 Kia ora koutou. Ngā mihi kia koutou. Welcome to this final episode of the Our Regenerative Future series, produced by Pure Advantage and Edmund Hillary Fellowship. It's wonderful here to have you here this evening. I'm Alina Siegfried. I'm the author and host of this series. And in this, the 12th episode, over the next 90 minutes, we'll be exploring the opportunities for a regenerative economy for Aotearoa New Zealand with four very special guests. Each of them are previous panellists in this series. So Dame Ann Sammond is an anthropologist and historian best known for her writings on New Zealand history, her study of Māori culture, and her efforts to improve intercultural understanding. She was named the Kiwi Bank New Zealander of the Year in 2013 as the Royal Society of New Zealand Rutherford Middle and is a distinguished professor at the AUT. I think University of Auckland, apologies. Hamish Bielski, along with his wife Amy and their three children, farm in a joint venture in the 300 hectares in South Otago. It's gentle rolling hills and steeper gullies that bound the Pōmahaka River. They have been travelling the path of using regenerative farming principles for several years now, running 2,500 breeding sheep and 200 trading cattle. Using well-planned high-density mob grazing has allowed them to increase the pasture growth as well as highest docking rates and profits for the farm, which is fantastic to hear. Mike Tautoko is the co-founder of Tōha, an investment platform being set up to fund frontline action to solve climate, environmental and biodiversity challenges. He recently launched Tōha's first impact venture, Calm the Farm, which supports the scale transition towards regenerative agriculture in Aotearoa. Mike is a leading advisor in Māori and Indigenous economic development and is the co-founder and CEO of Takewa, an award-winning data visualisation and analytics company. And finally, we have Rod Orham, a business journalist who contributes weekly to Newsroom, 9 to Noon and News Talk ZB. He is a public speaker on deep sustainability, business, economics and innovation. Rod is a member of the Edmund Hillary Fellowship, as is Mike as well, which brings together people from here and abroad who seek to contribute to global change from Aotearoa, New Zealand. I think we'll just quickly look at the poll results. It looks like we have got most people have voted now and we've got 36% of you this evening from the primary sector with a few other people from areas of tourism, other business. We've got a few council or government reps here this evening and academia as well. It looks like we have got most people at least a little bit familiar with our regenerative future content series and got an almost even split between rural and urban this evening. A few more from urban, which is fantastic that there's that level of interest in regenerative agriculture and a regenerative economy from our urban dwellers as well. Kia ora to the 14% of you this evening who are calling in from outside New Zealand. Fantastic to have you along. Before we dive into discussion with our panel this evening, I wanted to take just a few minutes to outline what we've covered so far in the regenerative future series. I began work researching this series back in December last year and the idea was to develop a content series funded by Pure Advantage and Edmund Hillary Fellowship to bring to light some of the stories of those that were working at the front line of regenerative agriculture in New Zealand. Pure Advantage had been looking at soil carbon through the lens of regenerative agriculture and some of the EHS fellows were already involved in various ways. So I originally interviewed Corum Sense co-founded John O'Frew and found it quite fitting that at the time when we first spoke he was actually navigating a long detour around closed roads in South Canterbury due to the extensive flooding that happened late last year down in the South Island. That sparked off a discussion around farm resilience and the soil moisture holding capacity with regenerative techniques. Threads of Conversation connected one expert from another in the field and we ended up with an initial 15-part content series that we launched mid-May off the back of the COVID-19 lockdown which was an interesting time to be bringing to light some of these conversations. We had launched an initial six webinars and then as interest grew we added another six culminating in this, our season finale. We first looked at trends in international food markets with organic yoghurt entrepreneur Gary Hirshberg who outlined the big opportunity for New Zealand to capitalise on changing consumer behaviours towards organics in the US with premium products and American suppliers unable to actually keep up with demand at the moment. That's how quickly it's growing. Later in the series that was reiterated by Jeff Czech from the Rodale Institute, a global leader on regenerative agriculture and American organics expert Robyn O'Brien who has been called the Aaron Brockovich of food which I think is a pretty neat title to have. We also discussed what international food trends are most pandemic New Zealand and the world as people begin to realise I guess how intricately intertwined we humans are with the natural world. We've talked in depth with those who have got their hands in the soil here in Aotearoa including one of tonight's guests Hamish Bielski and exploring what regenerative agriculture looks like at the moment across sheep and beef, dairy, mixed cropping and horticulture. We've learned that regardless of the type of farming, many of the same principles of regenerative agriculture apply such as observing and responding to what's going on around the farm and then learning to trust your intuition alongside the data that's coming from it. We got deep into soil science with Quorum Sense and Manaki Fenoa's Dr Gwen Grele along with internationally renowned soil expert Nicole Masters and talked a lot about plant diversity, soil biology and microas or fungi and the key roles that each of those play in building a resilient soil ecosystem that reduces or in some cases even can eliminate the need for synthetic chemical fertilisers, pesticides and insecticides. Nicole and several others also shared their insights from around the world, what's happening in the space and with some important lessons for New Zealand and against the backdrop of this summer's past drought in the Hawkes Bay and much of the rest of the North Island. We explored how the deeper root structures, more diverse pastures and thriving soils that are typical of regenerative agriculture can help make farms more resilient to both droughts and floods, both of which I think we're going to see more of in the coming decades. We talked with John O'Fru and Sam Lang about how the concept of regeneration actually extends beyond the ecological aspects into the social fabric of our rural communities. Hearing firsthand some stories of how a switch to regenerative agriculture has improved mental health for many farmers. It is a big issue for rural New Zealand and farmers reporting that it's brought back the joy into farming for them again. We've peeled back the layers of this conversation and the generation of our natural living systems and communities is going to take more than just farmers and that it's both urban and rural dwelling Kiwis who have a role to play in this, such as the scope of this mahi. We shine a light to what's going on in our cities with the fast growing urban agriculture movement and circular systems approach that folks are taking towards waste reduction, sustainable transport and community-supported agriculture all in the same model. We spoke with several in the Regenerate Now Network who are doing amazing work all over the country. Took a deep dive into forestry with Daman Salmon who returns this evening, Dr David Hall and Scions Ramona Radford questioning the strategy of widespread plantation forestry for the purpose of clearfelling. And we looked at the integrated role that native forests can play in restoring our ecosystems and the somewhat perverse incentives that we have in our current emissions trading scheme for farmers to plant their land in pine trees. And in this post-COVID world, which sees much of our tourism industry suffering greatly at the moment, we explored what a future of regenerative tourism might look like. And that panel included Dr Suzanne Beckin from Griffith University and advisor to DOC and who had a fantastic article also published last week by Pure Advantage for Newsroom along with Larissa Cooney who outlined tourism beautifully from a standpoint of developing relationships with place and a focus on bringing more Matauranga Māori into how we design our tourism experiences. Now, throughout all these conversations, the strongest thread underpinning everything is that building a regenerative economy is going to take a really widespread change in our mindset. And it's a change that sees us questioning every part of the integrated systems we live within, both the natural and the anthropogenic and committing to replacing extractive processes and practices with ones that regenerate, restore and embed resilience into the ways that they can function. One challenge that's come up time and again is that the idea of New Zealand's agriculture system is already regenerative. Now, in some places, I think there is some truth to this claim. We do have a comparative advantage on much of the world already with continual pasture cover and so on in a temperate climate. But for the purpose of this series is to show that there is still room for improvement and a huge opportunity for New Zealanders and the nation as a whole. So, as we close out this series, which