The Spinoff’s winners and losers of the week.
It was a good week for Peeni Henare, who escaped the clutches of parliament and now gets to be a normal person. This meant it was also a good week for Shane Jones who morphed into Lady Whistledown and went about proclaiming there was more to this and he’d be straight down the kumara vine to find out what.
It was a bad week for Auckland university literature professor Brian Boyd, who was revealed as an associate of Jeffrey Epstein, brought together by their mutual interest in the novel Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov. How was he to know that the billionaire with an obsessive passion for a book about paedophilic desire was a creep?
It was a good week for The Spinoff writer Hayden Donnell, who managed to wring yet another story out of his decade-long obsession with the Waitangi dildo.
It was a bad week for Wellington’s south coast, with raw sewage spilling into the ocean after a “catastrophic failure” at the Moa Point wastewater treatment plant. It’s the worst thing to happen to Wellington’s swimming beaches since this photo of Andy Foster:
It was a good week for the laser kiwi flag, which has been adapted to a symbol of resistance against ICE by the designer of the Minnesota state flag, proving that New Zealand’s greatest export is high-powered shitposting.
It was a bad week for Tauranga Mayor Mahe Drysdale, who has resorted to begging for donations to help repair his storm-ravaged region. It turns out the government scrapped the $6b climate resilience fund and replaced it with a glorified Givealittle page.
It was a good week for pearl-clutchers, after the latest BSA survey found New Zealanders were becoming less tolerant of swearing. The whole country is turning into pathetic fucking bitch losers.
It was a bad week for Wellington deputy mayor Ben McNulty, who got in trouble for calling a member of the public a nonce on Twitter. At this rate, all he needs to do is buy a social media platform and design an ugly truck and he’ll set a record for speedrunning Elon Musk’s career.
It was a good week for Stuff editors, who were beside themselves with excitement after discovering that one of their stories featured in the Epstein files. Truly one of journalism’s greatest honours.
