The cost of installing smart water meters in Wellington has ballooned from $144 million to $590 million, raising concerns over budget planning and financial oversight.
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. 2 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.
No, I mean, basically what happened in under the Labor government from 2017 to 2023, you had a massive growth in the public service. It went from like 47,000 people to 65,000 people, and that was like three times faster than the growth in the total workforce. And the problem with it, a little bit of what you've just highlighted is that there was 46% growth in actually what we call the back office, the support and administration functions, and there was only 18% growth over that six year period in the frontline services. So what Nicola Willis and I've been doing is actually going through the government spending and trying to cut all the back office stuff and actually take those savings and then put them into the frontline services. Think police think, you know, defence think um, you know, doctors, nurses, uh teachers, uh, all of that kind of stuff. So, you know, we've really just got to say, look, we've got to get the public service right size. But actually, what's the goal here? Is it you know, we want the public service to, you know, really serve the public of New Zealand well. We want it to be easy to deal with government. It's too inefficient, it needs to be more effective, um, and we want it to be a great place ultimately for people to work into.
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.
water and bike paths need urgent fixing
The Country 20/05/26: Christopher Luxon talks to Jamie MackaySocial-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.