has been recorded and is freely available to access, my hope is that New Zealanders can begin to see the opportunities there are in regenerative agriculture and regenerative principles in general, particularly for our primary industries. The producers, contributors and panellists for our regenerative future are calling for a mindset shift. One that embraces openness and continuous improvement. One that listens carefully and does better with nature. And one that imagines New Zealand as a world-leading model that is collaborative, restorative and regenerative using systems-level thinking to address the complex challenges of the 21st century. That is my vision for Aotearoa New Zealand. And I think with that, we're going to get into some questions for the panel. We'd love to start with you, Mike. When we're talking about these systems of regeneration, there are many crossovers with Matauranga Māori and Te Ao Māori. And perhaps you could speak to begin with how Māori worldviews can inform and guide our transition towards a regenerative economy. Over to you. Ngā mihi nung kia koutou ko mā taito ko takungua nō mania kotoa ho. I just want to acknowledge the panel. I feel really privileged to be part of this panel. Rod Hamish and Dayman kia koutou katoa. Matauranga, I mean this is a huge question to get started with, Alina. I think there's no doubt that from a Matauranga Māori perspective, let me step back a little bit. The world that I grew up in was dominated heavily by our democratic Westminster Governance Democratic System. By our capitalist industrial system, my dad had an engineering business. We grew up in commerce. We got used to what that kind of world was like. And today, right now, a lot of our policy and decision is driven heavily by a reductive scientific, Western scientific model of how we work stuff out, reduce it down to the nth degree so we can understand each of the moving parts. And then maybe we can put it back together against all those parts equal one. Now, working with a lot of Māori groups and Western science and organisations for a number of years now, if I get to see why Māori get confused when we get down to a highly reductive conversation around trying to understand something, it's hard for us to unpack each of the moving parts and see them for themselves when we deeply feel internally that the relationship and interrelationship between all the moving parts are critical to understand what those look like and how it feels. And so, from a Mataranga Māori perspective, if you think about that from an agricultural standpoint, the kind of monocultural, industrialised agricultural system that dominates New Zealand and globally right now aligns perfectly and neatly with that kind of Westminster and capitalist and industrial and individualistic kind of way, reductive way of seeing the world. It doesn't align so neatly with a more holistic worldview of the relationship between Ranginui and Papatūānuku, Mother Earth and Father Sky and how we understand everything in between and how we relate. We come from all of those things. We come from the soil. We go back to the soil. We can't reduce them down to an empty degree in order to understand them because true understanding comes from understanding the relationships across the space. It overlaps from a Te Māori and Mataranga Māori perspective with regenerative agriculture and regenerative economies. However, I think it's really for Māori and iwi themselves to determine what leadership looks like in this space as we decide for ourselves what how our own worldview is going to inform our farming practices, how our own worldview is going to inform our economic development, our community development, our whānau development. And we run the risk of trying to assimilate a Māori worldview into a Western worldview of governance of agriculture or whatever it looks like when, at the same time, we're trying to decolonise ourselves from being assimilated into a Western worldview to try and understand how life works. It's a big massive question. So excuse my flowery narrative around this, but I think it's important. I'll finish by saying if you look at what Hewake Ikenoa, what the primary sector joint action plan is looking like, what the primary sector councillor has come out with, with Taiā'u being right in the middle of the strategy, I think that's absolutely awesome. Māori values are the principle sitting right at the heart of cross-industrial pan-industry and government initiatives in order to think about how we drive into the future. The challenge, however, based on what I've just said, is going to be how do we work through these strategies not trying for someone else to try and be the other, but for someone else to understand the other. Because we don't want, if you're going to put Taiā'u in the middle and Kaitiakitanga in our roles as guardians and stewards of the land and water and the whenua, whatever we're going to have in our framework, we need to do that on a much deeper appreciation and understanding that we all think about this differently. Our worldviews aren't the same and it's okay to do that and don't try and make your view wrong and mine right and saying how do we move forward. Māori, if we're going to do this and lead it out around the agriculture and economy, we'll do so in a way that is inclusive, that thinks about ecological systems, that thinks about our community, that thinks about whānau first. When we think about selling projects offshore into the future, we need to make sure our whānau and communities are the first ones who are being fed. Because a lot of our Māori prime industry groups have been assimilated by the real process, there's still a little bit of unwinding to do as well from a practical perspective to get Māori businesses to start feeling okay to operate in a world that reflects their values and not someone else's and so we're seeing it in businesses right now that are exporting and doing some amazing stuff with whānau and community development. The return on investment spans across not just the financial return but the return on health and wellbeing and prosperity for their own families first. That's a massive question. I could go on for about a week on this kopapa or never ever get to the end of it so I hope I haven't confused everybody straight out the gate. Kelda. Kelda Mike, thank you. It is wonderful indeed to see some of the government sectors really starting to take a bit of notice of regenerative agriculture and it being mentioned quite a lot throughout that primary sector council report, the Fit for the Better World and everybody wants to check that out. Now this conversation is about a regenerative economy for New Zealand but Hamish I'd love to start with regenerative agriculture because that's where we started with this series and what it looks like in New Zealand so can you briefly just share for us where you see the sector is at and what sort of shifts have been taking place over the last few years or indeed just even over the last few months for you to unmute yourself there. Over the last few months it's the exponential growth is huge. I can't really believe my eyes after a lot of negative press earlier on in the year or even still now but I think we've had John O'Frew and Peter Barrett going through the whole country and they probably talked to now on a thousand farmers. We've had probably three or four events held in the last month and one in Kaikoura, Gore, we've got another one this week in the Taranaki and others which there's another 500 farmers there. The interest is genuine it's exceptionally exciting to see the genuine want for understanding of how to improve our farming systems, how to improve our land and our whole ecosystems. Farmers are really getting the message from the people of New Zealand and I think also when we look at our customers around the world the demand for produce growing that actually improves our environment is such a strong message that we ignore that at our peril and I just have no qualms about the future direction of agriculture, it's just up to each individual how fast they want to get on board in the sense of being honest with themselves about where they're at with their practices ask those questions is what I'm doing truly sustainable and by the term sustainable I mean not exhausting natural resources on our farms or throughout the world i.e. soil fertilisers etc and am I putting sediment into the water wise am I leaching unnecessary amount of nutrients so I think a whole lot more farms are now genuinely asking those questions and we're all just learning daily, weekly about some of those solutions to our challenges so it's just wonderful it's fantastic to hear that more people are coming along on the train they mean you travel around the country a fair bit speaking with people across the primary sector in particular how do you see regenerative concepts interweaving through our primary sector through agriculture, forestry, urban settings tourism and what trends are you noticing well I would add horticulture, viticulture you know as you say the urban settings what I'm seeing on the ground I think the closer people are to the ground in Aotearoa at the moment those that love our islands but also those that actually work with the land the closer they are the more they're seeing COVID-19 for example didn't come from nowhere it came out of the destruction of habitats and putting wild animals and people too close together so that viruses can jump the species barrier and their understanding about climate change and their seeing it in their own landscapes and in their own productive practices so what I'm seeing is a huge willingness to innovate to embrace these ideas but also to try and do things with them that in a small