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New Zealand can build a house. We just can't finish it.

In July 2026 the Government handed Fletcher Building up to $60 million to keep one

cement kiln burning near Whangārei, rather than let the country's last integrated

cement plant switch to imports. That decision is this whole episode in miniature —

and it's the only time anyone has actually written a cheque to answer the question

this show keeps asking.

The heavy materials are a genuine yes. We grow far more timber than we could ever

use. Glenbrook is the only steel mill on earth making steel from ironsand, and it

supplies over 90% of our requirement. Golden Bay fires its own limestone for its own

clinker. Frame, foundation and structure are all ours.

It's the small things that break. The chemicals that stop radiata rotting — copper,

chrome, arsenic, boron — all arrive on a ship. We made our own window glass in

Whangārei for twenty-seven years and stopped in 1991. The rock inside every sheet of

GIB comes from South Australia. And the zinc on a galvanised nail has never been

produced in this country at all.

But for almost every one of those problems there's an older answer that still works,

and in some cases is already running in a factory in Rotorua. We look at cooking

timber instead of poisoning it, at the 1914 process that could put wavy glass back in

our windows, at why the fertiliser industry and the plasterboard industry are the same

problem, and at painting houses the way this country did it from the 1840s to the

1950s — with linseed oil grown on the Canterbury Plains.

At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas.

More at ateotw.com

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About 92% of New Zealand's electricity comes from sources that need no imported fuel

at all. Rain falls, steam rises, the turbines turn. On paper this is the episode where

we're fine.

Then you ask who built the turbines.

When Mercury spent $90 million refurbishing Karāpiro, the work went to an Austrian

firm — whose predecessor had supplied the original turbines at Kaitawa in 1948. Even

Arapuni, the first state-built dam feeding the national grid, was built under contract

by a British company. "We used to do it all ourselves" turns out never to have been

quite true.

So this isn't a supply-chain story like food or water. It's a maintenance and

manufacturing story. Hydro at 54–58%, geothermal around 22%, wind just over 9% — none

of it needs a tanker. All of it needs transformers, control gear, bearings, castings

and the technicians who know them, and almost none of that is made here.

We also go looking for what a reverted, smaller version might look like, including a

Rotorua workshop building micro-hydro turbines out of recycled Fisher & Paykel washing

machine motors.

At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas.

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Ask how long a New Zealand hospital lasts without imports and most people think about medicines. The more frightening answer is the tests.

PHARMAC funds around 3,000 medicines. Almost none are manufactured here. Tens of thousands of medical devices are registered for use; virtually all are imported. Gloves, sutures, tubing, catheters — largely imported. Surgical consumables start being rationed within weeks.

But the vulnerability that gets least attention is diagnostic reagents, which are almost entirely imported and would begin failing within months. Without them, blood testing, pathology and imaging analysis stop. Clinicians can still treat what they can see. Everything else, they're flying blind on.

We work through eight areas of the health system, and find the damage spread very unevenly — some problems manageable over years, others life-threatening inside a month.

At The End Of The World is hosted by Nic Roland and produced by Jamie Thomas. More at ateotw.com