expected to hit the South Island on Friday and Saturday due to the low pressure system.

It will bring a change to strong southwesterlies as we moved into the weekend, with large swells possible for western coastlines, MetService said.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Explainer – At Clive’s Chemist in Wainuiomata, customers know Clive Cannons by name. That’s possibly helped by the giant, smiling photo of him pasted to the outside of the store.

This particular Friday afternoon, more than a dozen people were queuing for advice, prescriptions and vaccines next to shelves of Panadol, Codral, Difflam and Flixonase.

They are names we know well, but to get here, scientists had to formulate each medicine in a lab, test it, name it, and then other people had to figure out a target market, a brand name, and get approval to sell it in New Zealand.

What’s the difference between branded drugs and those you get on prescription?

Basically, nothing.

We have Pharmac’s tendering process to thank for this. In order to get the most bang for buck, Pharmac – a government agency – buys medicines at the best price it can get, and then provides them at a subsidised cost to New Zealanders.

Many companies make similar or identical versions of the same medication. The funded brand changes all the time, depending on which company can give Pharmac the best deal.

Sitting in one of the pharmacy’s little consult rooms, Clive Cannons told RNZ they used to arrange their dispensary alphabetically by brand name, but the brand that was funded changed so often they were constantly rearranging. Now, they ordered it by generic name.

Not all patients in need of paracematol came armed with a prescription. That meant unfunded brands still had a market in New Zealand. They sat on the public side of the counter, and attracted buyers with packaging and brand names.

But the drug itself was exactly the same, Cannons said.

In fact, he had recently cut down the number of brands he stocked for common medications. There was no point stocking multiple hayfever medications – for example, Claratyne, Loraclear or LoraFix – when they all contained 10mg of Loratadine.

“It’s like a mini Pharmac,” he said. “I change it every year, but we stock one brand, because that way we get the best price, we get a bigger discount because we’re buying more, and so we can pass that on to our customers.”

Generic versus brand names – and where do they come from?

Medicines have two names – generic and brand.

Brand names vary country to country – think Panadol in New Zealand, but Tylenol in the US.

Cannons said at least once a week someone visiting from overseas would come into his chemist and ask, sometimes with a language barrier in play, for a drug he’d never heard of.

Usually, he said, with the help of a picture on a phone, he could piece together what they were after – and it was usually something quite urgent, like blood pressure or diabetes medication.

But a drug’s generic name, or INN (International Nonproprietary Name), is unique and consistent worldwide, approved by the World Health Organisation following a set of established conventions – and usually, they’re far from memorable.

Daniel Sullivan, general manager of regulatory affairs at Douglas Pharmaceuticals, explained it usually began with the molecule.

Scientists would look at the chemical structure of the medicine they’d developed, and either base the name on that structure, or look to similar products in the market which followed agreed naming conventions.

For example; if it was a beta blocker, the name would likely end in “olol” – propranolol, metoprolol, atenolol. If the drug lowered cholesterol, it would end in “statin” – atorvastatin, fluvastatin, lovastatin.

A number of cancer drugs targeting the immune system end in “mab”, which is short for “monoclonal antibodies”.

If a medication had two parts to its name, usually the second part indicated the form the chemical came in, Sullivan said.

“So something like metformin hydrochloride as an example. Metformin describes the active part of the molecule that has the therapeutic effect. The hydrochloride in this example is the salt form or the particular version of that molecule that’s used to make that particular medicine.”

Some forms are easier to make into tablets or injections, and in other cases, it’s to get around patent or intellectual property restrictions, he said.

But those names are complex and hard to remember – so companies come up with brand names.

What’s in a (brand) name?

Sullivan explained the process of deciding a medication’s brand name varied depending on the size of the company. Large multi-nationals might contract it out to a marketing firm, where they would draft 20 names and send them to the company chief executive to shortlist, before sending them off to the country’s regulator for approval.

Sometimes it was about standing out. For years, the letter J had been unpopular because it translated into a different sound depending on the language – but now, it was becoming more popular, as a point of difference, Sullivan said.

David Willis, chief executive of Alchemy Health, told RNZ he remembered a time when the naming process was a lot easier.