intimate society you can do in a way that's much harder and some of the bigger more sort of if you like encrusted societies around the world where lots of practices are so embedded that they're very difficult to shift and New Zealand we can I think be quite agile and we have been in the past and so people are understanding that it's urgent that climate change but not just that the extinction crisis what's happening to our oceans because we are people that love our land and our oceans and our beaches we're kind of close enough to see it and especially young people when you talk with younger farmers younger horticulturalists bitter culturalists but not just them for them at the moment they want a future that's full of hope and joy they don't want one that's looming apocalypse you know and they're getting very impatient with the decision makers down in Wellington and in local government who just don't seem to be shifting as fast as things are happening on the ground so I think there needs to be a lot of listening to people who are close to the land in all sorts of different ways and that includes people in tourism as well and they're noticing shifts and they're seeing what's real and they're very impatient for smart practical action to start happening and some of that's been held up not by their own desires but because there are people that are stuck in policies that they've promulgated and they're now finding maybe they're counterproductive but because of political imperatives they don't really want to shift in too much of a hurry so I'm seeing something that's really exciting in Aotearoa and I think Mike just to respond to what Mike was saying I think they're a big part of it but they only work because there are ideas a bit like that in the west as well if you think of the old web of life idea or you look what's happening in the sciences with complexity theory and ideas of ecology and symbiosis and the biological sciences and so on these aren't, there's a resonance they're not the same but it makes it possible for all sorts of kiwis to listen to ideas of Tai O, a river that's you know if I'm the river and the river is me and lots of people say yeah yeah I get that I get that and they get it partly from their own heritage as well Yeah absolutely I think what we're seeing is western modalities of thought catching up a little bit to some of these indigenous concepts that have been around for so many generations and that's really welcome to see Keo Na Taroa in New Zealand that word regeneration does seem to still spook a few people both in politics and outside as well we've had initially in this series a little bit of pushback to this idea that farmers aren't regenerative already in New Zealand Rod, when we're talking about economy can you explain what sort of economic shifts we're talking about when we say regenerative economy and what are the opportunities if not even advantages for businesses in New Zealand to take that sort of approach It's a very profound shift across all of our economic activity because it's about us learning how to make sure everything we do works with nature and not against it and of course nature is our life support system and we humans have substantially impaired that life support system particularly in the last 50 years particularly in the last 70 years from about 1950 this is called the great acceleration where we've got this enormous acceleration in economic activity and energy use and land use and all the rest which then have impacts on earth systems and planetary boundaries work of Johann Rockstrom and others so I think regeneration is an unsettling concept for some people because it implies criticism about what we're doing is wrong or damaging well of course it's more complicated than that because we have a spectrum we've got things that we do which are sustainable at one end of the spectrum and things that aren't but I would argue even at the sustainable end of the spectrum the concept of how much we've lost in terms of the richness and the resilience of our ecosystems so for example here in New Zealand we were the last large landmass that humans settled and that was the first Maori to arrive about 800 years ago or so and we've also been the place where we've degenerated those natural systems fastest overall so the opportunity for us to understand how rich and resilient those ecosystems are and that we can play a part in taking the pressure of those ecosystems by using those ecosystems in more integrated ways and so those ecosystems have a chance to regrow to regenerate and for me that's not only an opportunity but a tremendous advantage for us in New Zealand because of all the developed countries in the world we are most dependent on our on that huge natural abundance for our identity of self for example even though we're a more urbanised population than the French or the Germans those urban of us in New Zealand still very much identify ourselves by this place and by this land and by its waters and the other aspect of this is that some of our competitors overseas on food for example are moving towards technologies that can get to zero environmental impact so growing meat from stem cells for example growing things aerponically in an enclosed building but if we get our farming systems and our land use systems right we don't just get to zero environmental impact we actually get to positive environmental impact where that regeneration really starts to kick in and of course this isn't just about how we grow food or use land in rural New Zealand and I think it's terribly important for us to consider across the whole economy how important those ecosystems are of course it's been very important for tourism and hopefully at some point that's going to come back but it's important for attracting people here to be students or to be immigrants here or our film industry but even I think more profoundly many of our economic activities that seem to be purely intellectual or really seem to be completely divorced from those living systems are actually deep down rather informed and enlivened by those systems so that's why giving those life systems a chance to regenerate themselves by using them in these sorts of regenerative ways I think is absolutely the right thing to do but an absolutely fabulous advantage for us out in the world absolutely and you talked a little bit there about the need for action beyond the policy and I'd love to get some tangible examples in a minute but what policies do you see that we need or that are really missing to embed a culture of regeneration into our primary industries I know we've heard a little bit about the fit for a better world strategy but can you speak to any other policies that might be helpful well we've certainly got at the very highest level the right policies in terms of a zero carbon act because that's now focusing our minds on that trajectory we need to be on to a very low carbon emissions economy across the whole economy but what's yet to come are the next levels down in that particularly as we start to think about sectors so how we decarbonise the transport sector for example or how we encourage different farming systems and I'm very excited by what Hewokia Inoua is up to because whilst I was a little skeptical about how affected that might be from what I've seen of the work so far there is a real sense of a journey here and an exciting one about how we do measure more on farm and make sure that what we're doing is reducing the negative things but increasing the positive things specifically that's around carbon emissions but we've still got a very good long way to go we've still been quite random in zooming over here to do this and over here to do that and see it in the Covid recovery investments there are plans like 1.1 billion dollars for digging up wilding pines and for restoring rivers and all sorts of other things but those are just dealing with the damage that we've done they're not investing in the better systems to prevent us doing that damage in the future so that's why there is still a long way to go and the key organisation in this is absolutely the climate change commission because that's going to be now taking that zero carbon act and making sure that because we have these stepping down budgets on our emissions that it will be evaluating all of our policies from government and all our responses in society on that journey and it's an impressive bunch of people who have been appointed commissioners and we've seen for example in the UK over the last 11 years how effective that sort of organisation is and I think the chance to do that in a very New Zealand way particularly increasingly informed by to Aalmari, that Marri world view which is turning up not just in the primary sector but it's fundamental to each of the 11 national science challenges and even the reserve bank now is able to talk about monetary policy in those terms if you haven't checked out the reserve banks to Aalmari view of the world it's worth checking out so we're on a very distinctive journey here which is hugely informed and enlivened by that Marri world view and Mataranga Marri Yes you make a very good point there and us treating the symptoms and being the ambulance at the bottom of the cliff for a lot of the effects that we've been seeing I'd like to put to you Hamish a question and just to remind people on the webinar this evening that you can submit your questions into the Q&A box for the panel and we'll get to some of those later in the call but Hamish what do you see as some of the practical low hanging fruits what are the levers that we can readily pull in our primary sectors to be more regenerative what are you seeing and what it's your advice for people right off the bat Like what Rod said there