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listener.co.nz celebrates its second birthday this week. It’s becoming something of a tradition to celebrate with a list of inspiring people. This year, we’re celebrating the visionary young New Zealanders who, not yet 30, are shaping our future. Here goes:
Advocates & campaigners:
Liam Carter started riding tricycles aged five. As a young person living with cerebral palsy, being able to hop on his trike and head out independently was life changing. Aged 17, Carter, who lives in Kirikiriroa/Hamilton, started Ride Your Trike NZ. His aim was to help others lead active lives when disability, age or the need for stability mean they can’t easily ride traditional two-wheel bikes. Now 18, Carter is spearheading Get off the Footpath!, a campaign asking government, police and councils to enforce the law on vehicles parked on a footpath or bike lane. He says this causes “a massive mobility issue” if you’re trying to fit past in a wheelchair, trike or other mobility equipment.
When she was 12 years old, Sophie Handford invited a local MP to speak to her class about climate change. Five years later, she founded School Strike 4 Climate NZ and mobilised 170,000 people to unite for climate justice. In 2018 she was elected to the Kāpiti Coast District Council, and, now aged 24, chairs its Strategy, Operations and Finance Committee. She’s also working part time for the Wellbeing Economy Alliance Aotearoa, as its future generations lead. “I’m committed to seeing us as communities and as a country lead our world to a better future for the next generation,” she says.
Alexia Hilbertidou was a student at Albany Senior High when she looked around her IT and physics classes and saw she was the only girl there. Her response was GirlBoss NZ, which aims to empower young women to consider leadership, entrepreneurship and STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) opportunities. It’s grown to a network of around 17,500 students in more than 400 New Zealand and Cook Island intermediate and high schools, helping young people use 21st century skills to solve problems in their day-to-day lives. The 26-year-old, who was born in Cypress and raised in West Auckland, has clocked up multiple accolades and awards including a Forbes 30 under 30 nod in 2021. She also received a Queen’s Young Leader Award for Services to the Commonwealth from Queen Elizabeth II at Buckingham Palace. Hilbertidou was selected from more than 20,000 nominees and is the youngest Commonwealth citizen to hold this honour.
A software engineer from Cannons Creek, Porirua, Namulau’ulu Nu’uali’i Eteroa Lafaele (Fogapoa, Leulumoega Tuai, Lefaga) is the current Young New Zealander of the Year. Judges said Eteroa, 29, is “redefining what it means to lead with purpose and heart on both local and global stages”. She founded Digi Tautua during the Covid-19 pandemic to provide refurbished digital devices to families in need, and went on to co-found Fibre Fale, creating new pathways into technology for Pacific people. In just under two years, Fibre Fale has reached 6500 people through in-person programmes, and more than 3 million people online. Eteroa has led groundbreaking initiatives, including the first Pacific Tech Careers Expo, tech-focused community events, mentorship programmes, and leadership camps tailored for Pacific youth.
Tane Tarlton is carving out his own legacy on the ocean. The 23-year-old adventurer and conservation storyteller is set to host Tane Tarlton’s Ocean Adventures, a new TV3 series spotlighting the people and projects working to protect New Zealand’s marine environment. Separate to the show, Tane is preparing for an ambitious mission of his own: restoring a bright-orange 6-metre lifeboat and circumnavigating the entire country. Along the way, he’ll document 52 ocean conservation efforts—from iwi-led initiatives to grassroots projects—and share those stories with everyday New Zealanders. He’s currently raising funds to bring this project to life. If the name ‘Tarlton’ sounds familiar, that’s because Tane is the grandson of Kelly Tarlton, a daring marine treasure hunter, underwater explorer, and founder of the legendary Auckland aquarium that still bears his name. While the two never met, that same spirit of exploration clearly runs deep.
Artists, writers and musicians
The Bennett siblings, Tīhema, 29, Māhina, 25, and Matariki, 23, join the list of Aotearoa New Zealand creative dynasties. They’ve grown up in the creative industries, with parents costume designer Jane Holland and writer Michael Bennett.
Tīhema is a composer who started playing piano aged 5. He has performed in the bands Haast Eagle and Black Jacket Rabbit, studied at Venezuela’s Conservatorio Vicente Emilio Sojo, and been mentored by the likes of renowned local composers Eve de Castro-Robinson and Leonie Holmes. His compositions include the award-winning score for the movie In Dark Places (with Joel Haines) and supernatural TV series Beyond the Veil, and he’s written extensively for commercials.
