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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.
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Topic

Migrant Worker Visas

11 items · 6 aliases · peaked week of 3 May 2026 · first seen 30 Apr 2026

An immigration investigation in the Bay of Plenty has found migrant workers employed in kiwifruit orchards despite holding visas only valid for other jobs, raising concerns about visa compliance and worker exploitation.

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. 4 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 4 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.

  • because a previous government flew through the floodgates, opened, closed their eyes and didn't do any proper verification. And once there's a chink in your armour and your borders are compromised, anyone can get in. I have completely turned that around in two years. We now have 70% of our workers coming in who are highly skilled workers and only 30% who are lower skilled. And we still need, as you know, those lower skilled workers, for example, the workers in our dairy farms, the dairy farm workers to come in. So we'll always need a proportion of those, but it is work tested, there has to be a genuine job, and you have to properly check that no New Zealander was able to do the work. And then after three years, and we've been pretty strict on this, you have to leave. Unless you've upskilled yourself into a higher role, you must leave to create room for a Kiwi. So all of these problems have been solved, and they are stirring up this... sentiment, which to be fair is a hangover from what Labour did, but it's all been solved under this government.
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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.

the-country Government / N-A

upfront costs make visas unattainable for most

The Country 04/05/26: Erica Stanford talks to Jamie Mackay
4 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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