is that we're fighting fires not implementing solutions and so you've got regenerative agriculture, forestry tourism are all one we have 10 hectares of gullies here that we would love to have planted out tomorrow but in our transition to implementing regenerative management we need to put that money into the risk of change but also the infrastructure the fencing and the water systems to allow us to improve our grazing management in the meantime we have tourism which entails a lot of flying now flying in itself is completely unsustainable so let's not delude ourselves there however if they want to help genuinely help New Zealand land and people invest in farms throughout New Zealand which is thousands upon thousands of unproductive land and plant diverse forests which increase biodiversity improve water quality and improve soils all of which pine trees do not do so this opportunity for big companies to not just offset but actually improve and restore our landscapes then is such a huge draw for our tourism so the combinations of all of them working together is so blatantly obvious and the advantage is so big I can't understand why this hasn't been put together by politicians and policy makers I guess it's just too hard and it's far easier just to sit down and do some simple accounting and then just plant some trees that will solve a problem for 30 years and then we're back to square one that could go into diverse plantings is going to take us 20 to 30 years of planting but we'll just carry on for hundreds of years it seems so obvious it's crazy but anyway I'm very encouraged and hopefully when you've got people like the panellists we have now to help encourage policy makers to really step in and step up the people of New Zealand would be so far behind that strategy any political party that implements it they could be in power for three or four terms I do like that idea you speak a little bit about the forests that we're planting and the nature of those sorts of trees Dayman we had a lively conversation a couple of weeks ago around the regenerative forestry can you briefly outline how the forestry sector in your view can become more regenerative and some of those opportunities that Haynes talked about to take a much more integrated approach towards forestry combining it with agriculture tourism that could culture horticulture and also community revitalisation I think the critical thing is that tackling one great existential crisis which is climate change we don't create others and we don't make things like for example the biodiversity crisis even worse and when we're thinking about how to sequester carbon trees are absolutely a great way of helping to sequester carbon but the key thing is to make sure that it's working in with everything else that we're trying to do restore our rivers have prosperous thriving rural landscapes livelihoods for people on the land in rural communities that are functioning really well looking after tourism as well and to blanket landscapes irrespective of their soil qualities their topography and all these kinds of things in vast ways of monocultures of conifers in other parts of the world people are not doing that because climate change is bringing increased risk of fire increased risk of pests big conifer forests are burning in many parts of the world northern Europe for example at the moment and that makes climate change even worse and industrial forestry also emits a lot of carbon in the process of doing it whereas if we had the sort of mixed land use model we stopped thinking of everything in some sort of like these industrial forests are like balance sheets laid across the land the trees are all planted in grids they're shallow rooting they're all the same the biodiversity obviously is not great and the environmental qualities we all know about we've seen what happens when they're clear fell harvested it's appalling what's going on in places like Tolligabai what we could do instead is what Hamish is talking about my experience of farm forestry is that farmers actually because they're there they look after the forests in a way that doesn't happen with the big investors and increasingly if we do carbon forestry it's going to be lock up and leave and those forests will be full of weeds they'll be full of pests they don't create any jobs we'll have landscapes that are barren on a number of fronts including the social front and this is where regenerative approaches the sort of nature-based forestry that you can see in countries like Germany and Switzerland and many other parts of the world today mixed forests mixed age mixed varieties closely adapted to local habitats they don't use they avoid spraying they harvest in small coops so the canopy remains intact they're open in many cases by law to the public so this leisure goes along with it as well this is a humane this is such a wonderful model and farmers my experience we're doing a big rivers restoration project at the moment every farmer in the catchment is on board the young farmers are just so keen to figure out how they can if only they could earn a bit of income from those gullies and those riparian margins because they are creating benefits for the wider public with that land use something like a biodiversity credit for example mixed up with combined with nature-based forestry again I think like Hamish I think it's a complete no-brainer and what we're doing at the moment is like brainless someone we're creating potentially ecological catastrophe and trying to solve climate change and we just need to be real and listen to the people on the land go and have a good look at what's actually going on after highly erodible landscapes are clear-felled and harvested and just stop it stop wrecking our beautiful country with solutions that don't work in practice and come up with something cleverer and more something which draws on our love of the bush for example and it makes it a pleasure and a joy you know the restoration project we're involved with both the river one but also the landscapes the birds come back we've got kids running all through the place you know people just there's a smile on people's faces when they walk into that kind of a landscape and that kind of a farm and we can do it New Zealand I think we could I love it just stop it just stop it New Zealand you touched on a really interesting point there about some sort of a biodiversity credit can you talk us through briefly how you would see such a credit being played out in New Zealand I can partly pass that one over to Mike as well because he's very involved in one of the initiatives that's going on in this space but essentially what goes on in the missions trading scheme is at the moment because we have a history of almost a century now of planting pine plantations and so nearly all of our foresters scientists are used to that kind of forestry and that's the way they think about forestry and that's the way it sort of goes and so the ETS has been set up and when people think trees I mean even looking there I say out of the greens forestry policy on the front page there's a whole picture of pine forests which is kind of amazing when you reflect on that because people just they think somehow rather any tree is a good tree but for us it's the right tree in the right place making sure that you're thinking about the rivers you're thinking about protecting the fertile soils you're thinking about rural communities and the future for young people on the land you know you're thinking about the birds you're thinking about the waterways you're thinking about the ocean you're doing this interconnected thinking and you're giving it a financial reward and the idea of a biodiversity credit is just instead of giving people on the east coast where I'm from 10 times more to plant pine trees on the most some of the most rotable landscapes in the world and then you give them for regenerating native forest I mean it's crazy what we're doing you put them on an equal footing financially and find mechanisms for doing that but maybe Mike couldn't talk more about that Kota Damon look I think 100% agree with everything that Damon has just said and Hamish and Rod too I see questions come up on the chat from Naomi asking about in New Zealand do their team retreats planting restoration natives on a farm they're a good example if I'm not mistaken it's a really good observation so getting your staff out to plant native trees indigenous trees on farms is a good idea but against the latest last thing I heard against some good advice around in New Zealand needing to divert some of their offsetting credits into a more but biodiverse strategy as far as the last thing I heard and I may be wrong here but that was still being pointed largely towards pine forest planting pine trees and making the most the companies are still going to try to make the most of the ETS framework that exists and if you look at the look up tables that the government sets out if you want to get some carbon credits through planting these trees somewhere then the best thing you can do is plant pine trees in Gisborne because the look up tables tell you that that's where you're going to get rewarded the most handsomly and so firstly we've got a couple of problems there firstly is the science that's driven the look up tables has come out of what I was saying earlier that reductive scientific view on what do we understand right now about carbon sequestration through money making industrialised kind of lens and it's pretty easy to come up with some science and maths that point us to planting pine trees is the best thing to do. Some researchers came out recently and said well actually the carbon sequestering opportunities through planting indigenous forests because of all the