Artist Māhina Bennett uses painting, photography, moving images and installations to explore identity, gender, sexuality and the impact of colonisation on Māori. She works on costumes for films including Chief of War, Wrecking Crew, Tinā, and costume designed season two of Not Even and Hui Hoppers. Māhina recently illustrated sister Matariki’s first book, e kō, nō hea koe. She collaborates with her siblings and is working towards an exhibition with her graduate paintings Tahuna Te Ahi, along with new work.
E kō, nō hea koe might be Matariki’s first book, but her way with words has been attracting attention since she was at Western Springs College and cofounded Ngā Hinepūkōrero, a bilingual slam poetry collective. In 2021, the group received the Creative New Zealand Ngā Manu Pīrere Award, recognising outstanding emerging Māori artists. In 2023, Bennett was the Wellington Poetry Slam Champion. She co-wrote and co-directed the films Te Kohu and the short documentary Wind, Song and Rain.
A love of cars from the 1980s and 90s coupled with artistic talent has taken Elliot Love, 27, in a different direction to the road he was travelling down when he left high school. Back then, the Dunedinite had given up art and was studying toward a degree in physical education but a visit to artist Tim Wilson’s gallery in Queenstown changed his mind. Love’s now been a professional artist for five years, focusing on urban landscapes where cars – many years older than him – are the subjects of incredibly crisp, hyper-real paintings. He now shows at the Parnell Gallery, where his work regularly sells out.
Jude Kelly, 25, was just 15 years old when she left her Ōtepoti/Dunedin home. The daughter of two pastors, she turned to songwriting to explore questions about identity and selfhood. Released this year, her debut EP The seven spirits of her starts with soulful pop and adds Americana and folk influences to create odes to growing up, love, loss, resilience and (re)discovering the world.
Jamie Te Heuheu: Born in Ōtautahi/Christchurch, artist Jamie Te Heuheu was gently nudged by his Hagley College teacher towards tertiary education. Te Heuheu took his teacher’s advice, went to University of Canterbury’s Ilam School of Fine Arts and saw how a full-time career in the arts would be possible. In 2021, he showed in A New Net: Four Early-career Māori Artists after being invited by gallerist Tim Melville, and shortly afterwards, couldn’t turn down the opportunity presented by Wellington gallerist Hamish McKay for his first solo exhibition. Now represented by Starkwhite, Te Heuheu recently opened his latest exhibition You and I in Unison.
Business & enterprise
Like Murrell and Phillpotts-Scales, Luke Campbell and Lucy Turner were studying at the University of Canterbury when they founded their legal-tech company, VXT, in 2018. VXT began as a simple voicemail-to-text app and has since evolved into a full communications platform that helps law firms around the world automate the paperwork that comes with phone calls. The firm has raised $2.5 million at a $45m valuation, including backing from Silicon Valley venture capital firm Alpine VC.
Georgia Latu was just 12, and desperate to attend a 48-hour boot camp for start-up businesses, when she founded Pōtiki Poi to raise money for the trip from Otēpoti/Dunedin to Matatā. In three days she raised more than $1000. Now 18, Latu’s company is the world’s largest manufacturer of poi. It’s a business founded on tino rangatiratanga, a commitment to sustainability, and diversity. Latu says her little brother Api, born with Trisomy 21 (Down Syndrome), was the inspiration behind her wish to create meaningful work for people with diverse abilities. Pōtiki Poi has grown to include the Kura Poi dance academy and a children’s book about the whakapapa of poi. Highlights of her business career so far include filling an order of 32,000 poi – within two months – for the 2022 Women’s Rugby World Cup, all before she was legally able to own her own company.
Who says gaming doesn’t pay? Certainly not 28-year-old Janzen Madsen who at 19 discovered online game platform Roblox at a friend’s party, then immediately rushed home to start Splitting Point Studios in his parents’ basement. The 50-plus titles Splitting Point has developed have now chalked up more than 6.5 billion game visits. Splitting Point won the Best Studio award at the Roblox Innovation Awards 2024, while its Gunfight Arena game nabbed the People’s Choice prize. Grow A Garden – where players plant seeds, grow plants and harvest them – developed by a 16-year-old member of the Splitting Point network, has broken records, surpassing Fortnite for having the most players (20 million!) online at one time. “I think New Zealand is like a pretty heavy hitting country considering how small we are, which is often the case and story of New Zealanders,” Madsen told RNZ. “It’s cool to be a part of.”
