Dr Alex Kazemi, an ICU specialist, writes here in his personal capacity on the opportunity Covid-19 provides to rebuild our healthcare system. The tooth fairy never showed. My daughter had written a note – “You are invited to a tea party on Saturday at 10.30. If you cannot come please leave this note behind” – … Read more
Over lockdown, a small team of music industry professionals have become emergency response workers. Josie Adams visited Spark Arena to meet them. Behind Spark Arena is a line of shipping containers filled with food and hygiene products. “Only a few months ago this was filled with Tool’s stuff,” said Tom Anderson, a coordinator of Auckland … Read more
New Zealand has never experienced anything like the Covid-19 lockdown of the past seven weeks. Simon Day spoke to a University of Otago researcher analysing the way lockdown has affected New Zealanders’ perception of the world. When New Zealand went into lockdown at midnight on March 25, and the government demanded New Zealanders stay at … Read more
Pour some bubbly, stick some sausage rolls on a platter, and park yourself in front of the laptop – the lockdown Ockhams are being broadcast live tonight on YouTube. Courtesy of illustrator Toby Morris, we have just the thing to complete your viewing experience. Tonight, the 2020 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards ceremony goes live … Read more
Made by a single family sewing together bits of old shows, Leigh Hart’s Big Isolation Lockdown was the funniest and most oddly comforting television created in level four, writes Duncan Greive. It takes a special kind of ego to make what is functionally a career retrospective about yourself, with your family as extras and directors, … Read more
They’re calling level two a return to normality, but for many of us that’s not really true. Sam Brooks, for one, is anxious as hell about the prospect of a world that’s more open, and more dangerous. Less than two minutes after Jacinda Ardern announced we would be moving to level two, I messaged two … Read more
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: level two is coming but some of the rules have changed, Work and Income could be facing class action suit, and China issues strong warning to NZ over Taiwan. So we got the announcement yesterday – we will be moving to alert level two this … Read more
The average wait for a jury trial in New Zealand is 425 days – and the coronavirus just made the problem a whole lot worse, write Nessa Lynch and Yvette Tinsley of Victoria University of Wellington. In a recent interview on Māori Television, chief district court judge Taumaunu described the Covid-19 pandemic as an unprecedented … Read more
Yes they’re annoying and mostly wrong, but the Covid sceptics fulfill a vital societal role, argues Danyl Mclauchlan. Most contrarian coronavirus theories go something like this. The response to the virus – the lockdowns, global panic, border closures, economic meltdown – is a huge over-reaction. Governments have made decisions based on scientific models forecasting mass … Read more
American R&B artist Kehlani released her long-awaited sophomore album just before the weekend – here’s why you need to start paying attention. If you’re even the slightest bit invested in modern R&B, there’s a good chance you’ve already had Kehlani on rotate for a while. One of the genre’s most respected contemporary proponents, with a heaven-sent … Read more
The prime minister has announced a staged, and adjusted, shift from alert level three. Here is what she said. I want to start today by acknowledging the sacrifices New Zealanders have made over the six and a half weeks we have been in alert levels four and three in order to beat Covid-19. Be it … Read more
Following a meeting of the full cabinet, Jacinda Ardern has announced New Zealand will begin a phased move from alert level three to level two on Thursday. Bubbles can be broken, but there is one major condition. Read Ardern’s speech in full here. New Zealand will move to alert level two in phased stages, Jacinda … Read more
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level three – read The Spinoff’s giant explainer about what that means here. For official government advice, see here. The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The Spinoff Members … Read more
Since Covid-19 hit the hospo industry hard, the tide has been turning against Uber Eats. Jean Teng looks at why people are increasingly anti the app, and checks out some (hopefully) less problematic alternatives for sating level three hunger. Even before Covid-19, we thought food delivery was pretty damn great. For the time-poor among us, … Read more
With shovels preparing to break ground on Covid-19 recovery projects, Mark Thomas writes why the rebuild should focus on addressing New Zealand’s systemic challenges. When the government put out a call for shovel ready projects on April 1, it was inundated with about 1,800 initiatives worth many billions of dollars. Not surprisingly, most of these … Read more
