RNZ: Sunday Morning

Hocken librarians Amanda Mills and Katherine Milburn discuss historic music posters in the Hocken Collections ahead of a talk on the subject at the Dunedin Public Art Galley on 16 May as part of NZ Music Month

A select committee has heard about families cooking on BBQs rather than risk a rent increase if the landlord fixes the oven at a hearing on the Child Poverty Reduction Bill. 

The Girl Guides will stop selling their biscuits from 2019. Around 28 million are sold each year to raise funds for the Girl Guides' association. Susan Coleman is the Girl Guides Chief Executive and explains the decision.

Conservation Minister Eugenie Sage has added $81.3 million in funding to the Department of Conservation to be channelled into predator control over four years. Kevin Hackwell, chief conservation adviser for NZ Forest and Bird, talks about what effect that will have. 

The fallout from Donald Trump's decision to leave the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran is being felt across Europe and the Middle East and beyond. Dr Rouzbeh Parsi is a Senior Lecturer at Lund University and director of the European Iran Research Group in Sweden. He says Iran has held up its end of the bargain.

The 'waka jumping' bill has raises a practical balancing act between electoral integrity and parliamentary privilege. 

New Zealand Sign Language interpreters will be a permanent fixture at question time but how will they deal with Parliament’s strange language?

In Parliament’s Oral Question the Opposition took a lead from the All Black’s Sam Whitelock and tried Front Loading as a tactic

Each sitting day in the House MPs work their way through business which is set out on the order paper. Here's what they plan to get through this week.

Wallace Chapman reads listeners' feedback from this morning's show.

Sonia Sly gives her assessment of iD Dunedin Fashion Week held from May 1-6 at the Dunedin Town Hall. The competitors are fashion design students from all over the world - 44 designers, 42 collections, from 19 countries. 

Pete Helliar is one of Australia's best-known comedians. He's the co-host on Australia's version of The Project, and in 2017 was voted Australia's most popular television personality. He's still performing stand up comedy but Pete Helliar has found another calling - it's writing books for children. He's coming to New Zealand to speak at the Auckland Writers Festival about his Frankie Fish books.

A new film takes an indepth look at filmmaker Steven Spielberg. The documentary "Spielberg" is directed and produced by award-winning doco maker Susan Lacy. It includes interviews with the likes of J.J. Abrams, Christian Bale, Drew Barrymore, Cate Blanchett, Francis Ford Coppola and Martin Scorsese and will play as part of the Doc Edge Festival in Wellington on 20 May and in Auckland on 3 June.

A fascinating book by British film writer Ian Nathan, "Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson & the Making of Middle-Earth", tells the behind-the-scenes challenges to get Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit movies made It also describes how one 25-minute preview of LOTR outside Cannes' main theatres blew the elite audience away. The former editor of Empire magazine also reveals how Harvey Weinstein rejected Peter Jackson's original idea for two films - but now, even though Weinstein didn't make LOTR - it still makes him more money than any of his films.

Introduced plant species are already taking over the New Zealand landscape, and ornamental garden plants could 'jump the fence' and get out of control too, says bioprotection specialist Philip Hulme.