William Murrell (Ngāi Tahu) and Ben Phillpotts-Scales launched KiwiFibre during a group project at the University of Canterbury in 2020, both just 23 at the time. What started as a student idea has grown into a pioneering venture, with KiwiFibre raising more than $5 million to transform harakeke flax into natural carbon fibre composite materials. The product is not only lighter and more sustainable than traditional fibreglass and carbon fibre, it’s also versatile, with potential applications ranging from sports gear to aerospace tech. KiwiFibre made its way into the spotlight when New Zealand rally driver Hayden Paddon used it in the bumpers and roof of his electric rally car, showcased at last year’s Fieldays, where Murrell and Phillpotts-Scales took home the Early-Stage Innovation Award.
Raised on a sheep and beef farm in Waotu in South Waikato, Penny Ranger was involved in farmwork from an early age, which, she says, gave her first-hand experience of the challenges and rewards of rural life. She created Mark-It, a tool that streamlines the sheep drenching process by leaving an ink mark on the side of the sheep’s mouth. It won her the 2024 Young Innovator Award for entrants 19 years old and under at Fieldays. Judges described it as a “classic Kiwi solution that simplifies an important task while helping save money and waste”. Ranger is now a first-year student at Lincoln University, studying a Bachelor of Commerce in Agriculture.
Ones to watch: Madeleine Anderson, Libby Meredith, Casey Purves, and Courtney Malloy, from St Paul’s Collegiate in Hamilton, could follow in Ranger’s footsteps. Their KiwiPrune team won this year’s Fieldays Young Innovator Award, earning praise from judges who saw potential in its ability to simplify a labour-intensive task. Based on the design of a wire cutter, it’s a tool designed to remove clips from kiwifruit vines on orchards, improving productivity, reducing strain and enhancing sustainability. Head judge Jenny Cameron says it could be used in horticulture and viticulture here and around the world.
Finance and law
Finance was a world away from the Bachelor of Optometry degree Simran Kaur, 26, graduated with. But in 2020, she started reflecting on the fact that men typically hold 50% more wealth than women, and founded Friends That Invest (formerly Girls That Invest), a podcast that became an online phenomenon and a bestselling book. Kaur says the fact she didn’t have a finance background proved helpful. “Not having a finance degree means I don’t overcomplicate things. We are able to demystify the jargon that can prevent women from entering the daunting world of shares and stocks.”
Whangārei born and raised Brad Olsen is just 28, but he’s spent the past few years as a go-to voice on New Zealand’s economy. It started during 2020’s Covid-19 lockdowns when Olsen, a recent Victoria University of Wellington graduate, was able to provide sought-after and straightforward information about the financial fallout from the pandemic. Now chief executive and principal economist at Infometrics, Olsen has kept right on talking money. He says it’s something he started as a primary school pupil, and told ZB’s John Cowan he would sit with a notebook while watching the news and note the trends in the stock market.
Te Kahukura Boynton (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāi Tūhoe, Te Whakatōhea) is the 21-year-old founder of Māori Millionaire, a platform educating people, particularly rangatahi Māori, on all things finance. Boyton, who says she’s on a mission to bridge the wealth gap, now has more than 60,000 followers and hopes to become a millionaire herself by the time she’s 25 – but not, she says, at the expense of health. She recently told RNZ that in her own experience, money without health is meaningless. “If I was, say, a millionaire, but I was still very much struggling with my health, with food addiction, all of these different things, the money would just come in and then it would go out on all of these addictions.” Her first book, also called Māori Millionaire, was released in June.
Lawyer Riana Te Ngahue (Ngāti Porou), 27, made her first TikToks for “people like her uncles” to explain complex Māori issues. Her rundown of the Treaty Principles Bill, and the straightforward way it unpacked legal and cultural issues, attracted 1.3 million views, so she kept on making the TikToks she describes as her “yapping videos”. During her time at Victoria University of Wellington (Te Herenga Waka), Te Ngahue was co-tumuaki (co-president) of the Ngā Rangahautira (Māori Law Students Association) and also completed a Bachelor of Arts majoring in te reo Māori. “It was a lot of more emotional work I would say. It was really good for my personal growth. I am equally as happy with my te reo degree as I am with my law degree.”
Food science
Ice cream made from cauliflower? Don’t knock it until you’ve tried it – and thousands did. When Mrinali Kumar, now 26, was studying food technology at Massey University, she co-founded EatKinda, a cauliflower-based vegan ice cream brand, with plant-based chef Jenni Matheson (over 30). Three years later, they launched in New Zealand, with their ice-cream – strawberry swirl, chocolate swirl and mint choc bikkie – selling out at Hell Pizza just four weeks after launch. Once stocked in 120 Woolworths stores, EatKinda has now pulled back from the local market to focus on the US, which offers more interest/opportunity to scale up the business.
