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Topic

Brain Drain Narrative

9 items · 9 aliases · peaked week of 10 May 2026 · first seen 13 May 2026

A research report questions whether New Zealand is experiencing a real 'brain drain', arguing that migration trends are cyclical and data limitations have led to exaggerated public narratives.

Volume by source orientation Methodology →

Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.

Alias drift

How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.

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In the press Methodology →

How the news corpus has covered this same topic over the last 12 weeks. 2 articles from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT, 1News, Newsroom and The Spinoff. Click through to the press view for the full panel.

12-week press volume 2 articles
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Heard on radio

Verbatim segments from politicians speaking on podcasts and radio shows about this topic. Sourced via the voice-reference library — each speaker has been confirmed manually from their voice clip. Click play to stream the original audio from the publisher, pre-seeked to the moment the quote starts.

  • Yeah, thank you. Hey, appreciate it. Thomas Rookmarker Fitch, head of Asia Pacific Sovereigns. Right, let me give you the numbers. NZX50 is down 0.13% today. ASX 50 is down 0.72% so far today. So that's down a couple of percentage points almost, or really maybe one and a half. Today, one New Zealand dollar is worth 59 US cents, 82 Aussie cents, 51 euro cents, 44 UK pence and 94 yen. Now, do you know what I love is an old wives' tale? And do you know why I love an old wives' tale? Because an old wives tale always turns out to be true. And so eventually, you go, no, it's not, but eventually there will be some researchers somewhere around the world who will have way too much government money and will go, well, maybe I should look into whether it's true that actually cranberries stop UTIs, and then they will, and then they'll prove it to be true, because that's what's just happened. Researchers in Canada have proved that cranberries may in fact help ward off urinary tract infections. Components of cranberry juice appear to help bacteria to absorb more of the antibiotic phosphomycin, which is commonly prescribed to treat UTIs, which potentially boosts recovery. Would you like some more old wives' tales that are in fact true? Cold damp weather does in fact make your joints ache. It's not just the old people making up stories. They think it's probably because of changes in barometric pressure, which affects your pain. Um also people tend to be less active in inclement weather, and moving around actually helps your your your joints to to, you know, just eases the suffering a wee bit. So it's a combination of the two of them. They don't think it's rain that's the problem so much. It's damp and windy days that have the biggest adverse of effect. It is true that if you have puffy eyes, you should use cold tea bags. There is an eye hospital called the Moorefields Eye Hospital, where the experts reckon if you lie back, put a teabag, cold one, please. Don't want to scold your eyeballs. Yeah, don't want to scold your lids. Put a put a cold tea bag on each eye bags, uh eye bags, lie back, and um give it about 10 minutes and you'll come up looking beautiful, like a supermodel. It is also true that a hot tea will cool you down. People and people in Africa and India will tell you this. They'll say if you're too hot, have a hot drink, you'll cool down. Because what happens is the hot drinks raise your body temperature, nerves in your digestive tract react to it by stimulating the brain to produce more sweat, and when the sweat evaporates, what happens? You cool down. Cool. There's more where that came from. I'll run you through some more in a minute.
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Sample framings

Up to 12 framings spread across orientations. Each framing is a short phrase the topic extractor generated to characterise the piece's stance — not a quote from the source. Click through to read the original.

a moral imperative to retain kiwi talent

Release: Labour launches New Zealand Future Fund
28 Apr
hdpa-drive Government / N-A

normal turnover with balanced return flow

Full Show Podcast: 13 May 2026
13 May
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How the public reacted

Social-media signal on the same topic, drawn from the social lens. Engagement is likes + 2×shares + 3×replies, the same weighting used across the digest cards. View on /social →

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