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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.
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Topic

Local Government Borrowing Capacity

16 items · 11 aliases · peaked week of 26 Apr 2026 · first seen 29 Apr 2026

This piece argues that New Zealand should embrace long-term infrastructure borrowing to address a persistent investment deficit, emphasizing transparency, equity, and the need to move beyond politically popular but economically unsound avoidance of debt.

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. 3 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 3 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.

  • Well, how long have they been talking about it? I mean, yes, it was. And so they've been talking about it a long time. So suddenly with the election drawing closer, they put an ultimatum to all the councils in the country saying, do something about it or we'll do it for you. Well, it's not going to be done this side of the election. So it's one of those things that you can talk really tough, but nothing is really done. I mean, when you consider the local government system. Currently in New Zealand has 78 councils of three different kinds, regional councils, they're the big ones of course, city and district councils, and they've got unitary authorities like the Auckland Super City and Nelson and Gisborne. So look, they can talk tough, three months time you'll see probably maybe legislation before the house. But it won't be the side of the election that anything will change. It does need to change.
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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.

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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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