The Bulletin: High alert as woman in Northland tests Covid-positive

Good morning and welcome to the first regular season Bulletin of 2021. In today’s edition: High alert as woman in Northland tests Covid-positive, house price inflation races ahead unabated, and schools grappling with new year after last year’s disruptions.  Ministers and health officials were keeping their options open yesterday afternoon after a new case in … Read more

NZ’s biggest house price surge? Kawerau. Here’s what it means for the town

As house prices escalate rapidly around the country, Kawerau saw them more than double, the biggest nationwide increase over the decade. Alex Braae goes to the Bay of Plenty town to find out what impact it is having on renters.  The headline figure was stark. Data from realestate.co.nz showed that over the last decade, Kawerau’s … Read more

Lockdown letters #17, Morgan Godfery: The ground beneath our feet

In an ideal world the physical lives we build would speak to the past, but the truth is New Zealanders silence it, building their social and industrial histories literally on top of Māori. Read more Lockdown letters here. “The past is a foreign country,” goes the famous opening line from The Go-Between, but for tangata … Read more

Lockdown letters #12, Morgan Godfery: Decay, domesticity and doomsday prepping

‘Paint is peeling from the old truck workshop walls. Some days you can taste rust on the autumn wind, like swallowing iron and blood and pollen.’ Read more Lockdown Letters here IT’S GONE BELLY UP FOR THE WORLD. I bet the doomsday preppers are feeling smug right now, locking down in their DIY bunkers. The … Read more

The Bulletin: Prefab factory promising but huge need remains

Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Prefab housing factory opened amid huge need, worrying new measles developments, and public shows common sense on drug testing. A new factory has been opened to produce building materials, which if scaled up could have a significant impact on construction time and costs. Anne Gibson at … Read more

We want to play like the girls: The contact sport where men play catch-up to women

Amanda Thompson spends a day with the New Zealand men’s roller derby squad as they prepare for next year’s world champs in the US. Let’s play a word game. Let’s list some contact sports and the top teams in those codes. Say rugby. Are you thinking about the All Blacks yet? What about rugby league. … Read more

Media and meth: The NZ Herald goes deep on the destructive drug

The NZ Herald today launched a new, wide-scope documentary into the effect methamphetamine has on small town New Zealand. Alex Braae talks to one of the journalists involved, Jared Savage, about the process of getting it made, and how his views on the meth trade have changed over his decade reporting on it.  Perceptions of … Read more

The Bulletin: High house prices a small town issue now

Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Latest QV figures show huge house price rises in smaller towns, new study shows terrible bottom trawling impact, and nurses give natural disaster warning. Concerns are being raised about small town house prices, with the view that they too are steadily becoming unaffordable. It comes off the … Read more

The Bulletin: Trouble in paradise for tourism industry

Good morning, and welcome to The Bulletin. In today’s edition: Two major threats loom for the tourism industry, fair pay agreement working group comes back, and Shane Jones and Russel Norman go to war over trawling. For two major of reasons, the tourism industry could be about to hit some severe headwinds. It’s an enormous sector of … Read more

I saw the mountain erupt: a Kawerau childhood

Morgan Godfery was born to a teenage mother and a gang father in Kawerau, New Zealand’s poorest town. He recounts the experience in this essay from the Journal of Urgent Writing, 2017. Time present and time past Are both perhaps present in time future And time future contained in time past. — T. S. Eliot, … Read more