“There was an explosion in the 1980s and 90s of medicines, compared to the 50s and 60s when there was just a limited number of prescription medicines that doctors could write prescriptions for,” he said.

“Back then, it was a piece of cake. Pick a name out of a hat and you could get it trademarked for your own brand.”

But come the 90s and early 2000s, he said, big pharma companies were trademarking every possible name, just in case.

Having worked in pharmaceuticals in the UK and then later in New Zealand, Willis said coming up with a brand name often involved weeks of back and forth with lawyers, emailing lists of names for their approval, with most knocked back for being too similar to an existing trademark.

In New Zealand, Medsafe, part of the Ministry of Health, explained that it approved brand names against a number of criteria.

“Medicine names must be clear, unambiguous, not misleading about its purpose or effects, and not likely to be confused with any other medicine in New Zealand,” it said.

Sometimes the brand name attempted to invoke images of good health. The case of Viagra was well documented, with the brand intended to resemble words like “vim, vigour, and vitality”.

When the usual naming process failed, sometimes a shot in the dark did the trick.

After a month drafting possible brand names for an osteoporosis drug called alendronate, sending them off to the lawyers for approval only to be knocked back every time, Willis said he eventually tried something a bit left-field.

“My daughter’s called Rosa,” he said. “So I threw it at the lawyers out of frustration – ‘for Rosa’. And they came back and said, Forosa, you can have that.”

A now popular naming convention began in the early 2000s – “company name-generic name”. Putting the company name before the generic name meant it was automatically a name nobody else had. Thus, Arrow-Fluoxetine became Arrow’s version of the antidepressant known elsewhere as Prozac.

How did Pharmac change the naming game?

Once upon a time, companies used to pick brand names which were easy for doctors to remember, simply to increase the likelihood that their version of the drug would be used over others.

But Pharmac’s tendering system has made that practically redundant for funded products.

Willis explained: “Usually you don’t need the doctor to remember a brand name because whatever they write on the prescription, either the old brand name or the generic, there’s only one medicine that will be given to the patient – the one that Pharmac pays for.”

Back in Clive’s Chemist, the customers are backing up. So one last question – had any names stuck with Clive over the years?

Not in particular, he said – but he had recently suggested “Jakavi”, a drug used to treat Myelofibrosis, as a potential baby name for an expectant colleague.

So far, it didn’t appear they’d taken him up on it.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

A loud explosion has been heard at Auckland’s Long Bay beach after an unidentified canister washed up.

Fire and Emergency New Zealand’s northern shift manager, Carrin Larkin, said Defence Force staff had been called to take a look but firefighters believed it was likely to be a marine marker.

She said the canister was “not unsafe” and one fire truck was at the scene.

A Long Bay resident said they had heard “one big boom” coming from the beach about 9.30am on Wednesday.

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– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand

Source: Radio New Zealand

Hundreds visited Auckland Art Gallery over the weekend to view more than 60 works by 42 Chinese artists that included photography, sculptures, installations, moving images and new media.

Titled Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now, the exhibition is the first major survey of Chinese contemporary art displayed in Auckland on this scale.

The exhibition features work by some of China’s best-known contemporary artists, including Ai Weiwei, Xu Zhen, Xiao Lu and Cao Fei, alongside artists exhibiting in New Zealand for the first time.

Among the key works is Ai Weiwei’s Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn, a photographic series capturing an act of deliberate destruction that raises questions about history and cultural memory.

Also on view is a striking sculptural work by multimedia artist Xu Zhen.

Standing 7.5 metres tall and weighing 3 tonnes, the work brings together a Buddhist figure associated with China’s Tianlongshan Grottoes and the sweeping form of Greek sculpture Winged Victory of Samothrace.

Another featured work is a robotic Corinthian column that stands nearly 4m tall and occupies an 8m x 8m footprint, giving a classical symbol of Western civilization an unsettling – almost living – presence.

The exhibition opened to the public on Saturday, attracting visitors from all walks of life for a first look.

Troy Zhou, who has lived in New Zealand for about a decade, said he felt proud as a Chinese New Zealander to see such a large-scale presentation of Chinese contemporary art.

He said the exhibition offered people from different backgrounds an opportunity to better understand Chinese culture.

“I think it is a window for the world to understand China,” he said.

