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Topic

Cost Of Living

4193 items · 130 aliases · peaked week of 26 Apr 2026 · first seen 29 Apr 2026

The Labour Party condemns the closure of the Kinleith paper mill, highlighting it as part of a broader trend of job losses and criticizing the government for inaction and broken promises.

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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. 88 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 88 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.

  • Australia has just handed its lowest paid workers a 4.75% pay rise, lifting the minimum wage to just over 25 Australian dollars an hour, which is about 32 New Zealand dollars an hour. That means a full-time worker across the Tasman will now earn at least 1,004 Aussie dollars before tax or 1,216 Kiwi dollars. Here, the minimum wage went up just 2% this year to $23.95 an hour. Even our voluntary living wage at $29.90 falls short of Australia's legal minimum. At a time when rent, groceries, petrol, and power bills keep climbing, the comparison is stark. So what does this say about how New Zealand values its workers? And why on earth would any young person want to live and build a life here? Today on the front page, New Zealand Council of Trade Unions President Sandra Gray is with us to talk about the growing wage gap, what it means for workers here, and whether New Zealand is in danger of pricing itself out of its own future.
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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.

living standards declining despite economic rhetoric

Democracy Briefing: Long-term pain or long-term wait?
29 May
rnz-comment Centre

urgent and deeply felt by kiwis

Nicola Willis walks a tightrope with Budget 2026
27 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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