 Te hau kainga, te atiawa, kai te mihi, kai te mihi. Ero rangatira ma tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou a tēnā rā tātou katoa. Ngāti Rangi, Ngāti Rangi Nui Descent, Tauranga Moana, Motueka, Ngāti Darua Kia ora tātou, kō Steve Saunders a hau. So i'm also from the best place in New Zealand, which is Tauranga Moana, and I'm Ngāti Rangi Nui Descent as well. So we're from the same, we share the same hapu back in Tauranga, so it's very cool to be here with me, Diana. This is particularly special for me because I wasn't brought up culturally, but what we're going to talk about today, starting back in 2014, took me on my journey reconnecting with my people and actually giving me as an entrepreneur, as we heard this morning, you can make a lot of money, you can do things, you can be an entrepreneur, and then you wake up and say, so what? I wake up now and I've got this great purpose about how I can take those learnings and those lessons and help transform our people into the modern era. We've been on the journey of recovering our lands and our rights, et cetera, and through that process we haven't really built the capability that we need now more than ever. So this is what our co-pop is about. Kia ora. So I'm an owner and director of Waka Tu, and our purpose is to preserve and enhance our taonga, our legacy for the benefit of current and future generations. And last year we celebrated our 40th year. Now that doesn't mean to say we've only been going for 40 years because our families, our extended kin, they came through from Kawhia down to, which is in the Far North, they came through Te Atiawa and they pushed on through to Te Tau Ihech at the top of the South Island, Golden Bay, Motueka, Nelson and Mulbrough through a series of epic migrations from 1828 to 1834. And I often think about my genie and the incorporation. It wasn't by accident. I was a scholarship recipient. I came through our associate director program. And then when I think about my relations and the senior leadership roles that we hold within Waka Tu, you know, it was, I guess, succession. It was mentoring and it was leadership by design. And my cousins often remind me that if service is beneath you, then leadership is beyond you. So it's a very, you know, a kind reminder. And we are a family of Kaitiaki, of custodians in the top of the South. It is our home. It is our Turangawaewae. It is a place where we feel connected to our whenua, to our land, to our water, where we feel empowered. And it's that real deep, I guess, love that we have and strength and respect for our place, our people, our planet and, of course, our purpose. And that is delivered. We live and breathe that and it's through our educational programs and it's through Cornwall New Zealand, which is our food and beverage basket to the world. We export currently to 45 countries, beautiful products, which is love for the land and respect for the sea. And when I joined our board nine years ago, one of our whānau got the call-up to get over to Stanford University to be part of a Māori food and beverage cluster. And he couldn't go, so I was the next cab off the rank size. Yes, yes, I'm off there. And when I came back, they said, you know, what did you learn up there? And really for me, I guess it was sort of the journey around where it was the next phase in terms of our journey, in terms of our development. And I guess the great thing about that was I came back and, you know, and innovation, I guess it's one of those buzzwords. But for us really at Waka Tū, it's about doing things better and doing better things. So I came back and there was two things. My cousin always, another cousin says to me, if you're not waking up shit scared, if you're not waking up excited, then you're not living. So I guess I came back and I said, well, actually, you know, there's two things that are actually keeping me up at night. We say that we are kaitiaki, but do we actually really live and breathe that? What does that actually mean to us? So we currently, one of the programs that I look after is around our land and water wellness. We're developing up our framework in terms of what that means to us. I've had a lot of discussion around metrics and how do we measure that. But, you know, we talk about the mauri, we talk about the life force of the whenua, of our water. My other cousins would say when they go on the whenua, it actually, it talks to them and they hear the land talking to them. And I'm not too sure exactly how we measure that, but I guess, you know, we tell our stories and we work together as a group. The second program that I look after is our high value aid program. It's around an investment in food and nutrition solutions. And it's really predicated a lot of the health issues that our families suffer from. So around metabolic health, obesity, heart disease, as well as a lot of skin and joint disorders. So we've got a full-on program in terms of looking at the marine. We've just mapped out all our fungi, flora and fauna, marine species, insects across te tō ihe. We've put that into a centralized database and then we've had wananga around our traditional practices as well as rungua. So when I look at both of those projects, it comes into a third realm, I guess, a little bit about what Brian was saying this morning, is that how do you build a resilient community? How do we reconnect our families back to whenua, back to their culture? So of course our marae is our centre point. It's our hub. So we're doing a major redesign of what that looks like in terms of housing, energy, gardens. And actually it's actually going back to the model where how we used to live. How we used to think that, you know, currently we think we know it all, but it's actually about learning it all and it's about sharing it all. So we've moved to a place like this weekend in the last couple of days, has really, I think, reinforced a lot of our thinking, a lot of our practices, and actually we're heading through in the future. So we don't want to do everything ourselves. We like collaboration, we like allies, we're heavily investing in partnerships. And one of those, I guess, movements that we're involved in is Nuku Kitapuku. Don't they look like a great bunch of people, but basically Nuku Kitapuku was formed in 2014. It came about with the support of Callaghan Innovation and mainly, you know, I often think their entities, but it