All Black and Hurricanes halfback TJ Perenara says professional players should have more opportunities to play at club level, in The Spinoff’s new video series Rugby Unwrapped with Scotty Stevenson. The future of professional sports is in a precarious position. With international and national games and competitions off the table for the time being, organisations … Read more
NZME asked the commerce commission for urgent approval to buy Stuff for $1. Minutes later, Stuff’s owner said it was no longer in talks with NZME. In the space of a chaotic few hours, the long-running courtship between print media giants NZME and Stuff dramatically escalated, as NZME informed the sharemarket that it was seeking … Read more
With the coronavirus putting a halt to in-person gatherings, climate activists are having to get creative to keep up the momentum from last year’s hugely successful strikes. In Lambton Quay, Aotea Square, the Octagon and dozens of other hot zones across the country, 170,000 protestors packed together in intergenerational crowds to chant, hug and share … Read more
As the question of whether the lockdown notices were lawful continues to fester, Andrew Geddis takes a deep dive into the issues at play. Now that the threat of Covid-19 has been vanquished like The Beast in Krull – apparently struck down, but always threatening to rise again – we can pause and take stock … Read more
As New Zealanders start to consider the end of the Covid-19 outbreak here, it’s time to look outward, to the many refugees in overcrowded, underfunded settlements worldwide. In Cox’s Bazar on the southeast coast of Bangladesh, refugees fleeing war, famine and death live in one-room bamboo structures with plastic sheet roofs. Toilets are shared between … Read more
Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Mass of documents dumped by government on Friday afternoon, pre-Budget announcements start rolling out, and Work and Income accused of not following the law. On Friday afternoon, at the moment of the week the longest possible time away from the next scheduled press conference, the … Read more
Jacinda Ardern, Ashley Bloomfield and thousands of anonymous comms workers just accomplished what we all would have thought impossible just weeks ago. Duncan Greive looks back at the historic lockdown, and how it was achieved. It came in the early evening of Wednesday March 25 – an angry, violent buzzing, all around the nation. The … Read more
When we appointed Justin Giovannetti as our first press gallery journalist, it meant an adventure from Canada to New Zealand. When Covid-19 ripped around the world, the trip took on an altogether different dimension. Justin picks up the story from his temporary home in mandatory isolation in Auckland. The world as I knew it came … Read more
Jacinda Ardern will announce today if and when we go down the ladder to alert level two. If anything, the decision is even pricklier this time. Just as it did 19 days ago, cabinet meets today to decide whether, and when, to loosen the shackles. So encouraging are recent days’ Covid-19 new case numbers that … Read more
With fewer couples than ever getting married, women are realising marriage is not all it’s cracked up to be. Emily Writes asks herself why, despite this, she’s so enamoured with her own. Last year, New Zealand recorded a record low of marriages and civil unions, with just 19,071 – less than half the rate of … Read more
The new Netflix comedy features one of television’s most relatable depictions of teenage girlhood, writes Catherine McGregor. It sounds like the premise of a teen movie. A woman decades past her high school years is destined to revisit them, over and over again. Plot twist: The woman is me, and the high school experiences I … Read more
For all The Spinoff’s latest coverage of Covid-19 see here. Read Siouxsie Wiles’s work here. New Zealand is currently in alert level three – read The Spinoff’s giant explainer about what that means here. For official government advice, see here. The Spinoff’s coverage of the Covid-19 outbreak is funded by The Spinoff Members. To support this work, join The Spinoff Members … Read more
An essay-review of Becky Manawatu’s novel Auē, one of four finalists for the Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction, the most prestigious of the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. There are ghosts. They are real. You are born with them. You will die with them. They are your inheritance and will be your legacy. Cest … Read more
Got more feijoas than you know what to do with? Preserve them to enjoy all year round. I may have mentioned before that we have 26 feijoa trees. It means that at this time of year, come rain or shine, you’ll often find us outside under the trees picking up each and every feijoa that … Read more