The Weekend for Saturday 7 January 2017

8:12 AM.Over the next 18 months Children's Commissioner Judge Andrew Becroft will oversee the latest shake up for the ministry responsible for the wellbeing of children and more broadly families.

The… Read more Audio

8:44 AM.The Weekend heads 45 minutes into the future and about 8 hundred kilometres east now. To the most easterly part of New Zealand in fact... to the Chatham Islands, where a hoped-for runway extension… Read more Audio

8:50 AM.Hastings resident Andrew Austin is the editor of local newspaper the Hawkes Bay Today. Water contamination has and continues to steal the headlines there. Read more Audio

9:09 AM.Which plants make happy bedfellows and which don't? Cook and gardener Annabel Langbein talks about good combinations of plants - like tomatoes and basil, beans and corn, and beans and potatoes, and… Read more Audio

9:30 AM.Author and art historian Lucinda Hawksley didn't know that her great great great grandfather was extremely famous until she was at school. She thought Charles Dickens was just someone she was related… Read more Audio

9:45 AM.James Taylor, who emerged in the early 1970s as a star of the singer-songwriter movement, is coming to New Zealand next month. Read more Audio

10:07 AM.When our four-legged friends can't get around on land as they used to  - due to injury, illness or perhaps putting on too much weight - have you ever considered water as an option?

Hydrotherapy - or… Read more Video, Audio, Gallery

10:25 AM.We're a nation of walkers living in a country where the weather can turn from nice to nasty in a heartbeat. Lynn Freeman meets keen Wellington trampers Illona Keenan and Peter Barber. Read more Audio, Gallery

11:06 AM.Tourist attractions are starting to get back in business after the November earthquake. This is usually the busiest time of year for the South Island tourist mecca. Before the quake operators were… Read more Audio, Gallery

11:30 AM.A week in, how are those resolutions going? Have fat, sugar and carbs been banned from your diet. Or is the old willpower starting to crumble?

Niki Bezzant from the Healthy Food Guide explains why… Read more Audio

11:40 AM.For most Kiwis at this stage in the summer when we think about ice its to put in a long cool drink. Not so much for South Taranaki couple Lisa and Jimi Walsh. They carve giant sculptures out of ice… Read more Audio