Innholdsfortegnelse for Issue 04, 2026 i New Zealand Listener

Sometimes it’s the little things – like Winston Peters’ recent rebuke of Anna Breman, the recently appointed Reserve Bank governor. Breman signed a statement of support for Jerome Powell, chair of the US Federal Reserve, who is at war with Donald Trump after he resisted the President’s demands to lower interest rates. Trump is using one of his favourite tactics – “lawfare” – threatening to bring criminal charges against Powell over the cost of renovating government buildings. Central bankers around the world signed a letter of support for Powell; Breman did not take ministerial advice before signing the letter and Peters took to social media to announce, “The RBNZ has no role, nor should it involve itself, in US domestic politics. We remind the governor to stay in her New…

To mark that national holiday in early February, let’s talk about sovereignty. In Venezuela. Or maybe Greenland, Denmark, Ukraine, Israel, Palestine or Taiwan. Yes, everyone wants to talk about sovereignty except US President Donald Trump and his advisers. They’re too busy consulting Mafiaadjacent lawyers to justify how to violate everyone else’s. But fear not, that moral crusader par excellence, former prime minister Helen Clark, came charging to the rescue on X. The abduction of Venezuela’s President Maduro was very clearly a violation of international law, she intoned gravely. Yes, it’s just as clearly a violation of international law as the torture of children at Lake Alice. And what did Clark do about that when she was in charge? Short answer: not much. Longer answer: quite a bit when it came…

In the small hours of Valentine’s Day, 2023, Cyclone Gabrielle unleashed hell across the upper North Island. After two days of heavy rain, gale-force winds and power cuts, it doubled down, cutting off Northland, Tairāwhiti and Hawke’s Bay towns, wreaking havoc in both urban centres and remote communities and killing 11. But how those communities survived the disaster, then regrouped and rebuilt, binds them in similar ways to the calamities that tore them apart. Rahina Huata, an on-air host at iwi radio station Kahungunu in Hastings, recalls people being unsure of what to do as the day went on. Huata (Ngāti Kahungunu, Ngāti Ruapani) went to work early, leading to her reporting and broadcasting in 12-hour shifts throughout the emergency as Gabrielle intensified and widespread flooding and destruction gouged the…

“Wuthering Heights has plenty of heaving bodices and powerful pecs, as well as furrowed brows and thousand-yard stares. As ever, the year ahead is lined with films and series based on novels, but this poses a vital question for the literate viewer. Do we dive in and risk dislodging the characters that have formed in our heads, enjoy the screen versions as related but quite distinct things, or avoid all literary adaptations as inevitable abominations? Even before it’s been released, many pixels have been furiously illuminated over the latest adaptation of Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë’s tale of a life-long love affair between Catherine Earnshaw and the enigmatic, revenge-obsessed Heathcliff. The new version, out on February 12, stars the thinking people’s crumpet pairing of Jacob Elordi and Margot Robbie, so naturally…

IT WAS JUST AN ACCIDENT Directed by Jafar Panahi This Iranian Palme d’Or winner at last year’s Cannes is set in contemporary Tehran but feels even more horribly relevant right now, as deadly clashes between the authoritarian state and its civilians dominate headlines. It Was Just An Accident’s themes of power and resistance already had extra resonance given the treatment of suppressed film-maker Jafar Panahi. Panahi, who smuggled his 2011 documentary This is Not a Film, made under house arrest, out of Iran on a memory stick, has spent decades living under government observation and travel bans. He was recently sentenced in absentia (he has been living abroad and was touring the US last November) to a year in prison for “propaganda activities”. There’s no question this film’s plot is…

SCALA!!! by Barry Adamson With the compelling spoken-word and surreal South London poetry of Dry Cleaning’s Secret Love album ringing in our ears (reviewed last week), the logical follow-up might be Sleaford Mods’ The Demise of Planet X. But frankly some of it is like the bellicose ranting of an angry geezer down at The Bull and Bush on a Friday night. Anger is an energy, as John Lydon said, but phlegmatic fury can be wearying. One of the better new British albums is a soundtrack by Barry Adamson, formerly of Magazine, one of Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds and with an extensive solo career. Adamson’s 1989 solo debut album, Moss Side Story, was the unnerving soundtrack for an imagined murder movie (“in a black and white world, murder brings a…

