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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

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New Zealand produces food for three and a half times its own population — and still imports most of what it eats.

That paradox is the whole episode. We're self-sufficient in five of the seven major food groups: fruit, vegetables, meat, dairy, seafood. The two we fall short on are legumes, nuts and seeds, and starchy staples — wheat, rice, oats. The calorie backbone of the modern diet.

The reason is 150 years of optimisation. Pastoral farming occupies about 40% of New Zealand's land area; horticulture, the stuff that directly feeds people, occupies 1.5%. We grow what the world pays most for, and buy back what we actually live on.

So what would the isolation diet look like? Nobody starves. But you'd be eating a great deal of lamb, butter, potatoes and kiwifruit, and almost no bread.

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