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What the picker changes
  • Top topics digest — the cards score the selected period against the prior 4 weeks.
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  • 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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Rolling 7 days is a sliding live window for “current vibes”; switch to Weekly to compare specific weeks side-by-side.
Week of 25 May 2026
This week
Topic

Spending Restraint

68 items · 27 aliases · peaked week of 24 May 2026 · first seen 28 Apr 2026

A Taxpayers’ Union response to Moody’s negative credit rating outlook, arguing that rising government debt and continued spending growth reveal a lack of fiscal discipline and signal increasing risk for taxpayers.

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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. 17 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 17 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.

  • I think we have a structural deficit and a government that came to power promising to improve our fiscal situation. Ultimately they have borrowed more money than they said they would borrow. Ultimately they have pushed out their path to surplus a couple of years. They even change the accounting measure by which they record whether or not they're getting surplus. So I think if you are to compare their position today with the position they promised we would be in when they uh were about to come to power, they are they are pretty distinct. That being said, it would be unreasonable for any of us to suggest that the state of the world doesn't require some pretty serious thinking. I actually think there is a really big opportunity for any political party to go into November's election talking about resilience. You've already seen this across the ditch, but I think resilience could be a central theme for policy platforms for our big parties going to the election. I actually think it'll be really popular. I agree.
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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.

pundit Centre

cutting public servants to offset fiscal unsustainability

Is the New Zealand’s Economy in Dire Straits?
29 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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