really comes back to the people. So Hemi Rolliston, general manager of the Māori economy, brought together Māori entrepreneurs, iwi and trust groups to actually start to think about how can we mobilise and how might they work better with Māori food and beverage entities. And I guess for us, we've been on a series of trips offshore because it's quite hard when you actually, in your communities, you're doing things every day, but actually how do you sort of get that lift and shift? How do you actually start to think about other things that might be coming down the pipeline? So we've travelled overseas, we've looked at new food technologies, we've seen startups, we actually visited each other to see what, each other are up to an Aotearoa New Zealand and then we decided well actually maybe it's time to start to formalise ourselves as a particular entity and let's build the programme because a lot of us actually face the same challenges, so how might we solve those together? For example, a lot of our members, they were, you know, I think Charles mentioned yesterday that governance can often be one of those blockers. So how do you start to take them on a journey in terms of where we need to go? How do we talk to each other? What's the education lift and shift that's required? And other things where how do you actually get investors? It's too hard to try and do everything ourselves. So how do we do things better? So we came up with our purpose and the purpose of Nuku Kitupuku is how we design a healthier future together. And it's really along the lines of having some similar, I guess values, you know, manaki tanga, how do we care for one another? Oaha tanga, how are we innovative together around pono and actually being truthful to who we are and who we stand for and being transparent about how we share this journey with others and rangatira tanga. You know, we are here to serve and we should be excellent in everything that we do. So Steve's now just going to take us through actually some of the projects that we're involved in. Good, so I've got the great job of trying to explain how the Nukes work but essentially we've really developed this really great collaborative ecosystem. So this is about our members and this is about, you can see on the left there, the brands that are coming out of this group of Māori collectives and entrepreneurs and how we can use that knowledge and fast-track ideation, prototyping and faster outputs to market. And that's partnering with our government partners, utilising those research institutes, that science, that capability but also the acceleration-enabling partners, NZTEs, those things that help us be able to actually accelerate fast into the marketplace and taking all that knowledge in from our experience of our innovation outputs, our commercial enterprises and being able to fast-track through that sort of ideation funnel to get those outputs a lot quicker and really lifting and shifting that education process for Māori. And it's a really cool, one of the coolest things I've been involved in. I mean we saw someone like Nāti Parou who have fisheries wanting to change into high-quality products like Smokefish, for example, to then have one of our entrepreneurs, Jason Witteheada, who owns the number one New World in New Zealand, who was able to ideate that smokefish process, get it into consumer tasting and help perfect that product very quickly for Nāti Parou to now that they're building a state-of-the-art new factory for that high-value processing of fish rather than the low-value that we're so commonly used to. People like me with Robotics Plus, for example, putting Māori at the front end of Agritech. So we're creating autonomous vehicles, platforms, robotic solutions to help harvest our produce because of the ageing populations, the lack of labour resource, those sorts of things. So how do we make food more sustainable and affordable to people around the world? And to in fact then have someone like Yamaha Motors come to New Zealand and invest in New Zealand in Robotics Plus to really develop our own talent pipelines in New Zealand. I think New Zealand has to shift a lot to a talent economy as well. And a lot of our talent goes offshore, comes back at a later date. I really love to see our talent stay onshore and provide the opportunities for them to actually prosper here in Aotearoa. We've had a mention, Kazibarro Wayne Mulligan, who's been here. He's like this travelling salesman, right? He pulls out all these potions and things like that from lung health to you name it. You got a problem? He's got something in his bag. But the big thing for me is coming into, you know, coming in and acknowledging back with my people and in the culture has really been the support of this group to actually give me that courage to actually do that and stand out there. Very, very powerful. And particularly when we're launching some of the initiatives, we'll show you in a minute to have that support behind you as incredibly powerful, because being an entrepreneur, as you know, can sometimes often be a very, very lonely journey. But now I have this family, I have this purpose. It's like awesome. But like the Hotel California, because once you check in, it's hard to check out. But what we're always doing is, yes, that's true. I get dragged to everything. But, you know, what we do regularly though as a group is we check into what's going on and ensuring are we covering everything, where are gaps? And so recently we did a sort of a check-through with all the part-members and sort of said, well, you know, where do you still find your struggling? Where are their gaps? And through that process, we've decided to actually form, Nukia Ki Tupuki was sort of like a membership. We're now actually forming it as a company. And that company is really to take our members through another level of fantastic sort of learning and education. So really what we're wanting to do is the education piece around Māori and investment into science and R&D and IP and that commercialisation of that process. And so we have the Tuora High Value Nutrition Project. So we looked around to say, what project could we actually do together that was meaningful. And because, you know, we're from the land, we're plant-based people, we were able to address an issue that was dear to our own people and also what we saw as a growing trend in the world and that was diabetes. And