SUNDAY FEBRUARY 1 THE WALSH SISTERS Marian’s maidens Streaming: TVNZ+ Yes, another Irish television comedy-drama about adult sisters having problems with the men – or the pharmaceuticals – in their lives. Made for Ireland’s state broadcaster RTE, The Walsh Sisters is based on two novels – Rachel’s Holiday and Anyone Out There – by bestselling author Marian Keyes. The books focused on Rachel and her time in a Dublin rehab clinic, and Anna who’s back in the family home after problems with her hubby in New York. The show extends to five sisters and the cast includes Louisa Harland (Derry Girls, Renegade Nell), Danielle Galligan (House of Guinness) and Máiréad Tyers (Obituary), as well as Hollywood veteran Aidan Quinn as the sisters’ father. The full six-episode season is available at…

The NZSO’s 2026 season is nicely balanced. A North and Central American programme of John Adams, Copland, Bernstein and big-news Mexican composer Gabriela Ortiz looks especially tasty (Rhythm & Dance, Wellington, September 4; Auckland, September 5), but it’s impossible to look past Enigma (Wellington, November 13; Auckland, November 14). The concert is named after Elgar’s warhorse set of variations, but the reason to attend is English pianist Sir Stephen Hough, who’s playing Saint-Saëns’s Concerto No 5, The Egyptian. Hough is probably the leading interpreter of this music, so be sure to book early. As an added bonus, Kiwi Ross Harris’s new Concerto for Orchestra opens the concerts. Auckland Philharmonia has managed to secure several of the year’s biggest stars. With a budget significantly smaller than the NZSO’s, it’s not often…

Has summer been cancelled? It might as well have been at Lush Places. If it were summer, our clowder of cats would be like kids back in the 1960s and 70s: they would wake up, wolf their breakfasts and then bugger off to heaven knows where for the day before arriving home absolutely starving at dinner time. Instead, in the middle of January, they can be found on beds and couches, preferring to sleep under warm blankets. Meanwhile, next winter’s firewood, delivered in the blue-sky days before Christmas, is hiding, too. It should, like us, be baking in the heat and turning brown. Instead, it is lying damp and pale and heavy under blankets of tarpaulins. Were it dry enough to burn now, I would be doing just that; as…

At an annual appraisal of my work in family violence, I was asked about the training I needed to work more competently with women, ethnic groups, LGBTQIA+ and other communities. Men were missing from the list. Even though men are a majority, especially among our clients, there were no questions about their needs. This is not to deny the plight of women or minorities. Women have been invisible for millennia, hidden under the term “man”, forgotten in science, literature, law and more, and entrapped under the tyranny of the male gaze. But the visibility of powerful men with privilege and control hides the invisibility of those unable to meet the demands society places on them. Men may appear dominant in public life, but many feel unrecognised and abandoned. Men have…

For challenge No 127, we asked you to write a modern proverb on the topic of the new generation of weight-loss drugs. FINALISTS: A jab a week will soon have you sleek ‒ Mavis McGregor, Hamilton Everyone wants to go to heaven but nobody wants to diet ‒ Ann Love, Nelson Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we can have another injection ‒ Janine Stratton, Whanganui Saxenda comes to those with weight ‒ Jill Matthews, Palmerston North Use it and lose it ‒ John Edgar, Christchurch WINNER: The road to well is paved with semaglutide ‒ Chris Greenwood, Motueka For the next Bright Lines challenge, we have the Limerick Competition. Please write a limerick on Donald Trump’s bid to acquire Greenland. Don’t forget to include your address with entries.…

Here’s a terrible game: name the single worst thing the Trump administration has done in the year since slithering back into the White House. Give up? It’s simple, really: killing USAID. The shutdown of the US Agency for International Development has caused an estimated 600,000 unnecessary deaths in Africa, two-thirds of them children; it takes the crown of cruelty in a landslide. Only abandoning Ukraine comes close in terms of total lives lost. So far. Potential wars to satisfy Trump’s pathological yen for hemispheric hegemony – in Venezuela, Colombia, Cuba, Mexico, pretty much anywhere folk have brown skin or don’t speak American – have bronze medal potential. But war with Iran to see who has/is the biggest dick in the world could also provide a stiff challenge. And war with…

