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Topic

Mike Smith Activism

1 items · 1 aliases · peaked week of 24 May 2026 · first seen 29 May 2026

A breakfast podcast segment challenges claims of government-corporate collusion in blocking climate-related lawsuits, arguing that consistent policy decisions reflect shared values rather than conspiracy.

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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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.

  • Mike Hosking mike-hosking-breakfast Mike's Minute: Not everything is a conspiracy 25 May · 120s
    Some are working pretty hard at the moment, you might have noticed to uh bind the Mike Smith storyline that the big end of town has the government's ear over climate change. So Mike Smith, you know, the activist, the agitator, the chainsaw man, the smack the America's Cup bloke, you know, Mike, life full of angst and upset. Anyways, later out and was in court looking to sue individual companies over there. Pollution around climate change. He was looking for an activist court to agree with the idea that a company can be held to specific an individual account for something that happens all over the world by, if you think about it, all of us. The government stepped in a week or so back, put an end to it, or will put an end to it. Their argument is Parliament is your ultimate court, and these sort of laws are for it, not individual judges, who may sway with the wind. But there is no doubt in my mind, in a number of areas, various courts these days are, of course, open to a little bit of judicial dabbling. It is brought about, in my humble opinion, by an increasing arrogance that they make the rules and not the government. It is true to say that a court can have a say or hold sway, but it is equally true to say that the ultimate court has always been the parliament of the land, and we do not want that undermined. Now, Mike claims people like Fontiera have been writing to the PM's office and advocating for the government to step in on court action like his. And given they did, he now suggests this is collusion. This is scallywaggery. This is big money, big influence malarkey that borders on scandal. Or could it be a corporate saying what you would expect a corporate to say, and a government, not surprisingly, doing what they would do anyway. In other words, Fontiera didn't need to say anything. Paul Goldsmith would have done what he did without any correspondence at all. Why? Uh because they think the same way, say, for example, I do. I didn't write to anyone, didn't have a meeting with anyone, and yet I would have thought, nay, expected the government to nip the Smith fishing expedition in the bud. Why? Because it's obvious and it's common sense. See, not everything's a conspiracy. Sometimes, remarkably, especially when it's obvious, people tend to have the same view. Letters or no letters, meetings or no meetings. Nothing to see here.
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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.

mike-hosking-breakfast Government / N-A

activist actions seen as extreme and unproductive

Mike's Minute: Not everything is a conspiracy
25 May
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