so this project is the first true high-value nutrition through the New Zealand Science Challenge. This is the first true Māori-led project through that high-value nutrition and that's around creating a plant-based bar or snack for treatment or snacking for pre-diabetes. And our target is that it's not only going to solve something that's dear to our own people, diabetes, but also that the growing diabetes issues in Asia. And the group of us are actually heading up to Singapore very shortly to address the conference in Singapore and in Asia around the product that we're producing. So this is a really cool thing where we're in the science. We're doing education alongside the project so we're bringing the members along. How do we formulate the bar? How do we go through clinical trials? How do we evaluate that output? How do we design the packaging, the market and head to market? So it's a really, really cool project. But that's how we start to lift and shift and that's how we work collectively together to actually start to create opportunities of scale. And to that point this one's pretty dear to my heart. I've been 34 years and growing. My ancestry is Māori, Dalmatian, Bohemian, Scottish. All my ancestors are from the Fedoa, you know. And so growing's been in my family bloodlines for a long time. And so really the challenge came from the Federation of Māori Authority to me to say what does a horticultural strategy look like for Māori? How do we develop our regions? How do we develop that underutilised land that's currently just been leased to corn farmers for minimal money per hectare? Destroying that ecosystem, no value, not creating jobs for our people. And so I thought about that and it was really about creating Māori transformation, step change by working collectively and developing an end-to-end value chain. So that's everything we've talked about in the last few days about scale and collectiveness. New Zealand's a small place. If we can't collectivise to actually make impact we're going to struggle for a long time. Doing it individually is a hard road. We're only 4.7 million people and we have the ability to connect, be collective and actually make a difference. This project's really been a great journey. For me personally I spent hours on the road having cups of tea at Little Marais and land trusts all around the country to really understand what is important to our people. And it was really about the land. It was about keeping the whānau together, creating the jobs. They wanted people to be able to stay on the lands, not have to go from the lands where else to find that income. So what we did was we actually talked to Plant and Food Research, our Government Research Institute around horticulture, and found that really in the berry programs no-one was really funding that. So we really looked at this whole process of saying if we can fund the berry program, take the ownership of the genetics program and we can actually create real value chain through that process. So we signed an agreement with Plant and Food Research and all the berry genetics out of the New Zealand breeding system are in a co-owned, co-owned venture now between Māori and the Government. And that's our intergenerational piece where we're leaving a legacy of genetics and breeding into the future. And I'll talk more about that. Then we had to go through, we had 42 Māori entities put 10k each and to a seed fund to look at the opportunity. The first big Māori collective ever come together to look at our collective opportunity and through that work we did all the market research, et cetera, to put an investment together. Then we went on to our journey of raising capital. We had 27, which is equivalent of 33 Māori entities invested into this value chain. So it's incorporated and we're underway, we're planting our first plants and you can see that we're heading, we're going to create a zespere of berries in a supply chain for Māori. And it's a unique proposition. By Māori for Māori, market-led ownership of an integrated value chain through well-designed business models, scale, protected high-cropping systems, proprietary varieties, regional development, breeding for health, Māori brand stories for provenance. This is an opportunity to have a true Māori brand and tell our stories to the world with something that brings health and well-being to people, being berries. And we're not just going to go and replicate what everyone else is doing trying to grow these big super berries, we're actually going to breed for health. So we're thinking with the program, not to try and compete with the $72 million breeding program, whether it's Driscoll's or someone offshore, but actually look at how can we enhance the health aspects of the berries and actually sell berries with our Māori culture, our provenance and actually a healthy outcome for people globally. And then it's also about creating that whole value chain from the genetics to the growing, to the harvesting, to the high-value processing, to the marketing, to the exporting, to new packaging formats, non-plastic, things like that. If you look at berries, you've always seen them in a plastic pun-up for every one of the days. Time to change. And the research and development, we want to lead where we can take some of those health attributes and convert those into high-value powders on nutrition or nutraceutical opportunities as well, not just frozen berries. And then we go through the various growing systems, which is really around from being able to do it regeneratively or through to high-tech where we can recycle all the outputs, et cetera, and be fully sustainable, catch the rainwater, recycle it back through the system, through very smart, and putting our people at the front end of intensive horticulture with sustainability. And just before Steve wraps up, we fundamentally believe as we've started to get these collectives, we've started a movement, it's about what's good for Māori, what's good for Aotearoa New Zealand, and it's good for humanity. So for us, very simple. We're on a journey, and we just want to work with people who are aligned with our vision and our values. So I'll just leave you with this whakatauki, which is hē rangitā mata whaiti, hē rangitā mata whanui, which is a person with a narrow vision has restricted horizon, a person with a wide vision has plentiful opportunities. Rai hā rangitā mata whanui.