Fellow NZ alt-protein proponent Emily McIsaac, 27, is the cofounder and chief operating officer of Daisy Lab, a food technology startup using precision fermentation to develop dairy-identical proteins, such as whey, traditionally found in milk. McIsaac graduated from Massey University with bachelor’s and master’s degree in genetics. Her early research laid the groundwork for Daisy Lab, leaving her well placed to contribute to science and overseeing advancements in dairy production. Since its founding in 2021, Daisy Lab has successfully expressed several dairy-identical proteins and is preparing to scale up. Right now, McIsaac is in Europe, where she was a speaker the Global Dairy Congress and is meeting with potential partners and investors.
Media
When Lucy Blakiston, 27, found herself in a university class trying to make sense of complicated geo-political matters, she decided there had to be a better way to explain shit you should care about. With two friends, she started the blog Shit You Should Care About. Now, it’s a fully-fledged media brand that millennials and Gen-Zers (and their parents) flock to: two podcasts, 3.5 million Instagram followers, a daily newsletter, a weekend advice column, and the book Make It Make Sense co-written with her friend, the poet and writer Bel Hawkins. Originally from Blenheim, Blakiston speaks and advises on engaging Gen Z audiences. She’s been recognised internationally - on the News Media Association’s Global 30 Under 30 list in 2023 and nominated for Young New Zealander of the Year in 2021.
Lola Fisher, from Whanganui, didn’t like the stories she was seeing on digital media about young New Zealanders so in 2022, aged just 13, she started Create Happy Media to give voice to young people from their perspective. Since then, more than 90 writers – all aged under 22 – have contributed 350 articles to the platform and Fisher, 17, uses her tech and media skills to tell new stories of community, connection and campaigning. She cofounded Gen-Z Aotearoa, a network of young changemakers looking for a place to network and develop the skills to take into the world and create positive change. Fisher is also the media coordinator for Make It 16 and, in 2023, was a youth ambassador for Save the Children NZ.
Unlike others around his age who have launched digital media businesses, Pete McKenzie, 26, has opted to tell stories of New Zealand and the Pacific through the world’s most prestigious media outlets, including The New York Times, Harper’s, The Washington Post, The Guardian and The Economist. In the process, he has become one of the region’s leading investigative journalists. He exposed an alleged corruption scheme in the strategically located island nation of Palau, involving individuals tied to the Chinese government; and reported a pattern of allegedly abusive Catholic priests being sent to the Pacific Islands. In 2023, he was named Reporter of the Year at the Voyager Media Awards, the youngest recipient since 1981. Last year, McKenzie was named the Sir Harry Evans Fellow in Investigative Journalism, working with the global investigations team at Reuters, and was a finalist for the Livingston Award for International Reporting. Now based in Sydney, McKenzie also writes for the Listener.
Sport:
Born in France in 2005, Julian David moved to New Zealand with his family when was 3. He started speed climbing at the 2018 AIMS Games, which gives 11-, 12- and 13-year-olds the chance to compete in individual or team events. From there, the Bay of Plenty teen rocketed into the sport joining the New Zealand high-performance speed team when it was set up in 2022. The following year, David became the first New Zealander ever to win a world climbing title, becoming youth world champion in South Korea. It helped land him the emerging talent award at this year’s Halberg Awards. He’s now the eighth fastest speed climber in the world – it takes David less than 7 seconds to scale a 15m wall – and aims to compete in the Los Angeles 2028 Summer Olympics. Not bad for someone who got into the sport because they broke their wrist falling out of a tree.
After fracturing her hip and tearing the joint in 2022, Nicola Pendreigh, 23, was misdiagnosed with a groin strain and spent months battling pain so severe she was advised to quit running. Her love of the sport meant that was never an option. Pendreigh slowly built up her tolerance and plans to run the Tāupo Marathon in August. It will be a run with a purpose. Along with the injury, the Hawke’s Bay rehab coach also experienced a terrifying encounter when she was chased by a man, and she’s using the August event as fundraiser for women’s safety. She’ll dedicate her marathon to 118 women killed on runs worldwide, wearing a tee-shirt featuring all 118 names. Pendreigh intends to keep contributing to conversations about making communities safer for people exercising outdoors. “Whether that’s through the availability of legal self-defence tools like mini pepper spray, improved street lighting, or other safety measures – the discussion needs to continue.”
In March, Sam Ruthe was added to the record books when the 15-year-old from Tauranga became the youngest person in history to break the four-minute-mile barrier with a time of 3:58.35.