biodiversity and activity that happens under those canopies sequesters a huge amount more carbon than what we do what we're seeing out of our pine plantation so when we're getting into these kind of debates and arguments about what sequesters more pine trees or indigenous forests the question is actually there's a wider question is actually how we're thinking about this for a much more diverse and therefore biodiversity kind of lens what are all the things we need to be thinking about in nature if we're going to really start to turn around the hydrological cycles the carbon cycle all of these things that are kind of really we've as Rod said earlier humans we've impacted on these cycles so severely and dramatically that you know this extinction that's coming is now looking like it's real it's not when it's if and so while we're here and what time we have left what are we going to do to acknowledge that this whole biodiversity play is quite possibly one of the most important plays that we might make and so the biodiversity credit offers us a way to say well what's up if money is still the primary driver and I think it is based on the investors and people that we've been engaged with globally in this space at the end of the day the financial return on investment is still the number one thing that's driving these investors you can talk about ESG and SDGs and all the DGs in the world from a general rate of at X percent then we're not interested we'll go and find something else to claim out ESG kind of brownie points against and so again this is where biodiversity credits open up whole new opportunities for us to leverage the offsetting the investment that firms or investors want to make and areas that are going to help us regenerate going to help us get carbon and going to help us hold water on the ground rather than getting washed off with nutrients and soils into our rivers it's going to allow us to have estuaries and waterways and harbours and oceans that are starting to work kind of symbiotically with how nature works as best as it can without us getting in the way so how do we not get in the way well we don't get in the way by continuing to follow down this kind of top down cumbersome investment model that we've all bought onto and we kind of get in the way, we don't get in the way by getting in the way by bringing in new types of funding and investment mechanisms like the biodiversity credits, like soil carbon credits like water bombs and the types of markets that we need now from a financial standpoint that are going to encourage better practices and better behaviours. We kind of hope that humans are waking up and investors are waking up and wanting to see the global stats scale wanting to see their money being put to work to make a difference now that climate we're seeing it in New Zealand right now our biggest drought in many years turned to a 500 year flood within weeks and the devastation is insane. I don't know why we call it 500 year floods these annual things now but unfortunately our investment global investment landscape still dominates around financial ROI and so we've got to find ways to be much more innovative around that. We'll give you the return on investment but at the same time we have to prove that that return on investment is impactful in areas of biodiversity and areas of carbon sequestration and areas of cleaning water up. Pollyanna View says well you know we can show right now, we're doing my guys right now can show what cleaner water looks like as a consequence of regenerative agriculture they can show what healthier food systems look like right now as a consequence of regenerative agriculture and regenerative organics they can show what increased carbon sequestration looks like and healthier animals and healthier humans as a result of regenerative organics the investors go that's cool but we want to know what our financial return on investment is going to be if we put our money in and so that's not all the investors but that's probably 99% of the global investor landscape that we're engaged with so thankfully there's some solutions coming as they mentioned like the biodiversity credits right now there's some guys up in the US that have a lofty goal of raising $100 billion to put to work towards a large scale transition towards regenerative agriculture it's a massive goal but the quality of the people that we've seen involved in the early stages of this fund are absolutely no doubt they can pull it off so that kind of runs counter to what I was saying about there's an investors only want to see what the financial ROI is we are seeing more and more wanting to see how they make money but how they make it in a way that and Robin O'Brien who I just think does some of the most amazing work on the face of the earth and you mentioned her earlier Alina and she was on an early webinar you know replant capital and what they're doing, people need to start taking notice there's vehicles now that can meet the needs of investors and at the same time provide evidence to policy makers to communities to industry that money is not just making a financial return but it's having a positive impact on environment, climate outcomes as well it is heartening to see some larger companies overseas looking to this regenerative agriculture as a solution we've got Patagonia made an announcement last year Denone and also General Mills are submitting on some level to sourcing a lot more of their ingredients and raw materials from regeneratively produced origins so there's a good question here from Jen in the Q&A panel that doing regenerative business is one side of the argument of a regenerative economy but Rod do you have anything to say about changing the way that we do economics in general to make it more regenerative by nature? Big question It's a great question and indeed economics is very broken as indeed is capitalism and the problem with economics and capitalism is they are very much swamped and driven by just the financial aspect of things so we've been dominated by financial capitalism if you like but it's much more helpful to think of the other capitals of which the most important is natural capital i.e. those living systems themselves but then human capital which is the skills and resources of individuals but crucially social capital in other words the resources of us collectively as we work together and then the intellectual, technical and other kinds of science capital then if you think all of those capitals working together whereas financial capital is only a facilitator of all of that it's not by any means the dominant one you then get a much better balance in what's going on here there are all sorts of ways in which economics is changing so we have a very rich field developing in ecological economics for example and we've got some terrific exponents of that here in New Zealand but in terms of a single person who I think is most effective at describing how economics needs to change my absolute favourite is Kate Rayworth the British Economist and her book published two years ago sorry three years ago now Donut Economics How to Think Like a 21st Century Economist and she makes it clear that that is all of us all you need to be an Economist is a pencil to start trying to draw the world you want and she has in those seven principles a very excellent guide I think to the main drivers of economics as we've been practicing them to economics as we need to practice so I think that's a very helpful one if you want to delve deeper we go off into really interesting areas like new monetary systems but I won't disappear down that particular hole right now yes absolutely yeah Donut Economics fantastic concept and I guess most of us don't really consider that the field of economics is anything but financial a lot of the time so that's certainly a very good shift in mindset I mean our Government's agencies do talk a lot about joined up systems and this idea of driving a just transition towards a low emissions world Mike I wonder if you've got any tangible examples of what that might look like on a systems change level to really embed concepts of regeneration yeah thanks Lena just looking at John Malloy's comment there Kelta John John's got some amazing ideas around how investors might want to start how we capture the imagination of investors in this space a couple of examples firstly a real live one where you've got I put a iwi Māori group at the moment called Tuatupaki Trust that invested years ago in a geothermal power station with a power company and built a geothermal power station after a while of successful operations of the power station they realised that there was a whole lot of waste heat and energy going to atmosphere which is typical of all geothermal power stations but realised then that we'll ask the question we've got all this heat going to atmosphere what a waste imagine if we had hot houses and glass houses that could capture that heat and harness it this is in central North Island where it's pretty cold during winter 20 acres of glass houses later they are exporting selling produce into local and export markets and that's by utilising heat and steam that was previously going to atmosphere and then a group of them realised further down the track that there was still heat going to atmosphere or going to waste and so if they could capture that what else could they do and they built a milk processing plant which uses waste heat, surplus heat from the geothermal power station to drive the heat process for the dry milk powder and UHF milk plant the idea there is now you have this kind of circular mutually beneficial commercial program that's running through utilising energy that was previously not being utilised in a way that was efficient