The summer of 2026 comes and goes. I got a lucky break in the weather, and have just come back from holiday, brainwashed by sunshine and laziness. Everything looked good. Everyone seemed happy. New Zealand is at its best in slow summertime motion. The man in the farming town slowly driving his mobility scooter through a maze of white and pink at the rose gardens. At first I thought: lazy. It was a hot day, and his fat face was red, raining with perspiration—he had worked up a dishonest sweat by sitting on his fat bum. But his happy smile was actual proof of the old advice that it really is good to stop and smell the roses. I saw another, younger man in another farming town slowly riding his…

Seven years ago, I went to a specialist with perimenopausal symptoms and was prescribed HRT. I had been referred by my GP at the time, and there was some correspondence between the clinicians. I don’t know what the GP’s referral letter said, or what information it contained, but it was uploaded to Manage My Health (MMH), which I ignorantly thought was a Ministry of Health-run portal, where all my health data was stored: GP notes, prescriptions, lab test results, X-rays and MRI scans. I thought MMH was so secure there was no chance of anything leaking out. I thought nothing more about that specialist referral letter until January 9, when I got an alert from Manage My Health that it was in the hands of a hacker. I felt shocked…

THE CHORAL Directed by Nicholas Hytner The celebrated team of British theatre and film director Nicholas Hytner and playwright Alan Bennett reunite for the writer’s original screenplay about a Yorkshire mining town choir society striving to put on a show in the midst of World War I. Set in the fictional enclave of Ramsden in 1916 as conscription comes into effect, the largely light-hearted story follows an ensemble cast of larrikins and cheeky buggers who find solace in singing. The community comprises pit workers, saucy seductresses and the poor postal worker lad who’s tasked with delivering the telegrams to new widows. Intending to lift spirits by staging a production of Bach’s St Matthew Passion, mine owner and passable tenor Alderman Duxbury (Roger Allam) engages a choirmaster from out of town,…

SATURDAY JANUARY 31 SPIT Bordering on comedy Rialto, 8.30pm David Wenham is in good form as he revives his shambolic, petty criminal bogan character Johnny Spiteri from 2003 caper Gettin’ Square. His vanity-free performance is at the centre of a curiously warm-hearted story, which starts with him locked up in an immigrant detention centre where he becomes a tutor in all things Australian to detained refugees. (2025) ★★★ SUNDAY FEBRUARY 1 TRANSFORMERS Autobot action extravaganza TVNZ 2, 7pm That this first one remains the best of director Michael Bay’s five Transformers flicks isn’t saying a lot, but it was the one in which a young Shia LaBeouf briefly looked like the next Tom Hanks and Megan Fox briefly looked like an actor and the special effects looked pretty good, too.…

QUESTION: My husband wants to build a smoker. He desires smoked cheese and fish – probably not sausages. Would this food be harmful to our health? ANSWER: Anyone who has ever been stalked by a stream of campfire smoke knows wood smoke is not especially pleasant to breathe, let alone eat. So it’s understandable to wonder whether deliberately smoking your food is really a wise move. Many and varied are the ways food is smoked in the 21st century. Traditionally, smoking techniques for fish would have involved gutting the fish, dry-brining it in salt and sugar, then hanging it in a chamber where the smoke from burning wood drifted around it. These days, many commercial producers use indirect smoking, where wood chips or sawdust are heated on a hot plate…

The summer city empties out. Before the year’s work begins, a benign frame of mind prevails. Everyone is away and the weather undergoes abrupt mood changes, from calm to screaming wind, from burning sun to violent storms. The dog, Philip, great companion, philosopher, supplier of good ideas, is navigating his own instability. His health crisis begins with a night of weirdness in which he convinces us there’s an intruder in the house. From 2am he paces, stares, rushes at doors, barking and growling in melodramatic agitation. After we’ve armed ourselves and checked every corner, it occurs to us, could it be in his head? “Perhaps he needs therapy,” I suggest at 4am, as he roams, mad-eyed and muttering, around our bedroom. The vet investigates. After multiple checks and scans, she…

