Inside Child Poverty - A Special Report: On Demand.

Bryan Bruce has spent the last six months investigating why the current state of child health in New Zealand is so bad and what we can do about it.

“I’m a baby boomer,” says Bruce. “I went to primary school in the late 50’s when they gave us free milk, free health care and a free education. In those days, Kiwi’s were able to boast that New Zealand was a great place to bring up kids. So when I learned that we’d dropped to number 28 on the list of 30 OECD countries for child well being, with just Mexico and Turkey behind us, I decided to find out what’s gone wrong and what we have to do to fix it.” Read More...

The Nip Tuck Trip - Cosmetic surgery is no longer the exclusive domain of the rich and famous: now anyone with a computer, credit card, and the will to change what nature gave them can book their procedures online, get on a plane, and be under the knife less than 48 hours after their arrival.

In this hard-hitting and cinematic documentary, director Slavko Martinov takes a brutally honest look at why we’re spending infinitely more time, money and effort trying to keep up appearances than at any other time in history, by following 3 ordinary New Zealanders on a cosmetic surgery holiday to Kuala Lumpur. Read More...

A Drunken State weaves personal drinking stories with the harsh reality of our drinking culture in New Zealand : more than six hundred thousand adults binge drinking once every week; 75,000 teenagers regularly binge drinking; a high incidence of young women being admitted to hospital with alcohol poisoning. The statistics become meaningless unless we know someone affected by alcohol; this programme puts faces to the figures, putting our drinking behaviour into the context of real Kiwi lives.

Journalist, retired talk-back host and parliamentarian Pam Corkery tells her story of first getting drunk:

“Being drunk made me feel ecstatic and comfy and the room was spinning which most people, normal people don’t like, and I loved it.”  Read More...

 High Time?

A surprisingly large number of Kiwis regularly use cannabis – a world drug report by the United Nations in 2009 put New Zealanders as the third highest cannabis users in the world. And the same report found that New Zealand has the highest rate of teenage cannabis use in the world.

However cannabis causes less harm and costs the state less in health care than alcohol or tobacco; yet it’s an illegal substance in this country while tobacco and alcohol aren’t.

Read an interview with the producer here at 3news.co.nz

If you or any of your family or friends are struggling with alcohol or drug abuse you can contact the Alcohol Drug Helpline on 0800 787 797.

High Time? investigates the facts, fanatics and fallacies surrounding cannabis in New Zealand and puts the question, isn’t it time we made cannabis legal? Read More...

In an age where smoking is becoming increasingly frowned upon, banned and distasteful, there’s one sector of our community where evidence suggests the message isn’t getting through fast enough:

31% of Maori deaths are due to cigarette smoking
46% of Maori are regular smokers compared to 21% of non-Maori

Dying For A Smoke is an in-depth investigation into New Zealand’s smoking problem, specifically focusing on smoking among Maori but also looking at trends within the wider community.It features personal stories of smokers - people like Natasha who started smoking when she was very young... Read More.

The Banker, The Escorts and The $18 Million tells the story of Stephen Versalko – the ASB fraudster who stole almost $18m of his clients’ money to lead an audacious double life of sex, lies and betrayal, including spending around $3.4m on prostitutes.

In August, 2009, an uneasy ASB client made a phone call that would ultimately unravel one of the country’s most scandalous frauds of all time – involving a double life of sex workers, overseas travel, deception, and nearly $18m in stolen funds.

Inside New Zealand’s compelling new one-hour docudrama, The Banker, The Escorts and The $18 Million, produced by the Emmy® Award winning KHF Media, tells the story of New Zealand’s biggest ever single employee fraudster, Stephen Versalko – the man who defrauded a high profile bank and his clients for almost a decade.

Stephen Gerard Versalko was sentenced in 2010 to six years imprisonment, with a minimum non-parole period of four years, after siphoning $17,763,110.19 off 26 sets of wealthy clients from the ASB Bank where he worked as an investment advisor. Read More...

We’re constantly surrounded by radiation – from cell and cordless phones, wi-fi internet, cell towers, powerlines, and even from our electric blankets. Could this invisible radiation cause a devastating public health crisis? Is our new technology the new tobacco or asbestos? Read More...

24 Hours: POLICE is a three-part documentary series that compares crime and policing methods in four major international cities (Auckland, Perth, San Francisco and Oslo) to find out how New Zealand stacks up. Is crime in New Zealand worse than in other countries? What can we learn from how other police forces work?

Documentary crews spent 24 hours filming on the streets with each of the forces, starting at 8am Saturday morning, through to 8am Sunday morning.The revealing footage is woven through the three-episode series, which is arranged into chronological order: episode one deals with the daylight hours; episode two covers the period from 8pm to 2am; and episode three looks at the early morning - from 2am to 8am.