for a business standpoint but it wasn't that helpful or friendly from a greenhouse gas perspective so they are using a lot of that energy internally to build these businesses which are hugely successful by global standards and highly competitive so that's one example where they've got at the heart of that kaitiakitanga principles for what drives their strategies they've got worm farms from waste from the milk factory being regenerated and processed on the land around these operations and now have farmers that are starting to line with the regenerative agriculture movement in order to provide their supply which is the milk company with cleaner food with a lower environmental footprint that's one way. Since post COVID and during COVID there's a lot of conversation narrative around the need to shorten our supply chains and one of the huge opportunities we've got in Aotearoa and this again goes against the grain the economies of scale model that we drove to shut down our local milk processes and move everything, you know, truck everything you know 50 to 250 km away to the milk factory to get economies of scale is tech is caught up now and stainless is caught up where the cost to build small plants almost sub-scale and pilot plant size on the farm or close to the farm where a number of farmers can invest in downstream processing opportunities how do you create a regenerative agriculture and a regenerative economic model and a regenerative food system and shorten the supply chain so that we're better equipped for when the next pandemic hits or when COVID hits or when climate really starts to get disruptive and one of those ways is to move that processing and that downstream stuff onto or closer to source or farm and we know you can do that now and we know that these plants have become affordable for farmers to come together for the people who build these plants to come in even as co-investors and for outside investors to come in and partner and build brands and put your distribution channels in place to get to market much more quickly than what you can at the moment and so we know that these are now affordable profitable in the US for every dollar that a consumer spends about seven and a half cents of that makes its way back to the farmer under this regenerative economic model where farmers invest in downstream processing close to the gate we anticipate that by running regenerative on farm practices that they get that they're able to extract a lot more value out of that kind of that dollar at the end through being able to prove that it's a healthier, more sustainable product that they're sending to market they should be able to benefit from that their import costs down and get a whole lot of other costs down at the same time plus the farmer should be able to have the opportunity to invest in downstream processing kind of like they do with Fonterra and the big guys at the moment by holding shares but they have much more say over the process and much more say over how they engage with the end consumer and it's a much more intimate economic model that the farmers locally can engage with at the same time they can have strategies in place where the first piece of the pie of produce that goes on the gate finds its way to the local communities before the risk goes off to the high value export or local markets that we know we can access and there's about another hundred different examples but I think it's the time has come where day man goes we have to stop it 100% agree the cool thing is as we speak right now we can actually start doing things differently better we can't wait for government to catch up government will catch up but we can't wait for that we have to keep backing and supporting the people on the ground who are doing it who want to keep doing it and any new ones who are interested and want to come in and play this game we're building short cycle regenerative food system starting in the paddocks ending up on the shelves or on the fridges and back to John Maloy I know John knows what is one of the visionaries around this space how do we get consumers buying into our infrastructure our products, our goods, our services because they love what we do now and we can prove that what we're doing is making an impact absolutely Hamish you look like you wanted to add something there I just wanted to add an example to what Mike's been talking about where we've shortened the supply chain the jersey that I'm wearing is a bunch of farmers down in Otago that have invested in the whole supply chain and now we're getting our jerseys made and we sell them ourselves online we're getting carpet made we sell them direct the point is we actually pay all the costs upfront which is quite significant so we are the bank in essence but the return for our jersey our lamb's wool which we get through the market is $2 a kilo $3 a kilo we're returning $40 a kilo for these jerseys and the customer is getting good value it's not an overinflated price it's a fair price and the farmers getting rewarded and the carpet we're returning $10 a kilo versus $1.50 a kilo and the customer again is getting almost synthetic price value for top quality carpet Mike absolutely can be done it just takes a lot of effort because we've had a couple of really key guys that have driven it and have had the desire and the knowledge to be able to pull it together so just an example on that one it's a fantastic example where can we find one of those shirts what's the name of the company it's ag wool is the company online but that's not the point the point is that it can be done and it's quite exciting to see the potential but it is hard for farmers because we need more than just farmers to drive it because it's it takes a lot of time and energy initially I'm just going to say to add to that I mean people want to know what the examples are but all birds came out recently and announced to the world that they wanted to run a strategy that was supportive of regenerative agriculture now they buy their wool for their shoes out of New Zealand or Marino and so that sends and then you've got Icebreaker you've got some amazing fashion brands Maggie Marilyn, you've got a whole bunch of New Zealand iconic brands Cavaliers just announced they're going all wool these producers the producers on that side of the value chain are really sending a signal they're listening to the consumer market that's saying that at the moment it might be niche but it's growing that this is what we want this is what we're looking for we expect this cool level of quality we want to know that the products that we're buying off you in this case wool wool that's coming from a place that is sustainable or regenerative the market's waking up and starting to understand this and so I think what Hamish is saying farmers are starting to come together to build a more profitable model inside it doesn't have to be productive or higher yield it has to be more profitable for them at the same time you've got these labels these fashion labels going well this is announcing to the world this is the path we're going down and then you've got Enzi and Marino and others who sit in the middle going well we need to start making sure now that we can meet both sides of that equation which a man on a call the other day she gave me huge faith in the universe and in the world we were super optimistic about our medium long-term future because of some of the things she's seeing and then that really made me think about going from a kind of a depressed state of this sixth mass extinctions getting closer or whatever it is then you actually think step back and think about it and what Hamish just said that farmers are coming together to do this the labels are coming together to do this the guys in the middle are saying we need to be able to make sure that we can meet this demand that's growing and through all of this process this is all come back to this is we need better policy to support this but right now it's policy that's going to have to catch up because we're seeing this amazing groundswell of supply demand playing up at the moment one of the things that we still need to solve is to get scale finance into the sector because it's a key part of the infrastructure that hasn't quite caught up but it's coming and it just gives me huge kind of faith and hope that there's a way out of this and New Zealand is going to lead the way Thanks Mike Hamish maybe we'll just bounce back to you briefly Hamish with a question from Rosie Walford on the back of that conversation what do you think needs to happen before consumers can start to vote with their wallets and choose foods or goods that are regeneratively produced in Aotearoa need some sort of certification system or what do you see as the key leaders to pull there Right I'll get to a controversial topic we need to forget about the debate between animals and plants we need to start understanding on how our food is growing so a huge focus goes on our dairy industry but let's replace our dairy industry with growing vegetables and vegetables are just as destructive to our land on 99% of the cases as it's more destructive than a dairy farm we have to understand that our cows, our sheep, our ruminants are not the problem the problem is how we manage them the ruminants aren't the ones piling on the nitrogen fertiliser the ruminants aren't the ones plowing up our soils the ruminants are just a wonderful tool to help us actually build top soil with permanent pastures that can be done for decades, for centuries our cropping and our vegetables our horticulture have all got huge amounts of pesticides and chemicals that go into it so we have to be very careful about understanding one versus the other we have to understand on how and the way each