The schedule, deadlines, and procedural process set by the New Zealand government for councils to undergo amalgamation or structural reform, including debate over whether the timeframe allows sufficient planning and consultation.
How the framings classify across 5 articles. Each framing is labelled by a small AI stance classifier; see the methodology page for details.
Up to 12 framings across outlets and orientations — each a short phrase the extractor generated to characterise the piece's editorial angle (not a quote). Filter by lean to see how each bloc is spinning the story; click through to read the original.
ambitious but unfulfilled structural change
‘Cowards’: Govt pauses work on council mergers until after the electionphased rollout leading to 2028 elections
\\ \\ **Government to consider Headstart proposals**\\ \\ 11 August, 2026\\ \\ Chris Bishop, Simon WattsLobby groups, unions, think tanks and industry bodies whose own releases or whose people’s media appearances touched this topic over the last 12 months. Owned = their own press releases; earned = their people quoted across radio, press & commentary. A card carried in both — with the release coming first — is the agenda-setting signal. Co-occurrence isn’t proof a group drove the coverage.
unjustified delay in democratic reform
Stacked weekly counts; colour by lean. “n/a” covers government and iwi-Māori sources where lean isn't applicable.
How this topic has been named, week by week. A new alias winning out is usually a framing shift.
How the news corpus has covered this same topic over the last 12 weeks. 11 articles from RNZ, Stuff, NZ Herald, ODT, 1News, Newsroom and The Spinoff. Click through to the press view for the full panel.
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, totally. I really enjoyed it though, Oscar, because Simon kept going, oh, it's an election in six weeks. I don't know if you know there's an election in six …
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 →
Spotted something wrong on this page? Report a correction.
