New Zealand Listener Issue 50, 2025

Editor Kirsty Cameron Chief Subeditor Geoff Cumming Managing Editor Ruth Brown Art Director Derek Ward Books Editor Mark Broatch Entertainment & Arts Editor Russell Baillie Digital Editor Dionne Christian Content Producer Louise Barnes Subeditors Richard Betts, Bevan Rapson Senior Designer Richard Kingsford Editorial contact listener@aremedia.co.nz Contributors this issue: Jennifer Bowden, Steve Braunias, Russell Brown, Greg Bruce, Jane Clifton, Michael Cooper, Greg Dixon, Anthony Ellison, Peter Griffin, Charlotte Grimshaw, Andrew Gunn, Michele Hewitson, Jeffrey Paparoa Holman, Jonathan Kronstadt, Paul Little, Danyl McLauchlan, Graham Reid, Nicholas Reid, Alex Scott, Sarah Watt, Marc Wilson Chief Executive Officer Jane Huxley  General Manager Stuart Dick  Editorial Director Sarah Henry  Head of Digital Melissa Walsh  Senior Digital Content Producer Katie Delany  Sales Director Claire Chisholm  Senior Account Managers Amy Madden Amy.Madden@aremedia.co.nz Chloe Jordan Chloe.Jordan@aremedia.co.nz  Classified Sales…

There are only two New Zealand films that have ever brought me to tears. In April 1995, Once Were Warriors was released in the UK while I was bookselling in London. Watching those kids upstairs crying while Jake Heke bashed Beth downstairs, I was gone. A fortnight ago, with an old friend, we went to see Pike River. Watching Melanie Lynskey and Robyn Malcolm play Anna Osborne and Sonya Rockhouse I was gone again, weeping in the dark. In the light of day, I ask myself: what good are tears without a response to this film, to 15 years’ neglect of holding to account those who allowed this to happen? As a miner’s son in Blackball, I was taken down into the Paparoa mine in my teens to the workings…

In a fascinating article that explores increasing nastiness in political discourse (“Hearts & minds”, December 6), Peter Bale writes of “the speed at which memes and themes from the United States – especially the Trump-inspired Make America Great Again (Maga) movement – get picked up and repurposed for domestic consumption”. He identifies Act leader David Seymour as one of the key players, saying he “tap dances along the darker online threads”. Indeed, one of those threads was the “victim of the day” campaign. This online campaign featured scholars who had commented on his then Regulatory Standards Bill. It echoed the Maga “professor watchlist” in the US, which has led to professors facing threats including harassment, defunding and firing. The victim of the day posts, which carried the parliamentary insignia, were…

“I think in response to that moment in time, my plea is for people is to not give up on the prospect that politics can be better.” – Former prime minister Jacinda Ardern on The Graham Norton Show discussing her fall in popularity in the latter part of her tenure “At all times, I acted in good faith. I made my decisions honestly. I was mistaken.” – Former police commissioner Andrew Coster on his errors of judgment in the Jevon McSkimming case “[It’s] absolute complete nonsense.” – Police Minister Mark Mitchell responds to Coster’s claim that Mitchell had been informally briefed about the McSkimming affair “Britain is broken. We’ve come here to the jewels of the nation to take back power.” – Protesters who flung apple crumble and custard at…

1. Which one of Catherine Chidgey’s novels features a talking magpie? ❑ The Wish Child ❑ Pet ❑ The Axeman’s Carnival ❑ The Book of Guilt 2. From December, NZ Police will begin a rollout to test drivers for four drugs. Which are they NOT testing for? ❑ THC (cannabis) ❑ Methamphetamine ❑ Cocaine ❑ LSD 3. In the acronymic term CRISPR, the gene-editing tool, what does the P stand for? ❑ Packet ❑ Perfect ❑ Precise ❑ Palindromic 4. Nineteenth-century English scientist Richard Owen coined which word? ❑ Pleistocene ❑ Dinosaur ❑ Feminism ❑ Lumberjack 5. “America has no permanent friends or enemies, only interests.” Who is this quote usually attributed to? ❑ Richard Nixon ❑ Henry Kissinger ❑ Donald Trump ❑ William F Buckley 6. Samuel Ryder, who…

The year began with a death: that of DAME TARIANA TURIA, on January 3. Politics is the realm of cruel choices: for small parties, this is often the struggle between purity versus compromise, government or opposition. In 2004, Turia chose purity and left Labour over its foreshore and seabed legislation; in 2008, she took her newly formed Māori Party into government with National, where she built the Whānau Ora health and social services framework. Turia’s version of the Māori Party was voted out of Parliament in 2017; punishment from the Māori electorate seats for supporting a right-wing government. Yet Whānau Ora survived both Labour and the current coalition while the achievements of Labour’s much-vaunted Māori caucus are a series of smoking craters. In recognition of this, Turia is posthumously appointed…