system is farmed, is produced to me that's a key point I want to make and the other thing is there's regenerative organic standards across the world now or even a regenerative standard and the Savory Institute has pulled that together and I think we could just tie that into New Zealand no problem I don't think it's a major problem it'll be driven by our companies our meat companies our wool companies our dairy companies wanting to drive it and if enough of our people who buy our food start to support the regenerative management and concepts then these big companies as Mike has said about allbirds and icebreaker etc and Patagonia etc have been driven that way anyway so I think if there was a label that came out and it was supported you would see change accelerate although I do feel change is going to take some decades sorry but the transition the change is hard I just want to stress that point while I get very very excited about the glimpses of brilliance I see it also can be quite a kick in the guts at times when things that you try don't work and that then goes under my experience column and that can wear you down a bit but where we see the winds and the progress that's what keeps us going and it keeps us going with other farmers now hopping on board and trying stuff and we're learning from each other we're bypassing so-called industry experts or scientists that think they've already got all the answers we just carry on and then we start getting support from the likes of you guys, our panellists here and others in the urban setting and in policy and once you start getting that um that big wave I think the customer can come in and start really supporting with what they buy but at the moment it is a bit tough because there's only organic versus everything else so just give us time give us all time and I'd say in the next five years there'll be some big change wonderful, yes, Rudd you wanted to add something yes, thank you very much indeed Hamish, I agree with you all the way and I'd just like to add one more bit so yes to ruminant animals as a very important help in developing soil carbon and fertility and building up soils and nutrition is good too but in moderation whereas most of us westerners are hugely overeating red meat, we're not so badly off on dairy but the crucial thing is though about the methane from those ruminant animals because it is a very potent greenhouse gas and it's a problem for ruminant animals worldwide and the fact that we have a somewhat lower profile there doesn't let us off the hook so the additional challenge through first of all feed and farming practices but then also breeding up herds around those animals which naturally have a lower methane profile to gradually keep reducing them methane and we've been on that journey for over 25 years reducing methane per litre of milk or per kilogram of milk solids by about 1% a year and all we've got to do is to keep going on that rate but we do need to be focused on that because at some point particularly say when tundra melt more and or hell breaks loose with a lot of methane emissions from the natural world that methane and farming and in landfills and the rest of the byproducts of the way we do things is going to be a real issue so yes to, I'm sorry to add one more to your to-do list but I'd methane too You're a good point Rod, thank you Daman what sort of learnings do you think we can see from from COVID-19 it's really tossed a mirror up in our faces really so what do you think we can learn from our response to the virus to help form our thinking into a transition towards a regenerative economy I'd like to chip in a little bit more on trees and then answer that question if I may because we've been talking about shortening supply chains and one of the things that I think already in New Zealand we have a lot of pine plantations and we could be turning more of that timber into things like engineered wood timber for a building it's useful for framing potentially for biofuels but what we're doing at the moment in a climate stressed world is taking very large quantities of logs raw logs and shipping them off to countries like China and India and South Korea that is just not a viable strategy when you're thinking long term about sustainability and the kind of emissions involved in taking these vast very large logs and shipping them halfway around the world so we did have nature-based forestry happening the thing that would be great about that is we have some of the most beautiful timbers in the world in our forests and they're unique the high value and so instead of doing this kind of high volume low value kind of production out of forestry as we've been doing arguably also with things like white powder and brown paper bags to use more of our timber source where it's useful but also to be thinking much harder about how can we produce these beautiful unique timbers with which sustainably in regenerative forests ones which regenerate they rely on regeneration they don't have to be planted all the time where the canopy is intact where the birds have a home where the rivers are being are running clear again and the ocean has a chance to come back to life and where people can find pleasure and peace I can just see this kind of series and this is what happened in COVID-19 to go to your question so many people turned for solace to places like the bush to the beach, to the rivers they went on walks they listened to the birds to hear them and I think in Aotearoa New Zealand we have that love anyway but I think it was magnified and we also pride ourselves on being able to produce food I come from a rural community I've got four brothers who are on the land doing very innovative things in biticulture and horticulture and farming and if we could do that in such a way that we were leading the world we were actually adapting ourselves to our islands we were learning how to live with our our own indigenous forests and to use them creatively as Maori did in earlier times before a lot of them were burnt and the rest were locked up in conservation estate but to use them wisely and to appreciate because the timbers are gorgeous my husband's an architect and instead of finishing with pine it would be so beautiful to be able to finish everybody were beach and all these beautiful timbers and we could export those and they would be very very high value because they are unique in the world so Covid I think everybody wants people want hope on the horizon they want something to look forward to I think all the scrapping and the grubby tactics that have been surrounding some of the early phases of the election are so out of touch with what people are feeling like at the moment they don't want that they want hope they want to think about a better future for our country they want to see a future for their children grandchildren in the farming community they want to be able to see a future for their kids on the land in many cases in our rural communities they don't want to see them dying and we can do this we're small enough as a country I think many of them some of them don't listen but many of them do and if they don't listen then we have recourse so it's a good idea for them to listen to good ideas at this point so that's what I think I think Covid has focused our minds it's given us time to think it's given us some peace it's given us a chance to re-appreciate how gorgeous this country is and to make in many cases a very fixed determination to look after it and to look after the future for our children and our grandchildren absolutely you raised an interesting point there we do have an election coming up in six weeks time I would love to finish this webinar by asking each of our panellists what would be the ideal announcement from a political party that you would like to see around taking us towards a more regenerative economy within the next six weeks in an uncertain world when we've got much of the world still facing Covid-19 and we have an opportunity down here to start the rebuild what would that announcement look like for me to our panellists so let's start with you Mike Kia ora Lina what an awesome question to wrap up with just following on from what Dayman said really Covid we showed and thanks to the leadership of the government I gummed in my soapbox about how slow government is and they need to keep up and I'm not going to take that back but at the same time credits where it's due I mean our government did an amazing job at keeping us informed in order to make the right decisions leading into Covid and during lockdown and after that and they've done an amazing job to secure the board is rightly or wrongly however long we can do that for is still a big question but right now we've got the luxury of apart from the fact that visitors are unable to come and enjoy our place on mass which I'm kind of okay with right now it's life you know life goes on and I'm really with Dayman I think Aotearoa New Zealand we need to firstly ourselves understand each other again right back to what we start what I start with to understand more deeply about what drives us and what our aspirations are and not that we necessarily need to agree on those but let's just try and come from a better place of understanding understand that when we have to go follow the rule book and go into lockdown and protect ourselves we lock down roads that were discussed protecting their elderly because no-one else was going to come and protect them that's a regenerative community happening an economy happening right there look after your elders first and foremost even if it means taking matters into your own hands but as a nation we looked after ourselves and now coming to election we need to think about what looking after ourselves looks