OpenBrief
Log in Sign up
What the picker changes
  • Top topics digest — the cards score the selected period against the prior 4 weeks.
  • 12-week heatmap & outlet matrix — show the 12 weeks ending at the selected week (they slide back with the picker, they aren’t a fixed snapshot).
  • Per-topic volume / alias drift — same 12-week trailing window, anchored on the selected period.
  • Coverage gap quadrant — scores the selected period against the 12 weeks before it (not including it).
  • Anomaly cards — only show alerts the detector fired during the selected period. Quiet weeks legitimately show none.
What stays as-is
  • Outlet orientation strip / lean colours — context-only, drawn from the last 12 weeks of activity regardless.
  • Co-occurrence graph — recent-activity anchored, not picker-driven.
  • Source & topic profiles — all-time data for the topic; the picker doesn’t affect them.
Rolling 7 days is a sliding live window for “current vibes”; switch to Weekly to compare specific weeks side-by-side.
Week of 8 Jun 2026
This week
Topic

Consenting Costs In Infrastructure

6 items · 6 aliases · peaked week of 3 May 2026 · first seen 9 May 2026

A discussion on the City Rail Link's escalating costs, with civil contractors advocating for better project scoping, early contractor involvement, and bipartisan long-term infrastructure planning to ensure value for money and avoid repeated cost overruns.

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.

Free account Watch this topic with a free account — get alerted when framing shifts, when an MP adopts new language, or when discourse and press diverge. Create a free account Log in

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.

  • I think most Kiwis would say yes. I mean, if you think about just how hard it is to do simple stuff to your house, how hard it is to build housing in this country, how long infrastructure takes and how many conditions are placed on infrastructure that does get built, you know, which is all my responsibility. I think most reasonable people would say yes. You know, we spend 1.3 billion bucks a year on consenting costs alone for infrastructure. That's basically, you know, it's the cost of transmission gully on consenting costs. It's just red tape, right? That's not actually building anything. That's just the consents. You know, it's and that's every year. So it's a nightmare for the country, and that's just in one sector alone. And I think that's sort of the flip side of the point David was making yesterday about the you know vast size of government, the number of regulators, but also the number of regulations that apply in the system.
Free account Create a free account to unlock the full set here — plus alerts when framing shifts or an MP adopts new language. Create a free account Log in

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.

Free account Create a free account to unlock the full set here — plus alerts when framing shifts or an MP adopts new language. Create a free account Log in

Spotted something wrong on this page? Report a correction.