Stories by Guyon Espiner

Many of the private law firms with warrants to prosecute serious crimes are failing to reflect the diversity of the regions they serve - even though it's a condition of their contracts.

Why do we give $41 million each year to private law firms to conduct public prosecutions? Guyon Espiner investigates.

Analysis - Guyon Espiner on how a leader may have plans for grand transformation, but they are often instead judged by how they react to events.

Highly confidential meetings where Pharmac ranks the funding priority of medicines are open to executive assistants, payroll staff and graduates.

RNZ is challenging a reporting ban that effectively prevents media publishing any information about the fatal police shooting of Rotorua man Shargin Stephens.

A Tauranga mother is moving to Australia with her ill daughter to access treatment for Spinal Muscular Atrophy that Pharmac won't fund. She has to leave her husband and son behind.

Labour MP Louisa Wall has accused China of harvesting organs from Uyghur and Falun Gong political prisoners.

John Key says China's human rights issues shouldn't hinder a close economic relationship, as he reveals the country's president sends him Christmas cards.

The young New Zealand resident says he has lost all contact with his family in China and the Chinese Embassy will not help him.

The police watchdog is reopening its inquiry into the 2016 police shooting of Rotorua man Shargin Stephens.

The former US National Security Advisor is warning New Zealand over its economic reliance on China and says we must decide between 'sovereignty and servitude'.

Suspected spies have been spotted in Chinese politics and history lectures taking pictures of content and 'correcting' lecturers by giving CCP versions of historical events.

A coroner has banned media from reporting all evidence in the inquiry into the death of the Rotorua man, after RNZ revealed discrepancies in the official story of the police shooting.

The IPCA is considering reopening its inquiry into the police shooting of Rotorua man Shargin Stephens, who was shot and killed after smashing up a police car with a weed slasher.

Five years after an officer shot and killed a young Māori man, Guyon Espiner reveals previously untold disparities between what the public knows and what the evidence reveals.

Two of New Zealand's leading cancer experts have slammed Pharmac's proposal to take away the special exemption which gives children with cancer access to any drug they need.

Children's Commissioner Andrew Becroft is warning Pharmac not to play one group of children with a life-threatening illness off against another.

A woman trying to get drugs funded for young SMA patients is horrified Pharmac says it might end blanket funding of kids' cancer medicines because she accused it of discrimination.

More than a 1000 people are expected to request to end their lives in the first year of New Zealand's assisted dying regime, the Ministry of Health says.

Patients requesting euthanasia will be given unapproved, unregulated and "off label" medicines, sparking warnings of prolonged and distressing deaths.

Laura Hume says it was only after her health began deteriorating that she found out she was one of thousands of people who had been switched to a generic drug in a cost saving drive by Pharmac.

Palliative care experts who say we are woefully unprepared to introduce assisted dying are asking ethical and legal questions about euthanasia.

Palliative care specialists fear health practitioners with as little as six hours online training could end up providing euthanasia for patients who would have wanted to live if they had proper care…

"We have no system to monitor therapeutic non-equivalence and in my opinion this cannot be discounted as a root cause of the deaths."

Prison guards threatened to pepper spray an inmate and then went on to put her in a headlock minutes after she'd attempted suicide.