First, she came for cell phones in schools. Then she abolished open-plan classrooms, Treaty of Waitangi obligations for school boards, the skills-based learning curriculum, NCEA … All have fallen beneath the scythe of Education Minister Erica Stanford. The National MP has introduced a structured literacy programme and set new expectations for teaching maths and literacy in primary schools. Her ministry is rewriting the Years 1-10 curriculum, the mathematics curriculum and the sex education curriculum. It is creating an expanded curriculum for special-and high-needs students and adding financial literacy to the social sciences. Stanford is restructuring the Teaching Council, the regulatory body for the profession, creating a new school property agency and designing a new personal development programme for teachers. She has compressed a generation of reform into two years. She…

Among the ghosts that haunt central Dunedin must be the phantom of one whose sparkling presence once lit up the southern city. On winter nights, when the cold wind swirls around the nooks and crannies of the Octagon, the city’s central plaza, only the hardiest denizens are out after the Municipal Chambers’ clock strikes midnight. But is that a shooting flash of light in the darkness, a burble of falling water? A muffled hint of the overture to Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld? From January 1966 until its removal at the end of April 1989, the Octagon’s Star Fountain played eccentric musical performances to passersby, both appreciative and aghast. Quirky doesn’t begin to describe it. The plashing playlist was a bizarre mix of tunes, including the overtures to Suppé’s operettas…

NOUVELLE VAGUE Directed by Richard Linklater Nouvelle Vague is not Richard Linklater’s first love letter to cinema and its makers. He directed the 2008 backstage drama, Me and Orson Welles, which largely sank without trace. But with Nouvelle Vague, the prolific and versatile Texan film-maker’s missive is in perfect, Gauloise-perfumed French. It’s a dazzling homage to Jean-Luc Godard’s 1960 debut À bout de souffle (Breathless), which remains the most recognisable film of the French New Wave/ Nouvelle Vague, a period that did for French cinema what the Beatles did for British pop. Linklater not only makes a film of the making of Breathless shot in the style of Breathless. It’s also a whiplash introduction to Godard’s contemporaries, many of whom started as critics on the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma. Two…

28 YEARS LATER: THE BONE TEMPLE Directed by Nia DaCosta It’s exceedingly rare for a sequel to reach the high bar set by its exemplary predecessor, let alone the fourth film in something as lowbrow as a zombie horror franchise. But this excoriating (quite literally) follow-up to last year’s incredible 28 Years Later might be the best one yet. With no prologue, The Bone Temple comes hot on the heels of the previous movie, with young Spike (Alfie Williams) captured by the Jimmies, a nefarious gang of unhinged, weirdly wigged young folk, all decked out in shiny tracksuits and spiky blond hairpieces that evoke British TV figure (and, outside the world of the movie, serial child sex abuser) Jimmy Savile. This shocking detail wasn’t allowed to be spoiled in reviews…

When he embarked, Scotty Morrison never expected Origins, his voyage into Polynesian prehistory, to last more than one season. But his visits to Taiwan, where the Pacific migration began, and to the cradle of humanity itself in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley, revealed “so much more to do and so much more to explore”. A second season took the story from the far east of the Pacific to its western shores, following the kūmara’s journey from the Americas in the holds of early explorers. And now a third literally brings it all home. Early in the first of two parts, Morrison returns to “my Hawaiki”, Raʻiātea, the island in French Polynesia where his own ancestral waka, Te Arawa, set sail for a new land to the southwest 800 years ago. But the…

Danes have subverted US President Donald Trump’s Make America Great Again red cap to send the message that Greenland is not for sale. “Nu det Nuuk” puns on the Danish phrase “Nu det nok” – now it’s enough – and Nuuk, Greenland’s capital. European leaders, Danes and the Inuit people of the semi-autonomous Danish territory are all saying a hard nej /non/nein/no to Trump’s fever dream that America will take Greenland either by bank transfer or troops. The American narrative is the island is integral to US security and its European allies should allow this. Mightily displeased with the lack of support outside the White House for his plan, Trump has threatened further tariffs and revealed hurt feelings and a misunderstanding over who awards the Nobel Peace Prize. In a…