like into the distant distant future and we need to learn from the lessons of the past we haven't got everything right in our country I could not imagine living anywhere else our culture, the diversity of our cultures the kind of the governance I bet you about but I'm kind of okay with it we have a chance to show demonstrate to ourselves first and then the world what a regenerative economy looks like how do we give back more than what we take out we don't need to extract extract extract drive drive drive just take it as much as we can in order to survive and thrive we don't need to do that and I think we've made some really good gains in that I think post-Covid we run the risk of the big important people when we sit around our big important board tables or our cabinet tables it's forgetting about the idea that we have this opportunity right now to do things definitely and better we talk about it but we actually have to do it and so I think the message to Wellington right now is we absolutely have to leave the world in lockdown and coming out the other side we need to now leave the world in what a new type of economy looks like locally we need to show the world that looking after your local people first in a world of intensive globalization that looking after your people first is actually a good thing it's not a bad thing and what that means is that we need to think about our own supply chains, our own production processes our own distribution and marketing strategies and we can do that in a uniquely Aotearoa New Zealand way embrace our diversity our cultures our Māori culture, our Pākehā culture whatever culture it is embrace that and take that to the world but mean it this time 100% pure New Zealand is not 100% pure yeah but it can be so I know what the message is Elena but this government get on the program in terms of let's work with that with us and all our mates out there that are doing it right now changing the game absolutely well said Mike Hamish what policy would you like to see announced or what message have you got for the government pre-election I just want them to stop and seek to understand ecosystems, ecology a whole approach to all that we're doing from the urban to the rural to the forestry areas you know as a farm we are so genuinely trying to farm to the future and so the future for us is less fossil fuel was less inputs and that we just harvest solar energy in a way that our grazing management begins to grow grow more grass more pasture not just more increase our biodiversity of soil carbon, our water but our profitability for our family and its succession so if if policy makers could understand the benefits of those strong communities on the land and what we can produce it's you can do it forever but food doesn't food is always there and we're so good at it please back our food producers and understand the integration between all aspects of the different components that we deal with so that's wonderful thank you Hamish Rod over to you six weeks is a very short time to substantially change the national conversation so I think that there is a way that this can work though so much about elections is very transactional you know we're going to do this which is going to benefit these people or this group or that need so if our politicians were saying we're going to do this and here are some of the connections that play into this some of the additional benefits of it and start to build up that sense of connection across these issues I think that would be a great help they could actually go one stage further which is we already have the living standards framework and we've already had two budgets under that that was actually work started by national so it shouldn't be language foreign to them because it starts to identify those wider effects those wider connections so just to start using rather different language which plays into this idea of regeneration of reconnection and then once the elections over we can then start building on that national conversation so people are more ready for the bigger policies and the bigger frameworks that we will need to help us on this journey. Thank you Rod and over to you Dame and six weeks what would you like to see just a little unmute at the moment. Like Mike what I think we learned about ourselves in lockdown we learned that when our leaders call to the best of us we can rise to the challenge and when when we're thinking as a team of five million we're thinking about all of us we're thinking about the country we're thinking about the city dwellers we're thinking about Māori we're thinking about other New Zealanders we're thinking about women and men we're thinking about younger generation in the future when we come together and say we've got this catastrophe facing us we all just have to pull our weight so that we can have a future an immediate future which is one where we're not played by this pandemic we actually did it I think it gave me huge faith in Kiwis and New Zealanders to realise that when that call comes out we do respond and I think the same thing is also true of post-election I think that when we're thinking about our leaders at the moment and politics some of it's very tribal and they get stuck in policy positions that they've promoted somewhere else and so forth and so on and this party likes this idea so the other party's going to fight against it even if it's a good one in a way in this context at the moment that really does feel a bit irrelevant and that's why I think many New Zealanders just wishing the election was over and done with it's getting on the road rather than helping us think about the sort of future that we want so for me the future that we could be looking towards is one which is based on interconnection we need leadership in our country which says we're not going to play these kind of dualistic games and say the farmers aren't going to vote for us so we won't give them anything they want or let's just look after the business community or whatever this is just like in a small country like ours this is kind of fractured thinking it's very divisive it doesn't get us anywhere it just ties us up in knots and if we thought about the land that way too as many of us did during Covid a lot of people turned to their gardens they started doing stuff again like baking and looking after looking after all the people in the neighbourhood dropping stuff off and leaving into the gate carefully and so on each other in this country was really something else and I saw that in our community it was really inspiring so it's not so much a single policy as a shift in the way people think about how to shape our future as a country I'd love to see I'd really like to see people saying you know what is good for that team of five million you know how can we shape our policy so that we really are delivering for this part of the community for that for the other putting it us at each other's throats in order to try and a few votes or something and if we could just you know run our political affairs much more like a family you can squabble at times but in the end you know in the case of my large and rambunctious family we still really care for each other despite all the differences and when it really comes down to it we pull together that's the way I'd love to see it we have a farm in the cities you know in the productive sectors but also in the halls of power just be so fantastic to see that team of five million spirit carry through and allow us to plan for long-term futures which are really full of hope, full of promise and where we look after our beautiful land couldn't agree with you more that was very well said thank you day man it does bring us to the close of our session and the close of this Our Regenerative Future series so I want to say a massive thank you to all our panellists this evening and on behalf of all the panellists that we've had over the last 12 weeks our contributors, producers it is all our collective hope that we can continue building on these cross-sector conversations to get people thinking about systems level strategies for regenerative and restorative economies going forward if you would like to find additional resources these are available on the pure Advantage campaign page for the Our Regenerative Future series and you can also watch all the previous episodes of the series on that page a few thank yous to all the panellists that we've had the entire series all 33 of them would you believe and to our media partner newsroom big thank you to Paula Neme, Ants Cabral and Yosef Ayili at EHF as well as Ursula Griffin and in particular Simon Miller at Pure Advantage who's been a fantastic person to be bouncing all of these ideas off along the way I'm Alena Sinkfried it's been a pleasure to have you along for the ride I myself am taking the next few months off to finish the book that I'm writing on storytelling and narrative to support systems change and addressing complex global issues like this so you can learn more if you like and follow the progress of my book by heading along to onto my website at AlenaSinkfried.com we have certainly quarter glimpse haven't we this COVID-19 thing has held a mirror up to us and nature really has called upon us to think differently and tell a new story of what our lives and our society and our economy could look like so to close out I'd love to leave you all with a final question that you can go away and think about over the next few weeks and that is what can you do what can you personally do to help contribute to making our lives and our economy and Aotearoa New Zealand inherently more regenerative in the future for the generations to come thank you all so much for tuning in it's been fantastic to have you and I'm signing off Ka kite!