If there were a prize for the most indefatigable of New Zealand’s political parties, Act would win by a landslide. The fastest and most prolific press-release slingers of all the parties in parliament kept it up through the summer break, sending out a staggering 27 of the things between Saturday December 24 and yesterday, Sunday January 15.

Almost all formed part of the “We hear ya!” campaign, which has now delivered, by our count, 32 releases since mid-December, stopping for breath only on Christmas Day.

The Labour government, for its part, distributed 11 releases, with five of those on new year’s honours. National knocked out two (on an expensive pedestrian crossing and the CO2 shortage) and the Greens one (on the Iranian protest crackdown). But the most restrained of the parties currently in parliament was Te Pāti Māori, on zero.

I spent what felt like an unfair amount of time over the summer washing clothes and a question that often came into my mind was whether or not it was acceptable to just chuck everything in the same wash. Specifically, tea towels at the same time as clothes.

Stuff has come to the rescue with the answer in an article simply headlined: “Is it ok to wash your tea towels with your other clothes?” In short: it’s absolutely fine.

According to Steve Flint, a professor of food safety and microbiology at Massey University, it’s entirely acceptable to chuck pretty much everything into the same wash. “The reality is the washing process is supposed to clean your clothes,” Flint said. “People don’t need to be paranoid, they need to be realistic – the washing process is more than adequate to generate a clean tea towel.”

News you can use.

In case you somehow put Covid-19 out of your mind over the summer break, fear not, the Ministry of Health has continued with its weekly updates.

Over the past week, 19,215 new cases of Covid-19 have been reported, which includes 7,795 reinfections.

The daily average number of new cases now sits at 2,738, down from last Monday.

There are 333 people in hospital with Covid-19, including eight cases now in intensive care.

The Covid death toll has risen to 3,766, with 54 new cases added over the past week. That includes 44 who have definitively contracted Covid. The average number of deaths daily is now six.

Of the latest recorded deaths, one was a child under 10 years old and one was an adolescent aged between 10 and 19 years old.

As we all return to our regular post-holiday lives, there’s been an unwelcome reminder that 2023 is likely to present similar challenges to last year.

According to economists like Infometrics’ Brad Olsen, who was speaking to RNZ, we’re likely to see a continuation of the cost of living crisis across 2023. Specifically, we’re not likely to see any joy at the supermarket where a new study has revealed costs from suppliers to supermarkets rose by almost 11% over last year.

As a result, Olsen said local cost pressures and supply challenges aren’t set to ease anytime soon. “There is still a lot of pressure on the economy, but difficult to find the people and resource to do that work, so we’re waiting in limbo,” he said.

Recent severe weather had added to the challenges, simply by eradicating crops and making it impossible to plant others.

Meanwhile, the government’s signalled it will be removing its cuts to petrol tax and public transport fares in the coming months.

Newshub’s Isobel Ewing is in Tonga at the moment, where the Newshub crew is the first news crew in the world to visit the tip of the submarine volcano since it erupted. The eruption of Hunga Tonga Hunga Ha’apai was the most violent explosion on earth in 140 years. Ewing has spoken to first responders, politicians and tourism operators about life in Tonga now and their memories of the day of the eruption.

The Herald’s Jamie Morton also has this report on new findings from New Zealand scientists about the subsequent tsunami that reveal the tsunami towered 20 metres above the Tongatapu, ʻEua and Haʻapai islands.

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I went to the Auckland Art Gallery yesterday to check out the Frida Kahlo exhibition in its final days and was met with a 30-minute queue to get in the door. That was something of a surprise to me because the city’s mayor, Wayne Brown, was embroiled in a bit of a social media storm late last year after comments he made about the gallery.

”How do we get to have 122 people looking after a few paintings in a building that nobody goes to?” he queried, prompting a fiery response from The Spinoff’s Toby Morris. 

This week marks 100 days of Brown’s mayoralty and Stuff’s Auckland affairs reporter Todd Niall has dived into the highs and lows. Brown has developed something of a reputation for his gruff persona, demonstrated by his avoidance of pretty much all media since taking on the top job. Regardless, Niall notes that the mayor’s former dismissal of council agencies such as Eke Panuku “has given way to faint praise, and talk of the boards of directors resigning within weeks of the October 8 election now ended”.

You can read Todd’s full explainer here

Welcome back to The Spinoff’s live updates, I hope you all had a lovely summer break (as much as possible in the rain, anyway).

We’re back to regular news business at The Spinoff as of today, which means the return of both our live updates and The Bulletin. And it’s going to be a busy year. Of course, we are heading towards an election – which may or may not be on November 18. Before we get there, however, we’re going to be contending with a dramatic campaign, hangovers from 2022 like the cost of living crisis, ongoing global pressures including the war in Ukraine… not to mention new Covid variants and a probable second booster rollout. Buckle in, Spinoff readers – and welcome to 2023!