Sunday Morning for Sunday 17 December 2017

7:11 Neil Vaney: Protecting the confessional

The sanctity of the confessional in the Catholic church is under threat. One of the recommendations of Australia's Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse would require clergy told of child abuse in the confessional to be required by law to report it. Marist Father Neil Vaney explains what the sanctity of the confessional means to the Catholic Church.

7: 20 John Edwards: taking a stand for privacy in the US Supreme Court

A landmark US Supreme Court case against a US citizen accused of drug trafficking has caught the eye of New Zealand's privacy commissioner and prompted him to take a stand against the United States. The citizen has private data stored in an Irish data centre owned by Microsoft, and rather than ask Ireland to voluntarily hand over the information, the US wants to seize it under US search warrant laws. NZ privacy commissioner John Edwards explains his concern.

7:25 Brian Dawson: making council tenants prove they qualify 

Wellington City Council is coming down hard on people in its social housing who can afford market rates. They've been sent a letter telling them to provide three months of bank statements or face eviction. Lambton Ward councillor Brian Dawson explains why the council is taking the action.

7:47 May Boeve: ‘The world is changing in front of us’

The Climate Change Adaptation Technical Working Group's stocktake report out on Friday said the country lacks a "nationally co-ordinated plan" to adapt to climate change and says that means hundreds of billions of dollars of property and infrastructure is at risk. May Boeve knows is in NZ from the United States and is the co-founder and executive director of 350.org, a grassroots global climate movement she co-founded in 2008 with author and environmentalist, Bill McKibben. Its focus is getting the world's biggest institutions to divest from companies directly involved in the fossil fuel industry.

8:10 Insight: rebuilding Timor Leste

The Timorese are now coming of age as the first generation to have grown up since Timor Leste independence was won from Indonesia in 1999, moves into adulthood. New Zealand's peacekeeping troops left five years ago, but this country still spends millions helping to strengthen the still fragile country, formerly known as East Timor. Sally Round  travelled there to see how the country's faring.  

8.37 Bo Rothstein: how refugees help Sweden’s economy

Swedish political scientist Professor Bo Rothstein says Sweden’s economy is booming and it could be because of the number of refugees the country takes, more than any other per capita. This is despite the fact that many are out of work - Rothstein explains why that is. He also talks about the controversy surrounding his recent resignation as the Blavatnik chair of government and public policy at Oxford University. He quit his post on principle after discovering that Ukrainian-born billionaire Leonard Blavatnik, who had given £75 million to Oxford, also donated $1m to Donald Trump's inauguration committee.

9:06 Mediawatch

Produced and presented by Colin Peacock. This week: how the media works out what we want from them in the digital era. Plus are we getting a true picture of what's happening on Manus Island?

9:40 Rowan Simpson: how to make a startup business last

How do New Zealand companies such as Xero, Animation Research Limited and Weta Workshop compare on a global scale? Someone who's been building the innovative tech sector here for the past two decades is Rowan Simpson who helped build TradeMe and went on to help build other tech companies, including Vend, Timely and Xero. He says more NZ companies should take time to better understand what world class really means.

10:05 Jimmy Carr: ‘I don’t draw the line, audiences draw it’

Award-winning British stand-up comedian Jimmy Carr is known for jokes that sail close to the wind. He says people don’t choose what they laugh at - it’s a reflex - but when he hears an ‘ooooh’ after they laugh, he knows their conscience may have kicked in. Despite some of the controversy around his humour, he’s massively popular. Around 1.2 million copies of his live DVDs have been sold, he was the first Brit comedian to have a live show picked up by Netflix and he's made a fortune being funny. Jimmy Carr, who is also the host of 8 out of 10 Cats and appears regularly on Stephen Fry's QI, is heading to NZ in January for shows around the country.  

10:25 Bronwyn Coate: why Da Vinci’s ‘Salvator Mundi’ broke records

Is art really worth the value it reaches at auction? Take Leonardo Da Vinci’s Salvator Mundi - that fetched $US450m at a Christie’s auction recently. Or in NZ, a Colin McCahon work recently broke the $1 million barrier ... the same work sold for $500 in 1969. Bronwyn Coate recently wrote about what she calls "the economics of ridiculously expensive art". She’s a researcher in cultural economics at RMIT university in Melbourne  - her research explores different aspects of art and culture with a focus on the economics implications  of art.

10:40 Sondra Bacharach: Lego is more than child’s play

There's a Lego exhibition running in Wellington at Te Papa until mid February. Despite all the digital gadgets around, Lego is a toy children still love. As well as being exhibited at museums, it pops up in artworks and also robots. Sondra Bacharach is an associate professor in philosophy at Victoria University in Wellington and wrote an interesting article on The Conversation that said Lego isn't simply child's play: it’s shaping the way people think.
 

11:05 Iron Maiden’s Bruce Dickinson: ‘what’s going on in NZ with warbirds is stunning’

Iron Maiden's frontman Bruce Dickinson is an absolute enigma. As well as a singer, he's been a commercial pilot, businessman, novelist, international fencer, public speaker, broadcaster and craft brewer. Dickinson told Rolling Stone that despite being asked to write his memoir for the past decade, he refused because he wasn't done with music. And he's admitted he doesn't even read them himself. But now the singer, whose band's hits include “Two Minutes to Midnight”, “Run to the Hills” and “The Number of the Beast” has written a memoir called What Does This Button Do. And it’s already a No 1 bestseller in the UK.