“Artistic expressions are diverse. Through the work of these artists, visitors from different countries and ethnic groups can find resonance with their own cultures.

“They can learn more about Chinese culture through these artworks.”

Heather Cunningham, who has previously visited China with her daughter, said she was struck by some of the political elements in the exhibition and by the courage of some Chinese artists in questioning and challenging history.

She said the exhibition also gave her a new perspective on Chinese contemporary art, including its use of technology.

“This is very technologically advanced in terms of the video,” she said.

“The layered look, how the videos are used, how the photographs are used, how they are presented, the subject matter. It is very new to me, which is so exciting.”

Clara Curtice, who visited Beijing and Shanghai about a decade ago, said she was also struck by the political elements represented in the exhibition.

“I am really enjoying considering that there is still a strong political element to what these artists are trying to say, and that they use old types of Chinese art to express modern political ideas,” she said.

Curtice was impressed by the way the exhibition reflected China’s rapid transformation and the enormous disruption experienced by its people over a short period of time.

“It reminds me that this is a significant population, and there are a multitude of different ways of seeing the world,” she said. “It is a really interesting space.”

Hutch Wilco, exhibition project manager at Auckland Art Gallery, said Auckland’s Chinese community had grown rapidly over the past 15 years and that New Zealanders’ interest in contemporary Chinese culture and art had also increased.

Wilco said the exhibition highlighted the breadth of contemporary Chinese art.

Spanning the period from China’s reforms and the introduction of an “open door” policy in 1978 to the present day, the show reflects the country’s dramatic transformation over more than four decades, he said.

“There’s this sense of speed in the development in China,” he said.

“That is something we are all feeling globally, particularly since Covid, with changes to society, changes to global politics … and the impact of artificial intelligence.

“I think we can learn from the experience that has really sort of preceded us in the experience of China and Chinese artists.”

Pu Yingwei, a Beijing-based artist, has two paintings on display in the exhibition – one titled Purple King Kong: Red and Blue Entangled in Space and the other Chinacapital 1978.

Pu said his artworks explored the complexities of China’s rapid development, its rise as a global power and the ways that transformation had shaped the country’s relationship with the wider world.

“Chinacapital 1978 tells the story of China’s reform and opening up, and the emergence of a completely new China,” he said.

“It looks at the impact that transformation had on the world, as well as the changes within China itself.”

Pu said his second work, Purple King Kong, examined the entangled relationship between red and blue.

“Red represents China and blue represents Western ideology,” he said.

“The purple figure, formed from a mixture of red and blue, is a metaphor for China’s reform and opening up.”

Pu said the exhibition had also given him an opportunity to see works by other Chinese artists, some for the first time.

“I think this exhibition will provide both New Zealand and Chinese audiences with new insights into contemporary Chinese art,” he said.

Chen Wei, another Chinese artist who travelled to Auckland for the opening of the exhibition, has a photographic work titled Today Is Unsuitable for Shooting on display.

The image, made from a carefully constructed set assembled in his studio, reflects the difficulty of accurately capturing Beijing’s smog.

Chen said the exhibition of contemporary art gave visiting Chinese artists a chance to catch a glimpse of New Zealand’s artistic and cultural landscape.

“When we come here, we can also learn about local culture. At the same time, we invite local audiences to walk into a period of our history,” he said.

“All history is connected. China’s development is closely related to the development of the world.”

Wang Ziquan, a Shanghai-based cross-media artist, has a sculptural work titled Compromise on display in Auckland.

Wang said his practice focused on creating sculptures without relying on traditional sculpting methods.

He hoped audiences could sense the rapid changes taking place in Chinese contemporary art in his work.

“Even things that might once have barely been considered art are now becoming artistic [in China],” he said, noting that internet memes could now be considered a form of contemporary art.

“The shift is enormous,” he said. “Contemporary art today does not necessarily need to be about profound social issues or grand themes. It can also be about small things hidden in the details.”

Wilco agreed, saying the exhibition explored globalization, its effects and the ways different cultures come into contact with one another.

He hoped every visitor would find something in the show that resonated with them.

The exhibition is supported by the Auckland Art Gallery Foundation and the New Zealand government’s Events Boost Fund. It runs through 23 August.

– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand